The Dominoes Reach Somalia

The Dominoes Reach Somalia

Guns from the UK, Guns from America, and bodies from Africa.
Tuesday Congress gave President Obama additional emergency funding for the war in Afghanistan. But the real new news is that America and Britain are beginning a new war in Somalia.

This was a week where terror succeeded. It began with the Al-Shabaab (Al-Qaeda) bombings in Kampala, which like 9/11 are intended to provoke. Terrorists know they are militarily inferior, but if they can provoke the militarily superior to come to them, they can win.

Nine-Eleven did just that. It provoked the U.S. in a multi-trillion dollar response that hasn’t ended yet, and judging from Obama’s increasingly hawkish ways, won’t end at all soon.

The powers of the world just don’t get it: no matter how powerful you may be, you can’t beat the joker on his own turf.

By diverting resources away from eliminating poverty, or malaria, or child soldiers… despicable culture centers like fiendish jihadism flourish. These weirdos survive on misery. But we can’t try to end poverty, or malaria or child soldiers… because the resources that would be used are being used instead to buy guns.

So the bad guys at whom the guns are pointed and who want the poor to stay poor so that they can be elevated as the poor’s protectors, win.

It’s weirdly impractical, but if we’d just schedule regular drops of thousands of dollar bills over Helmand Province or Basra, rather than delivering guns to shoot one another, there’d be no terrorism left. And it’d probably cost a lot less.

And this enigmatic neurotic dynamic of World Powers has infected every single American administration, Republican or Democrat, since my birth.

And what I worry about, now, is Africa.

Africa has been mostly immune from this aberration of modernism, because only lately has its resources become so important. Yes Zambia had copper, and yes, South Africa had diamonds and gold, and yes Nigeria has oil, but not enough, or too deep, or too cheap, or too hard to get at.

But gold is five times the value it was ten years ago. Oil extraction technology is way superior to what it was before, and the thirst for oil especially from China and the U.S. is unbelievable. Copper is an old element. But Coltan is desperately needed by every cell phone and it’s in The Congo and Rwanda.

So enter Africa into the Modern Age: Prepare for battle.

So America called on the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to beef up its troops last week to fight Al-Shabaab in Somali. The OAU asked America for guns. We’re giving them big time.

Yesterday, Kenya’s security chief, George Saitoti, asked its mother colonizer Britain for “support” in fighting al-Shabaab.

Britain’s new conservative Minister of African Affairs, Henry Bellingham, said he was “delighted” to help.

“Al-Shabaab is a threat to all other countries including the UK (United Kingdom)”, Bellingham said, raising his China teacup to new heights.

Since I was born in 1948 just after World War II, the U.S. has spent more money on wars than any other single service for me or my fellow citizens, if you dare call “war” a service.

Korea, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Nicaragua, the Balkans, Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan and that doesn’t count the “Cold War” expense of nuclear armaments or troops and bases in Europe.

Now, it seems, add Somalia.

3 thoughts on “The Dominoes Reach Somalia

  1. That gun is not American.
    Its Soviet.
    But that heavy machine gun is popular on the black market and within middle east forces.

  2. The gun on the photo is a Soviet PKM and the other looks like a Soviet AK47.

    Guns America does not make.

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