We have reports that the CIA was giving financial backing to the "Warlords" in Somalia:
WASHINGTON, June 7 — A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has drawn sharp criticism from American government officials who say the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize...Officials say the decision to use warlords as proxies was born in part from fears of committing large numbers of American personnel to counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, a country that the United States hastily left in 1994 after attempts to capture the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his aides ended in disaster and the death of 18 American troops.
The American effort of the last year has occasionally included trips to Somalia by Nairobi-based C.I.A. case officers, who landed on warlord-controlled airstrips in Mogadishu with large amounts of money for distribution to Somali militias, according to American officials involved in Africa policy making and to outside experts.
Let's think of all the problems here.
1) You funded a man named Mohammed Farah Aidid. Not saying that he would be another Bin Ladin but damn if you have a history of ex- CIA paid Muslims turning on you, why would you be so dumb as to supply arms and money to another one?
2) Supposing that Mr. Aidid was going to set up some sort of secular government, after the debacle that was Iran during the Carter administration, why set yourself up with a so called "moderate Muslim" who could then be seen as a puppet of the US and therefore be a living and breathing advertisement for Jihad?
And here's the thing anyone who's thinking knows that the money for the "Islamic" front are Muslim countries or at least Muslim organizations therefore this was not simply a war between Warlords and Islamists, this is a front of a proxy war between supporters of Jihad and those of American imperialism. By losing this particular battle the US has put itself in a bad position.
On a side note on the death of Al Zarqawi: Yaaaaawn. Nothing has changed.
Assuming he really isn't dead: Nothing changes in terms of activity on the ground.
Assuming he is actually dead: Nothing changes because there is no doubt another person(s) willing and able to take his place since this is not a "charismatic" movement dependent on high profile "celebrity" leaders. Rather this is an ideologically driven conflict. This should have been known since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Assuming he has been dead for a long time: Nothing changes: Clearly the violence was not dependent on him. From other sources we have this:
Moreover, the Pentagon and the White House will have lost the personification of evil that Zarqawi represented to justify the war. As Scott McClellan — before his ticket was punched — said hundreds of times, like one of those dolls with a string on its back, "Iraq is the front line in the global war on terror." Zarqawi was the ultimate "foreign fighter," one who willingly adopted the name "al Qaeda in Iraq," feeding the mistaken notion that there is actually an organization called al Qaeda, an official enemy that is global and eternal, and now manifest on this particular part of the oil patch.
Just this year, the Washington Post published a documents showing that the Pentagon had an active program to legendize Zarqawi.
"The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. 'Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response,’ one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: 'Media operations,’ 'Special Ops (626)’ (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein’s government) and 'PSYOP,’ the U.S. military term for propaganda work…" (Washington Post, 10 April 2006)
So it is more of the same. lessons not learned.
Technorati Tags: critique, Middle East, politics
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