The true Black Hawk Down: To MAD MAC

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

Nobody knows everything. This is sort of a hobby of mine.

[biiqaaye]

...

[gurey25]

just though id say this

Habr gidir rules. !!!!!!

Aideed may e rest in peace.

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

Beek
Disagree. The SSDF had a solid hold on Puntland, the SNA was not in a position to challenge that. And the SNM was well organized with plenty of popular support in Somaliland.

And you know what we used to say in the QRF headquarters, the only good gedir, is a dead gedir.

[biiqaaye]

...

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

What time was that - obviously it wasn't the time that I was in Somalia and met with Mohammed Abshir Mussa in a dusty hole called Galcaio.

Aweys is Haber Gedir Ayr, and neither he nor the Haber Gedir EVER controlled the Mudug area north of Galcaio. Aweys and his Al Itihad a$$holes made an attack on Boosaso and got their clocks cleaned by the SSDF in 91 (which is why they were hunkered down in Luuq in 93) but that was the closest that the piece of sh!t Aweys ever got to seizing Puntland. The USC-Aideed faction never came close, never even tried. Galcaio has been the boundary since 92 and you know it.

[AbdiWahab252]

MADMAC, the USC did make two forays north into Bari & Nugaal. The town of Garowe was captured.

Militarly it wouldn't make sense to stretch your forces to capture territory which is nonproductive. If the land was hospitable and fruitful, then the case to move there makes sense.


MADMAC, It seems you like meeting your agents like Maxamed Abshir. He was a major source of incorrect info & bias intel for the US on Somalia. His lies and deceit helped bring OCt. 3rd.

"Remember the 500 kids who were high on drugs & supposedly all the manpower that Aideed had." It was BS like that cause the US to underestimate Aideed's capabilities.

Like in Iraq, bad intel lead to the disaster.

Abdi

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

Actually we had a good picture of SNA organizational capabilities as well as depth of popular support. We certainly didn't depend on HUMINT sources, that was just one way of getting info. You could judge the depth of support for Aideed simply by driving through the city each day. I felt I had a good handle on what was going on and who was who in the zoo. A fight like the one on 3/4 October was probably inevitable. In warfare, sometimes things go wrong. The enemy is actively planning just like you are. He's gonna get his too.

The Sun don't shine on the same dogs ass every afternoon.

[Heat05]

Learning from Aidid. (military strategy of Mohammed Farah Aidid in Somalia) (When, Where and How to Use Force) : An article from: Commentary
by A.J. Bacevich

They are a study in contrasts. The one goes by the title of President, but in appearance and manner is the very model--if not the parody--of a modern field marshal. It is all there: the Western-style battle dress, the beret, the epaulets, the ceremonial sidearm, the bushy mustache above stiff upper lip that would win approval in any regimental mess, even the entourage of similarly outfitted staff officers and sycophants hovering respectfully nearby.
The other styles himself General, but makes little apparent effort to look the part, his standard "uniform" consisting of slacks and an open-collar, civilian shirt. His public persona is suggestive less of a warrior than of some political hopeful running for election to the city council, his appearances on the front page of our newspapers typically taking place against a backdrop of cheering constituents. His most prominent feature is a seemingly affable grin--incongruous and disconcerting in that his machinations seldom inspire mirth.

Appearances deceive. In this instance, appearances belie expectations. Which of these two individuals--Saddam Hussein and Mohammed Farah Aidid--is likely to possess the greater military acumen? Billed as a formidable opponent, Saddam turned out to be a pushover. Contemptuously labeled a "warlord" or "thug," Aidid has caused the United States no end of consternation and embarrassment. With all due respect to the ghost of General George S. Patton, sartorial splendor would seem to be a poor predictor of generalship.

Yet the deeper deception--self-deception, really--derives from the conclusions drawn from America's successive encounters with these two adversaries, who in confronting the world's only superpower employed vastly different methods to vastly different effect. With the one, America's encounter was a smashing success; with the other, a minor but frustrating failure. Together, they have distorted our understanding of what war is or is becoming. They have confused Americans about the role of force in international politics. And as a result, they have thrown American military policy into disarray.

