A land of misadventure for US foreign policy

As superpower humiliations go, it was in a class of its own.

The Russians had beaten a retreat from Afghanistan in 1989 after losing 15,000 soldiers to a guerrilla war.

But a single ambush of US Rangers in Mogadishu by a gang led by a Somali warlord in 1993 was enough to force the withdrawal of US forces from Somalia, and spook the US military establishment for a decade.

The Americans had been dispatched to Somalia the previous year as part of a UN peacekeeping force that was intended to bring food and relief to the Somali people, facing famine and anarchy after the removal of the dictator Siad Barre.

But the mission took on a "nation-building" role. It became "an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country," as America's then-UN ambassador Madeleine Albright put it.

As the months wore on, and after25 Pakistani peacekeepers were killed, the US forces became engaged in a manhunt for the warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, whose forces were blamed for the Pakistani deaths.

That mission, led by a US general, steered the Rangers into the trap that ended with the dead US soldiers being dragged through the streets.

By the end of the incident on 3 October 1993, 18 US soldiers were dead and two Black Hawk helicopters were lost. It was such a blow against the US that it became the subject of a novel and film, Black Hawk Down.

The UN was blamed. The next year, when the US was asked to help stop the genocide in Rwanda, the Clinton administration refused.

It took the events of 11 September 2001 and President George Bush to overcome America's queasy reaction to body bags.

US soldiers have been taking losses in Afghanistan and in Iraq, but little has been said of the US return to Somalia. Yet the US quietly returned to the failed state after the 11 September attacks, tracking suspected al-Qa'ida militants. Now, in a bid to prevent another Islamic fundamentalist regime taking hold, they are supporting the warlords who they once opposed.