Obama fires few, but he just fired our ambassador to Kenya, Scott Gration. Was it over the Mombasa warning last week?

The news is that Ambassador Gration “abruptly resigned.” But we all know what that means.

Several weeks ago, his boss, Kenya’s former ambassador Johnnie Carson, arrived to discuss the future of this high profile diplomat who has courted the Kenyan press, staged humiliating performances (such as when he carried a bag of U.S. donated grain off a cargo ship in Mombasa in defiance of a dock workers’ strike there), and fired more than a few salvos about Kenya’s parliament off command.

Most informed and educated Kenyans loved Gration and his “honest” style. Just take a minute to read the comments that followed Nairobi’s leading newspaper story about the resignation.

The problem is that these readers are so used to politicians who do nothing in the open, that Gration’s style was refreshing, and I suppose, encouraging. The problem is, dear Kenyan readers of the Daily Nation, it might also have been counterproductive.

What was so ironic about his tenure in Kenya was that it was the exact opposite of his previous assignment, as the U.S. special envoy to The Sudan. Then, he was widely criticized as being too soft. In fact it was widely reported the Kenyan job was a way of getting him out of area before the two-country election.

So this suggests someone who marches to his own tune. And you don’t get bin Laden or defeat al-Shabaab by marching to your own tune. It’s a team effort, and Gration may have been a one-man show.

He seemed perfect for Kenya. He was born in The Congo, grew up speaking Swahili, and could tunnel into Kenyan politics in a way few outsiders can.

The bomb blast last weekend in a bar in Mombasa which killed three people (no tourists) and which today seems to have all the hallmarks of an al-Shabaab terror event may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The U.S. alert was pretty expansive, and remains in place today. It prohibits all American government travel to/from the Mombasa area through Sunday. It advises all Americans not to travel there.

Now that seems reasonable enough, doesn’t it? I mean after all a bomb went off.

Yes and no. Yes because a bomb went off. No because two other bombs went off in Africa last week with no American warning even to tourists:

* Abuja, Nigeria and also * Gari, Bauchi, Nigeria. Abuja is where the American embassy is located. And the U.S. has recently contributed to the development of tourism in Bauchi.

And no, because the U.S. has already warned everyone who’s listening not to go to local Kenyan bars. And Kenyans don’t listen to American travel warnings, and it’s not our job to instruct them, anyway.

(Oh, and there was also a bomb in San Francisco, possibly “ecoterrorist,” with no warning. Apologies for being flip, but there’s a point here.)

The U.S. public warnings on Nigeria as a whole and Kenya as a whole are about the same. And quite possibly Gration learned of the potential bombing in Mombasa while his counterpart in Nigeria learned nothing in advance of those bombings.

But the effect of the quick fire, high alert warning in Kenya has devastating consequences for its tourism and what exactly happened? Were one of the 40+ luxury tourist resorts bombed, or the airport bombed, or a main highway bombed, or bridge or port? No, a local bar was bombed. Exactly as has happened multiple times in Nairobi recently and last week in Gari.

This is the signature terror of Boko Horam and al-Shabaab. They’re after locals, not tourists. They’ve said often they don’t mind bumping off a few of those, too, but their targets are local.

Now that doesn’t mean that my company EWT will send anyone racing to Mombasa, quite on the contrary. Several times this week I discouraged inquiries about beach holidays in Kenya. But we aren’t discussing where you should go for your vacation. We’re discussing the appropriate diplomatic response to terror intelligence.

Kenya is actually doing a yeoman’s job against terrorism. As I’ve often written their invasion of Somali goes beyond impressive, almost capable of changing my world view about fighting terrorism. So far, God Willing, foreign visitors out of the fight zones have been untouched. Kenya’s cooperation with America has led to multiple terrorists leader eradicated or arrested.

So actually, in the War Against Terror, Kenya’s doing pretty well.