II

SADDAM HUSSEIN did more than conform to preconceived American notions of how a "real" enemy should look; his whole approach to warfare reinforced established American views of the proper character and rhythms of war. Just as Saddam affected Western-style battle dress, so did he mimic the standing conventions of combat between modern industrialized states.

Consistent with the age-old faith in big battalions, Saddam weighed his forces down with Soviet-style fleets of tanks, fighter bombers, and guided missiles. He organized and trained his legions (albeit to indifferent standards of proficiency) in accordance with precepts common to mechanized armies going back to World War II. He even initiated hostilities in the manner expected of a dastardly adversary: with an act of brazen aggression.

Yet, having thus boldly seized the initiative, Saddam obligingly allowed the United States and its allies six unencumbered months in which to reclaim it. He ordered his forces to sit idly in the desert while the American-led coalition mustered its forces--equally laden with tanks and fighter bombers and guided missiles--for a massive counteroffensive aimed at liberating Kuwait. The coalition's success in bringing this episode to a rapid and decisive conclusion dazzled the world. Dazzled in something like a literal sense: Americans themselves found it difficult to gauge accurately the factors contributing to the outcome of Desert Storm. That Saddam's own bungling had contributed mightily to his defeat was noted only to be dismissed. A victory so complete, so one-sided, and so sudden required an explanation more compelling than an inept opponent.

Military analysts discovered that explanation in a concept borrowed from a most unlikely source: Soviet military theory. American performance in the Gulf war, these experts determined, portended the arrival of an entirely new approach to warfare, an approach made possible by what the Soviets termed a military-technical revolution (MTR). Although this technology-driven revolution had been under way for some time--as evidenced, for example, by advances in long-range precision weapons, in surveillance and target-acquisition capabilities, and in the military application of computers--it took the showdown with Saddam Hussein to reveal its true scope.

What were the implications of this phenomenon? In short order, discerning an answer to that question became a cottage industry, particularly in the rarefied circles inhabited by Washington's national-security elites. Among the effusions to which this effort gave birth, a report entitled The Military Technical Revolution, issued by the highly respected Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, may be taken as representative.

The product of extensive deliberations by over 75 outside experts," the CSIS report heralds Desert Storm as a portent of things to come. In this one brief, spectacular campaign it divines a template for all future combat. Realizing the MTR's full potential will mean, quite simply, that the face of battle and the nature of warfare will both be completely transformed." Nor will this event be long in coming. By the first decade of the 21st century, according to CSIS, warfare "will look very little like it does today."

IN DESCRIBING the essence of this new style of warfare, the CSIS report generates a fair amount of balderdash: "The MTR is about integration, synergy, and flexibility"; "the MTR is a holistic phenomenon"; the MTR "may boil down to two fundamental effects: tempo and psychology"; "the heart of the MTR is information"; and so on.

On two points, however, the report is emphatic. First, for the foreseeable future, "only the United States has the capability to achieve the MTR." Second, as Desert Storm's low-cost, lightning victory seemed to promise, this revolution in military affairs expands the utility of force. The military-technical revolution will provide American political leaders with an instrument possessing broader application while easing the constraints--notably the prospect of heavy casualties and widespread collateral damage--that heretofore have limited the willingness of democratic societies to use force.

By exploiting the promise of this revolution, the report concludes, U.S. leaders will be increasingly free to conduct such operations without assuming massive risks. The MTR will render the military instrument more effective by reducing the costs of military operations, both to the United States and to its adversaries, and will thereby help mitigate the constraints on military operations imposed by media coverage and public opinion. The language may not be crisp, but the implications are clear: the MTR will free the United States to employ force not simply as a last resort--responding to outrages perpetrated by the likes of Saddam Hussein--but in pursuit of more positive goals.

