HOW HE SEES IT Clinton's book needs to explain 'Dark Day'

By MARTIN SCHRAM
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
When The Book comes out in a couple of weeks, it will have three kinds of readers. Many will read "My Life" by Bill Clinton to find out about His life. Which is to say, his lifestyle.
Some will read "My Life" to find out about Our lives. Which is to say, the things he did that made lots of lives a little better.
I will read "My Life" to find out mainly about 18 Lost Lives. Which is to say, the real, never-told story behind the 1993 tragedy in Somalia. That's because the facts, as I have pieced them together, indicate that 18 brave U.S. soldiers died heroically but needlessly, in a battle that didn't have to be fought. They died while a secret peace effort was under way -- an effort that would soon be successful. But for some never-explained reason, nobody in Washington ordered a halt to fighting while the peace was being forged.
Shakespearean tragedy
The facts, as I have pieced them together, reveal Somalia as a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, far sadder, even, than the gory tale of "Black Hawk Down," with that television footage of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
Oct. 3, 1993, was Clinton's "Dark Day." It happened in the ninth month of his eight-year presidency. Yet, only in his last weeks in office did he hint that there was more to tell -- in a December 2000 interview with Dan Rather on "60 Minutes."
DAN RATHER: "Your darkest hour?"
PRESIDENT CLINTON: "I had more than one of them. ... But certainly one of them was when those 18 American soldiers were killed in Somalia. It was awful because of the circumstances, which I hope to be able to talk about in some detail someday. But to lose them all, in what was a humanitarian mission ...with all those Somali dead, and losing 18 of our people, it was -- it was -- it was the dark day."
We'll soon know whether Clinton is finally willing to tell all about that Dark Day in Mogadishu. Including who bears the blame for failing to put the war on hold when peace was at hand.
How mission began
Here's the background: The Somalia mission was borne of good intentions in the last days of the presidency of George H.W. Bush. It was still a modest little humanitarian mission to feed starving Somalis when Bush passed it on to his successor. President Clinton reduced the number of U.S. troops in Somalia from 28,000 to just 5,000. But then officials saw that the Somali warlord, Gen. Mohamed Farrah Aideed, was preventing the food from reaching his own starving people. So Clinton permitted the mission to change from feeding the people to apprehending the warlord.
In October 1993, Aideed craftily lured the U.S. military officials into attacking him not in the open, sparsely peopled countryside, where helicopter gunships could operate safely, but over the capital city neighborhood where Aideed controlled things. Two Black Hawk helicopters went down. Valiant U.S. Army Rangers couldn't get to the trapped crew before Aideed's urban guerrillas did. Videos recorded the rest.
But there was no video to record the beginning of the real story a month before that.
Some unanswered questions
Here is the story that Clinton needs to detail: In September 1993, former President Jimmy Carter received a letter from Aideed while in Somalia on a private humanitarian mission. The warlord wrote that he was willing to negotiate a solution. Carter did the right thing; he promptly forwarded the letter to Clinton, who promptly initiated a diplomatic effort to see if a peaceful resolution could be arranged.
But apparently no one ordered U.S. troops to suspend their efforts to capture Aideed while the peace path was being explored.
Did Clinton's new national security adviser, Anthony Lake, fail to pass the word to put the war on hold? Or his defense secretary, the late Les Aspin? Or perhaps his retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell (who was on the job when Clinton got the message from Carter and retired just four days before the battle in Somalia)?
Ultimately, of course, the buck stopped with the new commander in chief. He should have made sure that his underlings halted the hunt for Aideed while the peace path was being explored.
On Dec. 2, 1993, U.S. troops finally surrounded the Somali warlord. But they were not exactly hunting him down. Aideed was riding as their VIP guest aboard a U.S. military plane that flew him to peace talks in Ethiopia.
It was just two months after that "Dark Day" in Mogadishu.
X Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service.