US+cannot+be+trusted+on+Somalia,+Hans+Pienaar,+The+Star

The Star, Johannesburg, January 22, 2007 //Edition 1//
=US can't be trusted on Somalia=

//American President George Bush and British PM Tony Blair can now say and do anything and get away with it//


 * Hans Pienaar**

It is enough to put you off suicide. Forgive me if I sound too cynical, but the way the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia has been handled by the international community, and especially the international press, shows such a flagrant disregard for the lessons to be learnt from the Iraq debacle that one of the puzzles that should be reopened is: Why on earth did British government scientist Dr David Kelly kill himself?

Kelly's suicide, you may have forgotten, set off the Hutton inquiry that produced a hangar full of documents on suspected leaks, pre-emptive leaks, spin and counter-spin, sackings, surveillance and counter-surveillance all failing to produce the only useful truth, one that us lesser mortals could see as clear as the flash of a nuclear explosion: America and Britain were using imagined threats of terrorism as a cover for subjugating recalcitrant people to their will.

And while British reporters did a truly Herculean job of unravelling the circumstances surrounding Kelly's desperate deed, they also inadvertently demonstrated a major weakness of the media in the new global information age: Because every little action of a government has to be scrutinised and legally filtered, the resultant glut in information becomes too much too quickly already.

In the end, the winners are the very villains they try to expose: Tony Blair and George W Bush can now say and do anything they want in this fog of media war against them and get away with it. The democratic feedback system that is the hallmark of Anglo-Saxon democracy is simply too clogged to operate.

That Kelly decided to commit suicide apparently because his conscience was racking him over feeding a small piece of information to this monster machine, was a tragedy befalling a naive man.

Just how cynical that machine is, was demonstrated by the motivation for the US bombings of a few nomads in the Somali desert two weeks ago. They were supposed to be al-Qaeda operatives, but once again this was blithely excused as someone making a mistake somewhere.

But even worse was the way in which the international media just gobbled up everything the US spindoctors told them. And so, despite it being patently clear that the Ethiopian army was lying through its teeth, they repeated their claims at the start of the invasion of having killed 1000 Islamists - because murky US sources confirmed the figures.

More importantly, the United Islamic Courts (UIC) were described as extremists with links to al-Qaeda, with no proof being supplied, no withholding of such provocative descriptions before asking where they came from, no corrective statements even from UIC sources. Because the US said so, despite the US being so palpably wrong so often on Iraq, with close to a million deaths as the price.

It was comical to watch global news agencies scramble after a bewildered Canadian, as the only foreigner who came close to fitting the claim of "hundreds" of international terrorists having infiltrated Somalia.

If British and American officials have been exposed so many times as lying and bamboozling everybody who crossed their path, why would they suddenly become reliable purveyors of truth on a country as poor and miserable as Somalia?

George Clooney, who co-wrote and produced the satirical movie Syriana on US machinations in a fictitious Islamic country, remarked in an interview: "Only 5% of the world's population is responsible for 50% of its defence spending, which suggests to me America has lost its power of persuasion."

An opportunity for reviving such power presented itself in the Hezbollah-like rise of the UIC in Somalia. Like the Lebanese movement, it was fuelled by the desperate desire of ordinary people to enjoy law and order for the first time in a generation.

Sure, there were some "extremists" involved, but just a glance at the available literature, including the outpourings after the US's previous debacle, the Black Hawk Down incident in 1993 that was converted in a blockbuster movie, should have shown US officials that a plethora of disparate organisations were involved.

Because Somalians are not stupid, they realised from the start what the trigger-happy, serial-profiling Americans might do, and so many were at pains to highlight the communitarian roots of the movement.

And that most members of the hopelessly ineffectual transitional government had crossed over to them for that very reason. But this did not fit in with the War on Terror soundbyte paradigm that Bush wants to impose on the world. And so, just as Condoleeza Rice insisted on describing the mess in Iraq as a war against insurgents, when it is at best a civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis fuelled by American provocation, the UIC became "Taliban-like" or "al-Qaeda-linked" insurgents, when what they did was dare to oppose a government imposed by foreign soldiers.

If you think that's funny, it is. Similarly, we have to hear that the invading Ethiopians, who along with the Ugandans and Kenyans through their lack of capacity were responsible for the transitional government being born dead in the water, might now leave a power vacuum when they run back to Addis Ababa after their little adventure.

We read that the warlords who had been robbing aid organisations to such an extent that even President Thabo Mbeki expressed his disgust over the bad image of Africa they projected, are now the people on whom the US will depend to bring stability.

Despite the warlords' hired guns dragging the bodies of its own troops through the streets of Mogadishu. If you think that's not funny, it isn't. Suicide too is not something to make fun of.

But if there is somebody in British or US ranks who wants to become a whistleblower like Dr David Kelly, please don't do yourself in.

It's not that Somalia is such an insignificant country, it's that it is so futile to try to rehabilitate any notion of honour or morality in the US and British systems as they are currently being run. - Independent Foreign Service


 * From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3638635**

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