In short, according to the experts convened by CSIS, the MTR endows the United States--and the United States alone--with the ability to use military power to shape the future political order.

To be fair, the CSIS experts describe the military-technical revolution as still in the process of being realized. Yet, as the "lessons" of Desert Storm worked their way into elite and then into mainstream opinion, such distinctions were soon lost. Confidence in American military superiority became so pronounced that the capabilities foreseen by MTR's prophets acquired the sheen of accomplished fact.

Because such thinking discounted the peculiarly favorable circumstances of the Gulf war--circumstances as much, or more, the product of Saddam's bungling as of American genius--a belief took hold that the "troops" could accomplish almost anything. In the wake of the Gulf war, this perception opened the door to a rush of new American military undertakings. Viewed as a whole, it is the widely divergent character of these tasks that is striking: delivering humanitarian relief (Operation "Provide Comfort"); rebuilding shattered nations (Somalia); deterring the spread of ethnic violence (Macedonia); unseating oppressive regimes (Haiti); protecting minorities (Kurds and Shiites); and parceling out retribution from afar (Iraq)--not to mention proposals too numerous to count for military intervention in Bosnia.

Few of these initiatives were anchored in any prudent calculation of American strategic interests. Rather, as many observers have noted, things were done largely in response to some uproar in the media. But in any case, there was no particular reason not to do them. What was there to lose?

III

ENTER Mohammed Farah Aidid. Whether the Somali leader ever had occasion to contemplate the wisdom proffered by CSIS, the display of American military might in the Gulf war can hardly have failed to impress him. Yet whatever thought Aidid might have given to theories of a military-technical revolution, he remained unintimidated. Contrary to the expectations of many American policy-makers, Aidid did not take to heart the lesson administered to Saddam Hussein and behave accordingly.

As a military commander, Aidid appears to have had one great insight: unlike Saddam, he knew that to play your enemy's game is the height of folly. On the other hand, to engage your opponent on terms that emphasize your own strengths and expose his weaknesses is to gain a priceless advantage. Too few generals have grasped this seemingly simple idea. Grant understood it; Lee refused to acknowledge it, and led the Confederacy to exhaustion and collapse. In Vietnam, Ho and Giap understood it; French military leaders of the 1950's and Americans in the 1960's did not, and suffered disastrous defeats at the hands of a nominally weaker power. To be sure, properly applying this insight to the amalgam of circumstances bearing on a particular conflict is far easier to do after the fact than before. But doing so is a mark of true generalship.

Saddam had challenged the United States on terms that could hardly have been less conducive to his own success. It was war in the preferred American style: a high-tech, high-firepower encounter conducted (for the most part) on a battlefield remote from large civilian populations, in which combatants and noncombatants were (for the most part) clearly differentiated, and where the operational goal--liberating Kuwait--had the virtue of being limited and unambiguous.

The terms under which Aidid took on the United States were quite different. For starters, his chosen terrain was urban--a complex and congested environment as alien to American forces as it was intimately familiar to Aidid's supporters. The technology that had given rise to speculation about a revolution in military affairs proved ineffective, if not counterproductive, for close-in urban warfare. By the time Americans resorted to the use of anti-tank guided missiles to root out snipers, it had become apparent that the firepower which had demolished the Iraqi Republican Guards was ill-suited to the streets of Mogadishu. As American attack helicopters took to dispersing crowds of angry Somalis by spraying them with the fire of 20-millimeter cannon, the large numbers of dead and wounded--many of them women and children--suggested that the Gulf war's promise of a style of fighting minimizing noncombatant casualties was a long way from fulfillment.

But all that was nothing compared to the astuteness with which Aidid identified the American "center of gravity"--the point at which Americans are most vulnerable, against which a successful blow will likely have a decisive effect. As is now readily apparent, that point is the new American sensitivity to casualties, a sensitivity as pervasive as it is acute.

