Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Gli americani sono riusciti nell'impossibile

Peggiorare la situazione in Somalia.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2694/
It appears as if the Americans must be enjoying themselves so much
being bogged down in the Afghan war, that they want to try to create
another Afghanistan in the Horn of Africa. That would seem to be just
about the only sensible explanation for Washington's policy towards
Somalia, which has culminated this week in air strikes against
suspected al-Qaeda camps in the country's coastal swamps.
Washington policy towards Somalia has veered from one extreme to
another in recent years. But the results have been consistent: at every
stage, its interventions have succeeded in stirring up conflict and
making matters worse. The latest turn seems likely to be no exception,
a dramatic illustration of what happens when foreign policy runs out of
control.
A bit of background should help to put current events in perspective.
The Horn of Africa was an important arena for Western and Soviet
intervention during the Cold War, with both sides sponsoring proxy wars
and supporting unpopular governments. In Somalia, the brutal dictator
Siad Barre switched sides from the Soviets to the Americans in the late
1970s. Washington then propped up his regime until 1989, reportedly to
the tune of some $100million a year. With the end of the Cold War and
the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, America no longer had
strategic need of the likes of Barre. The USA withdrew its support, his
regime collapsed, and Somalia descended into factional strife.
After the Cold War Somalia became the scene for a different sort of US
and Western intervention, as the West sought to assert its global
authority under the new banners of humanitarianism. In 1992, as almost
his last act in office, President George HW Bush sent 25,000 American
troops into famine-wracked Somalia ostensibly to guarantee aid
supplies, in Operation Restore Hope. That this operation was primarily
intended to restore the image of US power was made clear when the
marines restaged parts of the landing for the cameras, so that the
media could get the right pictures. The invaders' lack of knowledge
or interest in Somalia was captured by a story doing the rounds at the
time, which had one US marine asking his sergeant which Somalis were
the good guys and which the bad guys. To which the sergeant supposedly
replied, 'The good guys are the skinny ones, the bad guys are the fat
ones....'
Under new US President Bill Clinton, the US and UN forces quickly
became embroiled in Somalia's internal conflicts between competing
'warlords', with predictably dire consequences. First the Americans
backed the warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed against rival clan chiefs. Then
they changed tack, branded Aideed the Somali 'Hitler' (sound
familiar?), and tried to hunt him down. This operation culminated in
the infamous 'Battle of Mogadishu' in October 1993, when US special
forces and helicopter gunships blundered into a catastrophic firefight
which left hundreds of Somalis dead and in which, more importantly from
Washington's perspective, 18 American soldiers were not only killed
but some of their bodies were dragged through the city streets. (For
the Hollywood version, see Black Hawk Down.) Clinton pulled out the
humiliated US military. Somalia had now all but ceased to exist as a
nation state, as warlords vied for control of clan fiefdoms. (See
Somalia: killed by 'kindness', by Brendan O'Neill.)
You might have thought that American presidents had learnt their lesson
about staying out of Somalia by now. But with the launch of the global
'war on terror' after 9/11, the Bush administration started
panicking that the al-Qaeda leaders supposedly driven from Afghanistan
might land up in Somalia, listed as another 'failed state' (I
wonder who could be responsible for that?). Attention focused on the
rise of the Union of Islamic Courts, a loose coalition of Islamic
groups seeking to re-impose some order in Mogadishu in the name of
Sharia law. This inevitably brought them into conflict with the
warlords.
Mogadishu warlords put aside their longstanding rivalries to launch the
Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) to
oppose the Islamic courts. As the name suggests, this motley outfit
became the unoffocial Somali wing of Bush's war on terror, and was
funded by the CIA. Thus America signed up to support the same warlords
who had fought against it a decade ago. Some warlords became
incorporated into the official-but-impotent Somali government.
The result of this latest intervention was that America effectively
helped to create a popular Islamist movement. The Union of Islamic
Courts grew in opposition to the US-backed ARPCT, finally taking
control of Mogadishu after fierce fighting in 2006. The courts then
reopened Mogadishu's airport and seaport for the first time in a
