Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Jeremy Sapienza, Senior Editor at AntiWar.com.
Welcome to the show.
Jeremy, how are you doing?
Pretty good.
Hey, Scott.
Hey, everybody.
Happy to have you here today, man.
I want to talk with you about a war that I'd be willing to wager some people in the audience at least have never even heard of, don't even know that we're fighting.
If you told them there were six wars and they started trying to count them on their fingers, they might not get up that high.
America's got a war in Somalia, but who's ever heard of that and why haven't they heard of that?
Well, they haven't heard of it because there's no declaration of war, of course, and there's not even a declaration of humanitarian intervention.
There's just no talk about it at all.
We just see isolated stories in the papers that the U.S. has struck this or that alleged militant or other in Somalia, and that's it.
And now Somalia's in the news because there's a famine, and one of your favorite themes is that history started yesterday.
We talk about that a lot, how people have a very selective memory or a short memory or the authorities make it as if our enemies just sprung out of nothingness to attack us for our goodness.
But the famine actually isn't just a random thing that it came from.
Yes, there's a drought, and of course that affects food production, especially in poor areas like Africa, but it's made all the worse because of massive refugee flows out of Mogadishu, actually for the last several years, in and out of Mogadishu, back and forth, because the refugees find it worse, and the refugee camps are worse in other areas.
This is because the U.S. has been backing a coalition, which is also backed by the African Union, to back the Somali government in its attempt to take control of what they call lawless Somalia.
So now Mogadishu is in the throes of endless conflict between the so-called government and the scary Shabab militants, which are really just a bunch of kids with a lot of weapons.
Now, let me stop you for a second and go back to the point about the media here.
You mentioned that you'll see an isolated story in the papers, and I think that's actually very telling, the way you said that.
You never see this on TV.
The only time I could see anything like this on TV at all was when Jeremy Scahill was on Morning Joe a week ago or something.
That was the first time the American intervention in Somalia has ever been discussed, certainly with any kind of reality to it on TV, which is how most people get their news.
If Somalia's not one of our wars on TV, it's not one of our wars.
That is true.
And now, though, there is just enough narrative getting across that, well, there is this al-Shabab movement, and I heard they're tied to al-Qaeda, and drone strike, you know, that made the front page of the Times, that might have made the nightly news, I don't watch it, but you could get the idea, at least from the papers, that America is now beginning to intervene in Somalia because of the al-Qaeda problem there, if they really hear anything about it at all.
Right, well, that's to make it seem, I suppose that partly it's just journalistic laziness, but also it makes it seem really easily like al-Qaeda spreading like an evil virus throughout scary Muslim countries, and now it has infected Somalia through no fault of our own.
Right, and so anything we do, just like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anything they do is aggression, anything we do is simply a defensive response, which I'm sure the narrative works the exact same way on the other side, too.
Probably.
Well, so, let's see here, what time is it?
We've still got enough time, why don't you tell us a little bit about the last few years of intervention here, and what this al-Shabaab movement is, where it came from, and then maybe when we get back we can talk about, you know, Scahill's work, and what we're learning about the new level of intervention being cranked up by the Obama team.
Sure, but I also want to get back to the famine after the break.
Oh, yeah, of course.
Of course.
Yeah.
Well, al-Shabaab is just the youth movement of, was the youth movement of the Islamic Courts Union, which took control of the country, or I should say, took control of certain areas of the country after the warlords had just made life a living hell after several years of relative peace.
The reason that the warlords popped back up was because the U.S. began to fund them to attack, of course, Al-Qaeda.
So it's funny, this sort of circle, we're supposed to believe that there are a bunch of Al-Qaeda insurgents ready to somehow attack the United States from Somalia, so we fund these warlords, which we had previously fought, of course, and we have them go take control and try to kill some of these Al-Qaeda operatives, alleged Al-Qaeda operatives.
So we're funneling millions and millions of dollars and tons of weapons to them, and they begin doing what they naturally do, which is set up checkpoints and extort the Somali population.
Previously, Somalis, through sort of like a distributed system of defense, everybody had weapons, so the warlords couldn't really exert control anymore.
So it was a sort of state of peace, and some prosperity came out of that in the early to mid-2000s.
This was all destroyed after the warlords came back up, because the U.S. was funding them.
So the courts union had had enough, everybody had had enough, and so they nominated these, they decided, all the tribes got together and decided that this courts union, which is just a union of Sharia courts that decide family law cases and things like that, again all in the absence of an official state, decided that they were going to take over, form this union that was armed, and stop the warlords.
