"'We're not inflicting pain on these fuckers,' Clinton said, softly at first. 'When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers.' Then, with his face reddening, his voice rising, and his fist pounding his thigh, he leaned into Tony [Lake], as if it was his fault. 'I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can't believe we're being pushed around by these two-bit pricks.'" -- George Stephanopoulos writing about the Somalia crisis in "All Too Human," page 214.
The difference between the Somali campaign against the US and the Al-Qaeda - ish campaign against London and New York is that the American military were occupying large parts of Mogadishu at the time.
I wrote this in a retrospective article on humanitarian itnervention in 1999:
"Somalia, 1993: 4000 killed by UN troops over 12 months; 700 killed on one night, 5 September."
(In 1993 I was outside the US embassy protesting against the killing of thousands of Somalis by US forces. We were about to march around the Embassy when I noticed that the door was open, and suggested we storm the building instead. About 100 of us got as far as the lobby, where we were squashed like students in a how many can you get in a phone booth competition. After an hour or so, we were charged by armed marines and came popping out like a cork. I was charged with criminal trespass, but when my lawyer started to prepare a defence that included a demand to be tried in the US courts on the grounds that the alleged offence took place on US soil, the charges were dropped.)
That was a fightback, four blokes from Leeds with bombs in their bags is a fartback.