Get Ready for Somalia...

Did you know there is a significant and growing branch of the Wart on Terrorism being conducted in Somalia? I didn't until today -- it's a page two story, as they say, but I think anything to do with the Wart is page one -- thousands of people are losing their lives and livelihoods, if that's not frontpage news then what is?

For years (unsurprisingly), as has been their practice, the US government has funded and supported ruthless warlord governments in Somalia -- a predominantly Muslim country in East Africa -- mainly because they have been trying to stop an Islamic government from coming to power.

This is an interesting point and something the US never seems to learn: the more you antagonize or attack any single political group, the more popular and ultimately more powerful it becomes. This happened with Communism and is now happening with Islamism, neither of which were or are good for a healthy society. The US, despite all its vacuous talk about democracy has done more to avert democracy in the world than any other modern entity. In fact, it is exceedingly adept at preventing and destroying democracy.

The solution for many countries throughout the world has been Islamism -- fundamentalist Islamic government. And it's a worrying state of affairs when non-Islamist publics are willing, nay, eager, to support Islamist governments because they at least represent native sentiments rather than foreign invasion -- nobody likes to be told what to do by outsiders, especially when those outsiders only want to take advantage of you.

Well, years of supporting the warlords in Somalia came to an end last month in the valuable metropol of Mogadishu when an organization called the UIC (Union of Islamic Courts) took power from them. According to the UK Independent, the UIC already controls half of Somalia and is "far more popular among ordinary Somalis than the fragile transitional government". The US fear is the Islamists will take over the whole country soon and so they have sent their own troops (remember the Black Hawk Down disaster of the mid-90s?) and are now funding Ethiopian troops (there are 5,000 in Somalia now) to battle out the UIC. Obviously this will only anger the people into supporting the UIC even more.

Let's point out again, for those of you who think there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans in the US or who think that the Bush administration is implementing their own brand of foreign policy that it was under Clinton that the Battle of Mogadishu occurred, Bush is merely repeating his predecessor's exact same policy.

So, there you have it: the Wart is far from over and as we've witnessed recently, is merely only expanding. It's a good thing the US media is so propagandist in favor of US government policy and actions, otherwise Americans would realize exactly how badly their government is screwing up the world and do something about it -- that's what democracies do, don't they? When they work, that is.