Russia Today’s Aloyna interviewed Antiwar.com assistant editor John Glaser about Wikileaks cables revealing friction between major US oil companies and Muammar Gadhafi.
The US House of Representatives passed the Sherman Amendment yesterday evening which bars money spent in violation of the War Powers act effectively banning spending for the war in Libya.
…allegedly "hacked" software, in the case of the CIA, is now being used to guide killer drones to their targets, according to IISI’s legal pleadings, despite the fact that the modified software doesn’t function properly… –CIA Drone-Code Scandal Now Has A Big Blue Hue
This might just be the Miami in me (Castro is dead…now! …nnnnow! …nnnnnnnow!), but Zimbabwe suddenly nixing price controls and allowing foreign currency to be exchanged freely, with mea culpa from the finance minister and no comment from the 85-year-old dictator himself, makes me think he is either finally deposed or dropped dead. This will help a lot of common Zimbabweans, and erode the state’s grip on the economy. But maybe, as a friend pointed out, though this seems to be against Mugabe’s interests, “they don’t call them acts of desperation for nothing.”
But really, I hope he’s just dead.
I predicted when the Ethiopians rode into Mogadishu in January, 2007, that the minute they fled with their tails between their legs, the Islamists would swarm back in to retake their place of power. I was right, but the time period was off — only because the occupiers, and the “Transitional National Government” they propped up, stayed far longer than anyone expected.
It’s been barely two years, but in that time span, Somalia’s economy and civil society has been gutted as if by fire — and in many cases, the literal sense applies. Of course, many things have changed since early 2007. Some of the more radical Islamists have gained strength after hardening as an armed insurgency. Half of Mogadishu’s population has been displaced by the fighting between the “transitional government” and the Islamist factions.
The tragedy is even more bitter because this is not par for the course in Somalia. Over the 15 years from 1991 after the end of the civil war, Somalia went from famine to having a functioning economy. Somalis enjoyed services such as schools, hospitals, multiple competing electricity, phone and internet companies and even a Coca-Cola bottling plant. It wasn’t Belgium by any stretch, but Somalis did for themselves what decades of foreign intervention never accomplished in any other country. All this despite the United States’ funding and arming of warlords — to “fight al-Qaeda,” of course — who continually threw off any peaceful equilibrium that might have been reached through economic stability. Those warlords now make up much of the foundering “government.”
The pirates that the world has been sweating lately do not exist in a vacuum — Somalia’s slide back down into the pit of poverty at the hands of its UN-installed “government” has forced the toughest among them to make a living where they can. Most of them would surely rather return to making money in another, less dangerous trade.
The Islamist groups have been fighting each other in recent weeks, but even this hasn’t kept one faction or another from snapping up bits of former “government” property and power. It seems the more moderate factions and tribal militias are fed up with the brutal tactics of the al-Shabaab group and are trying to finish them off before the “transitional” regime is officially routed.
I don’t know how this situation will end, except that it’s clear that forcing a state on authority-averse Somalis didn’t work the first 15 times, and likely won’t again in the future. The big question is, why wasn’t that obvious to “the international community”? Or — don your tin foil — maybe it was all along.
In New York, you cannot ride a subway without being bombarded with posters about Darfur and now, Tibet. Of course I have sympathy for those killed and displaced in Darfur, though the numbers have been overblown and other specifics of the situation have been exaggerated. And I am a sucker for all plainly legitimate secessionist movements, as in Tibet. But I am quite sick of being guilted into protest and “action” with the purpose of fixing problems my government is in no way (currently) responsible for.
The Tibet march poster I saw yesterday mentioned the “atrocities” perpetrated by the Chinese government. How about the atrocities carried out, abetted, enabled, and inspired by the US Government in Iraq? The death toll in Iraq beats last month’s entire cluster of clashes in Tibet practically every hour. Why, outside of a few stickers on newspaper boxes around town, is no significant mention made of what’s going on non-stop in Iraq? Are mainstream liberals just so cowed by the see-through rhetoric of the now completely debunked War Party that they still refuse to criticize a war their military is currently prosecuting?
Why are they demurely and cowardly “supporting the troops” in Iraq while wasting their rage on bullsh*t like a police crackdown against rioters in Tibet? This goes all the way up to top liberals in the country — the disgusting Nancy Pelosi tells the President he should boycott the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. Who is George Bush to express moral indignation about anything? France’s Sarkozy is just as ridiculous — he rubs his face in Bush’s crack as the Decider bends over to destroy another piece of Iraq, but is contemplating a boycott of the Olympics opening ceremonies over a few scuffles in Lhasa?
Sick.
How about some priorities reevaluation?
