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Go Home The Isolationist Left

THE PLANK AUGUST 1, 2007

The Isolationist Left

BY TNR STAFF AND TNR STAFF

Matthew Yglesias approvingly cites this article in the current issue of TNR by Eliza Griswold concerning Ethiopia's overthrow of Somalia's "Union of Islamic Courts" regime--and America's support for it--as indicative of the follies of foreign military intervention.

What Yglesias ignores is that the Union of Islamic
Courts had itself overthrown the legitimate government of Somalia and had declared war on Ethiopia, thus precipitating the Ethiopian response. Somalia's Transitional Federal Government was supported by the European Union, the African Union and the United Nations, a consideration that a great proponent of the sanctity of international multilateral institutions like Yglesias ought appreciate. War--and the awful externalities described by Griswold--is nothing new in Somalia, (it has been going on for over a decade), and had just been widened by the UIC's declaration of arms against Ethiopia last December. Now that the UIC is losing and blames the great Satan for its woes, Yglesias sees a great opportunity to bash American-backed Ethiopian adventurism.

While citing parts of the article allegedly showing the awful repercussions of ousting the UIC, Yglesias conveniently leaves out the following snippet, which appears immediately before the portion he quotes:

The head of the UIC's shura council, Sheik Hassan Aweys, was the military leader of Al Itti- had Al Islami, which launched several attacks against Ethiopia in the 1990s and had links to Al Qaeda. Also, in the second half of 2006, hundreds of foreign fighters reportedly arrived in Somalia to fight alongside the shebab. The UIC harbored several members of Al Qaeda, including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the elusive mastermind reportedly behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in neighboring Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 225 people.

In light of Griswold's piece, Yglesias wonders what I think of the invasion. I think Ethiopia was entirely justified in ousting an Al-Qaeda affiliated, Islamofascist junta which had overthrown the legitimate government of a neighbor state and was using that state's territory to launch terrorist attacks against it. And I think the United States was justified in aiding attempts to hunt down and kill the men responsible for murdering 225 people, many of them American civil servants.

I know it's a lot easier to snark about issues you don't know the first thing about, but if Yglesias thinks it's OK for terrorist groups to depose internationally-recognized governments and take over whole countries, declare war on bordering nations, and not expect any sort of armed reprisal, he should just come out and say it. But he's probably too busy obsessing over the cost/benefit analysis any such pronouncement would have for his career than to do something as silly as that.

--James Kirchick

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17 comments

"I know it's a lot easier to snark about issues you don't know the first thing about..." Pot, meet kettle. Seriously, did Mini even read her article?

- Crock1701

August 1, 2007 at 10:17am

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what is this obsession with him at TNR? Is he so powerful that they feel they need to take him down on a daily basis? Why doesn't TNR stick to taking down people who have actual governmental power instead of engaging in internet pissing fests?

- blackton

August 1, 2007 at 11:16am

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I didn't know that Somalia had a functioning government. The Somalis in the report on TNR didn't sound like they thought so, either.

- kerouac9

August 1, 2007 at 11:43am

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...this reaches a new level of the moronic. Is he really claiming that the security situation in Somolia was not helped by the UIC? Or that there were no other options than to allow the Ethiopians to invade Somolia outright as oppossed to simply defending the 'legitimate' government base in the west? And is Mini really now on the side on the side of multinational institutions and agreements, regardless of the relative virtues of the regimes at stake. I.e. that the incompetent, murderous, undemocratic government is to be preferred over issues of stability AND human rights considerations? This isn't realism, its simply stupid.

- jasamcarl

August 1, 2007 at 11:46am

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Kirchick's patron, Martin Peretz, pronounced himself 'exhilarated' by the invasion of Somalia by Christian Ethiopia - with the religious-war aspect of the Ethiopian invasion front and centre in his musings (http://tinyurl.com/2722yo). The human catastrophe on the ground in Somalia since then, brought on by that invasion, bothers him not at all. Since Kirchick appears to have not one single thought independent of Peretz, I'm sure that he was equally exhilarated, and doesn't like to hear about the consequences of that invasion. One might remember as well that, in the first place, the Ethiopian government has been assisting the Transitional Government and the CIA-financed ARPCT militarily throughout their conflict with the Islamic Courts Union: it's not as though the ICU decided to declare was on Ethiopia out of the blue. (As the TNR article says, this goes both ways: there is a long and continuing history of attempted destabilisation in the region, with Ethiopia, Somalia and now Eritrea as principals.) Kirchick also neglects to mention that the Transitional Government, warlord-dominated as it was, proved itself completely incapable of bringing any sort of peace to the country. But hell, compared to the Clash of Civilisations, how important are a few thousand dead Somalis?

