The Fourth War

Like a secret river flowing below the headlines, US actions regarding Somalia have garnered little attention since they began. As Eric Margolis reported in a piece on the 16th…

“In a striking irony, F-18 fighter-bombers from the carrier “USS Eisenhower,” deadly AC-130 gunships from the US base at Djibouti, and Special Forces units attacked Somalia from sea, air and land. Other US units and FBI agents deployed on the Kenya-Somalia border. As America’s latest foreign war began with air strikes from the giant carrier that bears this great president’s name, no one seemed to recall President Dwight Eisenhower’s magnificent farewell address in 1961 to Americans in which he warned against foreign entanglements and the growing political influence of the military-industrial complex.

Very few Americans understood their nation had just invaded another in an act worthy of the late, unlamented Chairman Leonid Brezhnev.

Much of Somalia has already been occupied by Ethiopia’s powerful, US-financed army which invaded that defenseless nation, with Washington’s blessing, under cover of the Christmas holiday.

It is an open secret in Washington that the Somalia operation is to be the Bush/Cheney Administration’s new model for war against recalcitrant Muslims. The White House failed to convince India or Pakistan to rent their troops for occupation duty in Iraq, but it has succeeded in using Ethiopia’s army in Somalia. Ethiopia’s repressive regime was only too happy to invade Somalia and received large infusions of aid from Washington. The Administration is duplicating the British Empire’s wide scale use of native troops (”sepoys” in India; “askaris” in East Africa) in colonial wars.

But is Somalia really a “hotbed of terrorism” as Washington claimed? The US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was sparked by last fall’s defeat of corrupt Somali clan warlords. They had recently been armed and financed by the CIA to fight the growing popularity of local Islamists.â€?

[…]

“A handful of African Al-Qaida suspects in the 1998 bombing of US Embassies in East Africa may have been in Somalia, but going to war against a sovereign nation to try to assassinate or capture a handful of suspects is like using a nuclear weapon to kill a gnat and is sure to generate more anti-US violence. Air strikes by carrier-based US F-18’s and AC-130 gunships killed between 50 and 100 Somali civilians but, apparently, no al-Qaida suspects. The real aim of the US air attacks was to destroy remaining fighting units of the Islamic Courts and clear the way for the US-imposed Somali figurehead government.�

There isn’t anything surprising in Margolis’s piece with regards to the funding of suspect governments to act as regional proxies. It’s as old as the crucifixion, really. And the United States certainly isn’t the first world power to employ lateral tactics to assert their influence. They are, though, the only world power to unilaterally invade another country in contravention of the UN Charter of late, not to mention setting a massively dangerous precedent with regards to the declination of human rights standards on a global scale.

In the shadow of The War On Terror, initiatives elsewhere are routinely overlooked and massively propagandized. Colombia, for example, continues to receive considerable US military assistance, aiding in the training of forces that have committed serious human rights abuses.

When Jean-Bertrand Aristide made a bit of a fuss regarding the privatization of Haitian industry, drug lords and thugs from the Dominican Republic dubbed “freedom fightersâ€? were armed and used to help mask the coup d’état that removed him, one in which Canada was wholly complicit.

Likewise, fearing the nationalization of the oil industry and a spark that might engulf Latin American in a new, democratically elected, socialist wave, the United States used a variety of organizations, among them the National Endowment For Democracy and USAID’s Office of Transitional Initiatives, to help fund the campaign that attempted oust Hugo Chavez by way of a public referendum. It failed, of course, but it’s simply another example of external influencing gone largely unnoticed and unchecked.

Then again, it is somewhat difficult to keep your eye on the ball when, as was the case yesterday, over 230 Iraqis violently lost their lives in what has become the preeminent disaster of this decade and (thus far) millennium.

One waits with bated breath to see how Iran’s piece of the puzzle fits and if, in the end, the natural world itself will actually out strip us all and simply cast us off into the deep like so many rats from a doomed ship.