BAD METAPHOR. The Chronicle of Higher Education interviews Columbia anthropologist Nicholas DiGenova, who may have done more damage to the university's fundraising efforts than Columbia's football team, which deserves special mention for an extended losing streak primarily against Ivy League teams. I hope the professor's classes are better thought out than his interview. Here is his explanation for the "million Mogadishus" trope: "The U.S. invasion of Somalia was humiliated in an excruciating way by the Somali people. And Mogadishu was the premier symbol of that. What I was really emphasizing in the larger context of my comments was the question of Vietnam and that historical lesson. ... What I was intent to emphasize was that the importance of Vietnam is that it was a defeat for the U.S. war machine and a victory for the cause of human self-determination." There is enough material here to compose a final examination in Contemporary Military History. First, it is difficult to describe the Somali campaign as an "invasion." If memory serves, President Bush (the elder) was mau-maued by weeks of pictures of emaciated children surrounded by flies into doing something to help out. (That he might have done so in order to leave the Clinton administration a mess is not outside the realm of possibility.) The Clinton administration's defence secretary, the late Les Aspin, decided not to send the heavy vehicles to Somalia as it became clear that the situation was not a simple Operation Vittles. The (probably late) Saddam Hussein probably missed that point when he issued tapes of Black Hawk Down as pregame preparation: a technical vehicle has almost no chance against a tank, as numerous 'splodeydopes discovered (who has the olive franchise for Hades these days?) Second, it is even more difficult to describe Vietnam as a "defeat" for the U.S. "war machine." For the sales efforts of the Great Society, guns-and-butter types, yes, but not for the military. Third, it defies parody to describe the North Vietnamese conquest of the South as a victory for the cause of human self-determination, unless the professor is referring to the self-determination of the boat people. Professor Drezner, from whom I found this article, is also unimpressed, and, in a touch of class, he permalinks the night owls who broke the story first.