No doubt many factors contribute to this sensitivity, not least of them the trauma of Vietnam and even the personal history of the incumbent commander-in-chief But the main factor is the Gulf war itself, and the expectations inspired by that conflict. As the CSIS report suggests, at the very heart of the military-technical revolution lies the belief that American military power can hence forth achieve success without significant loss of American life. That expectation has become a bulls-eye painted on the chest of every G.I. sent into harm's way.

It was Aidid's genius to seize upon this sensitivity, to orchestrate a campaign in which technological superiority counted for little and in which it would be only a matter of time before a minor reverse laid open the flaws of recent American thinking about war. The bloody firefight of October 3 did just that.

Aidid's reward was not long in coming: the Clinton administration promptly signaled its intention of surrendering the field to the Somali warlord as rapidly as a semi-respectable withdrawal could be arranged. That American military power could destroy Aidid and all his henchmen--could obliterate the entire city of Mogadishu, for that matter--was beside the point. The United States would not do so. Having inflicted approximately 100 casualties on the American forces deployed to Somalia, Aidid had won a victory that by any definition of the term was decisive.

IV

WHAT are the implications of this defeat? Many analysts worry that the setback in Somalia will seriously undermine American military credibility. Whether that will be the case remains to be seen. Much depends on how the Clinton administration manages the details of disengagement, and how it responds to subsequent crises. (Haiti comes immediately to mind.)

In some respects, however, the fallout from Somalia may even be positive. Among other things, the American encounter with Aidid might--indeed, should--accelerate the pace of Gulf-war revisionism. Did Desert Storm give us a glimpse of the future of warfare? Or was the conflict there a splendid anachronism, a style of warfare approaching obsolescence, if now finally done right? Is Somalia an unpleasant throwback to the colonial wars of the previous century? Or does it hint at a type of conflict that will continue to proliferate in the post-cold-war era?

In considering these questions, we cannot remind ourselves too frequently that by its very nature, warfare is rooted in politics. Just so, the continuing evolution of war will be driven by political as much as by technological developments. The world today is entering into a period of profound political transformation; any nation fancying that a corner on the market of leading-edge technology will give it a military mastery that effectively transcends politics is setting itself up for disappointment. Indeed, such a nation ventures forth into an unruly world at its peril.

Somalia provides the United States with a sharp reminder of what that peril entails. The fighting in Somalia has had little to do with the stakes over which wars have been waged since time immemorial--preserving sovereignty, controlling critical resources, extending spheres of influence, or seizing strategically vital terrain. It has had everything to do with ethnic identity, culture, history, and the rivalry of unsavory local elites vying for the privilege of picking over the remains of their pathetic quasi-state. In this regard, the Somali conflict shows a marked similarity to the brutal and murky conflicts convulsing many other societies of late. Events in Mogadishu--like recent events in Moscow, Sarajevo, Belfast, Monrovia, Port-au-Prince, and perhaps even at New York's World Trade Center--suggest that it is no longer the desert or the steppe or the pampas that forms the cockpit of struggle. Instead, the use of violence to achieve political aims is increasingly an urban phenomenon.

Furthermore, as the fighting in Mogadishu and elsewhere suggests, when war erupts in the streets, distinctions between combatants and noncombatants become blurred, chivalrous "rules" of warfare go by the board, methods appropriate to winning air superiority or targeting armored columns prove of limited utility, and relatively crude hardware--mines, mortars, and small arms--is employed with telling effect. Such conflicts are seldom susceptible of rapid resolution. Where they are concerned, the finesse and expertise that are the hallmarks of modern military professionalism count for less than persistence and pure bloody-mindedness. He who refuses to quit wins--eventually.

Thus, the expedition inaptly named Restore Hope can hardly be said to point the way toward a future in which "U.S. leaders will be increasingly free to conduct such operations," as the CSIS report hopefully predicted. Nor are such conflicts likely to loosen "the constraints on military operations imposed by media coverage and public opinion." Far from it. Absent clearly stated objectives and a persuasive rationale pointing to substantial American interests at stake, the firstsign of trouble will provoke a public backlash, a prospect that increases dramatically the political risk of such undertakings.