This doesn’t mean you should take a beach vacation in Kenya. But it is probably good enough for firing the man who jerks to warn his citizens about an event whose odds are won’t effect them.

Jim has often written about the unpredictability and downright irrationality of U.S. State Department’s travel warnings. But that’s hardly the end of our State Department’s equivocating.

Much more than travel advice, the State Department’s “Foreign Terrorist Organization” designations significantly impact world trade and local development in particular, and I find those designations horribly confusing.

A good example is why West Africa’s Boko Haram has yet to receive the designation despite their constant and increasing terrorist activity.

If suicide bombers driving explosive laden trucks into U.N. buildings doesn’t get you labeled a terrorist organization I don’t know what will. The sect’s string of terrorist attacks have killed more than 1000 people since late 2009 including two deadly attacks on Christian churches yesterday in the northern Nigerian town of Bui.

The seeming ridiculousness of our State Department not labeling these killers as terrorists sent me scrambling for the State Department’s official definition.

The definition is so detailed that many terrorist governments, militias, gangs, etc. can avoid the label… if the State Department is so inclined.

The definition is so comprehensive and all encompassing that almost any martial organization could be called terrorist– including professional armies at war: hijacking, kidnaping, assassination, the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, and, in the most general clause, the use of explosives or firearms with the intent to cause harm to individuals or property.

“Terrorist organizations” are those entities that train for, plan, finance, or actually carry out “terrorism.”

Oh, and of course, you will see on the State Department website that the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation only applies to groups that threaten U.S. interests, property, or personnel. This allows broad subjective (and likely political) conclusions. Consider, for example, how organizations like the IRA or Mexico’s various drug lords backed by local state governments there could be classified.

You’d think, though, that Boko Haram couldn’t wiggle out of the classification – kidnaping, assassination, and intent to harm for sure. They also, in my opinion, threaten U.S. interests more than the four outfits in Africa that were on the list circa January 2011:

Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM)
Al-Shabaab
Gama’a al-Islamiyya
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group

Congressmen and many Justice department employees have pressured the State Department to pass judgment on Boko Haram, but State continues to refuse despite the group’s numerous and increasingly spectacular attacks.

The take away here is that labels are political tools and not dictionary definitions. Apparently, the Nigerian government has strenuously requested that Boko Haram be kept off the dreaded list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Why? Well that depends on who you ask. Nigeria’s Ambassador to the U.S., Prof. Adebowale Adefuye, said because such a designation would open to the door for U.S. drone strikes like those in Yemen and Pakistan.

Our reputation precedes us.

Other Nigerian sources claim that such a designation would lead to the harassment of Nigerian citizens abroad, and/or would deter U.S. investment.

This entire debate upsets me because such vagaries leave room for gross manipulation; do some countries get to tell the U.S. who is a terrorist and who is not?

I get the feeling that the Uighurs or the Kurds are either nationalists or terrorists depending on how the political winds are blowing from the U.S. to China, or from the U.S. to the Middle East. What will happen if a weakened Al-Shabaab strikes a power sharing arrangement with the Transitional Government in Mogadishu? I wonder if they will suddenly cease to be terrorists, semantically anyway.

Congress can’t even make up its mind regarding Iran’s Mek.

The haphazard designations of terrorism bring back feelings from the Bush era “War or Terror” where designations were key in the cowboy ‘with us or against us’ mentality.

I am also uncomfortable with the fact the U.S. military has been guilty of many of the sub-clauses defining terrorist activity. We have assassinated foreign citizens, financed foreign militias, and used overwhelming force against legitimate targets even when they are nestled within civilian populations.

Many of these acts (certainly not all) might be legal, but playing politics with simple definitions like “terrorist activity” just increases the ugly feeling that the U.S. creates the rules and then applies them selectively.

I would be interested the hear anyone’s thoughts comparing Boko Haram’s eligibility for the terrorist label with a group like the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad in Mali. I think there is a substantive difference – do you?