ABSTRACT
Back in October 1993, American military forces received the order from their central command to launch a raid on rebel clan leader Mohammed Farah Aidid’s compound in Mogadishu, Somalia. The anticipated overwhelming success of the operation (capturing Aidid, dismantling his network, restoring order to Somalia) would put an end to the in-fighting between rival clans, an internal struggle that had forced the United Nations and later the United States to intervene. Getting rogue clan leader Aidid, dead or alive, had become a priority for the US military command in Somalia and for US President Bill Clinton so that stability could be restored in the region and humanitarian organizations and the United Nations could deploy their peacekeeping and nation rebuilding mission.3 In the euphoria of the post-Gulf War world, what promised to be a final onslaught against Aidid and his men turned out to be a disastrous mission.4 But, more importantly, it became one of the most horrendous visual spectacles of the United States’ post-Cold War interventionism throughout the 1990s, a sight that would haunt the rest of the decade. As Sidney Blumenthal noted, “within hours, horrifying pictures materialized on television screens: the corpses of American soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and burned by jubilant crowds, and a bloodied and bruised American hostage reciting his name and job in a monotone terror.”5 American audiences, who were just getting re-accustomed to foreign policy success and scenes
of US triumphalism since the Gulf War victory appeared to have buried once and for all Vietnam’s quagmire images, were clearly not prepared for these brutal images of dead and mutilated US soldiers streaming from Somalia. American politicians too were taken by surprise and were left unable to provide an appropriate spin to the visible events. Even Clinton, who up to this point had supported the US interventionist mission in Somalia and backed the strategy of going after Aidid, remained speechless. Again, Blumenthal recalled: “The appearance of a hostage turned Clinton into one himself: it was a picture of impotence and defeat, recalling, without any commentary necessary, the fate of the last Democratic president.”6 At the time, US television networks, starting with CNN, were really not too sure how they should handle those pictures: should they show them again and again, as they had done with the images coming from Baghdad during the Gulf War? Or should they hide them from sight, once and for all?7 In the hours that followed this failed military assault, both strategies were adopted by the media. The images would eventually be pulled from most US news networks, but they would quickly return, albeit in a still, freeze-frame fashion, as front covers and often color shots in daily newspapers and weekly magazines.8 In any case, it had been too late: there was no longer any buffering of the public from what had been seen by so many. In fact, the images started to speak for themselves. The US sponsored brave new world (order), championed by George H.W. Bush after the victory over Iraq in 1991 and later reprised by Bill Clinton, had come to an abrupt stop.9 What were supposed to be the dominant images of the 1990s, the humanitarian decade – images of new American military heroes standing side by side with UN peacekeepers, or often as UN peacekeepers, and paving the way for a more humane and democratic world – suddenly gave way to the vision of tortured American troops, caught in a war that may not have been in America’s vital interest to fight. On that day, October 3, 1993, in Mogadishu and hours later in the rest of the world, unexpectedly gruesome images of warfare and military violence interrupted the global flow of humanitarian and interventionist images that had filled TV screens so far, and rendered far less acceptable the political ideologies and military strategies that such a visual flow hoped to legitimize.
