What Lies Beneath:
The Essence of Modern America in
Somalia’s Blood-drenched Soil
By Chris Floyd, 11 September 2011
For days, weeks on end, we have been bombarded with earnest
disquisitions on the “meaning” of 9/11, its implications for America
and the world ten years down the line. Oceans of newsprint and
blizzards of pixels have been expended on this question. But in all
the solemn piety and savvy punditry surrounding the commemoration of
the attacks, almost nothing has been said about the place where the
true “legacy of 9/11” can be seen in its stark quintessence:
Somalia.
That long-broken land is, in so many ways, a hell of our own
creation. Year by year, stage by stage, American policy has helped
drive Somalia ever deeper into the pit. Millions of people have been
plunged into anguish; countless thousands have lost their lives. It
seems unimaginable that the situation could get even worse – and yet
that is precisely where we are today: on the precipice of yet
another horrific drop into the abyss.
By now it should go without saying that the Nobel Peace Laureate in
the White House has continued, entrenched and expanded his
predecessor's failed and corrupt policies in Somalia, as he has in
so many parts of the degraded American imperium. And it is in
Somalia that our serious, savvy bipartisan elite -- and their
innumerable enablers on both sides of the political fence -- are
building up what may turn out to be the mother of all blowbacks:
generations of implacable hatred sprung from unfathomable suffering,
inflicted on innocent people by vicious warlords in the pay of the
CIA, by America's own death squads ranging through the land, and by
the entirely predictable (indeed, predicted) extremist insurgencies
that arise in the chaos our elites create in their imperial
marauding. Here, if anywhere, is the true legacy of 9/11.
The Way of the Warlord
All of this is captured vividly in
a new article by
Jeremy Scahill in The Nation. His piece, based on solid
reporting in the field, is by far the best overview I've seen of the
situation in Somalia today -- and of how we got to this horrendous
pass.
Scahill notes how the current situation is exemplified by one of the
many warlords now being funded by the Peace Laureate:
The notorious Somali paramilitary
warlord who goes by the nom de guerre Indha Adde, or White Eyes …is
not simply a warlord, at least not officially, anymore. Nowadays, he
is addressed as Gen. Yusuf Mohamed Siad, and he wears a Somali
military uniform, complete with red beret and three stars on his
shoulder. His weapons and his newfound legitimacy were bestowed upon
him by the US-sponsored African Union force, known as AMISOM, that
currently occupies large swaths of Mogadishu.
… Yusuf Mohamed Siad was not always known just as Indha Adde. As one
of the main warlords who divided and destroyed Somalia during the
civil war that raged through the 1990s, he brutally took control of
the Lower Shabelle region, which was overwhelmingly populated by a
rival clan, earning him the moniker “The Butcher.” Then ... he
remade himself into an Islamic sheik of sorts in the mid-2000s and
vowed to fight foreign invaders, including rival warlords funded and
directed by the CIA.
Perhaps more than any other figure, Indha Adde embodies the
mind-boggling constellation of allegiances and double-crosses that
has marked Somalia since its last stable government fell in 1991.
And his current role encapsulates the contradictions of the
country’s present: he is a warlord who believes in Sharia law, is
friendly with the CIA, and takes money and weapons from AMISOM.
…Over the past year, the Somali government and AMISOM have turned to
some unsavory characters in a dual effort to build something
resembling a national army and, as the United States attempted to do
with its Awakening Councils in the Sunni areas of Iraq in 2006, to
purchase strategic loyalty from former allies of the current enemy
-- in this case, the Shabab. Some warlords, like Indha Adde, have
been given government ministries or military rank in return for
allocating their forces to the fight against the Shabab. Several are
former allies of Al Qaeda or the Shabab, and many fought against the
US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion in 2006 or against the US-led
mission in Somalia in the early 1990s that culminated in the
infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident.
This was precisely the same policy adopted by George W. Bush in
2002, when it was apparently feared that the tiny handful of
scattered individuals then in Somalia who might possibly have some
loose connection or vague adherence to "al Qaeda" would ... er ...
build rocket ships that would drop atom bombs on the Super Bowl, or
something. In any case, in the vast, Big Bang-like expansion of
power and profiteering that gorged the military-security complex
after 9/11, it was thought that “something” had to be done in
Somalia. And that “something” was taking American taxpayer money
away from schools, roads, hospitals and parks and giving it to
Somali warlords, who proceeded to terrorize their own people … and
fuel an Islamic insurgency, ostensibly the very outcome the policy
was designed to prevent. Scahill notes:
The “US government was not helping
the [Somali] government but was helping the warlords that were
against the government,” Buubaa, the former foreign minister, tells
me. Washington “thought that the warlords were strong enough to
chase away the Islamists or get rid of them. But it did completely
the opposite. Completely the opposite.” … By the beginning of 2006
(if not well before), the CIA’s warlords had become universally
despised in Mogadishu. Nearly everyone I interviewed in Mogadishu
about this period characterized them as murderers and criminals. The
warlords formed a formal coalition whose title reeked of CIA
influence: the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and
Counterterrorism.
