Has America become a rogue state?

[Castro]

Rogue State America

 

by John B. Judis

 

What exactly are we doing in the Horn of Africa, where we have encouraged the Christian government of Ethiopia to invade Somalia and replace its Islamic government? As far as I can tell, we have violated international law, committed war crimes, helped Al Qaeda recruit new members, and involved ourselves in a guerrilla war that could last decades. It's Iraq writ small. And it can't be blamed on Donald Rumsfeld.

 

There's an old principle of international law, going back to the seventeenth century, against one nation violating the sovereignty of another. It was often breached, but, after two world wars, it was enshrined in the United Nations charter. We criticized the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and justified the first Gulf war on these grounds. The purpose of this principle has been to prevent wars that could arise if more powerful countries simply took it into their hands to dominate smaller, less powerful ones.

 

Of course, when one nation attacks another, the other can respond. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the overthrow of the Taliban regime, was justified on those grounds. The Taliban weren't simply sheltering Al Qaeda; they were in league with them and had become dependent upon them. To justify its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration invented an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein's regime. It was pure artifice--remember the drones bearing nuclear weapons headed for our shores--but the very fact that the Bush administration felt it had to resort to deception meant that it understood that a certain principle of international relations was at stake.

 

But, last month, the Bush administration actively supported Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia. It provided money, advisers, and, finally, U.S. warplanes. And there was no justification for Ethiopia's invasion. It was a clear violation of the U.N. charter. The neighboring people have been feuding for centuries, but Ethiopia's Christian government could not cite a significant provocation for its attack on the Muslim country and its Islamic government. If anything, Ethiopia's invasion closely resembled Iraq's invasion in August 1990 of Kuwait. But, instead of criticizing the Ethiopians, the United States applauded and aided them.

 

The administration claimed that, in supporting Ethiopia, it was fighting the ubiquitous "war on terrorism." According to The New York Times, administration officials even held out the Ethiopia invasion as a model of how it would prosecute the war on terrorism by proxy. By this account, Somalia was Afghanistan, and its Islamic Courts Union government was the Taliban. But the analogy does not hold up. The United States claimed that the Islamic Courts government, which took power last summer, was harboring three Al Qaeda fugitives. But the Al Qaeda members had been in Somalia well before the Islamic Courts took power. They were not part of the government. And Al Qaeda itself did not have training camps in Somalia. Somalia was less like Afghanistan than Pakistan, which, according to outgoing National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, is also home to Al Qaeda members.

 

In the wake of the Ethiopian invasion, the administration made a stronger claim. On December 14, Jendayi Frazer, the State Department official for Africa, said, "The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by Al Qaeda cell individuals--East Africa Al Qaeda cell individuals." But Frazer didn't name any individuals. And intelligence analysts have questioned her claim, which, according to The Washington Post, was "

ased in part on intelligence out of Ethiopia." As Matthew Yglesias put it, "In other words, we're backing Ethiopia's war against Somalia because intelligence provided by the Ethiopian government suggests we should back Ethiopia."

 

The Bush administration often claims that it is encouraging democracy, but the invasion itself probably represents a net loss of freedom--and that's a hard calculation to make among these governments. The U.S.-backed Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi has been widely accused of human rights violations. After the Ethiopian opposition protested that the 2005 election was rigged, the Meles government killed 193 demonstrators and arrested about 80,000 others to quell the protests. Teshale Aberra, the president of the Supreme Court in Ethiopia's largest province who defected to Great Britain last fall, said, "There is massive killing all over. There is a systematic massacre." Meanwhile, in Somalia, the Islamic Courts replaced a weak transitional regime that was unable to control the warlords, who, since 1991, have turned the countryside into a Hobbesian jungle. The new government had brought a harsh Islamic justice and order to Somalia, which, for all its own injustice, was preferable to the chaos that had prevailed.

 

With the ouster of the Islamic Courts, the warlords are likely to return to power. Somalia will probably be plunged into another guerrilla war, as the Islamists try to retake power. And the United States will once again ally with these warlords and with a weak, corrupt regime. (According to Jonathan S. Landay and Shashank Bengali, the United States was actually paying off the aide to the militia leader responsible for killing 18 Americans in 1993 in the famous Black Hawk Down incident.) And who will benefit from American intervention? Al Qaeda, which will be able to draw up another recruiting poster from the American-sponsored invasion of a Muslim country. Al Qaeda will be able to point, in particular, to U.S. airstrikes that claimed to target Al Qaeda but instead killed scores of innocent civilians.

