The Essence of Modern America in Somalia's Blood-drenched Soil

"'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 inter-regional 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.

"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.

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