Somalia is the New Pakistan

Boy, isn't it great, that we have Somalia to play with again?

We've been having so much bad news from Iraq, and Pakistan won't let up play there anymore and is letting it's border region slide back into a Talibanized society controlled by al Qaeda.

And those Pakistanis are much too assertive.

When we claim to have killed some  high level al Qaeda leaders in the border regions, there is always some official  that will pop up and say we didn't.

Somalia is poorer, and less strict in their beliefs, well you know, less "Islamist".

Bribes in the right hands  could work wonders in backing up Bush administration propaganda about actions there.   Or not.

In Mogadishu, the Somali capital, reports circulated that as many as 50 people, many of them civilians, were killed in the attack by a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship. U.S. officials said they are fairly certain that at least one targeted individual was hit; they said they had no information about civilian deaths in the strike along the Kenyan border.
...

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman confirmed yesterday that a single airstrike occurred on Sunday, targeting "what we believe to be principal al-Qaeda leadership." Officials said that no further information would be released until U.S. personnel could assess directly the results of the strike and identify any dead.
...

A principal target of the airstrike was Abu Talha al-Sudani, a Sudanese who U.S. officials have said is a longtime associate of Osama bin Laden and a key figure in an East African al-Qaeda cell based in Somalia.

Officials cautioned against reports that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, two other al-Qaeda operatives said to be responsible for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, may have been killed in the attack.

Oh that's funny.   Yeah, just disregard anything you may have heard (from our own propaganda sources) about two others being killed. (Which means they'll have luck even getting someone to back up the idea that the first guy was anywhere in the right neighborhood.)

The Washington Post article "U.S. Is Not Saying Who, or What, Was Hit in Somalia Raid" (link above) shows that the Bush administration has an entire hit list for the nation.

Happy days are here again.
Because one thing the Bush administration likes to do is kill people (and do things that Daddy thought wouldn't be a good idea).

(Bush 41 did send troops to Somalia, but only after he was turned down for re-election by the American people and knew he'd have another president to pin the blame of failure on.)

BTW I saw a report in the Economist that was more balanced than most on the Somalia fight. 

It reminds us that the government that the Ehtiopians brought back with them is backed up by the warlords who the Islamists drove out and  the Economist says the brief tenure of the Islamic Courts Union may be looked back upon in the future as "golden days" in Somalia. Here's a usenet copy of that report.

(Another reason I compare Somalia to Pakistan is that it was obvious that news sources all got the same government handout about the glorious job that the military was going to do in the raid and who they were going to kill--though to be fair many news organizations did what they could to find out more especially after the attack.)

Locals say dozens of civilians killed in the US air strike according to a New York Times article (hosted here at mit.edu)

Also see BBC's "Somali herders hit by air attacks"

Pentagon says Somalia attack not the end

They forgot how much fun killing people is when you get out of the spotlight of Iraq.   The news media gets the facts out too fast in that established war zone.

Yeah, Mr. Gates sure is a big change.  Rummy was so dumb keeping the killing all to Iraqis.  There's a whole wide world to bomb!!

tags: somalia  al qaeda  tunisia  kenya  military  eithiopia  

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