 

That's what happened on January 7 and 8 in Somali border towns; the United States claimed its bombs were intended to kill an Al Qaeda operative supposedly connected to the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But he was not among the victims; nor were other Al Qaeda members. Then reports began trickling in of civilian deaths from the AC-130 gunships that the United States supposedly sent to hunt down the single terrorist. According to Oxfam, the dead included 70 nomads who were searching for water sources. The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, estimated that 100 were wounded in an attack on Ras Kamboni, a fishing village near the Kenyan border. The Economist, which is not an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, wrote, "The Americans used the AC-130, a behemoth designed to shred large areas instantly, in the knowledge that the killing fields would be cleared before journalists and aid workers could reach them." It's a war crime to kill civilians indiscriminately.

 

In the 1990s, foreign policy experts, eager to identify a new enemy, hit upon the concept of a "rogue state." A rogue state operated outside the bounds of international norms and had to be restrained. The obvious candidates at the time were Libya, Iraq, and North Korea. But the Bush administration has turned the United States itself into a rogue state. Tough-minded conservatives, flexing their "muscular" inclinations from comfortable sinecures in Washington, may dismiss concerns about international law and war crimes as inventions of silly panty-waist liberals. But these inventions, which, in the modern era, were championed by Theodore Roosevelt, were meant to protect Americans as well as other peoples from the wars and the inhumanity that prevailed for thousands of years. We ignore them at their peril, whether in Haditha or Ras Kamboni.

 

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The New Republic

[Castro]

Another gem.

[Conspiracy]

.!

[Conspiracy]

umh you look all bored here by yourself I don't really care about America but you started to reply to your own threads!! waan kuu camerayaa duqa woohoo

[Allamagan]

^^

[Caano Geel]

Originally posted by Conspiracy:

I don't really care about America

Why not saaxiib?

[Caano Geel]

This is the economist article refrenced.

 

This time it's revenge

Jan 11th 2007 | NAIROBI, From The Economist print edition

 

 

Despite its previous unhappy experience, America decides to get involved once again in a civil war in the turbulent Horn of Africa

 

BELATEDLY, if inevitably, the fist of American military power has smashed back into Somalia. On January 7th and 8th, an AC-130 gunship of the Special Operations Command (flying out of the large American base in Djibouti) struck Islamist targets near the town of Afmadow in the bush of southern Somalia and again at Ras Kamboni, a peninsula on the border with Kenya (see map). Further air strikes were reported, some from attack helicopters, but the Americans denied it was they who were making them. The surviving Islamist fighters, now numbering in the hundreds, seem to be surrounded, squeezed between the Kenyan army to the south, the Ethiopians to the north and an American fleet offshore. A few may escape, others will surrender, and the rest will probably be killed within the week.

 

 

They have fought a disastrous campaign. Since attacking Ethiopian and Somali transitional-government positions outside Baidoa on December 19th, they have been relentlessly driven back, losing control of central Somalia, then the capital, Mogadishu, before abandoning the port of Kismayo. Even then, observers still overestimated their military clout, expecting them to slip away into the thickets and the salty mangrove swamps, to reappear a few months later as a ferocious guerrilla force.

 

Instead, their convoys have sunk into mud and sand, making them easy targets for the Americans and invading Ethiopians. The Islamists failed to anticipate either that the Kenyan army would move so quickly to shore up its border or that America would risk firing directly on them. The lesson has been a hard one. Without a Tora Bora hideaway to run to, as in Afghanistan, and lacking the support of the local population, even the most zealous jihadist force is liable to be wiped out.

 

Still, the American action raises uncomfortable questions. For a start, how many people died in the air raids and who exactly were they? Taken together, the attacks claimed dozens, possibly hundreds of lives. Sketchy reports, including one from a doctor working for the Islamists, suggest that women and children were among the dead. The Americans used the AC-130, a behemoth designed to shred large areas instantly, in the knowledge that the killing fields would be cleared before journalists and aid workers could reach them. The Americans said that their first overt action in Somalia since 1993 was limited to stopping “al-Qaeda terrorists” from escaping. But that label hardly describes the bulk of the Islamist fighters, many of whom are little more than boys.

