All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, on the line, I've got the great Danny Sherson.
He was a major in the US Army.
He was in Iraq, World War II and Afghanistan.
And now he's an antiwar guy, writes for us at antiwar.com.
And man, he writes for everybody in the world also.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
And right now it's a counterpunch and it will be on antiwar.com within a day or two.
Sometimes we have a logjam of Danny Sherson articles, and it's hard to get them all run, you know, within a reasonable timeframe from when they're published, because you write so much.
But anyway, welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Danny?
Oh, man, I'm great.
Thanks.
I should probably be careful about confusing quantity with quality when it comes to my work.
Wrong.
That is not true.
Everything that you write is absolutely excellent.
And if you put out a book of all of it in no particular order, that'd be fine.
And I hope that you do put out a book of your great history series that you did for Truth Dig there over the last year or two.
There's so much great stuff, man.
I hope you have a good assistant somewhere to help you with all this.
And I should mention that you taught history at West Point, and that you really are a historian by trade when you're not out there fighting in the wars, which you're done with now, permanently.
But this one, I'm so glad to see you writing about Somalia, because even when I'm doing my litany of the terror wars, a lot of the times Somalia gets pushed to the margin.
It does get its own chapter in my book that's coming out someday.
And I've written about it before, and I've covered it on the show over the years a lot.
But it seems like a lot more people would care about it if they had any idea that America's been at war there, really since 2001, but especially since 2006.
So why don't you go back to, as you do in the article, you start with Cold War days, and take us through the chronology here, and essentially that's the best way to tell the story about what caused what over there, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
I was glad to write about Somalia, as I mentioned in my last Libya piece for Antiwar.com.
Last month I was on an empire analogy kick, and this month and probably a little forward I'm going to be doing individual theaters a little bit.
So Somalia is one of them, Libya was the first.
I'm a big backstory guy, and context, partly because I'm a history geek, but partly because I genuinely think it's important.
So Somalia is no different in some cases.
It's one of the prime examples of why context matters.
The United States has been involved in the Horn of Africa really for quite a long time.
We sort of set down some of the regional and ethnic problems through our pressure at the UN, immediately following World War II.
I mean, that's how far back it goes.
Folks forget that at the height of European imperialism, turn of the 20th century, but even by 1945, all but two countries in Africa had been colonies, and that is Ethiopia and Liberia, of course.
Why do I say that?
Well, one thing to keep in mind is that Ethiopia was an empire of its own.
It had conquered sort of a regional array of ethnicities.
One of which was this Ogaden region of ethnic Somalis, which the United States took out of the Italian conquered protectorate of Somaliland and sort of gave to Ethiopia.
All of that is to say that when Somalia tried to sort of take back the Ogaden, and there's still conflict there, the United States had largely set this problem in place.
Now, during the Cold War, Somalia and Ethiopia, who were at each other's throats always and ever and still, the United States and the Soviet Union took opposite sides.
And so initially, the United States had, of course, backed Ethiopia, right, given them this extra province, backed them in every way.
This is Haile Selassie, right, famous emperor, until in 1974, a Marxist military officer putsch sort of happens and takes over in Ethiopia and Selassie goes into exile.
Now, Somalia, which previously the Soviets had backed, because they too had sort of like a vaguely socialist, vaguely leftist sort of background.
In one of the rare times where this happened in such an overt and sudden manner, at least during the Cold War, Washington and Moscow switched sides almost immediately.
And suddenly, the United States is backing Somalia and the Soviets are backing the group in Ethiopia that had taken over, which was like the dog, at least what they call themselves, right, or the dig.
Anyway, the point is, from that point forward, right, so now for about a decade and a half till the end of the Cold War, the U.S. is propping up this like, even for the Cold War and even for Africa, pretty abusive, corrupt Somali dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre.
Well, like so many times in the Cold War or at the end of the Cold War, you know, it's peace and happiness and truth and reconciliation.
The wall comes down, the Soviets fall in December of 91.
Which, and by the way, isn't it funny too, right, and you correct me if I'm wrong, Mr.
Historian, but he was a communist too.
It wasn't communism America was opposed to, it was just the Soviet bloc.
That power conflict, but they were perfectly happy to ally with a communist against other communists, if those communists were in bed with the Reds, with the USSR, I mean.
