Former Peace Corps Director Mark Gearan recalls that after bodies of soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu "Making the case for the involvement was the challenge President Clinton had, and it was not met."
Video of Fallouja Scene Raises Questions
By James Gerstenzang and Elizabeth Jensen, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — The video is so graphic, so horrific, that U.S. television networks held back in their displays, wrestling with just how much to show on their news programs. They blurred some images and left out others.
Some websites on which the video was available warned visitors that it contained "graphic, violent images," and that they may not want to watch.
But for those who sought it out, a 1-minute, 20-second clip, available around the world, showed a charred body being beaten by a man wielding a metal pole, part of a body being dragged behind a car, and two bodies dangling from the steelwork of a bridge over the Euphrates River.
Such images raise inherent questions of taste. But beyond that, pictures and video of the attack today on four American contractors in Fallouja carried the potential of raising broad questions about the U.S. operation in Iraq. The images were widely seen by national security and political communications experts as likely to ripple across both the policy and political landscapes.
Such was the case when a U.S. Army helicopter was downed in Somalia in 1993 and the bodies of the soldiers aboard were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, in an incident that came to be known as Black Hawk Down.
Mark Gearan, who was director of communications in President Clinton's White House at the time, recalled the tragic episode today.
"It was among the darkest days that the president had, because of the sense of responsibility of having involved U.S. forces and the horror of what happened," said Gearan, president of Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, N.Y. "Making the case for the involvement was the challenge President Clinton had, and it was not met."
Soon afterward, the United States abandoned its military mission there.
