I Value Them but I Won't Cry If the Time Was Wiped Out

by Eric Martin

Robert Farley flagged this from the BBC:

Ethiopia is prepared to withdraw troops from Somalia even if the interim government is not stable, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said. [...]

He told the UK's Financial Times paper that financial pressures had to be taken into account and said the commitment was not open ended. [...]

"The operation has been extremely expensive so we will have to balance the domestic pressures on the one hand and pressures in Somalia on the other and try to come up with a balanced solution," Mr Meles told the Financial Times. 

Farley adds:

Given that piracy has skyrocketed since the displacement of the ICU (including a spread to the Gulf of Aden), and that Ethiopian and Somali "government" forces still control only a bare patchwork of the countryside, I'd say that this has been a pretty big disaster...

Disaster?  That depends on who you ask.  Ethiopia can't be that displeased.  On the one hand, the Meles government would have preferred to have maintained a troop presence to maintain leverage over a would-be proxy government in Somalia.  With that goal becoming increasingly unlikely, at the very least, Ethiopia will leave Somalia more destabilized, weakened and wracked than when it invaded. 

That's a feature, not a bug, as one of Ethiopia's stated policy objectives vis-a-vis its neighbor Somalia is to keep Somalia weakened so as to forestall a Somali bid for the disputed Ogaden territory (geographically a part of Ethiopia, but ethnically Somali).  The fact that we would actively support Ethiopia's "magnanimous" invasion of its long time rival - sold on the pretense that Ethiopia was looking out for Somalia's best interest - is either a sign of the Bush administration's ignorance or cynicism.

With respect to the United States, Farley is correct to label the operation a disaster.  Actually, he's overly generous in that he kindly omits many of the costs.  As I mentioned in a prior post, the ledger is as follows:

Low-to-non-existent benefits in terms of neutralizing known al-Qaeda operatives while the region has been further radicalized and support for al-Qaeda has surged locally [ed note: indeed]. There is increased instability and violence that allows al-Qaeda and other terrorists to move about, and conduct business, freely (the ICU had provided stability to the capital of Mogadishu which has since evaporated). There has been an increase in the number of dead from the flaring of the conflict, massive refugee flows and widespread humanitarian crises befalling the beleagured Somali people. Our overt support for anti-democratic and belligerent elements has led to a sharp upswing in anti-Americanism as we have become closely identified with the brutality of Ethiopia and the TFG.

Speaking of the "brutality" of the Ethiopian occupation, that provides a segue to discuss an interesting corrolary to the discussion on the tendency to view war as the inherently strong option (even if it backfires in terms of the objectives), as well as morally righteous if the underlying intentions are noble (regardless of the actual outcomes in terms of human suffering). 

There is also a prevalent current of thought amongst serial war supporters that we are not brutal enough in our conduct of war.  That is, if it weren't for the human rights groups that force us to restrain our tactics for fear of bad PR from killing innocents - and the media's willingness to show images of civilian casualties - we would be succeeding in places like Iraq.  That this belief coexists side-by-side with the belief in the moral superiority of war supporters that advocate for war as a means of helping the targeted population (whose safety we should disregard) doesn't seem to create much dissonance.

The Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was supposed to prove these theories correct.  We - especially us liberal do-gooders - would learn a lesson about the preferability of unrestrained brutality in war.  The Ethiopians, it was argued, were going to teach the Americans how to fight an insurgency.  I've posted excerpts of these arguments before, but with news of Ethiopia pondering withrawal despite failing to achieve the stated objectives due to ongoing difficulty and expense, they are worth revisiting:

Maybe we can learn something from the Ethiopians in Somalia? [Cliff May]

�I can�t read the news today and keep from wondering whether we should airlift a few Ethiopian battalions into Baghdad. [John Miller]

Why are [the Ethiopian forces] achieving what American forces�in Iraq today apparently are not? [Cliff May]

The lack of a large media presence - and the relative inattention of human rights groups - would show how both play a detrimental role in the effort to wage war and in their absence, how smooth things would go. 

There may be lessons for the United States in Ethiopia�s success. Abdiweli Ali, an assistant professor at Niagara University who is in contact with transitional government military commanders on the ground, says that Ethiopia has less concern than the U.S. about civilian casualties. There is no reliable estimate of civilian deaths, but the number is believed to be in the hundreds. �We�re fighting wars with one hand tied behind our backs,� Professor Ali says. �In Iraq we�re trying to be nice, thinking we�ll give candy to people on the streets and they�ll love us. But people will understand later on if you just win now and provide them with security.� [Daveed Gartenstein-Ross]

One difference between the Ethiopians in Somalia and the Americans in Iraq is that the former aren�t fighting with one hand behind their back just in case some EU ally or humanitarian lobby group or fictitious Associated Press source leaks some �war crime� or other to the media. In fact, the Ethiopians have the advantage of more or less total lack of interest from the Western media. So they�re just getting on with it. [Mark Steyn]

A second lesson relates to the media. The Ethiopian government is generally less sensitive to media criticism than the U.S. government-and is likely to encounter far less criticism in the first place, since the press traditionally gives short shrift to coverage of Africa. [Daveed Gartenstein-Ross]

Imagine the implications.  Perhaps the perfidy of liberals, the media and human rights groups did not lead to failure in Iraq.  Why, it's even possible that if we had adopted the brutality of Saddam in order to liberate the Iraqis from the...brutality of Saddam, they would have embraced us with the same level of affection that they held for...Saddam.  Without the homefield advantage of course.

I think Cliff May said it best: "Maybe we can learn something from the Ethiopians in Somalia?"  Indeed, we can.

(cross-posted at Obsidian Wings)