Haiti: The Past As Prelude

Administration officials pondering a military campaign in Haiti ought to be poring over the Pentagon's classified reports detailing what went wrong in Somalia. When the last U.S. official and his 59 Marine bodyguards leave Mogadishu this week, the U.S. will be abandoning a failed investment of $1.3 billion and 44 American lives. Two still secret postmortems spell out how the humane mission to feed starving Somalis degenerated into a guerrilla war that has left the country little better off than it was before the U.S. intervened.

The Pentagon's top brass have declined to release the studies because they are "politically embarrassing,"...

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