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By William Maclean
MOGADISHU, October 10, 2003 (Reuters) - Charred engine parts overgrown by cactus are all that remain today of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters downed by Somali gunmen a decade ago. Looters were quick to turn the aluminum chassis into household utensils.
Lying by a wall in a Mogadishu street, the wreckage is ignored by pedestrians too preoccupied surviving Somalia's continuing anarchy to care about its momentous origin in a failed U.S.-backed U.N. effort to rebuild their country.
Ten years on, does similar insignificance await the U.S. attempt to enlist the United Nations in reconstructing Iraq?
Somalia provides cautionary lessons for the world body, still smarting over U.S. attempts to cast it as the scapegoat for a disastrous foray into the African country in the 1990s.
"The (Somalia) mission was doomed because the United States essentially set the U.N. up for failure," wrote U.S. analysts Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst in a study of the mission.
"The U.S. leadership simply ducked the problems that logically flowed from the decision to intervene and then get out of Somalia as quickly as possible. The U.N. then was left to confront the problems raised by the American intervention and inevitably found the going to be quite rough."
Now the United States plans to ask the world body to mandate a U.S.-led multinational force to help rebuild Iraq amid growing guerrilla opposition to the U.S. military presence there.
But potential contributors such as India and Pakistan have insisted on a strong U.N. mandate before they send troops to joint U.S., British and other soldiers in Iraq.
"THEY KILLED US"
Their caution stems from memories of mostly failed U.N. peace operations in the 1990s and in particular the UNOSOM II intervention in Somalia, which remains mired in controversy because of the U.S. military's prominent role.
"We fed them. They grew strong. They killed us," one U.S. soldier bitterly observed to reporters as the mission ended.
In reality most killing was done by U.S. and U.N. forces.
U.S. forces gunned down thousands of civilians including women and children in a failed hunt for a renegade clan leader, and then were withdrawn by an alarmed U.S. administration after one particularly tough battle horrified U.S. public opinion.
A generation of U.N. officials still winces at subsequent U.S. efforts to pin the blame for Somalia on the world body, pointing out that in fact American forces battling militiamen were at all times under direct U.S. military command.
"Much, though not all, of that went wrong in Somalia during UNOSOM II was as a result of decisions made by U.S. commanders," wrote author William Shawcross in a study of U.N. peacekeeping.
"Giving the U.N. mission a political mandate without control over the military forces on the ground is where it went wrong in Somalia," said Tim Ripley of the Center for Defense and International Security Studies at Britain's Lancaster University.
Iraq is not Somalia. Iraq's big oil reserves and geographic position give it a strategic importance that impoverished Somalia can never match and any U.S. leader weighing involvement must take account of correspondingly bigger risks and rewards.
In Iraq, religious confession guides some political loyalties. In Somalia, it has no such role. Clan loyalty is important in both countries but in Somalia it is fundamental to social identity.
The importance of clans and warlords' ability to manipulate them were not fully apparent to outsiders when in December 1992 the United Nations authorized the United States to deploy tens of thousands of troops to prevent mass starvation.
In this phase, U.N. and American interests appeared to coincide and perhaps 100,000 people were saved from starvation by humanitarian workers protected by a powerful U.S.-led force of troops from a handful of mostly rich nations.
In May 1993 UNOSOM II took over -- most of the troops from developed countries went home and were replaced by often ill-prepared soldiers from 31 mostly poor countries.
Some U.S. troops stayed on but quickly found themselves locked into fighting with local warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed.
On June 5, 1993, 23 Pakistani soldiers were killed in fighting with Aideed's forces. From that moment, the imperative was to find Aideed, and for the first time since the Korean war, Shawcross says, U.N. forces were ordered to conduct military operations against an enemy identified by the Security Council.
In July U.S. forces attacked a private home hoping to find Aideed and instead killed dozens of men, women and children.
On Oct. 3 two Black Hawks were shot down and 18 U.S. Special Forces killed in a battle that ended any U.S. appetite for further involvement. Television images of U.S. corpses being dragged through the streets horrified the American public.
U.S. forces were gone six months later. UNOSOM left in 1995.
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