Returning to today's topic. one of the things you will find on the Coursera site is a reference to the Philadelphia Enquirer. and that will take you through to Mark Bowden's journalistic articles, which eventually formed the book Black Hawk Down as I mentioned earlier. Now I would like you to spend a little bit of time going through those links. And I've put them up on the screen behind me for those who've, attending this lecture as well. what I'm going to do in the latter part of today's discussion is actually explore that site. Mark Bowden, as part of his journalist brief with the Philadelphia Enquirer, went back after the events of the batte of Mogadishu and if you like, started to dig down and try to reveal what actually happened, and the detail of what happened, rather than the media reporting that was contemporary to the time. Now, this is a military engagement in 1993 between American forces and militiamen. I suppose militia women although that's not a common phrase. In Somalia during a period of political transition might be a polite way of putting it. Civil war is nearer the mark. It was intended to be a, a surgical strike to achieve some very specific objectives. And as we'll talk about as we go through this particular topic today, the intention was that in the heart of Mogadishu, the American servicemen would be there for no more than half an hour. As it is, the media reporting that broke overnight because of the time distance, talked about an ongoing battle. And, in fact, this has been described as the most intensive firefight that American forces have been involved with since Vietnam do remember that the Gulf War I was only two years before this. So the military assessment is that this incursion in Mogadishu actually was more of a battle, was more intense in every respect than what had gone through in the liberation of Kuwait two years before. Now the media reporting. because we had reasonably live feed at the time, like contemporary to the events going on, was portraying what went on as a failure. No it didn't take half an hour, to go into Mogadishu and extract the lieu- tenants of Mohamed Farrah Aidid. That was the objective of the exercise. What we actually find is that over the better part of two days, an engagement of over 120 American servicemen leads to 18 dead, about 84 wounded or injured. And hundreds, if not thousands of Somalians dead during this particular engagement. One of the points I'm going to come back to is how this particular event changed American foreign policy. About overseas deployments and also being part of the United Nations peace keeping forces. one of the reasons is that President at the time Bill Clinton was not fully appraised or briefed as to what was going on in Somalia. Therefore the king of smooth media relations found themselves not well briefed shall we say when it came to what was happening in Somalia that particular day. And I have a feeling that the subsequent policy decisions that came out of the Clinton administration were in part a knee-jerk reaction writ large from those initial media reports. So it's an event that in many states was seen publicly as a failure. As we're going to talk about during the course of the day, the actual military objectives of, removing two key men in a Mohamed Farrah Aidid's hierarchy was actually achieved, but it was achieved at the unanticipated loss of American lives, and if you think about it we're considering 100 men either dead or injured as the result of this one incursion... Now, my interpretation of this, looking at Mark Bowden's work, particularly. Is that there needs to be, or rather, he has achieved a rehabilitation of the Battle of Mogadishu, and I think that's where we start off with in considering what's going on. in the 1990s up to the publication of the book, Black Hawk Down. Now, the two branches from that, as we will discuss, and as I mentioned earlier, is firstly the film, and secondly what happened to the website? So it is worth spending some time going through each of the individual articles and we're going to take one or two examples later from the Philadelphia Enquirer website and allow you to look at those. Now I'm just going to bring one or two of those up on the screen now. This is the front page, if you like. It gives you links to the book, a DVD, and the site itself, and clearly at this point and time, we'd like you to go through and start looking at some of the journalistic articles themselves. This is just one example, Chapter Five, and as we go through this course, if you have access to the book, you can compare what was put in print in 1999 compared to what is available online now, considering they're based around the same core articles. So what I would like you to consider is how web resources can be developed over time so that you have core pro's that are that were published initially but even have reflections and comments videos primary evidence a whole range of different material brought into this environment this enriches our interpretive experience. And allows us to consider, a broader range of opinion than simply the printed word of the main journalist. [BLANK_AUDIO].
