Arm Somalia? Another Bad Idea

Somalia's defense minister, Abdulhakim Haji Faqi, is calling on the international community to arm his country against the radical Islamist terrorist group, al Shabaab, which is based in Somalia.

Last Saturday gunmen from al Shabaab stormed the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, killing at least 72 people and injuring 175.

"We are not looking at jet fighters. It’s small arms," he said. "If we had more weapons, [al Shabaab] would be less of a problem".

The average American's attention span being about as long as an episode of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians", it's easy to see how such an appeal could be met with approval here. Our government drops bombs, fires missiles, and sends weapons to insurgent forces, all for the purpose of destabilizing foreign regimes not currently in the president's favor. Why not send some small arms to an ally committed to fighting terrorists?

The trouble is, the situation in which Somalia finds itself is largely the product of previous adventures by the US and other western governments into north Africa.

In a recent commentary in Future of Freedom, "US Government to Blame for Somalia's Misery", Scott Horton writes that,

"By the turn of the century Somalia was more free and prosperous than it had ever been...[T]heir various postcommunist warlords had finally worn themselves out after years of fighting...There were still highwaymen and gangsters here and there, but none had the ability to do any large-scale damage."

"Somalia was never a paradise," he writes, "But by any measure [the situation] was preferable to the preceding eras of communism and civil war."

Never the world's humble servants, American politicians with grand designs decided Somalians needed help, again. Its first venture into that country having worked out so well, the US government pushed for the establishment of a Transitional National Government, later changed to the Transitional Federal Government.

Then came the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, "and the US government decided to take full advantage of the crisis to extend its military hegemony across the planet," says Horton.

George W. Bush and the neo-conservative cadre running his foreign policy immediately put together a list of countries ripe for "regime change", and "At the top of the list were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran -- none of which had any involvement whatsoever in the attacks or any real ties to those who did."

The CIA went to work in Somalia (and elsewhere, of course). The Company, as it is euphemistically called, started paying Somali warlords "to carry out targeted assassinations and kidnappings against those they accused of being Islamists -- or anyone else they felt like targeting." [Emphasis mine] Newly empowered, these violent, opportunistic warlords caused resentment among Somalis; this resentment spurred the CIA to pump more money into the situation.

"The cycle of violence continued until the Somali public was finally motivated to support the rise of a new government, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), to protect them in 2005. The combined forces of the 13 groups in the Courts Union drove the warlords and the Transitional Federal Government out of the country and established themselves in power".

In this newly radicalized environment (a harbinger of things to come in Libya and Mali), the new government then "declared the reign of Islamic law."

Somalians had "defied the empire and won, for the moment," says Horton, but "Then Uncle Sam got mean."

Very mean.

As Tony Cartalucci recently wrote in the Land Destroyer Report ("Kenyan Bloodbath: Reaping the 'Benefits' of US AFRICOM Collaboration", Sept. 23), the US government

"backed two Ethiopian invasions into Somalia. The first US-backed invasion, under then US President George Bush, was carried out in 2006. USA Today reported in its 2007 article, 'U.S. support key to Ethiopia's invasion,' that:
The United States has quietly poured weapons and military advisers into Ethiopia, whose recent invasion of Somalia opened a new front in the Bush administration's war on terrorism.

"The second US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, under US President Barack Obama, was carried out in 2011 - coordinated with Kenya's 2011 US-French-backed extraterritorial adventure into Somali territory. The UK Independent's December 2011 article, 'UN-backed invasion of Somalia spirals into chaos,' reported that: Kenya's invasion of Somalia, hailed by the West and the UN Security Council, was meant to deliver a knockout blow to the militant Islamist group al-Shabaab. Instead it has pulled Somalia's regional rival Ethiopia back into the country, stirred up the warlords and rekindled popular support for fundamentalists whose willingness to let Somalis starve rather than receive foreign aid had left them widely hated."

Al Shabaab began planning their attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall in retaliation for this latest invasion.

If the international community provides training and weapons to the Somali government, they will be exacerbating an already-chaotic situation created largely by earlier international meddling, further destabilizing a region that is falling increasingly into the hands of radical Islamist groups bent on causing even more bloodshed.

Many westerners lament Africa's inability to get its act together, but there's evidence to suggest that our governments contribute a great deal to the ongoing instability there. Maybe Africans could use less of our help.