Decline and Fall

I knew America was militarily involved in the horn of Africa (we've got troops stationed in Djibouti) but I didn't know how badly we had screwed things up there. Martin Fletcher reports:

I am referring to the Bush Administration's intervention in Somalia in the name of the War on Terror. It has helped to destroy that wretched country's best chance of peace in a generation, left more than a million Somalis dead, homeless or starving, and achieved the precise opposite of its original goal. Far from stamping out an Islamic militancy that scarcely existed, the intervention has turned Somalia into a breeding ground for Islamic extremists and given al-Qaeda a valuable foothold in the Horn of Africa.

Remember as you read the article that Afghanistan embraced the Taliban when they first took control for the same reasons Somalis embraced the Islamic Courts: after decades of civil war, the strongmen imposed order. I'm not as ready as Fletcher to laud the tyrannical rule of the Islamic Courts, whose thugs once opened fire on a crowd of World Cup fans.

But I do understand why the Somalis were quick to embrace trading in their right to drink and listen to music for the ability to walk to the store with a reasonable expectation of survival. That's where I see Iraqis heading now; I've been told as much by a lot of them. With all the talk of the statist "Road to Serfdom," it turns out that the quickest route to Serfdom is civil war, collapse of the state, several years of chaos, and the emergence of a strongman who imposes order. This is what we've given Somalia and Iraq: the desire to live under an iron hand.

This quote from the piece felt all too familiar:

“The Americans see an extremist under every Muslim stone,” one European official complained bitterly....

Doesn't that just give you the warm fuzzies?

Link via Obsidian Wings.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, Islam, terrorism