We have become a society totally conditioned to not believing it or not even being affected by things unless there are pictures. Do you remember when we first went to Somalia? George H. W. Bush sent some food with troops over there. You know why we did that? I mean, the Somalis had been suffering at the hands of warlords for, gosh, decades. These are a combination at the time communists. Haile-Selassie in Ethiopia, that was a communist inspired famine against his own people. The Somali war leaders had connections to Al-Qaeda as we now know, and yet we had heard of all the starving and the suffering. We didn't care anything about it. It just didn't have the same impact, was in the New York Times every day, people remember reading about it, but when the New York Times published a single photo of a young Somali child with flies buzzing about his head, that was it.
Everybody said, "We've got to do something! Look at that! It's horrible! Do something!" So Bush said, "Okay, going to do something." So we sent some food over there, and used the military to distribute the food -- and then all hell broke loose because it wasn't what we thought. It was an Al-Qaeda operation, a base camp, and here's comes the U.S. military, and what are we trying to do? We're trying to take the food away from the warlord, in this case Mohammed Farrah Aideed, who was using it as all of these type people do to control their populations, and all of a sudden we're over there and we find ourselves in the midst of a military mission when the American people are demanding a humanitarian mission, and we know what happened; led to Black Hawk Down and all that because we weren't prepared to go for military. We were using armed forces to distribute food.
