One of Ridley Scott's most extravagant war films was released in the United States just a few months after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

And while it is a tale of a brief and somewhat obscure but bloody military engagement during the Clinton administration,

it was a powerful draw on the film going public who spent over a hundred million dollars going to see this film in theaters.

Mogadishu, once known as the White Pearl of the Indian Ocean, is now in a period of reconstruction.

But it was plagued by violence for decades.

Somalia has become a punchline for facile political jokes about pirates and failed states.

But the repeated Kuz deta that have kept the country in chaos since it gained independence from Italy

and Great Britain have led to a situation where civil society and infrastructure are scarce resources.

Even scarcer are actual resources as this country long dependent on the rich fisheries

surrounding the Horn of Africa has been unable to defend its territorial waters from illegal

fishing operations from other countries.

The desperation and privation facing the people of Somalia have led some to turn to piracy

and other forms of organized crime, while others have clung to religion

yielding dangerous extremist groups like Al-Shabaab.

The opening of today's film gives us a crash course

in the geopolitics of the mission it depicts,

over plaintiff music sung in a decidedly Islamic

tone scale and images of corpses and famous children in hospital cots. The term of

art used by people who work in global health and development economics is poverty porn.

We've seen the same kind of imager used in television commercials that try to persuade us that for a monthly

donation that costs less than your daily cup of coffee, you could keep the

horse flies out of the corners of one child's eyes.

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