U.S.-backed Somalia regime about to bite the dust?

Glen Ford wrote:

Having failed in deploying Ethiopia as its proxy in the war against Somalia, the United States now attempts to rally Europe and as many African stooges as it can muster to gang rape the Somalis into submission.

Two years ago, the Americans encouraged Ethiopia to invade its neighbor, to overthrow a young Islamic government that had, miraculously, restored a semblance of peace and stability to Somalia after 15 years of chaos and rule by warlords. As could have been predicted, Ethiopian ground forces and American bombs and missiles combined to bring about the "worst humanitarian crisis" on the continent, forcing millions of Somalis from their homes and into the jaws of starvation. The Americans bankrolled the aggression, in a futile attempt to prop up a warlord-based puppet government that by early this month was in a state of total disintegration, with 80 percent of its soldiers and police having deserted. The Ethiopians, defeated by the Somali resistance, are eager to exit the hell they and the Americans have created in Somalia. That leaves only a small force from Uganda and Burundi to act as Washington's proxies on the ground in Somalia, under the guise of the United Nations.

Uganda, especially, is Washington's willing mercenary outpost in Africa, willing to accept any dirty assignment from the Americans. But Somalia is too big a mouthful to be bitten off by Washington's African proxies, and the Islamists forces now represent Somali nationalism. [b]Mogadishu, the ruined capital, is expected to be back in Islamic Somali hands, any day now.[/b] Desperate, in its last weeks in office, the Bush regime now seeks to turn Somalia into a "free fire zone" in which any country in the world can shoot and bomb and kill at will. George Bush invites the world's military powers to form a posse to invade Somalia by air, land and sea, [b]on the pretext of wiping out piracy.[/b] Yet the piracy that flows from Somalia's onetime coastal fishing villages is mirrored in the lawlessness of foreign fishing fleets off Somalia's shores and the industrial piracy of nations that treat Somalia's waters as international dumping grounds for all manner of toxic wastes. The Americans imposed an imperial catch-22 on the Somali people, robbing them of their right to form their own government, then damning the Somalis for not accepting the rule of foreigners and foreign-backed warlords.

The clock is ticking on George Bush's government, but Washington's threat to Somalia will outlast Bush. [b]Susan Rice, Bill Clinton's former assistant secretary of state for Africa, will soon become Barack Obama's United Nations Ambassador and [i]de facto[/i] point person on Africa. Susan Rice is just as warlike as Condoleezza Rice when it comes to Somalia.[/b] While Condoleezza Rice and her bosses justify U.S. aggressions in the name of spreading "democracy," Susan Rice urges American military interventions in Somalia and Sudan and elsewhere on "humanitarian" grounds.

For Somalia, an Obama presidency represents the "same old same old" - the same bombs, the same bullets, the same catastrophes, the same imperialism, with a slightly different vocabulary.

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Somalia: Another CIA-backed coup blows up

> Mike Whitney

Quote:

In a recent Chicago Tribune article, "US Appears to be Losing in Somalia", journalist Paul Salopek sums it up like this:

"(Somalia) is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants...and secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships. The British civil-rights group Reprieve contended that as many as 17 U.S. warships may have doubled as floating prisons since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks...

"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted." (Paul Salopek, "US Appears to be Losing in Somalia" Chicago Tribune)

The CIA has done its job well. It's created a beehive for terrorism and the potential for another catastrophe like 9-11.

Mission accomplished! So whatever the cosmetic guv's and CIA's official intentions and goals are, imagine for uno momento that they want to achieve the exact opposite. Imagine that a government of the rich, run by the rich and for the rich and heavily influenced by powerful multinational corporations could possibly be lying on occasion, and that millions of people are misled by the lies couched in plausible deniability.

"When the same mistakes are repeated over and over again, it's time to consider the possibility that they are not mistakes at all." -- Naomi Klein 

I must say that I appreciate that site and its contributors almost as much as this one. This and that are a wealth of information

Africa's forgotten wars shame the media 

Quote:

An army of journalists is leaving with the Israeli soldiers – about 1,500 have been reporting on Israel’s war in Gaza, mostly from the same spot on the Israeli-Gaza border. Israel didn't allow journalists into Gaza during the offensive. The question is: where is the world's media circus heading next?

Not to Africa, for sure. While the cameras focused on the Israel-Gaza border for the 22 days of the conflict, human tragedies were unfolding on another continent.

Thousands were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo as rebel fighting continues. In Darfur, 3,461 people died in the civil war; while in Zimbabwe, 1,500 died from cholera. However, very few cameras were recording these tragedies.

Yossi Meuller, an NBC producer, has covered news around the world. He has filmed Palestinian intifadas, the Yugoslavian civil war and has spent a few weeks in Africa. He says that Africa remains of little interest.

“Most of the time it was really a small story. Somalia was a story just because there was starvation and the interests of the USA were at stake. Nobody cares about what happened there,” he said. ”In Rwanda, we arrived after 30,000 or 60,000 people were killed. And we didn’t care, nobody cared. It was a story for a few days, not more than that.”

Genocide in Africa rarely makes breaking news headlines.

Some say the decision from where to report and what to report has nothing to do with the journalists but about money and politics.

“Nobody wants to touch Africa. People just want to make money in Africa, that’s it. No country wants to be there. France ran away, Italy ran away, everybody ran away from Africa,” said Meuller.
 
On Tuesday the world’s cameras are all turned on Washington to record for the first time in history a black man becoming the leader of a superpower

It remains to be seen whether Barack Obama’s policies can alter the media's agenda - turning cameras onto Africa and keeping them there.

Thanks for the Somalia thread, unionist.