Since his inauguration, Obama has waged a different style of war than his predecessor. There is a marked preference for strikes by CIA controlled drone aircraft crossing international boundaries without the need to obtain any local consent, streamlined SpecialOps raids, and the ever greater use of mercenary armies and local forces trained and paid for by the West.
There are currently at least 3 mercenary armies being prepared for combat in Somalia: a 2,000 man private force trained by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, another 2,000 being trained by EU troops, with thousands more being trained in Uganda by undisclosed backers. These numbers are in addition to the 8,000 strong UN funded AU mission under siege in the capital, and to the armed forces of the breakaway regions Somaliland and Puntland, which already exist as de facto Western protectorates.
This is the face of Democratic war -- no white boots on the ground, no public outrage, but still lots of people dying "over there" so that we can feel safe "over here," with a bit of humanitarian handwringing thrown in.
The failed state of Somalia has long been a thorn in the side of the West, the Arab world and global capital. The US became militarily involved there at the very outset of its great imperialist expansion, now known as the Long War, which followed the collapse of its superpower opponent, the USSR. The early efforts to bring the country into the US orbit however culminated in the Blackhawk Down fiasco in 1992, which effectively cratered domestic support for any further military efforts in that country. Though perceived as minor and largely irrelevant at the time, in retrospect the bloody nose received by the invincible American military in that tiny country at the hands of a nationalist militia which had (as we now know) received military training from veteran mujaheddin fighters and had been armed by Saudi financiers, accurately presaged the later difficulties which have been encountered by imperialist forces on all fronts of the Long War.
A brutal civil war has raged throughout Somalia since that time, eventually leaving a few relatively well organized regional powers in control of virtually autonomous parts of the country. Most of the country has become unified under a single Islamist group known as al-Shabaab (meaning "The Youth"). They now control over half the country, including much of the capital, and operate a repressive Islamic Emirate similar to that operated by the Taliban in Afghanistan during the 1990s. They have borne the brunt of fighting against foreign forces attempting to intervene in the country, including Americans, Ethiopians, and a polyglot African Union force still fighting in country, and have come out the stronger for the struggle.
The massive Ethiopian invasion launched with US blessing and assistance in 2006 in order to eradicate the seeds of Islamism from the country ended up enshrining the Islamists as a heroic national resistance movement, much like what happened with Hizbollah during the Israeli intervention into the Lebanese Civil War. While initially successful, the Ethiopian forces were expelled from the country by the determined guerrilla resistance of an increasingly radicalized and popular Islamist movement, which responded to the attempts to destroy its power by recharacterizing its struggle as part of the larger war between Islam and Christianity, announcing itself as an ally of Al Qaeda and recruiting veteran mujaheddin from around the world to come to Somalia to wage jihad. The retreating Ethiopian forces left behind a weak provisional government held in place by a scaled down African Union military mission limited in its scope to protecting the main centers of that government’s power (reduced gradually to only parts of the capital Mogadishu), and a brutal conflict between al-Shabaab and another, older Islamist militia for the spoils, which conflict ended with a definitive Shabaab victory in December of 2010.
Some sections of the country still not directly controlled by al-Shabaab have become pirate havens, run by criminal organizations and hosting dozens of hostages from all over the world who were seized in the countless audacious pirate raids on the shipping passing along the vital lanes around the Horn of Africa. The relationship between the pirates and al-Shabaab is not antagonistic, with Shabaab preferring to use the pirates as a source of funding despite their rather un-Islamic way of life. The fight against the pirates has become a truly international effort, with nearly every maritime power contributing a contingent to the forces attempting to interdict the pirates at sea. This campaign has been ineffective at eradicating the scourge of piracy, though its effects have been reduced and commando units from around the world have received valuable live fire training. Without land forces to occupy the land bases from which the pirates operate, no final solution to this problem can be put in place, and nobody dares to land on Somalian soil as long as it is protected by Islamist forces well versed in the tactics of guerrilla warfare.
Anti-Western forces or criminal elements have not triumphed in the entirety of the country. A large territory (about 1/3 of the country) known as Puntland has achieved de facto independence as a Western protectorate. In addition, there is the largely separate tough internationally unrecognized breakaway state of Somaliland, whose claims to independence date back to the colonial period when it was claimed by a different power (Britain) than the rest of the country (Italy). The claims of these regions are tacitly supported by the West, though nobody is prepared to officially recognize their independence. The fact that the West simultaneously supports the Transitional Government in Mogadishu which claims sovereignty over the entire legal territory of Somalia and two breakaway regions which deny that authority has not caused any real problems given the inability of the Transitional Government to exercise any real authority on any part of the country whatsoever.
