US Foreign Policy Legacy in Somalia

By now it should go without saying that the Nobel Peace Laureate in the White House has continued, entrenched and expanded his predecessor's failed and corrupt policies in Somalia, as he has in so many parts of the degraded American imperium. And it is in Somalia that our serious, savvy bipartisan elite -- and their innumerable enablers on both sides of the political fence -- are building up what may turn out to be the mother of all blowbacks: generations of implacable hatred sprung from unfathomable suffering, inflicted on innocent people by vicious warlords in the pay of the CIA, by America's own death squads ranging through the land, and by the entirely predictable (indeed, predicted) extremist insurgencies that arise in the chaos our elites create in their imperial marauding.

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This was precisely the same policy adopted by George W. Bush in 2002, when it was apparently feared that the tiny handful of scattered individuals then in Somalia who might possibly have some loose connection or vague adherence to "al Qaeda" would ... er ... build rocket ships that would drop atom bombs on the Super Bowl, or something. In any case, in the vast, Big Bang-like expansion of power and profiteering that gorged the military-security complex after 9/11, it was thought that “something” had to be done in Somalia. And that “something” was taking American taxpayer money away from schools, roads, hospitals and parks and giving it to Somali warlords, who proceeded to terrorize their own people … and fuel an Islamic insurgency, ostensibly the very outcome the policy was designed to prevent.

  Chris Floyd

Read this Chris Floyd article in its enlightening full where he quotes another article by Jeremy Scahill, in part:

In the summer of 2006 the ICU [Islamic Courts Union], along with fighters from the Shabab, ran the CIA’s men out of town. “The warlords were ejected out of Mogadishu for the first time in sixteen years. No one thought this was possible,” recalls Aynte. From June to December 2006, the ICU “brought a modicum of stability that’s unprecedented in Mogadishu,” reopening the airport and the seaport. “You could drive in Mogadishu at midnight, no problem, no guards. You could be a foreigner or Somali. It was at total peace.”

Back to Floyd:

But of course peace was not what Washington had in mind for Somalia. It is never the object of imperial foreign policy. The object was, as always, domination. Obedience. A regime that toes the line – and crosses the palms of Western elites with the proper amount of silver. The Islamic Courts Union was outside of Washington’s control. One couldn’t “do business” with them. They were the wrong kind of Muslim fundamentalist – not like those nice head-choppers and hand-choppers and palm-crossers in Saudi Arabia. So the ICU – and Somalia’s brief window of peace – had to go.

The article is a bit lengthy, but IMO worth the time.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.