Results
U.S. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin resigned his post late in 1993. He was specifically blamed for denying the U.S. Army permission to have its own armor units in place in Somalia, units which might have been able to break through to the trapped soldiers earlier in the battle. U.S. political leaders felt it would be bad for the mission's peacekeeping image if tanks were in country.
Osama bin Laden, who was living in Sudan at the time, cited this operation, in particular U.S. withdrawal, as an example of American weakness and vulnerability to an attack, which may have inspired him to plan the attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001.
Read more about this topic: Operation Gothic Serpent
Famous quotes containing the word results:
“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“It amazes me when I hear any person prefer blindness to deafness. Such a person must have a terrible dread of being alone. Blindness makes one totally dependent on others, and deprives us of every satisfaction that results from light.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)