Somalia: US Foreign Policy and Gangsterism

[fastpat]

Justin Raimondo on the US government's continued murders in Somalia.

Why the US supports the warlords

Somalia is the best evidence that, as Michael Scheuer puts it, the U.S. government is Osama bin Laden’s one "indispensable ally." If al-Qaeda is credited with reversing the threat of a complete social breakdown in Somalia, and the gangster warlords we once held responsible for the country’s torment, in league with a foreign invader, is held up as the only alternative, then surely the terrorist leader is smiling somewhere in a deep dark cave, rubbing his hands together and chortling at his extraordinary good fortune.

[varmint]

justin raimondo? that's your expert on east africa?

thank god i got out of the libertarian party.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by varmint
justin raimondo? that's your expert on east africa?

thank god i got out of the libertarian party.

Yes, I'm sure it was for the best.

Any facts you'd like to share on the subject of this thread, or are you factless and therefore forced to denigrate the author of the article?

[m21sniper]

Here's a fact: "US Backed" Warlordism is INFINITELY better than living under Sharia.

What'd you want the world to do, sit back while the Caliphate rides on? F that i says.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by m21sniper
Here's a fact: "US Backed" Warlordism is INFINITELY better than living under Sharia.

What'd you want the world to do, sit back while the Caliphate rides on? F that i says.

Kosovo!

[m21sniper]

Kosovo was the opposite. There we bombed Xtians to "defend" Muslims.

I'm still not entirely sure we bombed the right side in that one, but i suppose time will tell. A good friend of mine was a Canadian Forces Lt Colonel(actually he was a captain at the time IIRC) and onscene commander back in the day in KFOR. From the way he tells it we didn't do the world any favors by protecting the Croat muslims, though Wesley Clark apparently came "this close" to starting WWIII with the Russians.

[island911]

Originally posted by varmint
justin raimondo? that's your expert on east africa?

thank god i got out of the libertarian party.

NO doubt.

I'm begining to think that guys like Patsy are deliberately co-opting the Libertarian party. Even if he is an anarchist, he would be smart to give the Libertarian ideals some room to expand. . . .before pushing his extreme rhetoric.

The Rebupicans are the benificiaries of these anarchist guys, for sure.

[sammyg2]

Dude. how many hours a day do you spend scouring the internet looking for any scrap of anti-US government drivel so you can cut and paste it here? That isn't normal or healthy behavior. Seriously. You are obsessed, OBC.

BTW If you hate the U.S. so much, just get the heck out. There are lots of other countries in the world, try one.
Be careful though, most of them will kill you if you bad-mouth their government the way you do mine.

[Moneyguy1]

Armchair insurrectionist; member of NATO....(No Action, Talk Only)....

[fastpat]

Originally posted by m21sniper
Kosovo was the opposite. There we bombed Xtians to "defend" Muslims.

No, Clinton bombed Serbians to stop them form defending their homeland against an invasion of illegal aliens from Albania. The ensuing massacre, right under US government guns, of Serbians living in Kosovo, the burning of more than 150 Christian churches, some dating from the 13th century, and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Serbian homeland of Kosovo is what happened and is happening.

I'm still not entirely sure we bombed the right side in that one, but i suppose time will tell. A good friend of mine was a Canadian Forces Lt Colonel(actually he was a captain at the time IIRC) and onscene commander back in the day in KFOR. From the way he tells it we didn't do the world any favors by protecting the Croat muslims, though Wesley Clark apparently came "this close" to starting WWIII with the Russians.

My point is that the Bush junta is doing nothing to stop illegal encroachment of muslims into europe in land that the US government controls.

The notion of the "worldwide caliphate" is just the domino theory reloaded, it's bunk now just as it was bunk then.

[fintstone]

Originally posted by m21sniper
Kosovo was the opposite. There we bombed Xtians to "defend" Muslims...

I agree...big mistake...we certainly picked the wrong side in Yugoslavia.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by fintstone
I agree...big mistake...we certainly picked the wrong side in Yugoslavia.

Not "picked", "picking" is the correct tense. Bush has continued the Clinton Policy in toto.

[fastpat]

by Eric Margolis

"The US has opened a fourth front in the war on terrorism" the Pentagon announced last week, as if the US did not have enough failing wars on its hands with al-Qaida, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

In a striking irony, F-18 fighter-bombers from the carrier "USS Eisenhower," deadly AC-130 gunships from the US base at Djibouti, and Special Forces units attacked Somalia from sea, air and land. Other US units and FBI agents deployed on the Kenya-Somalia border. As America’s latest foreign war began with air strikes from the giant carrier that bears this great president’s name, no one seemed to recall President Dwight Eisenhower’s magnificent farewell address in 1961 to Americans in which he warned against foreign entanglements and the growing political influence of the military-industrial complex.

Very few Americans understood their nation had just invaded another in an act worthy of the late, unlamented Chairman Leonid Brezhnev.

Much of Somalia has already been occupied by Ethiopia’s powerful, US-financed army which invaded that defenseless nation, with Washington’s blessing, under cover of the Christmas holiday.