So if General Aidid has deflated some of the wilder expectations derived from Desert Storm, it may be just as well. The painful lesson he has taught the United States will remain a useful one. The lost battle for Mogadishu has shattered the dangerous illusion that the American military prowess displayed in the desert foretold an era of war without the shedding of American or civilian blood, an era in which American military might would guarantee political order. Americans have learned again what they should never have forgotten: that to resort to arms is a proposition fraught with uncertainty.

The lesson of Somalia is not that the United States must avoid conflicts of that type at all costs. Rather, Somalia reminds us yet again that for even a small war, clarity of purpose, resolution, and willingness to sacrifice are prerequisites of victory. Any adversary worthy of the namewill bring as much to the battlefield. No revolution in warfare can guarantee success on the cheap.

The errors and oversights that led to the debacle in Somalia are mostly attributable to Washington. For those errors, young American soldiers paid the price. This is as usual. We can only hope that in helping to restore some sense of realism to American military policy, those sacrifices may yet be redeemed.

Feel the heat of the Truth

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

Actually, his conclusions are excellent. I totally agree. There are details with which I don't agree, but not a bad article.

[RED STAR]

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REAL REASON:.........THE OIL FACTOR IN SOMALIA
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FOUR AMERICAN PETROLEUM GIANTS HAD AGREEMENTS WITH THE AFRICAN NATION BEFORE ITS CIVIL WAR BEGAN. THEY COULD REAP BIG REWARDS IF PEACE IS RESTOREDFar beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somali countryside.

That land, in the opinion of geologists and industry sources, could yield significant amounts of oil and natural gas if the U.S.-led military mission can restore peace to the impoverished East African nation.

According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.

Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the U.S. corporate oil stake.

But corporate and scientific documents disclosed that the American companies are well positioned to pursue Somalia's most promising potential oil reserves the moment the nation is pacified. And the State Department and U.S. military officials acknowledge that one of those oil companies has done more than simply sit back and hope for pece.

Conoco Inc., the only major multinational corporation to mantain a functioning office in Mogadishu throughout the past two years of nationwide anarchy, has been directly involved in the U.S. government's role in the U.N.-sponsored humanitarian military effort.

Conoco, whose tireless exploration efforts in north-central Somalia reportedly had yielded the most encouraging prospects just before Siad Barre's fall, permitted its Mogadishu corporate compound to be transformed into a de facto American embassy a few days before the U.S. Marines landed in the capital, with Bush's special envoy using it as his temporary headquarters. In addition, the president of the company's subsidiary in Somalia won high official praise for serving as the government's volunteer "facilitator" during the months before and during the U.S. intervention.

Describing the arrangement as "a business relationship," an official spokesman for the Houston-based parent corporation of Conoco Somalia Ltd. said the U.S. government was paying rental for its use of the compound, and he insisted that Conoco was proud of resident general manager Raymond Marchand's contribution to the U.S.-led humanitarian effort.

John Geybauer, spokesman for Conoco Oil in Houston, said the company was acting as "a good corporate citizen and neighbor" in granting the U.S. government's request to be allowed to rent the compound. The U.S. Embassy and most other buildings and residential compounds here in the capital were rendered unusable by vandalism and fierce artillery duels during the clan wars that have consumed Somalia and starved its people.

In its in-house magazine last month, Conoco reprinted excerpts from a letter of commendation for Marchand written by U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Frank Libutti, who has been acting as military aide to U.S. envoy Robert B. Oakley. In the letter, Libutti praised the oil official for his role in the initial operation to land Marines on Mogadishu's beaches in December, and the general concluded, "Without Raymond's courageous contributions and selfless service, the operation would have failed."

But the close relationship between Conoco and the U.S. intervention force has left many Somalis and foreign development experts deeply troubled by the blurry line between the U.S. government and the large oil company, leading many to liken the Somalia operation to a miniature version of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led military effort in January, 1991, to drive Iraq from Kuwait and, more broadly, safeguard the world's largest oil reserves.

