Ethiopian troops to soon leave Somalia, PM says

The Darwin Awards commemorate very stupid people who did a service to human evolution by accidentally removing themselves from the gene pool. The statesman's equivalent could be called something like the Obama-Zenawi Award.

I mention this because the shining stupidity of the US President and the Ethiopian Prime Minister are on special display this week, as the Ethiopian army prepares to withdraw from Somalia two years after its foredoomed invasion, leaving the country in the hands of precisely the people whom they wanted to eliminate.

We need negative role models too, and you couldn't ask for worse than this pair.

I can't actually prove that getting Ethiopia to invade Somalia was Barrack Obama's brainchild,

but it smells exactly like a Barrack Obama idea: crude, violent, and barking up entirely the wrong tree. Just like starting Arab Revolution, in fact.

As for Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, he had already distinguished himself by becoming obsessed with the stupidest border war in modern African history following another incident which the Sudan governor had to run for his life because he was found in an area that was not clearly demarkated between Ethiopia and Sudan.. It wasn't his fault to start with: Ethiopia was attacked out of the blue in 1998 by the insanely aggressive regime in Eritrea, but Ethiopian troops drove the Eritreans back. By the ceasefire in mid-2000, Ethiopia had recovered all the ground it lost at the start.

An international commission found Eritrea guilty of aggression and another one arbitrated all the disputed stretches of border, granting Ethiopia most of its claims. Both sides said they would accept the rulings and then Zenawi walked away from the deal. He has been getting ready for another war with Eritrea ever since.

Going to war with Eritrea again would mean defying the United Nations ruling which he did anyway in March of 2012 and admitted it to the whole world in April of 2012 , so Zenawi needed the backing of some great power that could protect him from the UN's censure.

Who better than the United States, which has assiduously ignored and belittled the UN under the Bush administration?

Now what could Ethiopia do for the Bush administration in return?

Well, it could invade Somalia. Washington didn't want to put American troops into Somalia again, having had its nose bloodied in 1993, but it did want to overthrow the civilian regime that was restoring peace in southern Somalia and put its favourite warlord in power instead. Ethiopian troops would do the job just as well.

The job was to overthrow the Union of Islamic Courts, a mass movement funded by local merchants in Mogadishu who wanted to end the constant robberies and kidnaps that made life impossible in the Somali capital. The UIC mobilised the desire of ordinary Somalis for an end to the violence that had ravaged the country for fifteen years, and the peace the brought to Mogadishu soon spread over most of southern Somalia.

Unfortunately the courts were "Islamic" and they wanted to enforce sharia law, which in Washington's book made them practically terrorists.

They did have a few unsavoury allies, notably an extremist militia called al-Shebab, but they gave people in Mogadishu their first real hope of security and justice. They should not have been destroyed.

The Ethiopian army invaded Somalia ., drove the Islamic Courts out of Mogadishu, and installed the president of the "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG) of Somalia, in power. Well, not exactly in power, since the citizens and militias of Mogadishu immediately began attacking the hated Ethiopians, who only controlled whatever was in their gunsights. As for the president, he only controls a suite of rooms and some telephones.

He was originally chosen as president of the TFG, with ample US support, at a conclave of Somali warlords dignified with the name of “parliament” in Kenya in 2004. He would never have made it back to Mogadishu without the help of the Ethiopian army, and accepting that help made him deeply suspect in the eyes of most Somalis.

The resistance has driven the Ethiopian army out of most of southern Somalia in the past two years, and now the Ethiopians are starting to go home to do more killing within Ethiopia.

.The president of Somalia will have to leave too, since he has no supporters except the Ethiopians and the Americans. Which will leave Mogadishu in the hands not of the Union of Islamic Courts, alas, but rather of the extremist militias that have pushed the UIC aside during their struggle against the foreign troops.

It's almost as perverse as the Bush administration's decision to eliminate Iran's two great enemies in the Gulf, Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ethiopia and the United States have not only plunged Somalia needlessly back into war. They have made it possible for the nastiest, craziest extremists, people who think it is their duty to kill other Muslims with "un- Islamic" haircuts, to take power in Mogadishu.

The world needs a Obama-Zenawi Award for Gross Political Stupidity, and I know who the first nominees should be.

Kaleb of DC 1:09AM April 23, 2012