American policy in the Horn of Africa turns out to be total debacle.
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Don't Say I Didn't Warn You
13 Sep 2007 10:24 am
Comments (8)
American policy in the Horn of Africa
And the evidence of this is... ? Certainly nothing in Robert Farley's post.
Apparently Farley, like Matthew, thinks that history in Somalia began on the day Ethiopia invaded - as if there wasn't a civil war in Somalia prior to the Ethiopian invasion. In fact, the Ethiopian invasion has certainly improved things in Somalia, seeing as how there used to be an out-and-out war there prior to the Ethiopian invasion, and now there isn't - there's just some insurgents and some posturing from the Eritrian capital.
For some reason, Matthew seems to think that ending a civil war is a "total debacle". What that is, I can't say.
At the risk of giving the appearance that I agree with Al, it does need to be said that the situation in the Horn of Africa has been a total debacle since before the first President Bush intervened in Somalia, and has been a debacle ever since. And, as I have been saying ever since Matt's first post on the subject, we should all first and foremost be thankful that Bush did not send US troops into the region to execute his fantastic "plan" to save Somalia from the Islamists.
That said, it is indeed a debacle. And it's worth questioning whether this is an instance where an Islamist regime would have been more of a stabilizing force and an overall lesser evil than Meles Zenawi's goon squads.
La Follette:
I'd argue that it was actually becoming less of a debacle right before the Ethiopian intervention. The civil war was basically ending. The Islamic Courts had won Mogadishu (see the Newshour: http://tinyurl.com/ynghk7 ) and were taking on the remaining strongholds of the Transitional government. This isn't to say they were a panacea, they had some hard-line tendencies (BBC description of their winning streak and the downsides: http://tinyurl.com/yp3v2w ).
The Ethiopian invasion got an exciting new guerrilla war going (see Slate http://tinyurl.com/create.php ).
So I think it's actually safe to say that the Islamist regime had become a more stabilizing force. Now whether they were a lesser evil, I couldn't say. But even with Ethiopia and the U.N. backing them the transitional government hasn't managed to achieve the level of stability that the Islamic Courts Union had.
Oh, the irony of it. Once again, the Bush administration gets hoisted on its own petard.
This time, using its puppets in the Ethiopian state, the administration engineers a coup in Somalia by overthrowing the so-called “Islamist” government. As many of us predicted at the time, this would only serve to force the “Islamists” to regroup and return to the fight, which they have now done in an alliance with Eritrea. So, now the US state-sponsorship of a coup in Somalia must be preserved by a war against Eritrean “state-sponsorship of terrorism.”
The bottom line: the lives of all these poor black people must be sacrificed to the greater glory of the “war against terrorism.”
What else is new?
Who could have seen that coming? After all, the last time we tried to link up with Prester John, King of Abyssinia, to open a two-front war with the Musselmen, that worked out swell.
Do you get the impression that America's military intelligence in the Horn of Africa isn't much more sophisticated than Richard the Lionhearted's was?
Yes, let's give into the Islamicisation of Africa and eventually Europe for the sake of stability. You stupid little turd.
Comments closed September 27, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
This is why Dr. Lorbeer's statement in the movie The Constant Gardener was so right on: “This is how the world fucks Africa.”
Posted by cecil rhodes | September 13, 2007 10:39 AM