“This was a turning point in Somalia,” says Aynte. At the time, he
explains, the Islamic courts were little more than small groups of
poorly armed, autonomous militias who supported the implementation
of Sharia law and the provision of social services in their regions
as a counterbalance to the warlord-sponsored lawlessness that
infected the country. They had no central authority. “But they
realized that the sooner they unite, the sooner they can defend
these innocent people who have been murdered across the city.” And
so they formed the Islamic Courts Union, and local businessmen
funded it, allowing the ICU to purchase weapons to take on the
warlords. “People started siding with the Islamic courts,” says
Buubaa. The ICU “brought about some semblance of order and stability
to Mogadishu. And a lot of people in Mogadishu appreciated that.”
In the summer of 2006 the ICU, along with fighters from the Shabab,
ran the CIA’s men out of town. “The warlords were ejected out of
Mogadishu for the first time in sixteen years. No one thought this
was possible,” recalls Aynte. From June to December 2006, the ICU
“brought a modicum of stability that’s unprecedented in Mogadishu,”
reopening the airport and the seaport. “You could drive in Mogadishu
at midnight, no problem, no guards. You could be a foreigner or
Somali. It was at total peace.”
Peace is No Object: The Essence of Imperium
But of course peace was not what Washington had in mind for Somalia.
It is never the object of imperial foreign policy. The object was,
as always, domination. Obedience. A regime that toes the line – and
crosses the palms of Western elites with the proper amount of
silver. The Islamic Courts Union was outside of Washington’s
control. One couldn’t “do business” with them. They were the wrong
kind of Muslim fundamentalist – not like those nice head-choppers
and hand-choppers and palm-crossers in Saudi Arabia. So the ICU –
and Somalia’s brief window of peace – had to go. Scahill:
Most of the entities that made up the
Islamic Courts Union did not have anything resembling a global
jihadist agenda. Nor did they take their orders from Al Qaeda. The
Shabab was a different story, but it was not the most influential or
powerful of the ICU groups. Moreover, clan politics in Somalia held
the foreign operatives in check. “We deployed our fighters to
Mogadishu with the intent of ceasing the civil war and bringing an
end to the warlords’ ruthlessness,” says Sheik Ahmed Mohammed Islam,
whose Ras Kamboni militia, based in the Jubba region of southern
Somalia, joined the ICU in 2006. “Those of us within the ICU were
people with different views; moderates, midlevel and extremists.” …
But by most credible accounts, the Al Qaeda influence at the time
was small -- consisting of about a dozen foreign operatives and a
handful of Somalis with global jihadist aspirations. A UN cable from
June 2006, containing notes of a meeting with senior State
Department and US military officials from the Horn of Africa task
force, indicates that the United States was aware of the ICU’s
diversity, but would “not allow” it to rule Somalia. The United
States, according to the notes, intended to “rally with Ethiopia if
the ‘Jihadist’ took over.” The cable concluded, “Any Ethiopian
action in Somalia would have Washington’s blessing.” Some within the
US intelligence community called for dialogue or reconciliation, but
their voices were drowned out by hawks determined to overthrow the
ICU.
Note well the telling phrase in the passage above: the United
States would “not allow” the ICU to rule Somalia. There, in sum, in
microcosm, is the essence of the American Imperium, its guiding
philosophy and modus operandi for more than 65 years: no nation has
the right to determine its own destiny. Only the American power
elite can make that decision: it can “allow” a government to rule,
if it suits American interests – or else it can institute “regime
change.” This is the bedrock principle that informs and determines
American foreign policy across the board, across both parties, and
across many decades.
(Of course, this principle cannot always be put into practice to the
extent that our elites would like: a frustration that accounts for,
say, the vindictive strangulation of Cuba for more than half a
century – during which time Washington has “done business” with
regimes far more repressive. But it is the pliability of a regime,
not its political structure – and certainly not its attitude toward
human rights – that determines its “legitimacy” in Washington’s
eyes.)
