All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest, I think our only guest on the show today, is Jesse Walker.
He's managing editor of Reason Magazine.
He's the author of Rebels on the Air.
And he's got this great article at Reason, which my mouse is completely out here, so I can't page up for the date.
But anyway, it's called Against All Flags.
And it's set up as a question and answer about the situation in Somalia.
Welcome back to the show, Jesse.
How are you?
I'm doing OK.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
And you know, I recommend this article to people all the time.
I just tell them, search Jesse Walker, Reason, Somalia, if you want to know the story.
Because I've never read another article that explains the history of American intervention in this tiny little East African country, as well as this one.
And it's just been too long since we've talked about it on the show.
And so I just thought we could kind of reprise the interview we did when this thing first came out.
And you could share with the audience, you know, why it is that this is their business.
Because after all, it is their business, right?
Yeah.
Where do you want to begin?
Well, let's say with the fall of the Soviet Union.
And then, well, everybody stay tuned, because once we get to 2006, it gets really interesting.
All right.
Let's start with the end of the USSR.
OK.
Well, actually, if we're going to start there, we should back up a little bit earlier.
Because a lot of US intervention in Somalia goes back to the Cold War and, you know, the alliances that we had back then.
And in fact, I should say, I mean, we could take this all the way back to the Italians and the British going into Somalia.
It's because there's just this long history of Westerners coming into the area, not understanding the traditional institutions and making a hash of things.
But we don't need to go all the way back there.
But we should say that a fellow named Ziad Barre had taken over Somalia.
He was a dictator, a self-proclaimed Marxist.
And his great rival was Ethiopia.
And in the 1970s, he joined the Western bloc in the Cold War, targeting USAID, even though he was, again, a self-proclaimed Marxist.
And the reason he did this was because Ethiopia had just had their own Marxist coup, and they had fallen into the Soviet orbit.
And so they had a war between Somalia and Ethiopia.
And on the immediate goal of the war, you know, for conquest of territory, Somalia lost.
But it did have one larger victory, which is that it, by 1982, was one of Africa's leading recipients of American economic and military aid, and received over $600 million over the course of the 1980s.
So if nothing else, it had won, you know, it had won a patron.
So when the Cold War ended, Somalia was still in the U.S. camp.
Then Ziad Barre got, there was a civil war, Ziad Barre got overthrown.
And there was, shortly after that, a U.S. and U.N. intervention, which you may remember, which went really poorly.
And we know that it went poorly for the United States.
But it's also worth pointing out that it went poorly for Somalia.
They undercut local farmers by dumping free food into circulation.
They took nomads who had been, you know, self-reliant and herded them into refugees camps, which were, you know, filled with disease and other problems, because, you know, people who had been used to living spread out far apart and moving around were suddenly being stationary and crammed in together.
A lot of the habits of living that worked in one situation did not work very well in the others.
It, civilians were disarmed while the stockpiles of the warlords were largely untouched.
And even the justifications for the interventions tended to not hold up to scrutiny very well.
For example, there was a figure that was kicked around a lot, you know, to justify the U.S. going in, which said that, I think it was 80 percent of the food aid was being stolen by warlords, you know, and gangs.
And, you know, in fact, it was far, far less than that.
And not only that, but the group that was responsible for more successful relief than all other efforts combined, well, at least all foreign efforts combined, was the local Red Crescent Society.
So there was this narrative that was being, you know, spread around that, you know, these helpless Black Somalis needed, you know, the great white Westerners to come in and rescue them.
In fact, the Somalis were doing all they could to keep themselves afloat.
And, you know, the Westerners made up, wound up making things a lot worse.
I should say one other thing, actually, backing up to the Siad Barre days.
The regime benefited from military aid.
It benefited from economic aid and even food aid in ways that bolstered the dictatorship.
And not only was, you know, aid that was supposed to go to feeding people diverted, you know, to the regime and its cronies, but the regime then turned around and used starvation as a weapon.
And so not only was the American food aid during the Cold War not helping all the people it was supposed to help, but it was bolstering people who were deliberately starving folks.
So if you want to look at an example of U.S. policy doing the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do, that's a pretty tragic example right there.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, hold on just a second.
Let's rewind and catch up real quick.
It's Jesse Walker from Reason Magazine.
The article is called Against All Flags.
And when did this come out again?
It was in 2009.
It was during the whole hubbub over the, you know, the pirates.
In fact, the first third or so of the piece has to do with that situation.
I don't know how useful people would find it now.
And I've got a couple other articles about Somalia.
I did one for Telos in the spring 1995 issue, which ought to be in libraries.
I don't think it's online.
And way back when I did one for Liberty in 1993 during the original so-called Operation Restore Hope.
And I think that is now up at Mises.org.
They've got all the back issues of Liberty.
What was the first publication you said there?
Telos.
T-E-L-O-S.
It's an academic journal.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I've heard of that.
Okay, cool.
Okay, right on.
So Jesse was explaining everybody that America backed the communist dictatorship in Somalia because he was against the Soviet-backed communist dictatorship in Ethiopia.
