Somalia proxy-wars

Freedom Fried In Somalia

Two years ago in a Balt. Sun oped, John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, urged the Bush Adminstration to get involved diplomatically in Somalia, so it won't be a failed state and "comfortable home for terrorist groups".

The Bushies didn't listen.

They could have chosen to shore up the relatively new transititional government, fostered economic development, engaged in diplomacy to solve regional differences -- all with an eye towards acheiving a stable, representative democracy.

Instead, they passed on the democracy, and secretly funded and armed Somali warlords -- possibly some of the same warlords who killed US soldiers in the Black Hawk Down episode -- in their battles with Islamist militia.

And what happened? Prendergast laments in a W. Post oped today:

"our" warlords -- and by extension our counterterrorism strategy -- have been dealt a crushing defeat by the Islamists, as the latter have consolidated control of Mogadishu.

Fueling a civil war completely backfired, as the popularity of the Islamists increased over the last few months.

And now we risk, as Douglas Farah wrote, having this be "the beginning of another serious Islamist threat to a much broader world."

The only possible silver lining here is if, as some hope, the Somali Islamists work with the transitional government, respect the moderate Islam of much of the population, and mean what they say about rejecting Al Qaeda.

But we'll just be lucky if that's the final outcome. It will be in spite of Dubya's anti-democratic foreign policy, not because of it.

A foreign policy that actually promoted democracy would not foolishly fuel civil war, but would bring factions together to set the conditions for a representative government.

Instead, by playing the old short-sighted game of propping up "friendly" tyrants, as Prendergast told the W. Post last month:

in the long term the conditions which allow terrorist cells to take hold along the Indian Ocean coastline go unaddressed.