The governments of these regions have been able to make lucrative deals with global capital interests and these regions are much more prosperous than the rest of Somalia, ensuring the loyalty of the population to the local rulers rather than a national ideal. The military forces of the breakaway regions have long been trained by Western instructors and equipped by Western powers without much controversy. However, these forces are defensive in nature and cannot be used either to combat the pirates in their coastal havens or to take on the aggressive Islamist movement overrunning the bulk of the country. In fact, these regions are utterly dependent on Western support to maintain their independence in the face of the aggressive Islamist dreams of a unified Greater Somalia (which is also envisioned to include parts of Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya). Called upon to defend these entities from possible attack, the US has responded with a classical containment approach, effectively ringing the dangerous country with military bases. There are currently four major American bases surrounding Somalia, -- the gigantic Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, which the Pentagon took over from the French Foreign Legion, two bases in Ethiopia, and one in Kenya.
However there is no expectation that the thousands of American soldiers stationed on Somalia’s borders for years now at great expense will ever enter the country on anything other than quick hit and run operations. The bloody fiasco of the Ethiopian intervention, the Blackhawk Down incident, and the Americans’ later experiences in trying to maintain occupations in the face of Islamist insurgencies elsewhere in the world, make a large scale entry highly improbable, at least until faltering Western domestic support for foreign wars can be shored up or new anti-guerilla tactics can be developed by the imperial forces. Nevertheless, reports of small scale intrusions by US forces are rampant, though difficult to verify. The fact that such operations still take place shows the mindset of an American military command trained to ignore international borders and questions of legality in their operations, and the lack of any alternative vision to military intervention in the imperial camp. The only effect of these actions is to create a paranoid siege mentality in a population which increasingly finds itself embroiled in yet another phase of the global imperialist conflict variously known as the War on Terror/Overseas Contingency/Long War, and to increase the popularity of al-Shabaab as the only force capable of national resistance.
Faced with the unavailability of either professional imperial troops or local proxies for aggressive operations against the hostile elements in Somalia, the powers that be have increasingly come to rely on tactics alternative to direct occupation -- assassination strikes by missiles and unmanned aerial drones, targeted raids, and the employment of mercenaries, both those recruited locally and those brought in from abroad.
Accordingly, as in many previous instances when the West had goals in Africa which could not be solved by direct military intervention, the idea of using mercenaries or white led locally raised armies as the main striking force has reared its head and is being implemented on a massive scale. Multiple independent forces with differing and conflicting purposes are being trained and equipped by Western powers, with funding coming form a wide plethora of interests, including the Arab nations separated only by a narrow stretch of sea from Somalia's pirate fleets, are being readied as we speak to take part in the Somalian conflict. The sight of white officers barking orders in unfamiliar languages at African recruits whose chief attribute is their expendability, so common during the colonialist era, is being repeated on bases in Uganda, Kenya, Somaliland, Puntland, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, etc.
Most of the recruits are Somalis, drawn from the millions of refugees driven from the country by decades of conflict, putting a native face on the operations and reducing interest from the Western public. Their trainers are mostly white, drawn from the old colonialist nations and of course, their modern heirs, the United States and South Africa (the operation in which Erik Prince the founder of the infamous mercenary corps Blackwater/Xe Services, is reportedly involved is being spearheaded by a firm called Saracen International, composed largely of apartheid era Afrikaner commandos). Its very familiarity means that this process has attracted little attention around the world. However, it has recently been given greater notoriety by the reports that Erik Prince, the top celebrity of the mercenary world has become involved. His level of involvement is unclear, it could be anything from freelance consulting with colleagues in the tight knit mercenary circles, to financial involvement in the setting up of an army intending to bid for supremacy in the Somalian territories, to a more modest assignment of providing training to recruiters for planned counter piracy operations.
Whatever Erik Prince is doing, the mere mention of his name has sent reporters scurrying around the world, tracking down fictitious addresses of the front companies used by mercenary recruiters and trying to get even remotely accurate estimates on the numbers involved. The involvement of such a celebrity indicates that the mission is gaining a higher priority in the corridors of power, and the willingness of those in charge to suffer the negative publicity that is sure to result from the employment of such a controversial figure in exchange for the resultant higher profile for the operations. Some sort of reliable official cover from the Western governments would have to have been procured before such a bold bid for publicity was launched.
