It must have been 1985 when I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Ms. Qalanjo. She was more beautiful in person than any video could show but what I remember the most is her utter humility and a smile so breathtaking, I have not seen anything like it since. I wonder what happened to her.

^^^^ I got jokes, yes. Here's one: The Postal Service created a stamp with a picture of President Yey. The stamp was not sticking to envelopes. This enraged the President, who demanded a full investigation. After a month of testing, a special Presidential commission presented the following findings: 1) The stamp is in perfect order. 2) There is nothing wrong with the applied adhesive. 3) People are spitting on the wrong side You like?

Originally posted by Kool_Kat: Oh Cry me a river kuligiinbo...He is the president of Somalia, so deal with it... Who's "kuligiinbo"? A Star Trek character? And why are you asking him to cry you a river?

Archbishop's assault on US foreign policy By Auslan Cramb Last Updated: 1:45am GMT 26/11/2007 The Archbishop of Canterbury has launched a stinging attack on the United States, comparing it unfavourably with the British Empire at its peak. Dr Rowan Williams criticised America for intervening overseas with a "quick burst of violent action" and claimed its foreign policy had created the "worst of all worlds". The wide-ranging interview with a British Muslim lifestyle magazine included the Anglican leader's most outspoken criticisms to date of the US and the war in Iraq. He also said that the modern Western definition of humanity was not working, and that there was something about Western modernity that "really does eat away at the soul". Dr Williams said the crisis in Iraq was caused by America's misguided sense of its mission in the world and ridiculed the "chosen nation" myth in America and the idea that what happened there was God's purpose. Full article in The Independent

Let's hope they have many more memorial gatherings like these before they leave.

Surely this man possesses not all his faculties. Not even with this overly sympathetic translation does he come across as a sane person, let alone a head of state. President-nimoy xaal qaado.

