The 13th Circle: Somalia's Hell and the Triumph of Militarism

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1656-the-13th-circle-somalias-hell-and-the-triumph-of-militarism.html#comments


As you might expect, the New York Times buries the lede in its latest story about Somalia, but surprisingly, the general outlines of the truth of the rapidly collapsing situation on this third front in the "War on Terror" can be gleaned from the piece.

Some 14 paragraphs into the story, Establishment water-carrier Jeffrey Gettleman finally gets down to the heart of the matter, and, to his credit, delivers an admirably succinct précis of the latest imperial flameout:



In 2006, Islamist troops teamed up with clan elders and businessmen to drive out the warlords who had been preying upon Somalia's people since the central government first collapsed in 1991. The six months the Islamists ruled Mogadishu turned out to be one of the most peaceful periods in modern Somali history.

But today's Islamists are a harder, more brutal group than the ones who were ousted by an Ethiopian invasion, backed by the United States, in late 2006. The old guard included many moderates, but those who tried to work with the transitional government mostly failed, leaving them weak and marginalized, and removing a mitigating influence on the die-hard insurgents.

On top of that, the unpopular and bloody Ethiopian military operations over the past two years have radicalized many Somalis and sent hundreds of unemployed young men — most of whom have never gone to school, never been part of a functioning society and never had much of a chance to do anything but shoulder a gun — into the arms of militant Islamic groups.


That is pretty much it, give or take some details -- such as the extent of Washington's direct involvement in the ongoing destruction of Somalia, which as we have often noted here, involved not only arming, training and funding the Ethiopian invaders, but also dropping US bombs on fleeing refugees, lobbing US missiles into Somali villages, renditioning refugees -- including American citizens -- into captivity in Ethiopia's notorious dungeons, and running U.S. death squads in Somalia to "clean up" after covert operations. (The latter is no deep dark secret, by the way; U.S. officials openly boasted of it to Esquire Magazine.)

Now, as anyone not completely blinded by imperial hubris could have predicted, the entire misbegotten exercise has collapsed into the worst-case scenario. A relatively stable, relatively moderate government which held out a promise of better future for the long-ravaged land was overthrown-- ostensibly to prevent it from becoming a hotbed of radical extremism. The resulting violence, chaos and brutal occupation by foreign forces led directly and inevitably to -- what else? -- a rise in radical extremism. Thousands of innocent people have been killed, hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes, millions have been plunged into the direst poverty and the imminent threat of starvation and disease, unspeakable atrocities and unbearable suffering are arising, as they always do in any situation, anywhere, when a human community is destroyed.

Yet none of this penetrates the glossy shell of imperial hubris -- not even now, when the disaster is so glaring that even eager water-carriers of empire like Gettleman are forced to acknowledge reality (albeit in the closing paragraphs). For the real thrust of the Times story is not outrage at the living hell engendered by the Terror War's third "regime change" operation. No, the Times' "analysis" is clearly aimed at one goal: continuing the brutal occupation of the Ethiopian invaders.

The Ethiopians are making serious noises about withdrawing all or most of their troops in January. Perhaps Ethiopian strongman Meles Zenawi realizes he has been played by the great gamesters on the Potomac, expending massive amounts of blood and treasure only to end up in a face-losing retreat, and with a far more virulent, dangerous mess on his borders than before the invasion. Or perhaps he is playing games of his own. In any case, the Ethiopian threat has suddenly panicked the Lords of the West, who realize that, as in Iraq, the only thing holding up their local clients is the armed might of a foreign invader. Suddenly, the Western powers that backed the invasion are shocked -- shocked! -- to find that the warlords they installed in power (some of them openly in the pay of the CIA) have no popular support in the country, and, as Gettleman notes, now "controls only a few city blocks of the entire country." The only preventing the complete collapse of Washington's clients, he warns, is presence of the Ethiopians.

Thus the emphasis in the article on the dire consequences of Ethiopia ending its participation in the American-sponsored war crime in Somalia. Gettleman trots out some heavy Establishment lumber for the requisite fearmongering: The International Crisis Group, which he tells us is "a research institute that tracks conflicts worldwide." No doubt it does; for the group is chock-a-block with the great and good of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, whose raison d'etre is "conflicts worldwide."

The ICG board is packed with such luminaries as Thomas Pickering, who served as the Reagan-Bush man in El Salvador when the US-backed government there was slaughtering civilians by the thousands to maintain its elitist-militarist rule. Pickering was a simpering apologist for the blood-letting, declaring that the dead civilians were all sympathizers with the insurgency, and thus "somewhat more than innocent civilian bystanders." Later, as US ambassador to Moscow, he went on to applaud Boris Yeltsin's violent suppression of democracy in Russia in 1993 -- an incident that seems largely forgotten these days in all the fulminations about Vladimir Putin "introducing" authoritarian rule in Russia.

1961-1963:



Thank you for this post, seemslikeadream. Wish I would've seen it sooner to K&R. It's as important as any on the 'Net.