I'm so glad you brought that up.
I mean, that's one of the most interesting things about the Cold War and the Horn of Africa is that it's the moment where America and Russia are picking their favorite communist, so their favorite leftist, in the Horn, right, and then fighting against each other, right, so pick your leftist poison.
Yeah, this is not like a free market, you know, classic liberal, the dictator of Somalia.
Well, Bari had outlived his Cold War usefulness, and Congress started to pretend to care about human rights, as they do, and all military aid was cut off or suspended, all of it, right, and almost all economic aid.
Sure enough, the dictator Bari, who had, in order to hold power, just like Saleh did in Yemen, he sort of danced on the heads of snakes, right, so he empowered and played clans, which had always been important in Somali life, against one another.
So when he gets toppled in a coup by those same sort of clan-based militias, they then, of course, carve up the remnants of the Somali state, and in microcosm, of course, carve up the capital and the biggest city of Mogadishu.
So this is when the Civil War rages.
Those of us of a certain age sort of definitely grew up with, like, Somali starvation on television, and this is in the early 90s.
So there's a massive famine, hundreds of thousands starve to death, you know.
And thanks to Black Hawk Down, right, that 2001 Hollywood film that was shown to us as an entire class at West Point, which is fascinating, right, because this is like 2002, I'm at West Point, what came next because of that movie is sort of the one bit of Somali history Americans know or care about.
So first, you know, sort of the Marines land on the beach, and it's not quite a martial invasion like Normandy, because of course they're met there by cameras from CNN and the international media, right, so it's more like they just, they cakewalk in, but it doesn't turn out to be a cakewalk inside.
So you know, eventually they sort of realized, and this is in conjunction with the UN at some point, that they're not able to really get the food aid, you know, to the starving folks because the militia was stealing it, or they're, you know, redirecting it to their own groups and regions, you know.
So although some good was inevitably done, the US taking the lead and the UN sort of to some extent following it, although one could argue the chicken or egg there, ends up sort of taking the fight to the militias or to the clans.
And this is 93, really, so the second year of the American intervention.
Well, when you take sides, well, you inevitably take sides, right, when you go after these clans, and the United States did, and it particularly had sort of a hard-on, for lack of a better word, for one of the clan members, Mohamed Farah Hadid, and he was, you know, a bad guy and all that, but he was one of many.
And the US sends in rangers and Delta Force, okay, so now we're not just talking like foot soldiers handing out aid, and they do a number of raids.
And of course, in one of them, there's actually a meeting happening in this building between a variety of the clans, not just Hadid's guys, and some of them are there actually as peacemakers, but in the raid, numerous sort of civilians, and then also some of these actors who were actually looking for peace from the clans are killed.
This creates almost like an orgy of violence, which the clans, specifically Hadid's clan, like whip up, you know.
So soon after, weeks later, when a group of army rangers is supposed to secure another building to take down another group of Hadid clan members, so Delta Force could, you know, go in from the roof and actually do the killing and capturing, the whole thing is botched.
And everyone knows the story, Black Hawk down, because of the two Black Hawks that were shot down.
It's a day-long battle.
18 American soldiers die, which of course is the most US soldiers to die in a single day since Vietnam.
And of course, far less supportive, you know, 500 or so Somali men, women, and children.
Of course, we don't know the exact numbers, because we never know the exact numbers of foreigners.
Well, you know, with little press, you know, little stomach for the bad press, we sort of have Bill Clinton, you know, pulls the troops out within months.
And then at that point, the US kind of reverts to its, you know, fluctuating trend to start ignoring the Somalis and their tragedy again.
Now, wait, let me jump in real quick.
Sorry, if we can't help it.
But preceding that intervention against Hadid, the Italians, Belgians, and Canadian UN troops were just, I think it was specifically the Italians that were just shelling Mogadishu for fun with artillery and just at random.
And the Belgian and Canadian troops were, you know, took pictures of themselves holding a little boy over a fire in a barrel, torturing him and holding their gun to the head of another little boy that they're forcing to eat worms.
And then if I remember it right, it was after he puked that up, they made him eat it again.
And they, in fact, their home countries, all three countries, went to prosecute them.
And the UN tried to prevent their prosecution and said, only we get to decide what's a war crime.