And the guy was a communist.
He was a horrible guy, just like all communist dictators are.
A wage war against his own people using starvation as a weapon, as he was just saying.
Then he was finally overthrown at the end of the Cold War.
And I guess the warlords started fighting among each other.
I'm not exactly sure.
Adid and others.
And then this is the operation that everybody knows is Black Hawk Down is the end of it, basically.
But Operation Restore Hope when George H.W. Bush and then handed it off to Bill Clinton had their intervention in Somalia.
But well, now I can definitely see the scenario of just unintended, terrible consequences.
Let's give them all food aid.
And all it does is bankrupt them because they can't sell any of their own crops anymore, that kind of thing.
But I wonder, you say it really wasn't true that the warlords were stealing the 80 percent of the food aid that was being delivered, etc.
And so I wonder if you have an opinion about any ulterior motives of George H.W. Bush, whether or not they transferred over to Bill Clinton or not back in the early 1990s there.
Well, there were different theories that were passed around.
And I'm not about why, you know, the U.S.'s motives for being in Somalia, some of which are more plausible than others.
There were claims that there was oil was the motivation.
I don't I don't think that there's strong evidence for that.
There are certainly the argument that this was right at the end of the Cold War and the military was looking for a mission.
And I think that likely played a role.
I think that there is a natural tendency for mission creep to set in and there's if nothing else, you know, you had you had not just the Pentagon, but, you know, the whole concept of humanitarian intervention.
You know, sure.
Yeah, well, there's no lack of do-gooders at the State Department.
You know, and for that matter, I mean, I mean, that helped establish its right to send a multinational peacekeeping force into a needy country without the nation's consent.
So, you know, that I mean, whether or not that was the planned reason for the intervention, you know, that was certainly an outcome of it.
Right.
OK, well, we'll have to hold it right there as we go into this break.
Everybody, it's Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason Magazine.
We're talking Somalia.
All right, so we're talking about Somalia with Jesse Walker from Reason Magazine here.
The article, one of his articles about it at Reason is called Against All Flags.
All right now.
So basically, we're talking about Operation Restore Hope.
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in Somalia, which ended with the Black Hawk Down episode of 1993.
And then Bill Clinton did the correct Ronald Reagan like thing and went ahead and got the hell out of there rather than staying and making things worse.
And then so poor Somalia fell apart without the white man there to share the burden after 1993.
Right, Jesse?
Right.
In fact, once the helpers started leaving, things started coming together again.
You know, the elements of Somali society that are able to make peace then could reassert themselves.
You know, there was arbitrated truces between the clans.
Entrepreneurs started businesses.
You know, parts of the economy started growing again.
Violence came down quite a bit.
And Somalia seemed to be, I mean, it was by no means any kind of utopia.
But it seemed to be moving for the first time in a long time in the right direction.
I mean, violence was still fairly high, although not nearly as high as it was during the Civil War.
And literacy rates were still low.
There were problems with dirty drinking water.
But at the same time, you compare it to the rest of the region, and the country was, again, it was on the right path.
The World Bank did a study in 2004 that showed that Somalia had as many roads per capita as the countries that were bordering it.
It had a better telecommunications infrastructure.
Its rates of extreme poverty were lower.
It had a system of courts that worked pretty well, even though there wasn't a central government.
They had systems of credit, social insurance.
They had electric power.
So for a while, it seemed to be on the sort of path of steady incremental improvement.
And then things started going downhill again after 9-11.
Okay, now hold it right there, actually, because I wanted to basically focus back on what you said about it wasn't utopia.
Now, this is kind of a pet issue for libertarians a lot of times, because people say, hey, look at anarcho-Somalia.
It was actually working pretty well.
And of course, we're comparing working pretty well to how it was under warlords and before that the communists, where you're talking about a very poor country coming up from nothing.
And this very limited central government, really no central government at all type system, was actually working very well for them.
And then, of course, the punch line is that Rachel Maddow and them look at Somalia post-2006, especially, and look at the madness going on there.
And they say, well, that's libertarianism in practice, which I don't want to get too far ahead of the story.
But I thought it was important to point out that no libertarian ever argued that Somalia was utopia.
What they argued was, look at how much better off these people are when they're actually free to determine their own destinies for a change.
And not that Somalia was fully free.
I mean, there were lots of little mini states that emerged, little warlords had some territories, you know.
But yeah, they were much freer than they were before and freer than the bordering countries.
And that's the comparison that you have to make.
Right, because no one was really powerful enough to have, I mean, they might have been want to be authoritarians, but they didn't have the manpower to really be authoritarian.
Right.
You had these sort of pockets of authoritarianism, but no one was able to build a central government that covered the whole country.
Okay.
And then now talk to me about September 11th and the advent of the Islamic Courts Union and how exactly, was that just an outgrowth of the system that was already existing?
Or I know there was warlords and interventions.
Go ahead.
Well, basically after 9-11, the U.S. started worrying that Somalia was going to become a failed state where jihadists could go move.
It was going to be another Afghanistan.