- SMacEachern2

August 1, 2007 at 12:09pm

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Leaving aside whether Yglesias sucks or Kirchik blows or vice versa, the more interesting question raised by the TNR piece is whether US involvement has contributed to the royal mess Ethiopia found itself in. I'm not saying that Ethiopia wasn't right to invade, or that we didn't have the moral right to support them with airstrikes, but maybe it would have been in our interest and theirs for us to remain more in the background. The Somalia mess also reinforces the degree to which nation building has become one of the most difficult and essential challenges of the new century. Ethiopia doesn't want an empire in Somalia, any more than we do in Iraq or Israel does in the majority of the occupied territories. Unfortunately, there's no good model to turn over a state to its own people while its in the throes of an insurgency. If the UN or regional alliances could find a way to assist with that problem, they could save a lot of lives.

- Johnni

August 1, 2007 at 12:30pm

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poor, poor mini, not a single supporter here. I wonder how it must feel when he writes his postings that pretty much everyone will rip into him. most likely I think he relishes it, showing to himself that he is an iconoclast or something.

- blackton

August 1, 2007 at 12:31pm

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>>I know it's a lot easier to snark about issues you don't know the first thing about<

- Fairfax

August 1, 2007 at 1:04pm

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"Ethiopia doesn't want an empire in Somalia..." That's almost certainly true. But what Ethiopia _does_ want is the ability to control events in that country, to have a friendly government in Somalia regardless of whether that government would actually be good for Somalis. Ditto for the USA. Given that Ethiopia is engaged in pretty brutally suppressing an ethnic-Somali insurrection in its own Ogaden Region, using tactics that include the interdiction of food supplies*, I think that we can assume that the well-being of Somalia was not front and centre as a reason for the invasion. * Seizure of food supplies in rebellious areas is a tactic that James Kirchick has (on TNR) eloquently denounced in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, but that he doesn't appear to give a shit about when used by Ethiopia, a country he approves of.

- SMacEachern2

August 1, 2007 at 1:24pm

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than the rest of us, why do they keep getting everything wrong in th real nondebate world?

- gator27

August 1, 2007 at 2:39pm

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And here I thought this beautifully precise and underappreciated term was relegated to the 2004 CNN archives. Thanks for bringing it back, Mini!

- jpschwartz

August 1, 2007 at 2:56pm

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...begs the question, "What's Somalia?" There in no reason Ethiopia shouldn't want to "control events", or at least to "have a friendly government" there. Why not? It's their region. The West, roughly defined, has a dog in this fight (apologies to Michael Vick), and should be unapologetic about safeguarding them. Any objections? If so, please specify.

- Robert Powell

August 1, 2007 at 4:33pm

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I think that Somalians and Eritreans would both object to the notion that Ethiopia owns the Horn of Africa. T"he West, roughly defined, has a dog in this fight..., and should be unapologetic about safeguarding them." What does that mean? "Any objections? If so, please specify." The descent of Somalia back into anarchy and violence? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Somali civilians dead? The radicalisation of the ICU side in the war? The first suicide bombing this year - something that was never seen in fighting before the ICU and the transitional government before this?

- SMacEachern2

August 1, 2007 at 4:59pm

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word. i mean, his girlfriend's really hot, looks great on the court and off, but he can't sing worth a peseta and he's just trading on his old man's name. Plus his blog's just more BS from someone who doesn't report, doesn't research, and basically cobbles together links to other people's thoughts, punctuated by smirks and sneers.

- teplukhin

August 2, 2007 at 3:44am

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This latest round of fighting doesn't look all that different to me from the Somalian norm of decades. Regrettable, sure, but you know perfectly well that the ICU was setting up an increasingly intrusive and radical Islamic police state, with steadily increasing ties to Al Qaeda. Such regimes do not moderate--on the contrary. This was simply a non-starter, and with good reason.

- Robert Powell

August 2, 2007 at 12:55pm

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teplukhin writes of Matthew Yglesias:

Plus his blog's just more BS from someone who doesn't report, doesn't research, and basically cobbles together links to other people's thoughts, punctuated by smirks and sneers.
That is, after all, why it is a blog The Atlantic and not a leading article on A1 of the Wall Street Journal. Ironically, Yglesias has precisely the kind of success that teplukhin usually lauds as the desirable outcome of this Web 2.0 world of social networking and the democratization of opinion-based journalism.

- ndmackenzie

August 2, 2007 at 2:02pm

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you do realize that you come off as the biggest hypocrite on the net when you make these assertions about bloggers being all attitude and little research. No offense, but you often make some of the cheapest knee jerk attacks of anyone on the Plank, and your thoughts also often seem ill-formed, poorly researched, or atleast simplisticly sourced. Please stop embarrassing yourself.

- jasamcarl

August 2, 2007 at 4:00pm

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