From: wagner@bodie.cs.unc.edu (Michael Wagner)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.quaker
Subject: Re: Are troops effective care-givers
Date: 16 Dec 92 15:30:55 GMT
Organization: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In article <lisbcmINNcji@boogie.cs.utexas.edu> swisher@cs.utexas.edu (Janet M. Swisher) writes:

>appear.  The danger is in assuming that such things are inevitable.
>Panama, Iraq and Somalia were all the result, in one way or another,
>of the US's foreign policy for years previous to the crises.  Now El

I don't know much at all about Panama or Iraq.  I think that
blaming Somalia's present crisis on the US is pretty naieve,
to ge gentle.  I lived in Mogadishu for a year and a half, and
left when the war in the North started.

I think it's hard for some to believe that there is *evil* in the
world that the US isn't responsible for.  I am not claiming that
the US is completely guitless in this regard, but I think that
Somalia is a very complex case.

I think that some of the elements that contributed to the current
crisis: 
	1)	Russian advisors who taught Siad Barre how
	to run a tightly controlled police state, and trained
	the NSS (National Security Service) on a KGB type
	model.  The NSS bloodily repressed even the slightest
	sign of dissent.  When I was there, they excuted
	dissidents on the beach, making a kind of party of
	it.  They would tell the dissidents to start runing
	down the beach, and then laugh and shoot them.  This
	was the Somali rumor, at any rate.

	2)	The establishment of  dictatorship.  The problem
	was that as Barre aged, he trusted fewer and fewer members
	of other clans.  They were excluded from government, which
	lead to more probles, which fueled more Barre paranoia, which
	caused him to trust other clans, less, which caused him to
	exclude them from government.  When I was in Somalia, everyone
	knew that Barre's days were numbered, and figured it would
	be fairly bloody when he went.  My days in Somalia (and
	Yemen before that) convinced that US-style democracy may
	be a very poor way to *choose* a leader, but it's not a
	bad way to *depose* a leader. 

	3)	I think that a fair portion of the blame for Somalia
	must be laid on the theories of the kind of state-controlled
	socialism that Barre followed, and that has laid waste to
	a lot of Black Africa.  I think that even the most liberal
	assessment of the socialist experiment in Africa must confess
	it a miserable failure, and responsible for the deaths of
	millions as former self-sufficient food exporters nationalized
	everything and became starving countries.  The old people in
	Somalia, who were not as afraid of the NSS used to say "When
	the Italians were here, we had food."  When the farms were
	nationalized, they stopped producing, and  Somlia became a 
	country whose only internation currency earning industry 
	was famine.

I am not saying that the US did not have some hand in this.  But
I think that were the US to have done nothing in Somlia at all, the
present situation might have occurred.

I think that Quakers serve best when they serve Truth first.  I
am as suspicious of simple "it's all the US's fault" explanations
for evil in the world as I am of Reagan's "evil empire" explanations
for evil in the world.

Mike