Hortlund: This is your trolling miko. I've highlighted the trolling parts.
OK, now you are talking, Hortlund.
Guess what - I am perfectly willing to admit that my phrase "We decided to go to Somali to arrest or kill a single person Mohamed Farrah Aidid" was a bit of an exaggeration and should be viewed in context. Should have said "went to the Mogadishu hotel".
Surely everybody knows that we went in to help with the food, etc. and that without the Mogadishu incident or US troops getting killed some other way, nobody would ever remember we've ever been there.
Which is hardly relevant anyway - as I am not talking here about politics, as if slaughter of 3000 peasants contributed to the politics any.
The major event that happened there was US troops going after Aidid, so I concentrated on that.
The post in another thread from which this thread branched out was specifically about the unfulfilled purpose of that particular mission - the Mogadishu raid. If I mistakenly made an impression that I cared to discuss the whole Somali involvement - sorry, I was not clear. I am not even sure it was me who derailed the conversation to Somali from that one day in Mogadishu.
The 99 troopers there were not bringing food. They were killing Aidid - and having found no Aideed, they had no reason to fight and die and should have considered other solutions.
The first highlight is so outrageously stupid that it can be compared with someone saying that the only reason the US entered ww2 was to remove Hitler from power.
Apparently not. US also had to kille tens of thousands of germans in bombing raids of 1945 which could not have made the slightest difference towards the outcome of the war. Improving stats?
The situation can be compared to someone walking up to you saying "I want to discuss the battle of Stalingrad, but I dont know what ww2 was, can you educate me?"
It depend what aspects of that battle the person is interested in discussing.
and after explaining all that it turns out the person asking the question just wanted to get some weird "AHA, so the Germans LOST huh...IN YOUR FACE sucker"-satisfaction out of it.
Not at all. You can ask a valid point that apply to only a narrow aspect of the event. Like I ask - why kill all those peasants when Aidid was not home", some could ask about Stalingrad "Why was that army left to die and even supplemented by the soldiers returning from the leave rather then be allowed to pull back - if the purpose of Holding Stalingrad could not have possibly been accomplished."
On which a rational and possibly valid answer exists like "The surrounded 6th army at Stalingrad distracted a lot of soveit troops and allowed germany to orderly evacuate the whole southern front towards bridges in Kiev, scorch the land and thus escape major disaster."
See - I don't need to know why and when the WWII started and what it was about, and who else fought in it, etc. I may even be ignorant about a lot of those things but since I am not claiming to know about them and not entering them into a conversation, what's the problem.
At least that's what happened. Manshein thought it was an error to leave the army there because he did not think russians would be so incompetent as to concentrate on the 6th army and let the southern group escape.
miko