Over the past decade, U.S. intentions have not been realized anywhere America has tried to exert influence November 25, 2007 David Olive Columnist The epic failure of American foreign policy in recent years should have yielded a new world vision among candidates seeking to replace U.S. President George W. Bush. But it hasn't, and perhaps it won't. There remains a consensus among both leading Democrats and Republicans that their homeland is in danger; that America is well served by its financial and military support of unreliable and repugnant regimes; and that continued projection of U.S. values and military force is imperative in the protection of America's commercial and security interests worldwide. Yet it is plainly evident that over the past decade, well before Bush took office, U.S. intentions have not been realized in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Cuba, Haiti, Darfur, Somalia, Myanmar, Russia, France, Canada, China or practically anywhere America has tried to exert influence. The two notable exceptions are North Korea, which suspended its nuclear-weapons program when the Bush administration finally abandoned sabre rattling for the bilateral talks Pyongyang had sought all along. And Northern Ireland where, in another triumph of old-fashioned diplomacy, then-U.S. president Bill Clinton played a peripheral but useful role in helping broker the Good Friday accords that finally brought an end to the decades-old Troubles. Thus the familiar U.S. foreign policy of seeking to protect America's interests by controlling world events – with military force, covert insurrections, coercive trade practices, or threat of sanctions – is bankrupt. It was bankrupt before Bush debilitated the U.S. Armed Forces in Iraq, and found no takers for his so-called "freedom agenda," articulated in Bush's second inaugural, by which he dedicated America to bringing not stability but democracy to the four corners of the Earth. That Bush is not alone in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment in failing to grasp that stability – domestic tranquility – is a precondition to freedom, democracy, the rule of law and a market economy indicates that the deep thinkers in Washington have missed Iraq's most important lesson. A new, self-interested American foreign policy for the 21st-century would embrace a strategy that might be called "constructive isolation." That would mean: being far more selective about U.S. entanglements abroad, and even then only after a mighty overhaul of America's intelligence agencies, with their unfathomable lack of basic foreign-language skills and understanding of world religions and cultures; acting alone at times but usually with others in boosting goodwill responding to natural disasters and humanitarian crises abroad – being "the first with the most,"as America was in rushing essential supplies to victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis; ending the genocide in Darfur by joining others to hamstring the regime in Khartoum; resisting a superpower's temptation to meddle, and embracing the humility of learning from and working with others. The enhanced legitimacy of collective action is a "force multiplier" in confronting the world's bad actors and the challenges threatening the planet, including nuclear proliferation and climate change; and forsaking the soft bigotry of low expectations by which the U.S., with its massive financial and military aid to favoured nations, traps America's wards in a cycle of dependency. Without the crutch of unqualified American support, Israel, for instance, would have to think harder about the consequences of its settlements policy. The European Union's emerging military prowess, which the U.S. has long discouraged, would relieve America of the burden of coping with emergencies in Europe's backyard, such as civil war in the Balkans. And Japan could be empowered to assume responsibility as a guarantor of stability in the Pacific Rim. With apologies to Wordsworth, America is too much with us, laying waste its powers. Its global ubiquity has bred regional resentment toward the U.S.. It too often has yielded unsatisfactory outcomes. And it is an increasingly perilous burden on the American people. The U.S. tab for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is officially placed between $2.4 trillion (U.S.) and $3.5 trillion (U.S.), depending on the duration of those obligations. To put that in perspective, as recently as 2000 the national debt accumulated during the entire history of the republic was about $5 trillion (U.S.). In a well-reasoned essay titled "The Case for Restraint" in the November-December edition of The American Interest, U.S. political scientist Barry Posen grades America's persistent attempts to impose its vision on the world. "Since the end of the Cold War 16 years ago, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have been running an experiment with U.S. grand strategy," writes Posen, the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The theory to be tested has been this: Very good intentions, plus very great power, plus action can transform both international politics and the domestic politics of other states in ways that are advantageous to the United States, and at costs it can afford. The evidence is in: The experiment has failed. Transformation is unachievable, and costs are high." Posen's treatise (available at the-american-interest.com) is an obvious counterpoint to the cri de coeur of the Project for the New American Century. That 1997 neo-con manifesto–signed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Norman Podhoretz, and 20 kindred spirits–urged the creation of what William Kristol, then-chair of the Project for the New American Century, would later describe in a piece co-authored with Robert Kagan in Foreign Affairs magazine as a "benevolent global hegemony." That meant maintaining America's unrivalled influence against emerging rival superpowers, China in particular. It was the neo-cons' misfortune to put aside misgivings about Bush (Kristol's The Weekly Standard endorsed John McCain in 2000) and see their designs on regime change in Baghdad and Tehran taken up by one of the least competent administrations in memory. Yet Democrats are more complicit in the notion of American exceptionalism than Republicans. The early neo-cons were inspired by Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democratic U.S. senator and Vietnam-War hawk, and contemporary neo-cons modelled their fantastical vision for Americanizing the Middle East on another interventionist Democrat: the World War I-era president Woodrow Wilson. It was John F. Kennedy who committed the U.S. to paying any price and bearing any burden to assure the global embrace of American values, and his vice-president who transformed Vietnam into a quagmire. And it was Clinton, in his 1997 State of the Union Address, who declared America to be "the indispensable nation." Alistair Cooke – the 20th-century successor to Alexis de Tocqueville in examining the American character for the benefit of a foreign audience – said in a 1968 Letter from America radio broadcast that JFK's invocation of Pax Americana on the day of his inaugural in 1961 was "magnificent as rhetoric, appalling as policy." By then a permanent U.S. resident, Cooke sadly concluded, "Vietnam, I fear, is the price of the Kennedy inaugural." So is Iraq. All of the Democratic frontrunners for the presidency pledge a continuing U.S. military role in the Middle East, where America's very presence is arguably the greatest obstacle to resolving the multitude of animosities in the region. Hillary Clinton – who joined a majority of fellow Democratic U.S. senators in 2002 in authorizing Bush to wage war in Iraq – recently voted for a Senate resolution that gained overwhelming passage and brands Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. The poorly understood RGC, an adjunct to Iran's regular army, is a hybrid of armed forces and business managers who run many of Iran's major industries and essential services. That Senate vote was akin to Britain declaring the U.S. Armed Forces and the Fortune 500 to be terrorist enterprises. (The U.S. House of Representatives declined to take up the absurd motion. America stopped short of demonizing even the Wehrmacht in that manner.) The appeal of Barack Obama's presidential bid arises mainly from his having opposed the Iraq war before it began. But as recently as 2004, Obama said, "There's not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush's at this stage," explaining his votes to extend funding for the war. More recently, Obama tried to inflate his hawkish credentials by vowing to invade a sovereign Pakistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, with or without Islamabad's assent. Since its inception, America has regarded itself as exceptional, a curse that has fed the American sense of omniscience that Kennedy came to rue. An exaggerated belief in its prowess has prompted America to deploy troops or sponsor insurrections abroad on close to 300 occasions since the country was founded. Just as Thomas Jefferson was certain of victory in the War of 1812 ("We shall strip her (Britain) of all her possessions on this continent"), Cheney was over-confident in 2002 in selling an Iraq invasion to a skeptical Dick Armey, then-Republican House majority leader. "We have great information (about Iraq)," said Cheney in that exchange. "They're going to welcome us. It'll be like the American Army going through the streets of Paris. They're sitting there ready to form a new government. The people will be so happy with their freedoms that we'll probably back ourselves out of there within a month or two." America might profitability take to heart Gandhi's counsel to be the change you wish to see in the world, after betraying its stated values by torturing detainees and illegally wiretapping its own citizens. Maybe it's too soon after September 11, 2001, to ask Americans why they allow their politics to be held hostage by fear. America is far safer from external threat than its scare-mongering leaders and mass media suggest, and terrorists are far weaker – as Europeans learned from the traumatizing but ineffectual activities of the Red Brigades, the Irish Republican Army, and the Baader-Meinhof group. America has suffered greatly by over-reacting to forces whose only weapon is fear – "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror," as Franklin Roosevelt said in another context. A U.S. foreign-policy renaissance is inevitable. The U.S. is a nuclear superpower, but the same can't be said of its conventional military forces. With the bulk of them tied down for years by a mere insurgency in a fourth-rate power, their global ambit has been shown to be surprisingly limited. By mid-century, five power blocs – the U.S., China, India, Russia and the E.U. – will vie for global influence. Unilateral action on major issues by any one of them will be impossible, and cooperation among them of mutual necessity. Because of its role in helping save the world from fascism and staring down the Soviet Union in the 20th century, America retains enough residual goodwill to be greeted warmly as a housebroken member of the community of nations. The alternative, a status quo that George W. Bush has shown to be obsolete, was described by Alistair Cooke in a 1946 broadcast that accurately predicted the next half-century of American foreign policy. "If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done, if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves." Source

