For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest on the show is Ivan Ehlen from the Independent Institute, and he also writes for us, a regular contributor at Antiwar.com.
His latest article is Making Unneeded Enemies in Somalia, and also I recommend to you his book, Recarving Rushmore, Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty.
Welcome back to the show, Ivan.
How are you doing?
Very well, thanks.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us.
I think this is one of the most important and ignored stories, is the war going on in Somalia and America's involvement in it.
I guess I'm going to start with the big strategic type thing.
Why do you think America's involved in Somalia?
Is it just because it's a strategic place?
We want to have a Navy base there one day or something?
Or what's going on?
Well, I think what they're really worried about is this Islamic movement there, and they're worried about it being a haven for Al-Qaeda.
But the problem that we have is anytime we see an Islamic group nowadays after 9-11, we automatically think that, well, they could harbor Al-Qaeda and that sort of thing.
Most of these Islamic groups have local concerns.
Even the ones that have Al-Qaeda in the name, most of them are mostly local groups, and they're just using the name Al-Qaeda to get resources and prestige, that sort of thing.
So I think we're kind of making the same mistake we made during the Cold War, saying that all communists were the same.
And, of course, we eventually found out that that wasn't true.
And I think we're doing the same basic thing.
We're creating enemies here because the Al-Shabaab movement in Somalia wasn't really very strong.
Most Somalis are very moderate Muslims.
And before the U.S. started supporting the warlords because they were scared of this group, the group had very little supporters.
Well, of course, when the U.S. starts supporting vicious and corrupt warlords, and the U.S. is a foreign power, of course this group is going to adopt the mantle of nationalism.
And whenever a group is allowed to do that, as the Vietnamese communists were in Vietnam, then what you really have is a national movement under the veil of some other label, in this case Islamic fundamentalism.
And so this group has swelled in popularity and has now taken over most of the country and some of the capital.
And so the U.S. is now...
Well, after that, then the U.S. made an even bigger mistake by supporting Ethiopian invasion, which Ethiopia has always been Somalia's traditional rival.
Well, of course, that made al-Shabaab even more popular as a national movement.
And so the Ethiopians have now withdrawn their forces.
But now we have this situation where al-Shabaab controls most of the country and part of the capital.
And so we've created a situation there.
George Bush created it and Obama's continuing it, where we have a self-inflicted wound.
And I think the same thing has happened in Yemen.
And now the al-Qaeda in Yemen are now...
There's an alleged alliance between them and al-Shabaab in Somalia.
And those two countries are right across the Horn of Africa from each other.
So, you know, in Yemen we did the same thing.
The Christmas Day bomber was in a reaction to U.S. stepping up an offensive against the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The U.S. gave the government of Yemen weapons and advice and that sort of thing.
Then al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula put the Nigerian guy on a plane over Christmas.
And, of course, that's the attempted bombing that got so much attention in the press.
So these two segments are related, not only because the groups are now apparently teaming up, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Shabaab over in Somalia, but also because both of these threats were sort of created or exacerbated by U.S. actions.
Well, all right.
So there's a lot to review there.
First of all, on the strategy thing, you know, I asked the very same question.
You know, what is America's purpose in all this intervention in Somalia to a woman named Leslie Lefkow from Human Rights Watch who is just brilliant and knew everything about Somalia there is to know or something.
And she said the same answer as you.
America is literally chasing ghosts like Scooby-Doo.
And here's my thing, though.
The reason I start out with such a, I guess, conspiratorial type question, what's the ulterior motive, Ivan?
What's really going on there?
It's because I just can't imagine that the policy is really as silly as that.
I mean, it's as though Washington, D.C. can't understand the most simple fourth grade cause and effect type situation, you know?
Well, they do.
I think they do.
Ever since the Carter administration, they do regard Somalia as strategic on the Red Sea, right across the waterway from the Arabian Peninsula, which, of course, has all the oil.
So Somalia is regarded as strategic.
So I think that's in the background as well as the group.
But I think it gets acute attention because of the Islamic group there.