Scahill goes on:
...The United States “had already
misread the events by aiding heinous warlords. And they misread it
again. They should have taken this as an opportunity to engage the
Union of Islamic Courts,” asserts Aynte. “Because out of the
thirteen organizations that formed the [ICU], twelve were Islamic
courts, clan courts who had no global jihad or anything. Most of
them never left Somalia. These were local guys. Al Shabab was the
only threat, that was it. And they could have been somehow
controlled.”
Perhaps. But control of Shabab was not the issue. Control of the ICU
was. And since this was not forthcoming, then many, many thousands
of innocent people had to be murdered. This is what Washington
proceeded to do. The Bush Administration instigated the slaughter;
the bipartisan foreign policy establishment gave its approval.
.....The Ethiopians invaded on December 24. It was a classic proxy
war coordinated by Washington and staffed by 40,000-50,000 Ethiopian
troops. “The US sponsored the Ethiopian invasion, paying for
everything including the gas that it had to expend, to undertake
this. And you also had US forces on the ground, US Special
Operations forces. You had CIA on the ground. US airpower was a part
of the story as well. All of which gave massive military superiority
to the Ethiopians,” says Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the
Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization …
The US-backed Ethiopian forces swiftly overthrew the Islamic Courts
Union and sent its leaders fleeing or to the grave. Many were
rendered to Ethiopia, Kenya or Djibouti; others were killed by US
Special Operations forces or the CIA. ….“If you know the history of
Somalia, Ethiopia and Somalia were archenemies, historical enemies,
and people felt that this was adding insult to the injury,” says
Aynte. “An insurgency was born out of there.”
Again, as we have seen constantly, repeatedly throughout this
low, dishonest decade, a policy ostensibly designed to quell
extremism and insurgency instead creates it. Given the clock-like
regularity of this outcome, a cynic might be forgiven for beginning
to detect a pattern that could almost be described as deliberate.
As in Iraq, the lawless invasion bred an endless cycle of further
crimes, which I wrote about extensively at the time. [For more,
see
“Silent Surge: The Bipartisan Terror War Intensifies in Somalia,”
especially the links at the end.] Scahill gives a capsule
description of the American-induced invasion and its aftermath:
The Ethiopian invasion was marked by
indiscriminate brutality against Somali civilians. Ethiopian and
Somali government soldiers secured Mogadishu’s neighborhoods by
force, raiding houses in search of ICU combatants, looting civilian
property and beating or shooting anyone suspected of collaboration
with antigovernment forces. They positioned snipers on the roofs of
buildings and reportedly responded to any attack with
disproportionate fire, shelling densely populated areas and several
hospitals, according to Human Rights Watch.
Extrajudicial killings by Ethiopian soldiers were widely reported,
particularly in the final months of 2007. Reports of Ethiopian
soldiers “slaughtering” men, women and children “like goats” --
slitting throats -- were widespread, according to Amnesty
International. Both Somali government and Ethiopian forces were
accused of horrific sexual violence.
.... If Somalia was already a playground for Islamic militants, the
Ethiopian invasion blew open the gates of Mogadishu for Al Qaeda.
Within some US counterterrorism circles, the rise of the Shabab in
Somalia was predictable and preventable. ....
Predictable. Preventable. Again, the same old pattern. Terrorize
people with your warlords and proxies, your black ops and secret
armies – and you will breed terror in return.
The Death Squads of the Peace Laureate
In 2008, of course, the United States finally had its own “regime
change.” The despised and discredited Bush Regime left office, and a
fresh-faced “agent of change” swept into power, riding in on a wave
of global goodwill unprecedented in modern times. Lauded, laureled,
he stood at the center of a transformative moment in history, when,
lifted on that mighty wave, the ship of state could have been turned
from the course of empire and set in a new direction.
That never happened, of course. It was never going to happen. Obama
himself had made clear, throughout his campaign, that he did not
have the slightest interest in changing the imperial course (as
opposed to recalibrating the imperial PR a bit). And so it has
proven – nowhere more so than in Somalia, as Scahill notes:
When President Obama took office in
2009, the United States increased its covert military involvement in
and around Somalia, as the CIA and JSOC intensified air and drone
strikes in Somalia and Yemen, and began openly hunting people the
United States alleged were Al Qaeda leaders. In September of that
year, Obama authorized the assassination of Saleh Ali Nabhan, in his
administration’s first known targeted-killing operation in Somalia.