People could use that as a base to attack the United States.
And so the U.S. started channeling aid to the warlords, including some of the warlords that the U.S. had been fighting just a decade before in order to defeat the terrorists.
And in fact, the warlords started a group called the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, which is, you have to wonder if they had independently invented the focus group to come up with what would get the...
They hired Hill and Knowlton, it sounds like.
Yeah, American aid.
But at any rate, so the U.S. started giving warlords aid and the warlords started fighting again.
I mean, this amped up the social peace started to break down.
It started amping up the violence again.
And of course, they were pursuing their own agendas with the aid.
It's not as though they were really out to help U.S. interests in Somalia.
And a lot of Somalis then said, all right, we'll go to the nearest alternative to this, which is a group called the Islamic Courts Union.
It's a confederation of Sharia-based arbitrators who presented themselves as an alternative to the warlords.
And they gradually took over about half the country, including Mogadishu.
And so then Washington took a look at a country where Islamists were getting more and more influence.
You know, and rather than saying, hey, our attempt to intervene to stop Islamist influence actually wound up giving more power to the Islamists.
They said, we're going to back an Ethiopian invasion.
So Ethiopia invaded, occupied, major human rights disaster.
Well, and, you know, we've learned since you and I last talked, Jesse, that according to the WikiLeaks, they didn't just back it.
They really twisted arms and they had the Ethiopians invade Somalia.
Yes, yes.
I mean, that wasn't clear back then.
We kind of thought so, right?
But we didn't know for sure.
Ethiopia was serving as a U.S. proxy in that war.
So at any rate, and I quoted in the piece, the Human Rights Watch report from 2008, the last two years are not just another typical chapter in Somalia's troubled history.
The human rights and humanitarian catastrophe facing Somalia today threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions of Somalis on a scale not witnessed since the early 1990s.
So basically, by stoking and backing this invasion, the U.S. plunged Somalia back into the sort of conditions that we, in theory, invaded to stop back in the George H.W. Bush years.
Well, and now this is the part where it gets kind of complicated, but it's ironical enough that I think it's worth having you at least attempt to get clear here, which is that they already lost this war, right?
It was in 2008 or something that Connelisa Rice made a deal with the Islamic Courts Union.
The Ethiopians were driven out and the rebels had won.
And so they told the very same people that they had regime change that, OK, you can be the government as long as you're the transitional federal government, you know, inside the shell of the bogus thing that we created.
But by then, the Al-Shabaab, which means the youth, which were the militia that rose up to oppose the Ethiopian invasion, considered the Islamic Courts Union old men, a bunch of sellouts, and they kept fighting.
And this civil war is still going on.
Do I have that about right?
Just to add on, I mean, it's very complicated.
But when the transitional government, so-called transitional government, because, of course, their authority is extremely limited, you know, was set in charge and Ethiopia was out of there.
The person who was elected the president was a fellow who previously was commander in chief of the Islamic Courts Union.
So it's a and he had been, you know, a part of his own faction within it, opposed to the hardliners, to that, to that, to that.
But I mean, this is just another example of the ways in which, you know, the U.S. set out to do one thing and or at least, you know, it's stated rationale for what it's doing with the exact opposite opposite of what it wound up accomplishing.
Right.
Well, and I want to get back to what you said about that human rights watch report.
And I'm not sure if I'm thinking of the same one or not.
But I talked with Leslie Lefkow from there about, I guess this would have been in the summer of 2009, maybe 2008.
Anyway, she said there were a million and a half people on the brink of starvation, that there were refugee camps up and down every highway, that Mogadishu had been empty, the city of millions, I don't know how many had been basically emptied that we're talking.
I mean, they never show us this on TV.
We don't know how to picture it in our head, Jesse.
But apparently the empire just took its fist and just smashed Somalia.
Just, you know, like the Ledeen doctrine, just slammed him up against the wall to prove we could or whatever.
And and nobody even knows how many people have died in this thing.
Well, that's what libertarianism leads to, right?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
I saw that on MSNBC.
You know, once you let Somalis have the slightest bit of liberty, look what they do to each other.
Yeah, well, and it really is too bad.
And, you know, it's still in Ethiopia.
It's still the communists left over from the allies.
They never had their regime change after the Soviet Union fell down there.
That's who we're backing.
There is the former Soviet back commies, right?
Yeah, I mean, and I should say, and this is true of Somalia, too.
I mean, communism, capitalism, it's all a matter of rhetoric.
I mean, Ethiopia did make its effort to collectivize the country, you know, way back in the 1970s and all.
But it's ultimately a kleptocracy with Somalia.
You know, he changed his bar.
He changed his rhetoric from, you know, being a leftist to being, you know, an America friendly capitalist, quasi capitalist, you know, in the 1980s to get USAID.
But there was no real change in the policy.
And it's just a matter of statism is raw, thuggery and theft.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry we have to leave it there.
We're out of time, but I really appreciate your time, everybody.
That's Jesse Walker from Reason Magazine.
Thanks again.
Glad to be here.
