USS Clueless gives a series of baffling remarks about Somalia. As far as I can figure, Steven seems to think the USA was the primary aggrieved party in 1993 when it tried to carry out the UN’s behest and help impose a central government on Somalia at gunpoint. Forget the daft movie, read the excellent book for a more balanced view.
So if the Somali government is now to be the next target, where exactly is this ‘Somali’ government? Exactly why is Somalia about to be attacked and in what manner? Somalia does not have an army like the Taliban did, it is just a heavily armed society. Does the US attack everyone with a gun? Well, that is pretty much everyone. I expect they will tend to shoot back unless a great deal of political finesse is used.
Unqualified Offerings wrote an article a while ago pointing out why the UN/US actions pretty much guaranteed a fight with the so called ‘warlords’ in Somalia. I have always thought this part of his analysis was spot on
No, the racism of the Somali intervention had more to do with the familiar liberal/left “soft racism of low expectations.” Because the reason some Somalis were starving was that other Somalis, with guns, wanted them to starve. Starvation was a weapon of war. “Warlords” were the root cause of starvation, and starvation was a means to an end, and that end was power. “Warlords” are nothing more nor less than politicians; if the claim offend thee, call them “politicians of a type.” By making it its business to “prevent starvation” the Bush administration put itself in the business of thwarting warlord ambitions. That’s not the racist part. The racist part is that, as was clear at the time, the idea that the warlords would take exception to this took the US government, media and public completely by surprise. Then the US announced its plan to disarm the warlords, which is to say, turn them into non-warlords, which is to say, vitiate their claims to power. Again, it wasn’t racist to try to disarm the warlords as such. But one could only imagine the warlords not objecting to this, and violently, if one somehow couldn’t imagine that these swarthy foreigners took themselves and their own ambitions seriously. One had to believe either that the warlords were attempting to shoot and starve their enemies into submission by mistake, and would be grateful when shown the error of their ways, or that they had made the decision to try to shoot and starve their way to power lightly, and that once US attention turned like the gaze of a stern yet kindly parent upon these errant children, they would cast their little eyes down, mutter “Sorry, mom,” and go play right. In US perceptions, the warlords could have been idiots, children or cowards. What US policy could not have been based on was a sober appreciation that the US was setting itself against serious, adult power brokers who cared more for their own plans than American ones.
Yes indeed. This may have come as a shock, but folks do tend to act in what they think are their own interests, even black folks in Africa. How about that?