And they did, for a time, and they did some terrible things after they took power, like they punished people for watching soccer games, and watching movies, and things that you would expect in other countries that the U.S. doesn't consider to be overrun by Al-Qaeda, like Saudi Arabia possibly.
So the U.S., because they were Islamic, the U.S. decided that this was even worse than a warlord country, or the communist state that came before it, and decided to attack it.
And so they began to fight back against this coalition of, again, the warlords and then former communist party members that had run the state into the ground before, and were mostly holed up in a hotel in Nairobi, flew into Mogadishu and decided to take over.
Well, the courts union had successfully fought them off, but finally the U.S. convinced Ethiopia to go in and destroy the courts union, which they did, and hand over power to the government, this supposed government.
It didn't quite work that way, because the courts union was still more powerful, and the splintered elements, one of which was Al-Shabaab, had lots of guns and lots of anger.
So they become the government, in fact, the current president was the leader of the courts union before.
So Al-Shabaab, this youth movement, who had never seen peace in their life, who had grown up in total violent trauma, and now they're told the people that they were fighting against, the people that had been systematically slaughtering them, oh, we're now with them.
That's cool, right?
Yeah, well, and it's not working on them at all.
Hold it right there, Jeremy.
It's Jeremy Sapienza, editor of AntiWar.com.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's AntiWar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jeremy Sapienza, senior editor at AntiWar.com, and we're talking about the madness that is America's war in Somalia, and its horrific consequences in these bad weather times.
And it really is, as you describe it there, Jeremy, it's just a microcosm of the entire terror war.
We start it, and then pick a point in there to just make up when history began, as you say there, to pretend that we're just reacting to it, and then you just go domino after domino of making everything worse and worse and worse as the intervention escalates and escalates.
And it just, you know, you take, you know, Saddam was our friend, Iran was our friend, Mujahideen were our friend, and then they become our most bitter enemies and all these things.
And right there before the break, we are fighting, the African Union, backed by the United States, is fighting to protect the so-called Somalia government, which actually is the Islamic Courts Union that they got the Ethiopians to invade to overthrow back in 06 and 07.
They went ahead and made a deal with them, and now the only people that they're left fighting are the kids who helped them win the war, who otherwise had just been kids before.
Right.
Well, and of course they're not going to give up, because, I mean, in the last 20 years since this, you know, the dictatorship was overthrown, I mean, really the only disruptions are from former government officials allied with warlords who have continually tried to get the West to force Somalis to view them as their government, and they kept failing.
The current government is the 14th attempt at this, and it's hardly a success.
But the only disruption of harmony, say, in Somalia is only ever by these people or foreign troops or foreign cash or foreign influence, I mean, and then the trauma of endless war is responsible for these, you know, extremist kids with weapons that never had a normal peaceful life.
They literally don't even know what that's like.
And so now we're surprised that they show up as if, like, Al-Qaeda planted a seed in Somalia and it grew into these kids that didn't exist before.
It's just, it's insane.
It's insane.
But if you're not paying attention, you could totally believe that.
Right.
Yeah.
Same, same thing with the pirates.
Even, you know, South Park did a really astute, I thought, episode about the pirates in Somalia.
Still no mention whatsoever of American intervention there.
And they talked about, you know, European countries dumping nuclear waste off the coast and all kinds of things.
But still not.
It's the USA that has turned this helpless, littlest, most helpless, littlest country completely upside down over the past six years.
Yeah.
Well, the pirate thing is absolutely completely insane.
I mean, really, pirates is what is what we have neocons writing missives about now.
This is what threatens massive, rich America is some raggedy ass pirates.
Come on.
Why not?
They're really just looking for stuff now.
All right.
Now tell me about this heat wave because it's the entire Horn of Africa is suffering terribly right now.
Yeah.
Well, exactly.
They're talking about, you know, the famine is throughout the Horn of Africa and of course the media set up is that it has to do with the drought and Somalia's quote failed state.
I literally saw an AP article or maybe it was Reuters with a sentence that simply said without attribution, with no quote expert saying anything about it, that the failed state is responsible.
Now if you look at this food insecurity map, it's spread well into Ethiopia, Kenya, almost all of Kenya, Djibouti and not to mention Yemen, which the locals might say suffers for many things, but not a lack of government.
So I really failed state happened 20 years ago, unless Somalis have just taken 20 years to starve to death.
I can't really see what that has to do with there being a state or not.
As you were saying before the Islamic courts union took over and then once they finally kicked the warlords out, that was the period of the most stable trade and, you know, the ability of people to get their goods from their farm to the market without being hijacked in a way.