decade, banned guns from the streets, and drove pirates (who had held
international organisations to ransom) from the surrounding areas. Many
Somalis who were by no means Islamic radicals supported the courts'
campaign to restore order, seeing even this collection of Islamists as
being preferable to the warlord alternative.
The US response to all of this was to encourage its allies in the
neighbouring Ethiopian government to invade Somalia and fight alongside
the warlords in support of the 'legitimate' government. This they
did in December 2006, the well-equipped Ethiopian forces quickly
driving the Islamists out of Mogadishu. The people of the city
celebrated the return of the warlords by turning off all the lights and
shutting up shop.
Despite the return of chaos to the streets of Mogadishu, however, the
US authorities apparently considered this a major strategic success.
Thus they moved to take advantage of the situation this week, by
launching air-strikes against suspected al-Qaeda bases in the coastal
swamps, where they claim leading terrorists responsible for the 1998
bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were sheltering. At the
time of writing the immediate military results are unclear, with
American claims to have got their men countered by local reports of
civilian casualties.
The wider political results of the latest US intervention, however,
should already be clear enough. It risks plunging Somalia into another
round of Afghan-style conflict and turmoil, with every chance of the
instability spreading elsewhere in east Africa.
Historically, this region is no hotbed of Islamic militancy. Yet US
policymakers seem to be doing their darnedest to rectify that
situation. Even before these events, the past few years had given rise
to a widespread conspiratorial belief that America and in particular
the CIA are behind everything that goes wrong in Africa today.
At the end of December, as the UIC fled Mogadishu, a young Somali human
rights worker gave a telling interview to the BBC. He described how the
fear of a return to 'chaos, confrontation and lawlessness' in the
city had grown alongside anger with the Americans and their Ethiopian
agents. 'When helicopters and warplanes appeared over our city and
the bombs were dropped on Mogadishu airport, we got the feeling that
what is going on is an international war - the war on terror. The
fighter planes were coming from the sea and US ships from their
Djibouti base are in the Indian Ocean. People really do believe that
the US is part of this mission.' After this week's air strikes, of
course, they would appear to have pretty good reason to be certain of
that.
Even if those strikes did hit their immediate terrorist target or not
(and the record in Afghanistan is hardly encouraging for the
Americans), they will have gained little in return for losing a lot
more authority and support. As that Somali human rights worker summed
it up, 'Since 9/11 everything has changed. America used to be a dream
for us....'
So why do they do it? The point is that the 'war on terror' is not
really about what happens in Somalia or Afghanistan. It is about
America and the West seeking to resolve their own problems on the
international stage, thrashing around in the desert of Afghanistan, the
towns of Iraq or the swamps of Somalia in search of a moral mission, a
victory. The result is an out-of-control, fear-driven foreign policy,
characterised by a mixture of risk-aversion and recklessness that has
proved so disastrous in the Iraqi conflict and beyond.
President George W Bush's decision to send more troops into Iraq this
week has been described as a 'surge'. In fact, like the air strikes
in Somalia, it looks more like a violent spasm from an almost-paralysed
foreign policy elite. Having talked up the war on terror as the test of
America's resolve, the pressure to 'do SOMETHING' leads to an
apparently endless cycle of overreactions and own-goals.
Watching the news of the US air strikes, while waiting for President
Bush to announce his 'surge', it was tempting to imagine that
perhaps The Manchurian Candidate was right. Maybe the White House
really had been taken over by some secret malign power bent on twisting
US policy to its own ends. Why else would they be undermining their own
global interests like this? (Some might think the plot was confirmed by
New Labour's Geoff Hoon announcing that the war in Afghanistan was
'going to plan'!)
But perhaps another literary reference is more appropriate. Those air
strikes on Somali swamps put me in mind of a passage in Heart of
Darkness, where Conrad describes a French warship blasting away at the
jungle off the coast of colonial Africa: 'firing into a continent',
at a target nobody could see, presumably for no better purpose than to
demonstrate that it could.
Mick Hume is editor of spiked.

 Peggiorare la situazione in Somalia.
In effetti...sono riusciti a rovinare pure una cosa
fatta
Ciao! 

 Peggiorare la situazione in Somalia.
Ah... beh.... Se lo dite voi due allora....!!!!
*ROTFL*
-Stefano