The 1992-94 US intervention in Somalia, in which military forces were sent "to secure the delivery of humanitarian aid to Somalia," is "usually judged as an unmitigated failure."
Yet Operation Restore Hope is "widely acknowledged to have saved the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of Somalis."
What most people remember is "the infamous 'Black Hawk Down' battle in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in early October 1993, in which 18 US soldiers were killed." Although that battle, which took place during the Clinton administration, resulted in US forces' "killing perhaps fifty opponents for every loss of their own," the images of dead American soldiers dragged through the streets left a deep impression on both the US public and the White House. A poll soon afterward found that only 25 percent of Americans considered the intervention in Somalia successful.
Because the Somalia operation came to be viewed as, the authors assert, "the greatest US failure since Vietnam," the Clinton administration declined to intervene half a year later in Rwanda, thus arguably permitting a genocide of about 800,000 people to proceed without interference.
Bottom line: "winning" is complicated business.
