If saving lives were the interest of the Washington warlords, they would have gotten food there a year ago. But no such problems were present when it came to transporting 500,000 troops and millions of tons of military equipment to Saudi Arabia to fight Saddam Hussein. But the real purpose of the war was never to topple Saddam, only to tame him into a pliable puppet once again. In fact, the State Department has categorically stated that there will be no attempt to do so. With the Soviet Union no longer in existence to compete with the U.S. for dominance in the third world, it is the people of those exploited countries who pose the major threat to continued plunder by the multinational corporations.
Islamic fundamentalism is a reactionary, authoritarian movement.
But in the absence of a genuine international revolutionary workers movement, the fundamentalists provide the only avenue by which the poor can oppose Western exploitation. And it is the only organized force by which they can fight their native rulers, who serve and protect those foreign interests in exchange for a share of the loot. If the U.S. had chosen to continue to ignore Muslim Somalia, the faction that eventually won out and came to rule the country might have adopted the anti-Western fundamentalist ideology. Nearby Sudan, across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia, already has a fundamentalist government which is allied with Iran and helps train and fund guerrilla fighters. As a precautionary measure against this possibility, Bush sent in the Marines.