A JSOC team helicoptered into Somalia and gunned down Nabhan. JSOC
troops then landed and collected the body.
By late 2010 the Obama administration unveiled what it referred to
as a “dual-track” approach to Somalia wherein Washington would
simultaneously deal with the “central government” in Mogadishu as
well as regional and clan players in Somalia. “The dual track policy
only provides a new label for the old (and failed) Bush
Administration’s approach,” observed Somalia analyst Afyare Abdi
Elmi. “It inadvertently strengthens clan divisions, undermines
inclusive and democratic trends and most importantly, creates a
conducive environment for the return of the organized chaos or
warlordism in the country.”
The dual-track policy encouraged self-declared, clan-based regional
administrations to seek recognition and support from the United
States. “Local administrations are popping up every week,” says
Aynte. “Most of them don’t control anywhere, but people are
announcing local governments in the hopes that CIA will set up a
little outpost in their small village.”
The New York Times had more on Obama’s “dual-track approach” in
a story over the weekend:
For the first time in years, the
Shabab Islamist group that has long tormented Somalis is receding
from several areas at once, including this one, handing the
Transitional Federal Government an enormous opportunity to finally
step outside the capital and begin uniting this fractious country
after two decades of war. Instead, a messy, violent, clannish
scramble is emerging over who will take control.
… Already, clashes have erupted between the anti-Shabab forces
fighting for the spoils, and roadblocks operated by clan militias
have resurfaced on the streets of Mogadishu, even though the
government says it is in control. Many analysts say both the Shabab
and the government are splintering and predict that the warfare will
only increase, complicating the response to Somalia’s widening
famine.
“What you now have is a free-for-all contest in which clans are
unilaterally carving up the country into unviable clan enclaves and
cantons,” said Rashid Abdi, an analyst for the International Crisis
Group, which studies conflicts. “The way things are going, the risk
of future interregional wars and instability is real,” Mr. Abdi
added, “even after Al Shabab is defeated.”
More than 20 separate new ministates, including one for a
drought-stricken area incongruously named Greenland, have sprouted
up across Somalia, some little more than Web sites or so-called
briefcase governments, others heavily armed, all eager for
international recognition and the money that may come with it.
Officials with the 9,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force,
the backbone of security in Mogadishu, say they are deeply concerned
by this fragmentation, reminiscent of Somalia’s warlord days after
the government collapsed in 1991. ...
So we are witnessing a return to the darkest days of Somalia’s
decades of hell: hydra-headed warfare among merciless warlords
carving out petty fiefdoms for themselves through terror, robbery
and murder. And what does the Obama Administration think of this
development? One unnamed (of course) American official told the NYT:
“It wouldn’t be the worst thing in
the world to have a local leader with some charisma and grass-roots
support.”
The hell of warlordism is A-OK with Washington, in other words –
as long as the terrorizers, murderers and thieves play ball with the
Potomac overlords, of course.
The Killing Cult of Profit and Control
Scahill also tells the story of how the fruits of imperial policy in
Somalia have turned ploughshares into swords, tracking the
conversion of a non-violent aid group into one of the most deadly
fighting machines in the land. Here too we see how one of the most
sinister developments of our age has entered the killing fields of
Somalia: the ever-accelerating rise of corporate mercenaries,
killing for private profit, bankrolled by public funds.
One of the more powerful forces that
has emerged in Somalia’s anti-Shabab, government-militia nexus is
Ahluu Sunna Wa’Jama (ASWJ), a Sufi Muslim paramilitary organization.
Founded in the 1990s as a quasi-political organization dedicated to
Sufi religious scholarship and community works -- and avowedly
nonmilitant -- ASWJ viewed itself as a buffer against the
encroachment of Wahhabism in Somalia. Its proclaimed mandate was to
“preach a message of peace and delegitimize the beliefs and
political platform of … fundamentalist movements.”
…By some accounts, the ASWJ has been among the most effective
fighters battling the Shabab outside Mogadishu, winning back
territory in the Mudug region and several other pockets of land. But
like most powerful paramilitary groups in Somalia, the ASWJ is far
more complex than it may seem.
This past July, the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia declared that
some ASWJ militias “appear to be proxies for neighboring States
rather than emergent local authorities.” According to the UN report,
ASWJ also received support and training from Southern Ace, a private
security firm. Technically registered in Hong Kong in 2007 and run
by a white South African, Edgar Van Tonder, Southern Ace committed
the “most egregious violations of the arms embargo” on Somalia.