It is an open secret in Washington that the Somalia operation is to be the Bush/Cheney Administration’s new model for war against recalcitrant Muslims. The White House failed to convince India or Pakistan to rent their troops for occupation duty in Iraq, but it has succeeded in using Ethiopia’s army in Somalia. Ethiopia’s repressive regime was only too happy to invade Somalia and received large infusions of aid from Washington. The Administration is duplicating the British Empire’s wide scale use of native troops ("sepoys" in India; "askaris" in East Africa) in colonial wars.

But is Somalia really a "hotbed of terrorism" as Washington claimed? The US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was sparked by last fall’s defeat of corrupt Somali clan warlords. They had recently been armed and financed by the CIA to fight the growing popularity of local Islamists.

The warlords had kept Somalia in turmoil and near anarchy for 15 years. Last year, a group of Muslim jurists and notables, the Union of Islamic Courts, managed to defeat the warlords and impose a rough form of law and order on many parts of chaotic central and southern Somalia. Northern Somalia is ruled by a secessionist government based around the strategic port of Berbera.

The conservative Islamic Courts were sympathetic to pan-Muslim causes. But there is no evidence so far that they were involved in anti-American jihadist movements and had no identifiable links, as Washington claimed, to al-Qaida. Now, Somalis are seething with anger at America, providing yet more volunteers for jihadist operations. In fact, the Christmas US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia threatens to ignite violence across the Horn of Africa.

A handful of African Al-Qaida suspects in the 1998 bombing of US Embassies in East Africa may have been in Somalia, but going to war against a sovereign nation to try to assassinate or capture a handful of suspects is like using a nuclear weapon to kill a gnat and is sure to generate more anti-US violence. Air strikes by carrier-based US F-18’s and AC-130 gunships killed between 50 and 100 Somali civilians but, apparently, no al-Qaida suspects. The real aim of the US air attacks was to destroy remaining fighting units of the Islamic Courts and clear the way for the US-imposed Somali figurehead government.

The invasion and occupation of defenseless Somalia is the latest – but probably not the last – example of the increasing militarization of US foreign policy. VP Dick Cheney’s new Pentagon golden-haired boys, Special Operations Command, elbowed aside the humiliated CIA and the feckless State Department and vowed to "drain the Islamic swamp" in Somalia.

Thus begins President George Bush’s fourth war against the Muslim World. Invading dirt-poor Somalia is Bush’s last stab at military glory and a final effort to convince disgruntled American voters the so-called "war on terror" is a success. So also continues Washington’s preference of only invading small nations that cannot offer much initial resistance by conventional forces: Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Somalia. Afghanistan has only 29 million wretched people; Iraq about 26 million – two-thirds of them in rebellion.

The administration is again recklessly charging into a thicket of tribal politics in a remote nation it knows nothing about. US policy in Somalia is being driven by neoconservatives seeking war against the entire Muslim World, and self-serving advice from ally Ethiopia. Israel, which has maintained close intelligence, military, and economic links to Ethiopia’s regime, is also discreetly involved: it has long conducted covert operations in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea’s western littoral.

Eritrea’s 1993 secession took away Ethiopia’s natural access to the sea, leaving it landlocked. Ethiopia’s strategic goals in Somalia may be to seize one or more deep-water ports, turn Somalia into a protectorate, and crush any Islamic movements that might enflame its own voiceless Muslims, who comprise half of Ethiopia’s 73 million people.

America’s attack on Somalia recalls Afghanistan. The US is again blundering into ancient clan and tribal conflicts, using foreign troops and local mercenaries to defend a puppet regime without any popular support. US-Ethiopian intervention in Somalia is certain to re-ignite the murderous clan rivalries that brought it to the current state of anarchy.

Like Afghanistan, Somalia was easy to invade, but may prove very difficult to rule, or eventually leave. Many Somalis saw the now scattered Islamic Courts militias as their best hope for stability and normalcy. Now they are back to zero – or worse.

Like Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001, Somalis have been slow to oppose invasion. But in time they could mount serious resistance to the new US-Ethiopian condominium over Somalia.

From 1899 to 1930, Somali mujahidin waged a fierce resistance struggle against the British, who killed a third of the native population. In 1954, Britain handed the Somali ethnic region of Ogaden to Ethiopia, thus assuring continued hostility between the two old foes.

Now we have a new war, in a faraway place, that could become yet another annoying, intractable headache for the west and yet another incubator of revenge-minded jihadis.
Read

[FOG]

Actually Gen. Clark had tapped the MEU for the Pristina raid via KC-130. The MEU was not chopped OPCON to EUCOM but TACON. The raid was planned but two days before it was to be executed the ARG, and supporting KC-130s were pulled out by the MEU commander.

It took EUCOM a few days to figure out they had no one they could readily tap and they couldn’t strong arm the Naval services. So he tried to strong the Brits.

We were still on the wrong side, it any side was the good side. Pat is correct in that over 500,000 (maybe as many as 900,000) Albanians had invaded Kosovo the previous two years due to the Albanian break-up. Basically we protected some the biggest white slavers and drug pushers in the European area.

Having served and still serving in Africa as a lendee I will state that I completely disagree with Mr. Margolis’s article. Whether he has an axe to grind or just doesn’t know any better is unknown.

S/F, FOG