Will Somalia Become Obama's War?

The days of the American-instigated Ethiopian occupation of Somalia appear to be numbered. Islamic resistance forces reportedly control most of south and central Somalia, and are within miles of the ruined capital, Mogadishu. Within Ethiopia, the occupation of its neighbor seems to be very unpopular, although public opinion is difficult to measure in a dictatorship. If the military momentum remains with the Somali Islamic "Shabab" forces, Barack Obama will be unable to avoid a fundamental foreign policy decision immediately upon assuming office. Will he continue the Bush regime's aggressions against Somalia, predicated on Washington's claim to a "right" to invade and brutalize other peoples in search of targets in the so-called "war on terror."

The American targets have expanded to include the whole of Somali society since late 2006, when Washington encouraged and materially supported Ethiopia's invasion. The Bush gang shrieked hysterically that the Islamic Courts movement, which had risen suddenly to bring a semblance of peace and stability to much of Somalia, was a kind of front for Osama bin Laden.

The Americans sent arms and money to the Somali warlords that the Islamic Courts had defeated. This was not so much an American attempt at regime change, as a cruel conspiracy to plunge Somalia back into the warlord-induced chaos that had reigned since 1991. When the U.S. discovered there was no Somali alternative to the Islamists - in a country that is 99 percent Muslim - Washington opted to launch a general war on Somalia with Ethiopia as its proxy.

The result was a nightmare for the Somali people, millions of whom have been displaced from their homes. Seven hundred thousand have fled Mogadishu, the capital, part of what the United Nations called Africa's "worst humanitarian crisis."

According to a British human rights group, at least 17 U.S. ships have served as "floating prisons," some of them off the Somali coast. The Americans, operating out of their garrison in neighboring Djibouti and from the high seas, pursued their own reign of terror, sending missiles and hit squads to assassinate and kidnap those Washington considered "terrorists" - a term that in Somalia came to mean anyone thought to favor creation of an Islamic state.

It was a nascent Islamic state that had made much of Somalia fit for human habitation, before the American and Ethiopian invasion. The rump Somali Transitional Federal Government, a creature of the Ethiopian occupiers, could not survive if the Ethiopians withdrew, as seems a likely result of the Somali resistance offensive.

The American war in the Horn of Africa has included all the covert techniques developed by the Bush regime to destabilize nations and whole regions of the globe. In Somalia, it seems likely that the Islamist "Shabab" will prevail in much of the country.

The U.S. will have no friends among the Shabab. Barack Obama will be forced to decide - if he has not done so already - whether or not to continue George Bush's war against Somalia. If Obama's version of the war on terror requires the subjugation and continued destruction of Somalia, then he will have made that war his own.

For Black Agenda radio, I'm Glen Ford.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com