And if these guys were working for us, they can't possibly be war criminals by definition somehow.
And that was, you know, in the weeks and maybe, you know, months leading up to the Black Hawk Down thing.
So you could see why, you know, the locals didn't consider this to be some purely humanitarian mission or something like that.
And then, I'm sorry, one more anecdote.
Please, please.
The dad of one of the dead rangers, it might have been a Delta guy, but I'm pretty sure it was a ranger, confronted Bill Clinton.
And he told the story on PBS Frontline.
And he said, I asked Bill Clinton, let me get this right, Adid is the bad guy you sent my son out to get him, right?
Oh, no, no.
First, you're trying to negotiate with Adid, right?
And weren't you guys working on trying to come to some kind of settlement?
And Bill Clinton says, yeah, that's right.
And he says, well, then how come you sent my son to go and get him at the same time you're trying to negotiate with him?
And then, this is the way he put it, Bill Clinton gave me the most blank look I've ever seen on a man's face.
And he just muttered, well, I asked Tony Lake the same question.
And that was the story of the Black Hawk Down incident, was that these guys, you know, and it was some of the Delta guys at Waco were the same ones who died over there in Somalia.
But anyway, a couple of footnotes.
And then I'm sorry, too, because I got to let you know that we're on a tight clock on We now got 12 minutes for you to tell the rest of the story, but I promise I'm gonna shut up now.
No, no, I'll be I'll keep it as brief as I can.
It's important you brought that up.
I mean, it's vital to understand that this wasn't a US only tragedy.
The UN had behaved horrifically, as you mentioned, and in fact, it was the response in response that like about two dozen Pakistanis were sort of like, attacked and killed in the streets of Pakistani UN soldiers because of this, it's really important.
So, you know, moving forward, though, you know, 9-11 happens and then suddenly the Horn of Africa is back on our radar screen.
We put our first permanent African base there or in Djibouti in the Horn.
But the Somali civil war hadn't really stopped.
However, sort of like an Islamist, but not quite as extreme as many other groups, Islamic courts union had emerged victorious or strong in large parts of Somalia.
And whatever their flaws, they sort of brought some measure of, like, stability and, you know, improved services to the region.
But this was, of course, unacceptable to the United States, which intervened in a wholly local at that time, wholly really local civil war.our old friends.
That's why I brought up in the beginning, the Ethiopians in an invasion and then fairly lengthy and bloody for them and both sides occupation of Somalia.
In many cases, the United States actually contributed to it.
Right.
So we didn't just back it, but there were like special forces involved and very little reporting on that.
Some articles have called it, you know, Ethiopia's Vietnam, which is hyperbolic, but also indicates how brutal it was.
Now, all of this turns the Somali people even more because of the courts union were pretty popular, even more against not only the Ethiopians, but they blame Washington, right, of course, as they probably ought to.
This all backfires because sort of a more hard line al-Shabaab sort of youth Islamist movement at the time is like empowered, largely catalyzed and grows in popularity in resistance, right, which is where they get their bona fides, right, to the illegal Ethiopian invasion.
That is who we bomb.
That's the justification, right?
The ostensible reason why the United States has been bombing and raiding in Somalia for nearly 20 years now.
And this is the justification for what I write about in the article, which is this pretty extensive escalation of the bombing by President Trump, even over the bomber-in-chief Obama.
And so I'll let you kind of frame the question, but I think that what's really important and what I tried to do in the article was, number one, say, what the heck is it that we think we're still doing there?
And then, two, why is it that the Pentagon and the administration feel almost no obligation to even bother explaining it, right?
So I think that speaks to the blackout in the media.
And yeah, so I'll let you kind of pivot to where you'd like to take it from there.
But that brings us to the present as quickly as possible.
Yeah.
Well, I guess the important point here is that al-Shabaab was there, the kids.
That means the youth.
When they had the Islamic Courts Union that was the 13 colonies over there, the 13 groups that joined together to form the ICU, al-Shabaab had no influence at all.
The whole thing was run by the old men, of course.
But then the war came, and al-Shabaab being the young were then also the ones who picked up the rifles to fight and, from the point of view of probably any Somali, heroically drive the Ethiopian army back out of the country again.
And so, you know, this is just, it's, at the time when the U.S. and Ethiopia invaded in 2006, Justin Raimondo wrote that this is the entire war on terrorism writ small.
