Some readers may remember how two years ago, the Ethiopian government launched a blitzkrieg invasion of Somalia with the support (and high hopes) of the Bush administration.
How the Islamic Courts Union seemed to fall apart immediately, only to regroup and wage a tenacious guerrilla insurgency.
Well, folks, the Ethiopian Army is about to pull out of Somalia, leaving another disaster in its wake.
To quote from an excellent article I came across in The Seattle Times (online):
"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted." Oh, goodie.
For more, see Paul Salopek, Chicago Tribune, "U.S. appears to be losing its secret war in Somalia" (11/29/2008):
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008448575_somalia29.html
One more snippet:
"Your government [i.e. the United States government] gets away with a lot here," said the prison warden Hassan Mohamed Ibrahim, striding about his antique facility with a pistol tucked in the back of his pants. "In Iraq, the world is watching. In Afghanistan, the world is watching. In Somalia, nobody is watching."
And to those who think Somalia, who cares? Everything is interconnected, only more so now than ever.
Today's Rune: The Self. p.s. Post title is not a direct reference to the book of the same name.
4 comments:
My contention has always been that when the ruling powers of any region of the world want peace they will have it without any outside interference. If the Somali's wanted to overthrow their war-lord masters they would be willing to die just as the Afghans did the Soviet.
bush and every other post WWII president (Carter excepted) and their drive to be the big dog, have so far departed from the American Doctrine that it is hard to care anymore about every war torn area of the globe. We don't fight for freedom anymore only for "national interest."
Every day we seem to penetrate a new rock layer.
If only the US Government stops screwing any country it invades in the name of spreading freedom and democracy and for once admit its there for its own interest (Bush and Chenny interests in particular). Anyways Somalia is a mess and no one ever cared, but is it possible that world powers like US, Europe and Russia cant put an end to pirates with machine guns??
Ethiopia should have picked on Italy. It's the only country they've ever defeated.
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