And we are chasing a shadow there.
But, of course, there is the strategic perception.
And I say perception because I think the strategic nature of Somalia is vastly overstated.
But it is close to the Arabian Peninsula.
And, of course, anything close to that means oil.
All right.
Now I want to get to a bit of the history of all this because you explained a little bit about how this happened.
Well, first of all, let me ask you, isn't it the case that really the Islamic Courts Union, that America, as you said, supported the warlords against and then eventually supported the Ethiopians in their invasion to overthrow them, those guys really weren't Al-Shabaab, right?
Al-Shabaab was this new thing that kind of grew up in order to help the Islamic Courts Union fight the Ethiopians and the bogus American-created government there.
And then, at least this is the way I understand it best I can, is that I think it was Connelisa Rice made the deal with the Islamic Courts Union that they could go ahead and be the government of Somalia after all, as long as they took the job within the shell of the bogus government that America had created, the so-called transitional government.
And now that's left what used to be the Islamic Courts Union fighting against their former friends in Al-Shabaab who helped them get the power.
Is that right?
Right, exactly.
What a mess!
Well, what's very interesting is when we have a choice between Islamic groups, the one that we choose we seem to think is more moderate and the other one that we seem to portray as a radical group.
For instance, in Iraq we supported for a long time the Shia militias and parties and of course they were the most radical forces in Iraq against the more secular Sunni uprising.
But we tended to minimize the radical nature of some of the Shia groups who were pro-Iran.
So the U.S. publicity machine downplayed that.
I think the same thing is happening now with the Islamic Courts Union because we're supporting their Islamists as well and they have a weak government.
Of course the only reason they're able to stay in power and they only control some of Mogadishu and the rest of the country is not under their control.
The only reason that they can stay in power is because, well, first the Ethiopians and now the U.S.
And so, yes, we tend to minimize and don't focus on their Islamist nature and Al-Shabaab, of course, we do focus on theirs.
Yeah, wow, isn't that crazy?
The very same people that America intervened to overthrow are now the very ones that we're supporting against the people who I guess are only fighting them because they're their former friends after all.
They're only fighting them because they made a deal with the United States.
It just goes back to what you said about Vietnam where you can call it whatever you want.
It's to get all the foreign occupying white people off the continent.
Yes, these become sort of a nationalist force, if you will, or anti-colonial force, the motivation.
And yes, that's the major purpose of this backlash is to get the U.S. or the foreign power, in the case of Ethiopia, and now the U.S. out of the Somalia area.
Yeah, I mean, I guess the same thing could really be said about the war on terrorism in general.
That, of course, Osama bin Laden or whoever else can dress it up in their religion the same way that the Republicans and Democrats dress their war up in their religion.
The U.S. government itself and the flag and patriotism and all that, which is the American religion, really.
You can call it whatever you want, but what it really is is an empire from this side and a resistance from that one.
Yes, well, it's not unlike other empires of the past which have gained resistance.
I think we tend to concentrate on the religious aspects of this because that's easy to do.
But I think Robert Cape and others have done a lot of work saying that religion is only sort of window dressing.
Most of these countries where suicide bombing and that sort of thing occur, it's because of nationalist groups.
And if you recall, in most of the Islamic countries, the only thing that's not, the only dissent that's permitted comes out of the mosques.
And so when you get a nationalist movement that overthrows a dictator or tries to push out a foreign occupier, a lot of times this nationalism is dressed up in Islamic garb simply because that's where the movement started because all other forms of dissent were suppressed.
So you get this Islamic veneer, but basically what you have, and that's the case with Al-Qaeda as well, Osama bin Laden attacks the U.S. because he objects to U.S. military occupation of the Persian Gulf countries and also because the United States supports what he would regard as corrupt Islamic regimes.
So that's his motivation, is to get the foreign occupier or the U.S. out of the Islamic world.
But a lot of these other groups, Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, they're all the same.
They want to get the foreign occupier out.
Well, you know, it's still, after all this time, commonly bandied about by politicians and news people on TV, that, look, hey, everybody knows we're at war with Islamic extremism.