Yeah.
Well, that's, that's somewhat true.
The warlord period though was actually just a blip before that.
I would say from 2001 ish to about two, just before the warlords began to really exert influence about 2005 or six was actually the most prosperous period where, uh, yeah, you had to pay thugs at checkpoints, but they let you go after you paid.
I mean, what's the difference between that and a tax?
And they had all these industries and electricity, multiple competing electricity and telecoms and internet and, and, uh, rubbish removal and, uh, water piping, just all kinds of things.
The poor was humming too.
The poor was humming.
They had a Coca-Cola bottling plant, which people go, Oh, what's a Coca-Cola bottling plant when you don't have a welfare check?
But I mean, these are people, this is Somalia, you know?
I mean, we're not taught, nobody ever said it was going to be like Switzerland just because it didn't have a state.
I mean, that would take years, but it was, it started so desperately after the overthrow of the regime.
Like, so we are the world shit there.
Okay.
And then it became, it was far more prosperous than any of the other East African or Sub-Saharan African nations, at least for a while.
So yeah.
And now the AU is there with these 9,000 so-called peacekeepers in Somalia that just actually shell and shoot up civilians that are in the way of their punitive raids on the Shabab.
And they big bomb the market in Mogadishu.
Of course, they don't bother anymore because nobody lives there.
They've literally abandoned whole neighborhoods.
And even after Shabab...
Well, it's been going on like that for years, where they're literally and figuratively bombing the market in Somalia, like the only place where people can gather together to trade.
They'd bomb that too.
Yep.
Yeah.
And then even after the Shabab allegedly did those bombings in Kampala that killed dozens of people, Uganda just doubled down on their bet and sent more soldiers in.
And the American League asked the question, why do Muslims hate soccer so much?
Because everybody knows that.
Yeah, it was during the World Cup when they did that, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And it's really rich that we have the Somali government condemning the militants for not allowing aid.
But their return to Somalia is the real reason for this famine.
They destroyed...
Somalis don't have property anymore.
They don't have any means of saving.
They don't have means of storing anything.
They can't save food.
They can't transport food.
They can't grow food.
They don't have anything.
They're moving back and forth, running away from bombs.
And this is the fault of the government.
And this is the fault of the occupier.
And this is the fault of the United States.
It was two years ago, I think, Jeremy, that I talked with Leslie Lefkow from Human Rights Watch, who said that there's a million and a half people on the brink of starvation.
That was two years ago.
She said that Mogadishu, as you were saying, is a ghost town, that all those people went somewhere.
They're living in refugee camps, dying on the side of the road is where they are, as the combatants fight it out.
It's been like that for years.
Yeah, it's like that for years.
And so who's farming?
Who can farm?
I mean, it's just insane.
So this is the reason for the famine is the war, not failed state or really the drought.
You can deal with the drought.
We know this because we have droughts in the United States and people do not starve.
They don't remotely starve.
So we know that it has nothing to do with that.
We know that there are other underlying reasons for this.
Yeah, we haven't had a famine, really, in America since I don't know when.
I mean, because we have markets, because you can be in one part of the country and buy food grown in another.
Right.
I mean, but now we have these...
I just saw a story that this eight-month-old kid weighs as much as an infant, as a newborn, seven pounds.
800,000 kids could die.
And 50% of the kids, when they reach these refugee centers, half of them are already estimated that there's nothing that can be done for them.
By the time they get there, half of the kids that show up will die, no matter what they're given at these camps.
Well, and since history began yesterday, I guess that means the U.S. better invade that country to help those poor people.
Right.
We've never tried to do that before.
I mean, did you see...
The drones are already buzzing around.
It looks like it's on to me.
They've escalated.
I mean, a scale piece about CIA and JSOC are they're in force.
Basically, the National Security Agency, they call it, the secret police of the Somali government, such as it is, is completely on the payroll.
The CIA runs the entire operation there.
Well, it's almost worse than that.
I mean, it's really a mini-gitmo.
The U.S. makes the rules.
The U.S. pays for it.
The U.S. actually interrogates some of the people.
The Somalis are just there to execute U.S. demand.
Oh, well, and some French, apparently, are there, too.
But it's in the same building as the former dictatorship's, like, torture hall.
And they just, they don't even...
Yeah, just like Iraq.
They just reopened the same Abu Ghraib prison again.
Why not?
Yeah, exactly.
Thanks very much for your time.
Jeremy Sapienza, editor at Antiwar.com, everybody.
Appreciate it.
Thanks.
