Mogadishu: Road to Hell Paved by Uncle Sam
The United States immorally pushed Ethiopia to invade neighboring Somalia, and now Washington has provoked yet another useless bloodbath as it attempts to cover its tracks by hyping Darfur.
Via Le Monde:
Month after month, massacre after massacre, Mogadishu's descent into hell looks as if it may never end. Since January, endless fighting has been going on in the Somali capital. For the third time, insurgents linked to the Islamic Courts have attacked the [US-sponsored] Transitional Federal Government and its Ethiopian allies, which intervened in Somalia without an international mandate at the end of 2006. The population of Mogadishu, nearly cut off from the rest of the word, is on the receiving end of violence from the two camps.
[More later...]
Via Le Monde:
Month after month, massacre after massacre, Mogadishu's descent into hell looks as if it may never end. Since January, endless fighting has been going on in the Somali capital. For the third time, insurgents linked to the Islamic Courts have attacked the [US-sponsored] Transitional Federal Government and its Ethiopian allies, which intervened in Somalia without an international mandate at the end of 2006. The population of Mogadishu, nearly cut off from the rest of the word, is on the receiving end of violence from the two camps.
[More later...]
posted by Nur-al-Cubicle | 9:31 AM
3 Comments:
I believe that this is a misconception of what happened in the Horn. The US did not push Ethiopia to invade Somalia, rather Ethiopia was bent on doing so. The US's mistake was that rather than work to prevent such an outcome it acquiesced and sought to take advantage of the situation, even knowing that Ethiopia had no post-war plan for Somalia.
Tom Barnett recently wrote an article for Esquire that fleshes this out. As he notes, even some in our military, particularly those working under the CJTF-Horn of Africa, agreed that Ethiopia's intervention was bad because of the perception it created of American motives in the region.
New Yorker in DC
Sorry, I can't buy that, New Yorker in DC.
The actions of the US military (strafing the Kenyan border, offshore naval units), and the rhetoric coming from officials like Jendayi E. Frazier and dishonest reports of al-Qaeda cells point to complicity.
Again, not complicity but an attempt to take advantage of the situation. Once Ethiopia made clear it was a go the US began to prepare. Meles Zenawi made clear that he would go in with/without American help. You look at what was going on back then, it clear that Ethiopia feared that the TFG would be overrun by the ICU. Given the ICU's rhetoric of reuniting Greater Somalia (the Ogaden region in Ethiopia), the Ethiopians had every reason to go in with/without American acquiescence.
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