Reflection: Black Hawk Down and National Security

So last night I watched perhaps one of the greatest war movies ever made Black Hawk Down. Every time I watch it I always feel this anger well up in me at the end where it lists the soldiers that died, the events that followed and the withdrawal of troops as ordered by President Clinton two weeks later. National Security is very closely related to image. As NSC 2010 constantly stated, our image is central to our safety and stability. This constructivist view is very important. As Mark Bowden points out in his book that covers the "Black Hawk Down" story, the militants in Somalia were terrified of an American counter-strike and were offering to hand over all sorts of top level people including Aidid the de facto president/warlord of Mogadishu that the US had been hunting for six weeks. But what happened instead? Clinton called for a hasty pullout. This sent a very bad message. Osama Bin Laden who was involved in this incident supplying arms and soldiers said, "It cleared from Muslim minds the myth of the superpower... The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American Soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat" (Lowry 2003).

This put the idea into Bin Laden's mind that we were weak and could be easily defeated with brutal terrorist tactics. If they made it bloody enough for us we would give up and go home. Bin Laden increased his attacks, hitting the khobar towers, the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and the USS Cole. After all of these instead of being aggressive and attacking head on Clinton made half-way efforts with failed cruise missile strikes and in some cases not reacting with force at all. Bin Laden had all he needed to believe he could succeed with a mass casualty attack. 9/11. He drew us into Afghanistan and now nine years later we are at the most important stage. We must go hard all the way or risk inviting greater attacks upon us again by showing weakness and pulling out.

It is all about image. Will we, having taken a few hard hits to our troops and morale, give up and go home, or freaking get angry for once and show the world that America is not to be trifled with? We can not keep up this pattern of half-assing it and expect to be secure. We can already see the world starting not to take us as seriously because we put up so much dissent at home when we are at war. Terrorist tactics work perfectly for this. We don't realize it, but we are destroying ourselves by not wanting to confront what are essentially bullies. We will be in a very dangerous position if there comes a time when a rogue state such as Iran gains a nuclear weapon and does not take us seriously or think we will invest everything into stopping them from using it. This is why I worry when people think things like the Northrop Grumman poster are a joke. Having that capability is diplomacy. When you move aircraft carriers, submarines, or troops to a specific area, it is a statement. It says this is important to us and we will use force if necessary. Pulling out of places has the opposite effect. Pulling out of Somalia said, this is not important to us anymore. In fact we really haven't involved ourselves in Africa until recently. We completely dropped the ball on aiding Rwanda because of fears that were fresh in our mind from Mogadishu in 1993.

We must get rid of this fear, get angry, and show the world we're done feeling sorry for ourselves. Image determines how people react to you and we must build ours back up strong. Not the apologetic America that Obama seems to advocate, but a Liam Neeson "Taken" kind of America.

Sources: http://old.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200311041024.asp