Between April 2009 and early 2011, according to the United Nations,
Southern Ace operated a 220-strong militia, paying $1 million in
salaries and at least $150,000 for arms and ammunition.
Southern Ace began acquiring arms from the weapons market in
Somalia, including scores of Kalashnikovs, heavy machine guns,
rocket-propelled grenade launchers and an anti-aircraft ZU-23
machine gun with 2,000 rounds of ammunition. Its arms purchases
“were so substantial” that local officials “noted a significant rise
in the price of ammunition and a shortage of ZU-23 rounds.” The
company also imported to Somalia “Philippine army-style uniforms and
bullet-proof jackets in support of their operations,” according to
the UN.
Backed by Ethiopia and Southern Ace, ASWJ conducted a series of
major offensives against the Shabab that the UN alleged were
supported through violations of the arms embargo. While Ethiopia and
the United States undoubtedly see ASWJ as the best counterbalance to
the influence of the Shabab and Al Qaeda, in just three years they
have transformed a previously nonviolent entity into one of the most
powerful armed groups in Somalia. “To a certain extent, the resort
to Somali proxy forces by foreign Governments represents a potential
return to the ‘warlordism’ of the 1990s and early 2000s, which has
historically proved to be counterproductive,” the UN soberly
concluded.
Counterproductive, indeed. Unless, of course, your main concern
is not bringing peace to Somalia, but imposing your fanatical agenda
of domination and war profiteering– whatever the cost. On that
score, the record of American policy toward Somalia over the past
two decades is clear. Through Republican and Democratic
administrations, through many changes of partisan control of
Congress, Washington has pursued the path of domination,
exacerbating violence, division, corruption, and plunging millions
of people into anguish, despair, starvation and death.
As I’ve noted here before, the leaders of the American Imperium are
not cartoon villains, twirling their moustaches as they cackle over
photos of dead babies and disembowelled mothers. They consider
themselves good people: righteous, caring, humanitarian. If they
could impose the strictures of their extremist cult without
bloodshed or suffering, they would do so. Osama bin Laden was the
same. But as leaders have found throughout history, humanity is a
recalcitrant element. All too often, people stubbornly refuse to bow
to the vision of reality proffered by the high and mighty, the wise
and the worthy. In such cases (which is to say, in all cases), it
thus becomes necessary to impose the worthy vision by force. The
fate of individual human beings must give way to the higher calling.
“Collateral damage” is an unfortunate but unavoidable necessity. As
Stalin said, in explaining away the millions killed by the wise and
worthy policy of collectivization, “when wood is chopped, chips
fly.”
As for Somalia, the chips – that is, the absolutely unique,
immeasurably precious lives of individual human beings who love,
yearn, fear, rage, weep, laugh, hope and dream with just as much
depth and reality as anyone else on earth (including, yes, those
killed on 9/11) – will continue to fly. That is the inevitable
result of the policies of the Nobel Peace Laureate, as Scahill notes
in his conclusion:
Perhaps the Shabab is truly on the
ropes, as the Somali government claims. Or maybe the group is
implementing [its late leader’s] vision of a guerrilla terror
campaign that gives up territory in favor of sowing fear throughout
the country. In any case, the Shabab’s meteoric rise in Somalia, and
the legacy of terror it has wrought, is blowback sparked by a decade
of disastrous US policy that ultimately strengthened the very threat
it was officially intended to crush. In the end, the greatest
beneficiaries of US policy are the warlords, including those who
once counted the Shabab among their allies and friends. “They are
not fighting for a cause,” says Ahmed Nur Mohamed, the Mogadishu
mayor. “And the conflict will start tomorrow, when we defeat Shabab.
These militias are based on clan and warlordism and all these
things. They don’t want a system. They want to keep that turf as a
fixed post -- then, whenever the government becomes weak, they want
to say, ‘We control here.’”
That is precisely the vision and the goal that also drives our
righteous, caring, humanitarian bipartisan elite in Washington:
They want to say, “We control here.”
This is the foundation stone of the modern American imperium. This
is what it is all about. This is the ugly, evil secret beneath all
the displays of piety and patriotism, the stirring calls to “defend
our values,” the endless evocations of our goodness and specialness.
All of it is meaningless. All of it is belched forth in order to
disguise – both from the victims and, in many cases, the
perpetrators themselves – the true nature of the bizarre, brutal and
barbaric cult of money and militarism that now controls American
society: They want to say, We control here.