Originally posted by Jumatatu: Very Very very good news...! Professor Ali Mohamed Ghedi is capable of the task and kudos to the president for not selecting a warlord as a PM. What a terrible choice Geedi turned out to be. A budding war criminal he was in 2004. It's unlikely the new dude can do any worse. For one thing, he doesn't have the three years Geedi did and the invasion is fait accompli now.

^^^^ Green card good, Greenback no good.

^^^^ 9/11 is to our time what Pearl Harbor was to WW2 and the Gulf of Tonkin was to Vietnam: preparation rewarded with opportunity. You may have seen the documentary "Loose Change" and how it tries to offer an alternative to the official "19 hijackers" theory. Some of the claims made in that documentary are somewhat difficult to ascertain. Specially conspiracies involving thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people. Surely that many people could not have all stuck to the same script for this length of time. Still, with advanced knowledge of the attack, much could have been done to, shall we say, facilitate it. Many argue there was advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack as well but letting it occur, at the cost of those lives, was far more beneficial than attempting to stop it. Similarly, I believe, allowing 9/11 to occur had far greater ramifications than the few photo-ops to have been gained from preventing it.

GJ, political expediency, my friend, political expediency. While Ethiopia and its predecessor Abyssinia spent the past 30 years (rather few centuries) trying its best to destabilize Somalia, Eritrea tried (and failed) to help Somalis reconcile. Now, Eritrea is being cornered by Ethiopia and the US. It is natural they fight back. The Asmara Group and Eritrea are natural allies much like the US and Ethiopia are. I'm against the Ethiopia/US/TFG love triangle. I choose the alternative, no matter how dim their chances of success may seem. Go Afwerki.

GeelJire, history began in 2004 when atheero was "elected". What Ethiopia are you talking about? Our friend, neighbor and natural ally? No matter what Eritrea's motives are, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Period.

^^^^ Don't uncork the Champagne just yet. This Rudd fella will stick to the script. He will say all the right things, do a few token things, then it's business as usual. Specifically, he will support all the hegemonic practices of the sole, but rapidly diminishing, super power. He will maintain Australia's bellicose posture in that part of the world and finally, he will ensure the public is slowly lulled into sleep after Howard woke them up with his chronic folly and he will ensure Australia's elite maintain their status unperturbed. You could even argue he's Australia's Hillary Clinton.

