Flutterby™! : After Black Hawk Down 2011-07-01 15:07:48.043127+00

After Black Hawk Down

2011-07-01 15:07:48.043127+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

Finished Black Hawk Down yesterday evening. That should be required reading. Now trying to find a good book on the background to how the State Department and the U.N. got our armed forces into that disaster so that I can better understand all the other disasters those organizations seem to be guiding us into.

My only reservation about recommending it is that there's an awful lot of "here's how things were" without too much tracing the decisions back. I kept wondering to myself how the people involved could be acting like they were, and not really getting an answer. But then I guess there was an awful lot of muddling through, so maybe that's accurate.

The Green Zone book has almost nothing to do with the military, and almost all to do with the "reconstruction" process and how the way it was set up probably did more harm than good. If you're interested in the political background, it might be a little weak on that, but it's very clear about the effects of the political decisions made.

After Black Hawk Down

I'm less interested in the military side of things and more interested in the political background. My impression is that in Mogadishu the U.S. State Department said "let's take this fine chef's knife (the Rangers & Delta Force) and cut through this concrete block".

Completely the wrong tool for the job, and what I'd like to learn a bit more about is the decision process that led to that. Because I think we're seeing that replayed with Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, ...

If you feel like moving to another continent, I recommend Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Then again, it had me shaking my head nearly the whole time I was reading it. There's also a movie tie-in version which might be cheaper, and the Matt Damon movie Green Zone which was what got me to order the book in the first place.

Different cluster-fuck (and I don't mean that in the good way), some of the same reasons behind it, I expect.