re: #229 jaunte

Yeah, I don’t think he gets it. I read somewhere that the movie was very popular in Somalia, because they saw it as a ‘win.’

That’s because they don’t see 1,000 lives of their cannon fodder worth anything like we see the lives of 20 of our soldiers. Look at the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the Iranian strategy of human wave attacks and using children to sweep minefields on foot (their detection method being to use their feet to detonate the mines).

The strategists on the Islamic extremist side don’t care how many of their own die, so long as they get us to do what they want us to do. In the case of Mogadishu, 1,000 of their men, women and children were an easy price to pay to get the Great Satan out of Somalia, so they could get back to the business of creating a base of operations for Islamic fundamentalism.

The Black Hawk Down incident was only a victory for the US in a numeric sense. In the sense of meeting military and geopolitical objectives, it was a crushing defeat for the US.