 

Their crime was to have sheltered (or pretended to shelter) three al-Qaeda men wanted for their part in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that killed at least 235 people (nearly all of them local Africans) and for the attacks on Israeli tourists in Mombasa, Kenya's main port, in 2002. One of the three men, Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, who served as a leader of al-Qaeda in east Africa, was originally thought to have been killed in the air strikes. But the Americans later denied these claims.

 

There is no way of knowing for sure. The American armed forces have issued inaccurate reports of their air raids before. Given Mr Muhammad's shadowy existence, perhaps not even a body will suffice as proof. The whereabouts of Abu Taha al-Sudani, a Sudanese bombmaker said to be close to Osama bin Laden, and a third man, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, were not known. Several Islamist commanders, including the political leaders of the Islamic Courts, which ruled most of central and southern Somalia in the months before Ethiopia's onslaught, have fled the country, some before the fall of Mogadishu.

 

Somalia's transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf, has praised the American action, but it is doubtful whether he speaks for most Somalis. There has been sharp criticism of the American air attacks in the Muslim and wider world; the new UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, was quick to give warning against the “possible escalation of hostilities that may result”.

 

The fear is that the air strikes will be a rallying call, as al-Qaeda hopes. After all, it was CIA backing for the hated warlords in Mogadishu to hunt down al-Qaeda people last summer that stirred support for the Islamists in the first place. The Islamists may be marked as cowards for recruiting boys to fight their war, then running away, or they may come to be seen as martyrs. Much depends on what comes next: America will need to pay more attention to detail and work out an approach not wholly framed by the war on terror.

 

The most urgent priority is to replace Ethiopian troops with an international peacekeeping force. Diplomatic efforts have failed to produce any troops yet. A battalion promised by Uganda may take a month to arrive. Troops from Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Tanzania and Rwanda may take even longer. Already, the European Union has cast doubt on the African Union's ability to run the operation.

 

Despite Mr Yusuf's quick support for American action, it is unclear how Somalis and Muslims elsewhere will respond in the coming months. Successive American governments of both hues have shunned Somalia since losing soldiers there in 1993. The quality of American intelligence has been poor, often reliant on the warlords who caused misery in Mogadishu. But the fervent anti-Americanism of most Somalis may in some ways reflect a sense of abandonment by the superpower as much as the usual grievances about its pro-Israeli policies and infidels in general.

 

They couldn't stay away for ever

In any event, the air raids have thrust America back to centre stage. While sharing military intelligence with Ethiopia, it has the ear of several ministers in the Somali transitional government, most of them warlords. Its decision to join the attack, some say to promote it, together with its crude characterisation of the Islamists as al-Qaeda fighters, has upset other members of the International Contact Group on Somalia, which includes the European Union and the two countries most closely involved, Britain and Italy. UN officials in Nairobi fear that America's involvement may further alienate Somalis from their transitional government.

 

But at least the Americans agree with the UN and the Europeans on one big matter: moderate Islamists should be included in a government of national unity. So far, however, Mr Yusuf has crisply rejected that idea. And even if his transitional government reaches out to these moderates, hideous problems will remain. In particular, rivalry between Somalia's many clans, which has been the country's bane since its inception half a century ago, will keep it unstable for a long time yet.

[Conspiracy]

Originally posted by Caano Geel:

quote:Originally posted by Conspiracy:

I don't really care about America

Why not saaxiib?

why should I duqa?

ps; you never got back me about that thing!!

[Naxar Nugaaleed]

why would the world's 911 be a rogue state?

[Castro]

Originally posted by Naxar Nugaaleed:

why would the world's 911 be a rogue state?

That's what the piece is arguing. Did you not read it?

[-Lily-]

All we can do is nod in agreement, I fail to see how this or anything will stop America from future illegal raids. They have by now established that they can do anything at will. I also wonder who will hold the TNG's hand once the Ethiopian troops and the US support wanders off. Somalis have a long memory.

[Castro]

Every empire goes through a period of invincibility but this one may prove to be the shortest in history. And when empires do eventually collapse (often for internal/financial reasons) you wonder how they ever got to be so invincible.