Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down has an excellent piece on what our reaction to Fallujah must be. He makes an excellent point:
It is a mistake to conclude that those committing such acts represent a majority of the community. Just the opposite is true. Lynching is most often an effort to frighten and sway a more sensible, decent mainstream. In Marion it was the Ku Klux Klan, in Mogadishu it was Aidid loyalists, in Fallujah it is either diehard Saddamites or Islamo-fascists.
The worst answer the U.S. can make to such a message–which is precisely what we did in Mogadishu–is back down. By most indications, Aidid’s supporters were decimated and demoralized the day after the Battle of Mogadishu. Some, appalled by the indecency of their countrymen, were certain the U.S. would violently respond to such an insult and challenge. They contacted U.N. authorities offering to negotiate, or simply packed their things and fled. These are the ones who miscalculated. Instead the U.S. did nothing, effectively abandoning the field to Aidid and his henchmen. Somalia today remains a nation struggling in anarchy, and the America-haters around the world learned what they thought was a essential truth about the United States: Kill a few Americans and the most powerful nation on Earth will run away. This, in a nutshell, is the strategy of Osama bin Laden.
We have to have a response, and it must be both overwhelming and precisely targeted – a sign that we will not back down and we will not tolerate terrorism. Just like the lynchings in America, the only way to stop such reprehensible acts is not to provide them with justifications and hand-washing, but to put those responsible away for good.
