Bush's legacy is a failed state

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/NewsDetails.aspx?storyid=267356

Posted on » Sunday, December 27, 2009

Afghanistan and Iraq have monopolised the headlines but Somalia is arguably an even greater victim of George W Bush's ill-conceived and lamentably executed War on Terror. America's interventions have proved so catastrophic that its best hope of salvaging something from the wreckage is a president it chased from power three years ago, who controls a few square miles of a country.

It has delivered a people that practised a moderate form of Islam into the hands of religious extremists. Its efforts to combat terrorism have turned Somalia into a launchpad for global jihad.

Somalia is now the ultimate failed state whose mayhem threatens to destabilise the region and whose pirates maraud the vital shipping lanes off its shores. Its people endure Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.

During the Cold War, the US pumped arms into Somalia to counter Soviet support for neighbouring Ethiopia. In 1991 clan warlords ousted the dictator Siad Barre and turned that arsenal on each other. In 1992 President Bush Sr sent in the Marines to help its suffering people - a venture that ended in the Black Hawk Down debacle, a humiliating US withdrawal and a dozen more years of anarchy as the feuding warlords ran amok.

In 2006, a grassroots movements called the Islamic Courts Union emerged. Fearing that the Courts would become a new Taliban and Somalia another Afghanistan, Washington sought to stop the Islamists by giving the warlords millions of dollars for arms - the same warlords who had humiliated America in 1993 and subsequently caused such carnage. The plan failed. The Courts drove the warlords from Mogadishu and imposed order for the first time in a generation. The city's roadblocks and machine guns vanished. Exiles returned, businesses reopened and people ventured out at night.

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http://www.netnomad.com/aydiidyounger.nyt.html

How a U.S. Marine Became a Warlord in Somalia

August 12, 1996

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

OGADISHU, Somalia -- One of the many oddities in this battered capital is that a son of Gen. Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the Somali faction leader who humiliated the United States in 1993, was a naturalized American citizen, not to mention a U.S. Marine.

But that bizarre footnote took on a new dimension last weekend after the general died of gunshot wounds he had received in battle. His clan elders, meeting behind closed doors, selected the same 33-year-old son, Hussein Mohamed Farrah, to become the new president of Aidid's self-proclaimed republic.

It was a strange choice, politicians here say. Until a year ago, Farrah was living an obscure and mundane life in a Los Angeles suburb, going to school part time and working as a clerk in the West Covina engineering department for $9 a hour. The closest he had come to his father's way of life was when he served as a corporal in the Marine reserves.

Now Somalis throughout this war-weary country are waiting uneasily to see how the young warlord with the American accent will change the balance of power among the clan leaders who have carved Somalia up into what amounts to feudal kingdoms.

On the ruined streets of Mogadishu, the same questions were heard on many lips last week: Is the son a copy of his father -- the ambitious and ruthless general who wanted to subdue the entire country by force? Or will he be a peacemaker, a man capable of ending the civil war that has scourged this harsh desert land since 1990?

[Zoeisright]

1. I thought the focus of the article was about the United States.

Because we certainly are a failed state thanks to Chimp and the Repukes.

[SpiralHawk]

2. "Smirk" - xCommander AWOL (R)