Trying to determine the largest failure of the Bush Administration is like trying to determine which of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse you would least like to meet.
Was it when the Bush Administration did nothing while New Orleans drowned? Was it the failure to follow up on early success in Afghanistan, and then ignore the country as it fell apart again? Was it the intentional disregard for regulations on Wall Street that has thrown the entire world into recession? Or was it the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq that has bankrupted America and killed tens of thousands?
In fact the biggest failure of this administration has been a place that almost never gets mentioned in the news media: Somalia. Christmas Day will be the second and third anniversaries of how the Bush Administration created this disaster.
Worse Than Darfur
We've all seen the commercials, the news articles, the Hollywood actors, and the politicians voicing their outraged about the genocide in Darfur. You would never know that a much larger humanitarian crisis was happening a few hundred miles to the east.
The number of people in Somalia in need of emergency food aid is likely to rise to about 3.5m in the coming months, the United Nations has warned.
Somalia faces a worse situation than Darfur, Mr Bowden says.
Why the vast difference in levels of outrage? Because unlike Somalia, we aren't responsible for the disaster in Darfur.
"The scale and the magnitude and the speed at which the humanitarian crisis right now is deteriorating is very alarming and very profound."
- Cindy Holleman, World Food Program
I won't go over how the Bush Administration backed the very same warlords that killed our soldiers during Black Hawk Down in a failed effort to defeat a grassroots Union of Islamic Courts. If you want a quick history of that, please see this diary.
Instead I'm going to focus on the horrific disaster of the past two years that has Bush's fingerprints all over.
"May God help us cos the world won't."
"What is certain is that we have taken a group of the world's most destitute, desperate, and brutalized people, and brutalized them some more."
- Matthew Blood
After the American-financed warlords were driven from Somalia (onto waiting American warships off the African coast), the Bush Administration swore revenge. They were unable to view the events in any lens other than the War on Terror, and thus missed the bigger picture of why they failed.
So they turned to a longtime ally in neighboring Ethiopian autocrat Meles Zenawi. Zenawi had massaacred 200 people during popular protests against fraudulent elections in 2005, and then arrested another 20,000. However, we had already given him $25 Million and had at least 100 American military personnel currently work inside the country.
Meanwhile in Somalia, peace had returned for the first time since 1991.
"The streets in Mogadishu were full of women and kids," says Eric Laroche, the head of the UN's humanitarian operations in Somalia. "The kids were playing soccer."
For the first time in over a decade the Mogadishu airport and harbor were opened to international traffic. The price of an AK47 rifle had dropped to less than half. It was not a situation that the Bush Administration was prepared to tolerate. The Bush Administration and Ethiopia encouraged the TFG not to negotiate with the Islamic Courts.
It was time to throw out the al-Qaeda boogyman.
Less than two weeks before the invasion, mid-December 2006, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer publicly declared that "The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals, east Africa al-Qaeda cell individuals." The claim was dubious and the Assistant Secretary of State provided no evidence. Horn of Africa specialist Ken Menkhaus notes that the Islamic Courts "movement as a whole was far from an al-Qaeda front. Only three foreign al-Qaeda operatives were said by the US to be in hiding in Mogadishu, a number far lower than those suspected of residing in neighboring Kenya."
On Christmas Day 2006, tanks from christian Ethiopia rolled into Islamic Somalia. The invasion was unprovoked, but was financed and directed by America.
Ethiopia was not acting alone. The US had given its approval for the operation and provided key intelligence and technical support. CIA agents traveled with the Ethiopian troops, helping to direct operations.
The Ethiopian army quickly routed the Somalian militias and victory was declared, but the war was far from over. In fact, it had only just begun.
About ten thousand civilians have been killed in the fighting since the 2006 invasion and the Ethiopian troops have resorted to methods even worse than al-Qaeda terrorists.
NAIROBI, Kenya - Amnesty International has accused Ethiopian troops supporting Somalia’s UN-backed government of killing civilians by slitting people’s throats, gouging out eyes and gang-raping women.