Originally posted by Kashafa: The opposition is rejecting every person nominated because every person nominated is installed directly by Meles Zenawi, no ifs or buts about it. First thing Nur Cade did, before he was even nominated, was fly to Addis Abba so that the Ethiopian overlords would make sure that he was 'with the program'. Having satisfied them that he would see to their interests, they gave the nod to Cabdullahi Amxaar. The road to Muqdisho does go through Addis Ababa nowadays but that trip, alone, does not make him a bona fide dabo-dhilif just yet. Unfortunately, it is likely this guy will stick to the script and do what's expected of him: capitulate.

Che, Yey is a sorry excuse for a human being. It is time plans were made without this geriatric fool.

You and me both.

Instead of rejecting every person nominated, may be the opposition should name a candidate of their own for Prime Minister. I can't believe I just suggested working with the TFG.

Fri 23 Nov 2007, 16:37 GMT By Jack Kimball ASMARA, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Somali dissidents rejected President Abdullahi Yusuf's nomination of a former attorney general as premier, saying the move would do little to end an insurgency against government troops and their Ethiopian allies. Yusuf nominated Nur Hassan Hussein on Thursday three weeks after his predecessor quit under pressure over a lack of progress in building a transitional goverment -- the 14th attempt at restoring central rule since the 1991. Now a senior Red Crescent officer, Hussein is largely seen as a politically neutral figure, but a spokesman for an opposition group uniting former lawmakers and Islamists was sceptical about Hussein's ability to make a difference. "The issue is not changing one person for another. The (issue) is about a new strategy for the withdrawal of the Ethiopian occupation forces from all of Somalia," said Ahmed Abdallah of the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS). "There is no policy change. Still (Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles) Zenawi is instructing his followers in Somalia," he told Reuters in an interview in the Eritrean capital Asmara. If the nomination is endorsed by parliament, Hussein faces a tough challenge as the prime minister of a country facing what the United Nations says is Africa's worst humanitarian crisis. Thousands have been killed in fighting this year between gunmen loyal to ousted Islamist leaders and allied Somali- Ethiopian soldiers. One million Somalis have fled their homes. U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Friday it was concerned about the welfare of at least 26 Somalis detained at Nairobi's main airport and wanted access to the mainly women and children. They were among 49 Somalis returned to Kenya after flying via Nairobi to Uganda from Mogadishu. Of that group, 23 were forcibly flown back to Somalia on Tuesday without being given the chance to seek asylum, UNHCR said. "We have received reliable information that all of the Somalis of the group expressed fear of persecution were they to be returned to Somalia," UNHCR said in a statement. "We are now extremely concerned that the remaining group ... will be returned to the Mogadishu area, where continuing unrest and fighting would put them at extreme risk." Kenya has denied deporting Somalis back to Mogadishu. "They were denied entry into Uganda and thus had to be taken back to their country of origin. Kenya was only a transit point," read a statement on the government spokesman's Web site. (Additional reporting by Duncan Miriri in Nairobi; Writing by Katie Nguyen; Editing by Giles Elgood) Source

I've read the review article as well. I'm too cheap to buy the book but it's well worth the money, I think.

^^^^ LOOOOOOOOL. Indeed two of these things are kinda the same. But I've known Campbell before I've known the other two. I just can't seem to let go. lol. Seeing that this topic is on target, have you read the Naomi Klein article on the "Shock Doctrine"?

^^^^ Now you know what I'm talking about with Colbert and Stewart. On an other note, I've never met a Naomi that I didn't love: Campbell ( ), Klein or Wolf.

^^^^ The URL is bad. Recopy and paste.

He's got some ways to go before he can show up on the list. Let's hear his acceptance speech first. If he speaks of "terrorists" and some such nonsense, he may qualify for the wanted list. Even then, he'll have to back up his words with actions that actually kill or displace the innocent. He's a candidate for the list but not a very good one at the moment.

Who's that saaxib? I'm always on the lookout for (genocidal) talent.

Originally posted by Naxar Nugaaleed: find a single person aside from those employed by your administration, who are clearly motivated, by money that supports your administration. Where are these people you talk about sheekha. Runta sheeg, do you really believe in the nonesense people of SSC that you talk about? Was there ever a member of SOL from SSC who supports somaliland? Maxad isu inda tireysan? Whats the point of a dishonest discourse or did this forum become another place to spread the propaganda of the rerka? Is it just me or is this statement pregnant with irony? NN, I know the irony is lost on you so pay me no mind Oh, and in case you forgot, here's a refresher.