I mean, you live in Washington, D.C., which means that at least the white part on the inside of that city, they basically all really believe that still.
They refuse to understand that they've picked this fight for us.
Well, yes, that's the problem.
I think George Bush started it off by saying that these people are attacking us for our freedoms, and no one ever really bothers to ask, if you go and ask a group of citizens anywhere, not only in Washington, but anywhere, why Al-Qaeda is attacking us, they'll either say, oh, they're crazy or they hate our freedoms or whatever.
But, of course, the politicians have masked Al-Qaeda's real reasons.
And when George Bush came out and said that, Osama bin Laden put out an angry audio tape saying, that is not why I'm attacking the United States.
Here's why I'm attacking.
And he proceeded to mention his gripes on foreign occupation and intervention and that sort of thing.
But, of course, no one ever pays any attention to what Osama says, because he's an evil psychopath in many people's minds.
And I'm certainly not defending his killing of civilians, but I do think we have to pay attention to why people do these things.
And I don't think Osama bin Laden is crazy.
I've never thought that.
And I think we label other enemies, such as the Iranians or the North Korean government, as crazy.
And none of those governments are crazy.
And we, therefore, when we label them crazy, we don't pay attention to what they say.
And I think we would be better off if we did pay attention to some of the things that they say, so that we can understand why they're hostile or, in the case of Al-Qaeda, attacking the U.S.
Well, and it should be said, I think, that even if bin Laden is the devil, and even if everything he said is, you know, he's Lex Luthor, the criminal mastermind, sociopath with no conscience, and every word out of his mouth is a lie, still the question is, what lie is this guy telling that seems to get people to be willing to do what he says, which is, you know, the holy war against Jews and crusaders?
How could Lex Luthor convince so many people that they need to do something?
Is he simply quoting out of the Koran to them?
Or is he actually talking about American foreign policy in the Middle East, for example?
Well, I think bin Laden, of course, is at the extreme, but he gets a lot of his popularity.
And his popularity has gone down because of their extreme tactics.
And that usually happens with these groups.
The same thing happened with Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
But I think after 9-11, he got a lot of his popular support, because people in the Islamic world were tired of the U.S. intervening there, and the U.S. was vastly unpopular.
And people were saying, well, yes, maybe they ought to feel some ill effects of that.
And of course, you know, that's not understandable to Americans, because most Americans don't realize how much their government has intervened in the Middle East and other places, and that people are really hostile about it.
Like the Iranians, most people know that Iran's president and supreme leader are hostile to America, but they don't know that the real reason dates back to 1953, when the U.S. overthrew a democratically elected government in favor of the despotic Shah.
And then, of course, the Shah became very unpopular and was overthrown by the current bureaucratic regime.
So that's the past, but most Americans don't know this.
Most Americans don't know that we were supporting the groups that bin Laden came out of against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan.
So we have all these enemies that we've created, and people just don't really remember history.
And certainly the press doesn't usually, because they're covering the story of the day, so they don't really go back in history and look at some of the stuff.
Yeah, they only want to talk about it if a Republican is accusing a Democrat of it or something.
They don't know anything about anything.
Here's something they don't know about.
There was an audio tape put out that at least the DOD said it was Osama bin Laden in the summer of 2006, which said, hey, everybody, look out, the Americans are coming to Somalia.
I guess, I don't know with you on this show, but with others, we've joked that for all the 9-11 truthers, they got it inside out, that really George Bush and Dick Cheney and I guess Obama are all secret agents of al-Qaeda, and their mission is to prove him right in everything that he says about us.
You want to see empire?
We'll show you empire.
You want to see intervention in Somalia?
We'll show you tens of thousands of dead bodies and prove that this guy is right about us.
That seems to be the policy, Ivan.
Well, I think certainly an example of what you're saying is that Bush's invasion of Iraq, which was totally unrelated to the 9-11 attacks, although the administration did their best to imply and sometimes even say the link between the two of them.