The security forces of the Somalia Transitional Federal Government (TFG), made up largely of former warlords, have not been any better. They've killed journalists, attacked aid workers, carried out extrajudicial killings, fired into crowds at markets, and raped women.
Despite this brutality, or maybe because of it, the insurgency is gaining strength, and Ethiopia plans to pull its troops out of Somalia by Friday. The puppet government of Somalia is on the verge of collapse, and most of Somalia is already under the control of the Islamists.
The Ethiopian and interim Somali government troops are limited to parts of Mogadishu and the central town of Baidoa, where parliament is based.
The small African Union peacekeeping force has indicated that it might leave with the Ethiopian troops if it doesn't get reinforcements, but the UN has ruled that out.
Meanwhile the Bush Administration has done exactly what we have all expected it to do.
Here's how George W. Bush treats refugees fleeing from the carnage wrought by his "War on Terror": he has them captured at gunpoint and "rendered" to torturers in his pay, where they are chained, blindfolded, beaten, stuffed into cages then "disappeared" into secret prisons notorious for their vile abuses. These captures of people trying to escape from the terrors of "regime change," from the ravages of foreign armies invading their homes, include women and children, as attested by the story of 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, a pregnant Swedish woman who was grabbed – by American troops – as she fled from the bloodbath following the Bush-backed Ethiopian assault on Somalia, AP reports.
Some of those refugees that have been shoved into secret cages in Ethiopia and around the world remain there to this day.
During this occupation the American military has been bombing suspected terrorist groups. On January 7, 2007, two American gunships carpet-bombed a convoy of trucks moving near the Kenyan border. A team of special forces followed up the bombing with "with orders to kill anyone left alive." A Somalia government official declared that al-Qaeda leadership had been killed.
There was only one problem. According to local Somalis, and confirmed by western diplomats and aid officials in Nairobi, none of the dead was connected to the Courts. Instead, a group of pastoralists gathering around a fire to keep the mosquitoes away had been killed.
At least two more American bombings have occurred since then. Each time high-profile targets have been declared killed. Each time non-government sources have disputed the claims. "They haven't got anybody," said one European official. "It has been an absolute disaster."
In October 2007 Ethiopia tried its own version of a "surge". It was at this point that the the "international jihadi wing" took control of the insurgency.
Training camps have been re-established in southern Somalia. Dozens of villages and districts are handing over their administration to the Islamists. The group is well-trained and well-funded, with money from groups in Iran and Saudi Arabia. When Jendayi Frazer claimed the Islamic Courts were run by "East Africa's al-Qa'ida cell" she was wrong. But, said one Nairobi-based Somalia analyst, "It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
So not only has the Bush Administration failed to destroy a somewhat limited Islamic regime, their efforts have now created the exact thing they set out to destroy.
And to make matters worse, the Islamic Courts are gaining footholds in the semi-autonomous Puntland.
"We set the agenda and then we lost control."
- John Yates
The violence in Somalia has hit a two-decade high. In fact, Somalia's suffering wasn't nearly as bad until the Bush Administration made it a target. The largest concentration of refugees anywhere in the world lies about 15 kilometers outside of Mogadishu, where 200,000 people live in the most squalid of conditions. The largest refugee camp in the world lies just across the Kenyan border.
Yet most of the rest of the world pretends that nothing has significantly changed there. Aid to the region is only a tiny fraction of the amount of aid going to the Darfur refugees. However the real crime is the almost complete lack of news media coverage in America. This is unforgivable considering how this humanitarian disaster is a deliberate orchestrated product of our government.
Even progressive blogs have ignored this ongoing horror.
If we've learned anything from the lessons of Afghanistan and Rhwanda, its that you can't just pretend not to see something and hope it goes away. It never does. We've created a level of anti-American hatred in Somalia that rivals Afghanistan and Iraq. One day we will pay for it unless we immediately change our policies to this brutalized place.
"Of all the situations in Somalia, today is the worst. There is no food, no medicine, no education, no jobs, no hope. People are dying every day. It is a slow genocide. We are hopeless now. Hopeless."
- Dr Hawa Abdi, Médecins Sans Frontières