It has gotten to the point that I am hearing outright, bald-faced lies from conservative commentators on such a regular basis, I feel the need to address them in some manner. So here goes a series of small posts, in each a conservative claim and the truth of the matter.

Lie #1: “Clinton Sent Troops into Somalia.”

Heard this one on Crossfire the other day, and found several instances of it on the web as well, a notable one in The Washington Times. The claim is used as a way to criticize Clinton for his foreign policy, and to contrast this with Bush’s purported “success” in Iraq.

The fact: Clinton did not sent the troops. George H. W. Bush did. On December 4, 1992, Bush ordered 25,000 U.S. troops into Somalia. Remember the night-vision video of the beach landing on the news? One thing Republicans know, it’s how to script news coverage. Bush sent the troops in a month after losing the election, and one and a half months before Clinton took office, knowing full well that he would get the initial glory and that Clinton would get stuck with the quagmire. If Clinton had done the same to Bush Jr., conservatives would have been howling like mad, accusing Clinton of every political dirty trick in the book, claiming he was sending our soldiers into harm’s way just to embarrass Bush Jr. But Bush Sr. doing it to Clinton, that was OK. In fact, conservatives quickly erased the fact that Bush sent them in and blame the whole thing on Clinton, showing how he didn’t know how to handle such things.

In fact, Clinton’s handling of Somalia beats Bush Jr.’s actions in Iraq to hell. Clinton was anxious to bring the troops back, he didn’t have to wait until the whole country was screaming at him before he decided to do that. And unlike Bush, Clinton was able to get the U.N. forces into Somalia, cutting U.S. troops down to 4,200. Unfortunately, he could not pull them all out–despite conservative sneers that Democrats like to cut and run, Clinton stood ground with the U.N. forces as long as it seemed that good could be done–and so, naturally, conservatives lashed out at him when a mission went wrong in late 1993, where eighteen U.S. soldiers died in the mission that went so famously wrong. Soon after, Clinton ordered a withdrawal, the mission no longer publicly tenable, but U.S. troops still held ground there, staying until late March, 1994.

It was a fiasco, but it was a Bush fiasco; Clinton simply did the best he could with what he had been given.

Source: The History Channel: George Bush, Forty-First U.S. President.