Prometheus 6

The USofA backed an invasion to unseat a new government in Somalia that brought peace and commerce back after ousting an ineffective "internationally supported" government (like that government actually got any international support).

Why? Because they are "Islamicists." And this is what we get...this is what SOMALIA got...as a result.

Somalia’s Government Teeters on Collapse
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

MOGADISHU, Somalia — The trouble started when government soldiers went to the market and, at gunpoint, began to help themselves to sacks of grain last week.

Islamist insurgents poured into the streets to defend the merchants. The government troops took heavy casualties and retreated all the way back to the presidential palace, supposedly the most secure place in the city. It, too, came under fire.

Mohamed Abdirizak, a top government official, crouched on a balcony at the palace, with bullets whizzing over his head. He had just given up a comfortable life as a development consultant in Springfield, Va. His wife thought he was crazy. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

“I feel this slipping away,” he said.

By its own admission, the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia is on life support. When it took power here in the capital 15 months ago, backed by thousands of Ethiopian troops, it was widely hailed as the best chance in years to end Somalia’s ceaseless cycles of war and suffering.

But now its leaders say that unless they get more help — international peacekeepers, weapons, training and money to pay their soldiers, among other things — this transitional government will fall just like the 13 governments that came before it.

Less than a third of the promised African Union soldiers have arrived, the United Nations has shied away from sending peacekeepers and even the Ethiopians are taking a back seat, often leaving the government’s defense to teenage Somalis with clackety guns who are overwhelmed.

The Islamists have been gaining recruits, overrunning towns and becoming bolder. The new prime minister, credited as the government’s best — and possibly last — hope, is reaching out to them, and some are receptive. But it is unclear whether he has the power within his own divided government to strike a meaningful peace deal before it is too late.

The looming failure is making many people here and abroad question the strategy of installing the transitional government by force. In December 2006, Ethiopian troops, aided by American intelligence, ousted the Islamist administration that briefly controlled Mogadishu, bringing the transitional government to the city for the first time.

The Bush administration said it was concerned about terrorists using Somalia as a sanctuary. The hunt for them continued with a recent American cruise missile strike aimed at a suspect in southern Somalia, but it missed, and wounded several civilians and promptly incited protests.

Many Somalis, European diplomats and critics in Congress also question the State Department’s decision this month to label a Somali resistance group a terrorist organization, which many fear will only raise its profile among the increasingly disillusioned populace.

“The policy has failed,” said Representative Donald M. Payne, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health. “We’re Baghdad-izing Mogadishu and Somalia. We’re making people feel wrongly treated and pushing them toward more radical positions.”

In recent weeks, the Islamists have routed warlords and militiamen who have been absorbed into the government forces but are undermining what little progress transitional leaders have made with their predatory tactics, like stealing food. After 17 years of civil war, Somalia’s violence seems to be driven not so much by clan hatred, ideology or religiosity, but by something much simpler: survival.

“We haven’t been paid in eight months,” said a government soldier named Hassan, who said he could not reveal his last name. “We rob people so we can eat.”

Nur Hassan Hussein, the prime minister, does not deny that government troops rob civilians. “This is the biggest problem we have,” he said in an interview this month.

But, he said, he does not have the money to pay them. Each month, more than half of government’s revenue, mostly from port taxes, disappears — stolen by “our people,” the prime minister said.

That leaves Mr. Nur with about $18 million a year to run a failed state of nine million of some of the world’s neediest, most collectively traumatized people.