The numbers quoted so far for the intended mercenary armies, a few thousand here and there, are not great enough to make this theater of operations stand out from the others, and are also unlikely to alter the course of a conflict that has been waged for over a decade and in which the Islamist have all the momentum. Despite its low profile, in many ways this front typifies the current state of the Long War which has raged ever since the West began its latest round of expansion following the elimination of the Soviet Union as a counterbalance in 1991. Without a powerful enemy to prevent their advance, the US and its allies envisioned the End of History, a period of effortless unopposed expansion into previously coveted but inaccessible regions.
This triumphal march has run into stiff opposition from both local nationalist elements and an increasingly global and well organized Islamist network, which, while working in alliance with the West against the USSR and thus emerging as the other winner of the Cold War, became adept at flowing seasoned veteran jihadists and raising local mujaheddin at the points of Western attack, while simultaneously striking at Western domestic targets in an attempt to awaken the Western public to the costs of the wars being waged in its name. Although it lacks the power to deliver any knockout punches to the Western military-industrial behemoth, the global resistance movement has shown itself more than capable of stopping the attempted Western imperialist expansion in its tracks and possibly even critically weakening the Western powers at their core by a strategy of attrition.
The situation in Somalia typifies the current condition of stalemate – Western forces are no longer prepared to occupy any region held by militant Islamist or nationalist elements. The operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been so costly that any similar endeavors are almost entirely out of the question in the short term. But while the loose networks of militants and guerillas are sufficient to perhaps keep Western forces out of their strongholds, and even with some luck to deliver periodic painful pinpricks to the very heart of the Empire, they cannot break the iron ring of bases which surrounds them on all sides, nor can they defend themselves against a steady barrage of assassination strikes launched from those bases. And so both sides continue to bleed men and money, locked in an uneven but surprisingly well matched struggle, with neither anywhere near to the point of exhaustion. This state of affairs might last for a prolonged period of time, just as the Cold War did, because the continuation of the conflict confers tangible benefits on either side of the conflict inasmuch as it justifies the existence and funding of the militants on both sides.
The history of American intervention in Somalia encapsulates the larger history of the Long War conflict in one more important way. The first mission which culminated with the shooting down of two Blackhawks during the Battle of Mogadishu of 1993 was an operation planned and initiated under a Republican President but continued and expanded under a Democratic one. The Democrats have long walked a political tight rope of trying to capture the support of the more anti-war elements of the American public without actually being anti-war themselves and thus without alienating the pro-war elements and not acting contrary to the historically militaristic American character. The Democratic alternative to Republican militarism and hawkishness is to propose themselves as more competent but equally warlike, willing to fight the wars but capable of fighting them better. Clinton redeemed himself from the Somalian debacle with the surgical Yugoslavian operations, during which a difficult and violent country was carved into very digestible pieces without any loss of imperial lives.
The Democratic position of "both peace and war" (to paraphrase Trotsky) was brilliantly marketed by Barack Obama in 2008, when he ran as an ardent opponent of the Iraq War (that was his major trump card over Hillary). But to show that his opposition to the Iraq War was limited solely to that one misbegotten war, and did not effect his enthusiasm for solving various world problems with American military might, he simultaneously supported adding troops in Afghanistan, which is one campaign promise he has certainly carried out fully, despite the fact that 61% of Americans oppose the Afghan War. Since Obama’s inauguration, the American presence in Afghanistan has more than doubled, while operations in Pakistan has reached an intensity that dwarves anything seen under Bush (with, for example, 177 assassination strikes being carried out during the two years of the Obama Administration compared to 42 during two terms of George W. Bush). This proudly hawkish position, unlike some of Obama’s domestic policy debacles, cannot be laid at the feet of the Republicans or Congressional obstructionists, it is fully in Obama's discretion.
The fact that the Democratic global policy remains aggressively imperialistic, with a predominantly militarist strategy for achieving the imperialist aims, relying on the deployment of mercenary forces and long range tools of assassination and terror such as the aerial drone strikes and Special Forces raids, shows clearly the approach this Administration and the Democratic Party as a whole intend to take in future dealings with recalcitrant, disobedient or otherwise out-of-control regions and forces around the world. Anybody who still fools themselves into thinking that Obama's or the Democrats’ intention is to scale down the wars they inherited when the opportunity arises, need only look to the new wars being launched under Obama’s watch in Somalia and also its neighbor Yemen, and to the bloody war crimes being committed against the population of the Pakistani people, to see the face of Democratic imperialism. Therefore, it cannot be claimed by anyone voting Democratic in any national election that they are in any meaningful way anti-war. Any supporter of the two party system is a supporter of never-ending imperialist war, pure and simple. There is no lesser of two evils on this question.