You know, we go in there, we create the crisis, then we point at the crisis and say we have to double it now.
And all of these things.
And all these people are dying.
And what, I don't know, you want to comment on their alleged tie to al-Qaeda?
They said they like al-Qaeda one time.
Danny, what about that?
Well, I mean, that's, it's beautiful, right?
I think that the key, I think what Justin wrote is absolutely accurate.
This is a microcosm of the war on terror writ large, and I think it's also indicative of like where the war on terror is going.
I think major occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are kind of out for now, and then this is like the new model.
And it's, of course, an old model.
The al-Qaeda presence was invented essentially by the United States to have an enemy to fight for justification.
And the fact that al-Shabaab, like so many regional terror groups, essentially declared themselves a McDonald's franchise, right, of al-Qaeda, just like so many have with ISIS, has only, it's been a gift, right?
It's been a gift to the warfare state.
As I write, you know, reading, I read a whole bunch of different like lengthy reports that were really boring, but interesting also.
They show that the linkage with international transnational terrorism is so minimal.
I mean, in fact, a lot of like the trainers for IEDs and stuff that were in fact foreign, there were some, very few, they were kicked out actually by al-Shabaab in the interest of keeping it sort of a pure Somali fight.
This is all reported if you know where to look, but it's not the New York Times.
And so yeah, this is really, this is crazy.
And to the extent that it has gone cross-border, it's largely been in response to the American presence.
And so, you know, it's a self-licking ice cream cone because for example, how many Americans know that in January, three Department of Defense employees, two civilian and one military were killed in like a pretty massive attack on an air base in Kenya by, claimed by al-Shabaab.
Okay, well that is over the border.
It is another country.
But there was no al-Shabaab influence, of course, in places like Kenya before the United States started attacking al-Shabaab and empowering in the first place.
And until we started putting troops to, you know, train counter terror forces in Kenya.
So this all whips up the sentiment among al-Shabaab that America is not only trying to sort of take over Somalia, but it's trying to sort of spread its tentacles and fight against Islam.
Islam is the enemy across the entire East Africa.
So we've created the problem and now we're fighting it, but we can't win.
And you know, even one of the most infamous al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya was when they blew up a bar where people were gathered around to watch a soccer game.
And then when that was reported, it was completely ignored that Kenyan troops had bombed an actual soccer game in Somalia a week before and killed a bunch of innocent people.
And that this was a pure tit for tat retaliation for that.
Instead, it's like the Israelis and the Palestinians, where the Israelis are always defending themselves and the Palestinians are always the aggressors, even though it's just not true.
Oh, I mean, absolutely.
It's like the American model is to act like history started the morning of the newest terror attack.
Yeah, exactly.
That's when it started.
So if you don't, you know, if you don't look at the backstory, then, you know, then it's easy to just keep fighting it.
I think that's something really interesting and quick is that the United States military, especially AFRICOM, like my least favorite command, the key thing to remember about AFRICOM, it has nothing to do with helping Africans.
OK, that's the key.
But when you look at this, they've been lying at probably lying, but they've at least been like fiddling with the stats on civilian casualties in Somalia and elsewhere for quite some time.
And in fact, they've sort of been caught in it recently.
And so they've put out like a correction.
But even their correction is like literally thousands of percents lower than some, you know, external estimates of Somali casualties.
So even if we like cut that in half and say that the outsiders are biased, right, it's still obscene the degree to which AFRICOM lies and misrepresents the casualties of their air campaign in Somalia and elsewhere.
Yeah.
And, you know, as you mentioned there about how they don't even feel like they have to justify this to us, they don't even tell us that it's happening at all, much less explain what has to be.
And it reminded me of this Washington Post story where they don't even explain it to Donald Trump.
And well, if you believe the Washington Post, you know, is reporting this in good faith whatsoever.
Anyway, I don't know.
But for the sake of argument, Trump says to Mattis, why do we have to have troops in Somalia anyway?
Probably.
Where's Somalia anyway?
Why can't we just pull them out and whatever?
And Mattis says we're preventing an attack on Times Square, which is funny because the one time that ever happened, it was in direct retaliation to an American drone strike in Pakistan that caused the Pakistani Taliban to recruit this American citizen, this Pakistani American to try to do that.