"They sent all the wrong signals when Oakley moved into the Conoco compound," said one expert on Somalia who worked with one of the four major companies as they intensified their exploration efforts in the country in the late 1980s.

"It's left everyone thinking the big question here isn't famine relief but oil -- whether the oil concessions granted under Siad Barre will be transferred if and when peace is restored," the expert said. "It's potentially worth billions of dollars, and believe me, that's what the whole game is starting to look like."

Although most oil experts outside Somalia laugh at the suggestion that the nation ever could rank among the world's major oil producers -- and most maintain that the international aid mission is intended simply to feed Somalia's starving masses -- no one doubts that there is oil in Somalia. The only question: How much?

"It's there. There's no doubt there's oil there," said Thomas E. O'Connor, the principal petroleum engineer for the World Bank, who headed an in-depth, three-year study of oil prospects in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia's northern coast.

"You don't know until you study a lot further just how much is there," O'Connor said. "But it has commercial potential. It's got high potential . . . once the Somalis get their act together."

O'Connor, a professional geologist, based his conclusion on the findings of some of the world's top petroleum geologists. In a 1991 World Bank-coordinated study, intended to encourage private investment in the petroleum potential of eight African nations, the geologists put Somalia and Sudan at the top of the list of prospective commercial oil producers.

Presenting their results during a three-day conference in London in September, 1991, two of those geologists, an American and an Egyptian, reported that an analysis of nine exploratory wells drilled in Somalia indicated that the region is "situated within the oil window, and thus (is) highly prospective for gas and oil." A report by a third geologist, Z. R. Beydoun, said offshore sites possess "the geological parameters conducive to the generation, expulsion and trapping of significant amounts of oil and gas."

Beydoun, who now works for Marathon Oil in London, cautioned in a recent interview that on the basis of his findings alone, "you cannot say there definitely is oil," but he added: "The different ingredients for generation of oil are there. The question is whether the oil generated there has been trapped or whether it dispersed or evaporated."

Beginni 1986, Conoco, along with Amoco, Chevron, Phillips and, briefly, Shell all sought and obtained exploration licenses for northern Somalia from Siad Barre's government. Somalia was soon carved up into concessional blocs, with Conoco, Amoco and Chevron winning the right to explore and exploit the most promising ones.

The companies' interest in Somalia clearly predated the World Bank study. It was grounded in the findings of another, highly successful exploration effort by the Texas-based Hunt Oil Corp. across the Gulf of Aden in the Arabian Peninsula nation of Yemen, where geologists disclosed in the mid-1980s that the estimated 1 billion barrels of Yemeni oil reserves were part of a great underground rift, or valley, that arced into and across northern Somalia.

Hunt's Yemeni operation, which is now yielding nearly 200,000 barrels of oil a day, and its implications for the entire region were not lost on then-Vice President George Bush.

In fact, Bush witnessed it firsthand in April, 1986, when he officially dedicated Hunt's new $18-million refinery near the ancient Yemeni town of Marib. In remarks during the event, Bush emphasized the critical value of supporting U.S. corporate efforts to develop and safeguard potential oil reserves in the region.

In his speech, Bush stressed "the growing strategic importance to the West of developing crude oil sources in the region away from the Strait of Hormuz," according to a report three weeks later in the authoritative Middle East Economic Survey.

Bush's reference was to the geographical choke point that controls access to the Persian Gulf and its vast oil reserves. It came at the end of a 10-day Middle East tour in which the vice president drew fire for appearing to advocate higher oil and gasoline prices.

"Throughout the course of his 17,000-mile trip, Bush suggested continued low (oil) prices would jeopardize a domestic oil industry 'vital to the national security interests of the United States,' which was interpreted at home and abroad as a sign the onetime oil driller from Texas was coming to the aid of his former associates," United Press International reported from Washington the day after Bush dedicated Hunt's Yemen refinery.

