Black Hawk Down incident: 1993
The US has been involved in Somalia's civil war almost since it began in the early 1990s, including the infamous 1993 Black Hawk Down incident.
Where this was said
Why Isn't Anyone Talking About This? The Politics of Invisible War
At 21:02 · chapter starts 21:00
Keating traces the roots of American disengagement from the Somalia story. The country has been in effective civil war since the early 1990s, and the US has been involved almost from the beginning — the Black Hawk Down incident in 1993 was one of the formative moments of post-Cold War US foreign policy. But Somalia has never been a country that commands sustained American attention. More importantly, the military has absorbed a lesson from the post-9/11 era: when US troops aren't in direct harm's way and there are no American casualties to report, public debate simply doesn't materialize. The Somalia campaign is, by design, almost entirely invisible to the American public, even as it represents the most kinetically active US military engagement outside of Iran.
Trump's Somalia rhetoric vs. reality
Trump publicly calls Somalia 'the worst country on Earth' and vilifies Somali immigrants — while his military quietly escalates airstrikes there. Josh Keating argues the two aren't directly linked, but the context is impossible to ignore.
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