Bungling Into Somalia

Before I wade into the Iraq mess and more on the President's speech last night, I want to address the other war we're fighting. No, not that one. I mean Somalia, where we've decided to forget about putting an Ethiopian face on the war and get to bombing ourselves. Incidentally, anyone who thinks "Iraqis will be in the lead" of operations in taking Baghdad needs to remember the Somalia situation as exhibit A.

There are conflicting reports as to the success of air strikes against suspected Al-Qaeda targets in the south of the country. The Independent (UK) has the story that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, architect of the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa, was killed in the raid. But they add this:

Local Somali aid agencies said that the bombing was indiscriminate. They reported that groups of pastoralists wandering across southern Somalia's barren terrain searching for water supplies had been attacked during the day. At night, those that lit fires were targeted. Analysts in the region said the attacks could destabilise the Horn of Africa further. A Somalia expert in Nairobi said: "Trying to find a few individuals in Somalia when military intelligence is so weak is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It seems they cannot distinguish between Islamic Courts fighters and pastoralists watering their animals."

And The Financial Times reports that all that collateral damage was actually to little good end.

The controversial US air strike in southern Somalia missed all three top al-Qaeda members Washington alleges are hiding out in the country, a senior US official said on Thursday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said eight to 10 “al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists” were killed in Monday’s attack, but gave no details [...]

The strike was criticised by the European Commission, as well as the Arab League which claimed it had killed “many innocent victims” and demanded that Washington refrain from further attacks. There were no accurate casualty figures.

So, while we can debate the relative success of the mission (and it's highly debatable), we know that the blowback is a bitch.

A messy, low-level battle for control of the battered streets of Mogadishu continued Wednesday, as a fighter shot a rocket-propelled grenade at a convoy of Ethiopian trucks passing through the combustible Somali capital.

The situation is so confused and the city so fractured and armed that the attacks, recounted by witnesses, could have come from any number of groups frustrated with the presence of Ethiopian troops, who last month swept a popular Islamic movement from power on behalf of the weak, U.S.-backed transitional government that is now struggling to assert control.

Former fighters loyal to the ousted Islamic Courts movement are hiding in the city's byzantine tin-patch neighborhoods. Sub-clans and sub-sub-clans are angry with Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who they say is favoring his own people as he doles out power and who has announced intentions to forcibly disarm an insecure city fortified with guns.

And many Somalis are enraged over the U.S. airstrike in the southern tip of the country early Monday, which was aimed at suspects in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania who are thought to be among the ousted Islamic leaders on the run along the marshy coast near the Kenyan border.

"We are afraid of a long war," said businessman Abdulahi Mohamed Mohamud, 31, speaking by telephone from Mogadishu. "And people are angry at the Ethiopian troops."

More here and here.

Don't the Somalis know that they're supposed to wait a couple years before descending into civil war? This is Iraq on steroids. And there's a very good reason for that: decades upon decades of Western intervention in the country, causing hatred toward the West that the air strikes in the south just recollected.

Until yesterday's bombing, the last time America cared about Somalia was October 3, 1993, when 19 Americans were killed while trying to arrest local warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

I saw the movie "Black Hawk Down" and really liked it. The realistic battle scene, the bravery of the American troops. It even had an almost happy ending.


What it didn't have was a motivation for the Somalis who fought those brave American soldiers. Between the movie, the political rhetoric, and the MSM, all you can tell is that the Somalis hated us for no particular reason.

In other words - they are acting like primitive savages. You don't have to understand them.

For those of us who actually look for reasons and motivations, you might want to check the news from September 10th, 1993, just three weeks before "Black Hawk Down".

In the latest incident, at least 200 Somalis -- mainly women and children -- were killed when a US Cobra helicopter gunship opened fire on a crowd in Mogadishu on September 10. (Cobras have not been used in inner city combat since the Vietnam War.)

In a grotesque attempt to justify the slaughter, UN military spokesperson Major David Stockwell told reporters that "the women and children were combatants'' and that they posed "an imminent threat against our soldiers''.

The massacre began as a bulldozer accompanied by three tanks, four armoured personnel carriers and 100 ground troops started removing barricades in south Mogadishu. Armed resistance to the attack was followed by tank reinforcements. But when barricades were re-erected, largely by Somali children, the Cobra cannon attack started. According to Stockwell, the decision to fire on the Somalis was "regrettable but a last resort''. One UN soldier was killed, bringing the UN death toll to 48 since May.

A day earlier, hundreds of patients, doctors and nurses were forced out of one of Mogadishu's main hospitals as UN Cobra and Black Hawk helicopter gunships attacked.

While the 19 American soldiers had their deaths made into a movie, the 200 dead Somali woman and children are completely forgotten in the western world. No wonder we don't understand their motivations - we never cared enough to look for them.

I urge you to read the whole thing, it's an amazing account of the simmering hatred that demands that we do not enter that country as an aggressive force. Somalis have spent 15 years as a failed state in relative anarchy, but on two things they are united: they hate Ethiopia and they hate the United States. All we did is multiply that hatred, and severely damage the transitional government's chances of success. They tried disarming the clans and warlords and it didn't work. The public is completely skeptical of their motives and whether or not they want to set up an Ethiopian client state. We have another war that we are on the verge of being able to add to the increasing ledger of Bush Administration failures.