hey, check out the breaking news from somalia!!

The Waiting Trophy Man

have you heard about what's going on over there??

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/01/08/somalia.strike/index.html

MrBrian

Yeah of course, the US is backing a government with weapons and money, that governmnet is backing thugs like the ones that brought down black hawk down.The US is fine with that because they say "it's a fight against al queida".

I've been following this conflict quite a bit the past month or so. I was starting to think that america was losing it's edge when it came to hypocrisy, but this whole somalia thing has restored my faith in them.

MrBrian

December 29, 2006
Somalia: US Foreign Policy and Gangsterism
Why the US supports the warlords
By Justin Raimondo

In our Orwellian age, no one is surprised when American foreign policy takes a U-turn, and, suddenly, we are at war with Eastasia – because, you see, we have always been at war with Eastasia. Yet even the most jaded observers are bound to raise an eyebrow over our embrace of the Somalian warlords, whose disarmament and capture was our announced goal the last time we intervened. That failed effort, you’ll recall, was dubbed "Operation Restore Hope."

Now we are back, albeit semi-covertly – using Ethiopia, a major recipient of American arms and technical support, as our proxy – in a new project that ought to be named Operation Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here. In the post-9/11 Bizarro World alternate universe that our leaders and policymakers seem to have slipped into, the Bad Guys have become the Good Guys, and the formerly fiendish Somalian warlords are now part of the "anti-terrorism coalition" that the U.S. is assembling in the region.

A little history: The failed UN/U.S. intervention of 1993 led directly to the triumph of the warlords, who plundered, raped, and murdered their way through the streets of Mogadishu, the Somalian capital, and reduced the country to Mad Max territory. In response, an "Islamic courts" movement sprang up to impose some sort of cohesion on a rapidly disintegrating social order. The business community and public opinion rallied behind these courts, which were and are all that stand between civilization and savagery in Somalia.

As I’ve pointed out before, the long history of U.S. intervention in Somalia is a veritable case study of how and why American foreign policy always manages to generate the deadliest, most horrific "blowback," as the intelligence professionals put it. Blowback, a concept exhaustively explored in Chalmers Johnson’s classic book of the same title, means the unintended consequences of our bumbling, culturally tone-deaf, invariably unsuccessful efforts to manipulate local proxies to maximize our alleged national interests. In the 1990s, the Americans intervened in the name of "humanitarianism," against the warlords; in the new millennium, we have tossed aside humanitarian concerns in favor of the ruthless pursuit of "terrorists," real or imagined. The former "warlords" hunted by U.S. troops and blamed for Somalia’s shocking degeneration into pure chaos are now aided and abetted by the Americans and their Ethiopian cohorts.

This latest American turnabout – flooding Somalian warlords with money and arms – came about largely as the result of an imaginary confrontation between U.S. officials and supposed "terrorists." It happened a year ago, when U.S. government personnel investigating possible terrorist infiltration of Somalia landed at a makeshift airport just outside Mogadishu. No sooner had their plane set down uneasily on the tarmac than they heard shooting, and, assuming they were under fire, beat an unceremonious retreat. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, this was clearly an ambush, pulled off by terrorist elements possibly associated with al-Qaeda.

In reality, however, the Americans had stumbled into a conflict involving two rival clans, one of which controlled the airport, and the other which had recently purchased a large tract of land bordering the road to the airport. The former were outraged that this purchase would cut into their very profitable extortion and protection racket, and that their control over the heavy road traffic would be challenged. This led to an escalating series of threats and counter-threats, eventually exploding, on January 13, 2006, into open violence just as the American visitors touched down.

The protagonists in this dispute were characterized by the Washington Post as follows:

"Abukar Omar Adan was a devoutly Islamic and heavily armed clan elder with ties to the strict neighborhood religious courts that had brought a semblance of order to a city without a government.

His rival, Bashir Raghe, was a brash, younger man who had been a waste contractor with the U.S. military forces in Mogadishu before the United States pulled out."

Guess which one is the U.S. proxy.

(read on)
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10238

The Waiting Trophy Man

ignorance is bliss:

"Policy is made not only with imperfect knowledge but with a complete disdain for knowledge, as such. That’s for the "reality-based community," as one White House advisor put it to Ron Suskind – those vulgar empiricists who insist that American policy must have some anchor in factual knowledge, as opposed to the neo-Trotskyite wet-dreams of various neoconservative gurus and White House speechwriters".