How Bush Failed Somalia

Americans don't spend much time thinking about Somalia. And what time we do spend has in recent months been focused on somewhat amused accounts of the uptick in pirate activity off the Somali coast. But the piracy is but a symptom of the larger problem of lawlessness and anarchy in Somalia. To Americans who have paid no attention to East Africa in the time between the departure of U.S. forces from Somalia in 1995 and the recent spate of pirate attacks, this situation may appear merely endemic to the region. But it's not. The Somali situation was, in many ways, improving as of two years ago. At which point the Bush administration initiated a new adventure that, like most Bush administration deeds, was ill-conceived and worked out poorly. In this case, it destroyed the country, has been responsible for the deaths of untold thousands of people, has created the pirate problem, and is breeding a new generation of anti-American jihadists.

And nobody in the United States seems to have noticed.

In part, this is because Somalia is an obscure corner of the world. And in part it's because the crucial events took place almost exactly two years ago -- during the Christmas season when most journalists were on vacation and most people weren't following the news.

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To those of us who were both paying attention and chastened by the misadventure in Iraq, this looked like a recipe for disaster. Here was a largely Christian country (Ethiopia), operating with the support of the United States, trying to occupy a largely Islamic country (Somalia) whose population has historically been at odds with the former. The inevitable results would be insurgency, death, destruction, anarchy, and the development of a more dangerous strain of Islamism as the United States sent the message that we were the enemy of all Somali Islamists whether or not they had any quarrel with us.

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Of course the United States and the Bush administration are hardly the only blameworthy actors here. But we are blameworthy. We could have just minded our own business. But instead, in a fit of thoughtlessness, we initiated a policy that nobody in the States paid much attention to and that over a period of years has prompted massive human suffering around the world. And the Bush administration is continuing to make things worse in its final weeks in office. I can only hope that the incoming Obama administration will spend some time thinking about Somalia and learning not only specific policy lessons but also developing a sense of humility about the damage that can be done when the world's only superpower thrashes around carelessly.