So when you have that, George Bush did the exact worst thing that he could have done after the 9-11 was invading Iraq, an unrelated Islamic country.
See, if there had been honesty after the first 9-11 attack, then of course he couldn't have done that.
But of course he didn't want to be honest because he wanted to do something that was unrelated and use 9-11 as an excuse.
I think if the Democrats had stood up more and said, hey, listen, this guy's attacking us because we go into Islamic countries, why would we want to invade yet another one?
Won't that make the problem of Islamist jihad even worse?
If they had said that, but of course they were too scared to do so in the wake of 9-11 and all rationality seemed to have gone out the window, this would have been much better.
And of course Bush did this, and he also of course did it in Somalia.
And now Obama has realized, I think, that the Iraq endeavor wasn't a good idea, whether he'll be able to get out of there like he says he's going to, I don't know, after the election here.
But in Somalia and other places in Afghanistan, Obama doesn't seem to get it and is doing the exact same thing as Bush did.
He's accelerating the Afghan war, and in Somalia he's certainly continuing Bush's policy of trying to meddle around in there and aid this weak government.
Well, the New York Times has reported that they sent 80 tons of weapons, I think it was, now to the people that Dick Cheney went to overthrow Christmas 2006, now trying to consolidate their power and help them.
And then now, I'm sure you saw this article in the New York Times on March 5th by Jeffrey Gettleman, the Times man in Africa there, U.S. aiding Somalia in its plan to retake its capital, where they leaked it right to Jeffrey Gettleman here, yeah, we're going to use our special forces to come in, we're going to have a whole brand new offensive, they're arming up what they call a Somali army, this thing's a long way from over.
Yeah, and I think a lot of times what seems like a good idea at the time, Oh yeah, and people are starving, I just wanted to throw that in.
Well, they always use that in the case of Somalia because people often are starving there, but the reason they're starving is because the U.S. keeps funneling weapons in there to help the various factions fight.
And I think our policy, sometimes we think it's the right thing to do at the time, like aiding the Mujahideen against the Soviets, but in the long term, these things come back to bite us, or for instance, overthrowing the elected Iranian government in 1953 and bringing in the Shah, but all these things can have implications down the road.
What if the Islamic court people do beat back the insurgency, but of course they turn out to be every bit as radical as the Al-Shabaab's, I mean, what happens down the road when we funnel all these weapons, and we never know, because we can't predict the future, but you can predict that if you keep meddling around in this stuff, it's going to have implications, and we haven't had a very good track record in much of this, and I think it's better to stay with the physician's motto of doing no harm, and that would mean not intervening in Somalia.
Yeah, and you know, if you go back and look at it, the Islamic court's union of say, I don't know, the fall of 2006, they weren't the Taliban, I guess they closed down the local movie theaters and stuff, but they were a long way from America's giant Islamo-fascist caliphate enemy that we had to protect ourselves from.
I guess most people just don't care what Americans do to Africans, other than import them, right?
As long as we're not actually kidnapping them and bringing them as slaves, we can bomb them all to kingdom come, and nobody cares whatsoever.
I mean, you and me having a conversation about Somalia right now, we're the only conversation in this society about Somalia taking place at this moment.
You know that.
Nobody cares.
Well, the problem is the press is preoccupied with Afghanistan now first, and Iraq second, and maybe the priority switch is the war of the day, but Somalia is often tucked away in the news because there's no active U.S. forces in bulk on the ground.
There's probably some special forces, as you point out, running around, and maybe we use air- CIA kidnapping people.
But the military presence isn't as visible or numerous as in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it doesn't get much press.
It's kind of in the shadows.
I'm afraid so.
All right.
Well, I appreciate you covering it for Antiwar.com and for the Independent Institute and for caring enough to cover it.
Thanks, Ivan.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Ivan Eland from the Independent Institute and Antiwar.com.
You can find them at original.antiwar.com.
Also read his book, Recarving Rushmore.
Yeah, let's put all the peaceniks up there instead of all the warmongers.
How's that?
Makes sense to me.