But anyway, he just essentially bluffs.
And then according to the Washington Post, he said to the president, you have no choice.
And so Trump said, OK, and then not only sent special operations forces, but sent the infantry.
Well, I mean, you know what?
I'm glad you brought up the Clinton comment to the father, because it strikes me that if Trump were confronted, I mean, he may be less nice about it, but he would probably essentially either publicly or behind closed doors give the same answer, where he would say like just like Clinton said, ask Anthony Lake.
He would say, well, I don't know, ask Mattis or whoever right now, because I don't think that Trump really gives a damn about Somalia or cares to understand that.
And so long as American casualties are quite minimal, the American people in the media are going to ask questions.
So it just ain't on his radar.
Yeah.
You know, I think the most important part of this story, I don't know if you knew about this or it just got cut for space or what, but I think it's really important that people understand about the famine of 2010 and 11, especially there, I guess, 9 through 11.
And then I think there was another one that was not quite as bad, but still pretty bad in the middle of the teens.
I need to go back and do more research on that myself.
But I know that the American and British backed NGO Fusenet, the famine early warning system there, that they estimated 250,000 dead civilians, more than half of them children under five years old, who are just laying down and dying.
It was a terrible drought.
You can blame the weather, global warming or the sun, UV rays or whatever your problem is.
In Kenya and in Ethiopia and Eritrea, they didn't have famines.
They had severe droughts, but they didn't have famines because markets stayed open and people were able to distribute food to each other.
But in Somalia, because of America's war, the distribution, the food economy was completely destroyed.
And so people were just laying down and dying.
Again, more than half of them kids, a quarter of a million people.
All of them, by definition, innocent civilians.
Imagine if someone had done that to America, 250,000 dead Americans, and it was deliberate or it was as the direct result of very deliberate policies like bombing our country.
Yeah.
I mean, that's probably more civilians that have died in all of America's wars in accumulation, right?
Relatively rarely as America's homeland ever touched, except during the Civil War.
You know, the famine is almost never talked about in either of those two that you're mentioning.
Corona is getting a tad of, you know, reporting, but it's related and similar to a future famine or past famine, because the regions that America most commonly bombs have been just like evacuated of civilians into these camps in the slums outside of Mogadishu, which of course are petri dishes for potential pandemic, although it hasn't hit too hard there yet, although it's underreported, but also future famine.
So, you know, I mean, war is the great epidemic exacerbator in history and we know this.
Yeah.
Well, and just like with Yemen across the gates of the Red Sea there on the Arabian Peninsula, this is the most powerful country in the history of the world, right?
This is, you know, the Roman Empire is nothing in terms of power and influence, or the British Empire even, is nothing compared to the power and influence of the United States of America on this planet.
And picking on probably the two smallest, weakest nations you ever heard of, other than, you know, Virgin Islands that are already American protectorates, I mean, the Somalis and the Yemenis, what could they have ever even dreamed of doing to us?
I mean, yes, it's true that some Yemenis had helped coordinate 9-11 and had tried to attack Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009, but our war there is for them, against their enemies, AQAP's enemies, the Houthis, so that doesn't count.
And meanwhile, the people that were bombing, I mean, nobody would even pretend to say that these people are a threat to American civilians in any way.
This is all just policy, strategy, as George W. Bush called it, playing games over, that has nothing to do, killing people in a way that has nothing to do with protecting the Americans at all.
Yeah, you know, I know we're short on time.
Final point, I mean, if the Yemenis and the Somalis have two things in common, it's that one, they chew cot, and two, that they're the great victims, probably the two of the worst victims of American imperialism post-9-11.
And if there is an attack by a Yemeni or a Somali in America, the blame is with the polite policymakers like Mattis, who unthinkingly contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
And that's the story, really, of the war on terror.
Absolutely.
All right.
Thank you so much, Danny.
Hate to cut it short here, but really appreciate you, man.
No, thanks for having me on.
We'll talk soon.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Danny Shurston.
Ghostwriters of Baghdad.
That's his book.
He was there for the surge in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
And he writes for us at Antiwar.com.
And this one will be there soon.
Right now it's at Counterpunch.
It's called...
I didn't say this at the beginning, sorry.
It's called What on Earth is the U.S. Doing by Bombing Somalia?
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