No such criticism accompanied Bush's decision late last year to send more than 20,000 U.S. troops to Somalia, widely applauded as a bold and costly step to save an estimated 2 million Somalis from starvation by opening up relief supply lines and pacifying the famine-struck nation.

But since the U.S. intervention began, neither the Bush Administration nor any of the oil companies that had been active in Somalia up until the civil war broke out in early 1991 have commented publicly on Somalia's potential for oil and natural gas production. Even in private, veteran oil company exploration experts played down any possible connection between the Administration's move into Somalia and the corporate concessions at stake.

"In the oil world, Somalia is a fringe exploration area," said one Conoco executive who asked not to be named. "They've overexaggerated it," he said of the geologists' optimism about the prospective oil reserves there. And as for Washington's motives in Somalia, he brushed aside criticisms that have been voiced quietly in Mogadishu, saying, "With America, there is a genuine humanitarian streak in us . . . that many other countries and cultures cannot understand."

But the same source added that Conoco's decision to maintain its headquarters in the Somali capital even after it pulled out the last of its major equipment in the spring of 1992 was certainly not a humanitarian one. And he confirmed that the company, which has explored Somalia in three major phases beginning in 1952, had achieved "very good oil shows" -- industry terminology for an exploration phase that often precedes a major discovery -- just before the war broke out.

"We had these very good shows," he said. "We were pleased. That's why Conoco stayed on. . . . The people in Houston are convinced there's oil there."

Indeed, the same Conoco World article that praised Conoco's general manager in Somalia for his role in the humanitarian effort quoted Marchand as saying, "We stayed because of Somalia's potential for the company and to protect our assets."

Marchand, a French citizen who came to Somalia from Chad after a civil war forced Conoco to suspend operations there, explained the role played by his firm in helping set up the U.S.-led pacification mission in Mogadishu.

"When the State Department asked Conoco management for assistance, I was glad to use the company's influence in Somalia for the success of this mission," he said in the magazine article. "I just treated it like a company operation -- like moving a rig. I did it for this operation because the (U.S.) officials weren't familiar with the environment."

Marchand and his company were clearly familiar with the anarchy into which Somalia has descended over the past two years -- a nation with no functioning government, no utilities and few roads, a place ruled loosely by regional warlords.

Of the four U.S. companies holding the Siad Barre-era oil concessions, Conoco is believed to be the only one that negotiated what spokesman Geybauer called "a standstill agreement" with an interim government set up by one of Mogadishu's two principal warlords, Ali Mahdi Mohamed. Industry sources said the other U.S. companies with contracts in Somalia cited "force majeure" (superior power), a legal term asserting that they were forced by the war to abandon their exploration efforts and would return as soon as peace is restored.

"It's going to be very interesting to see whether these agreements are still good," said Mohamed Jirdeh, a prominent Somali businessman in Mogadishu who is familiar with the oil-concession agreements. "Whatever Siad did, all those records and contracts, all disappeared after he fled. . . . And this period has brought with it a deep change of our society.

"Our country is now very weak, and, of course, the American oil companies are very strong. This has to be handled very diplomatically, and I think the American government must move out of the oil business, or at least make clear that there is a definite line separating the two, if they want to maintain a long-term relationship here."

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

None of the original oil concessions are worth a crap now. That's all going to have to be renegotiated now.

But that wasn't what drove the train in 93. Wish it was, would make the whole thing more palatable.

[optimist_1]

[quote="MAD MAC"]And you know what we used to say in the QRF headquarters, the only good gedir, is a dead gedir.[/quote]

Put ''Haber'' before it because Gidir is a Qabiil. In ''West Ethopia'' Somali Galbeed. Gidir are brothers with Murusade and a gidir women gave birth to Habergidir.

[AbdiWahab252]

MAD, why do u have such hate for the Habar Gidir ?

[Dhaga Bacayl]

Abdi,

Does it matter whether it HG or habar Jin...This red neck asz-hole hates all Somalis and thinks very little of our beliefs.