By Dave Anderson:
Conservatives in 2006 and 2007 proclaimed that the reason why the United States was losing in Iraq and Afghanistan was that the rules of engagement were too tight --- not enough rubble was creating too much trouble. They argued that the Ethiopians in their invasion of Somalia would not operate under press-imposed constraints that hampered counter-insurgency efforts, and that this would be a great lesson for how to run a war as foreign invaders with low credibility, backing an unpopular and incredible regime and a long history of destabilizing the region.
Robert Farley at TAPPED last January recapped how that went:
Via David Axe, it appears that the Somali government has collapsed following the seizure of its capitol,
Baidoa, by Islamist fighters. Ethiopian troops withdrew from Baidoa
less than a day before its fall. The collapse of the Somali provisional
government represents a foreign policy disaster for both Ethiopia and
the United States; the United States supported Ethiopia's invasion in late 2006, in order to depose an Islamist government that the Bush administration believed was sympathetic to Al Qaeda. The proxy war quickly became a rallying point among conservative bloggers and commentators, who celebrated Ethiopia's brutal approach to counter-insurgency while decrying the limits imposed on the United States in Iraq. Caroline Glick denounced European skeptcism about the invasion as part of a wider pattern of anti-semitism and support for jihad....
The US military and US military aid in the form of cash, weapons, logistical support and trainers/advisers is a powerful but limited tool that can only accomplish certain goals. Sending in the Marines or the Green Berets to prop up a corrupt and faltering government that is fighting at least two, if not three or four civil conflicts may be as wise as sending in the Ethiopians to knock out the first group that had the capacity to impose some degree of order and stability in Somalia in a generation.
The primary US interest in Yemen is the suppression of 'far enemy' terrorists with a weak secondary interest in maintaining uninterrupted use of the seas in the Gulf of Aden and the northern Indian Ocean. Everything else after that is a nice to have at best, and not a critical interest. Calibrating a response to Yemen's internal weakness and hollowing should be made against those two primary constraints and objectives.
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