Last warlord flees; Somali jihadists now in full control of Mogadishu

Surely this is where Hugh's 'leave them to stew in the own grease'theory breaks down. Somalia is all set to become another Taliban Afghanistan - they've already got Arab fighters in the country. The only difference would be that the foreign jihadists who use it as a base and go there for training, would look more conspicuous.

A new wave of nice Somali refugees is sure to
be forced down our throats any time soon.

Anyone opposing importing more crime and poverty into the US will be branded racist.

"We must reach a real reconciliation within our country to stabilize it and bring it back as a full member among the nations of the world,"

It almost sounds like something out of Office Space. They should do a sequel, set at the State Department. They could bring back Bill Lumbergh as Secretary of State:

"Iran... what's happening... Look, we're gonna need you to go ahead and stop enriching uranium, okay? That would be greaaaaat."

*moves on to next cubicle*

"Somalia... what's happening..."

"Yyyeaaah."

"The Islamic courts have overcome the infidel stooges."

Now, the Mohammedan Stooges are in charge.

For sheer idiocy, I recommend listening on-line to Toom Ashbrook's NPR discussion tonight about Somalia. I caught only the last ten minutes. It was enough.

Particularly egregious were the statements of one "Steve van Evera," who teaches at MIT. I used to hear him on programs with the Kennedy School's Walt, or sometimes Mearsheimer and I couldn't tell one from the other. It was Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Tweedledeedum, separate or together. He wasn't dumb enough, and for all I know he may yet be angling for tenure, to join them on their "Jewish lobby" papaer, but it would hardly be a surprise to discover he shared their views on this as on so much else. Perhaps when he becomes that appetizing thing, a full professor, he will be able to rip the mask off. One knows the type. First, the flowing pseudo-scholarly crocodile tears over the mistreatment of Jews in Western Christendom, announced up front, which tears are then quickly dried, as we get to the real point: which is that neither Jews nor especially those poor "Palestinians" should be "made to suffer for the sins of Christians." This then grades into the usual Arab propaganda about "Israel was created by the West to make up for the Holocaust" and the "Palestians" are now "suffering" as "the new Jews." It's all nonsense. The Zionist return to the area known to them as the Land of Israel began long before the Nazi murders, was hardly helped by anyone except for the League of Nations' Mandates Commission that created the clear terms of the Mandate for Palestine, which was to lead to the creation of the Jewish state, just as an Arab state, a Kurdish state, and an Armenian state were originally planned in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire. There was no military or financial aid of any kind extended to the Jews of Mandatory Palestine after World War II; arms were smuggled in, in contrast to the arming of three Arab armies (Egypt, Jordan, Iraq) by the British, and the complete lack of sympathy shown by the British, by Ernest Bevin in particular (who warned that the Jews should not get too pushy), received its apotheosis in the wish expressed by the British military commander in Western Palestine, Sir Evelyn Barker, to his Arab mistress (the widow of George Antonius) that he would gladly help the Arabs in "exterminating" the Jews of Palestine. But this "Israel-was-created-after-World-War-II-to-make-up-for-the-Holocaust" is a staple of a certain kind of Arab propaganda intended for Western Infidels -- the kind that appears to recognize the mistreatment (by others) of the Jews, and even perhaps to sympathize (completely and transparently phony), but then adds the wailing coda: "But why must we, the inoffensive Arabs, or shoud we say the "Palestinian people," have to pay for the sins of those bad Nazis, and bad Christians?" None of it is meant, and none of it corresponds to historical reality, but the van Everas of this world find it appealing and plausible, and would like others to do so as well.

For in this version of things, one can overlook entirely (not even to discuss and then deny, but to not mention at all) the fact that Jews were severely mistreated by Muslims not as a matter of individual whim, but as a matter of Islamic theology. But it is doubtful that Steve Van Evera has taken time from his busy schedule of pontificating on what he calls the "Israel-Palestinian" dispute (in reality, merely a Lesser Jihad, with the local Arabs, renamed the "Palestian people" after the Six-Day War, not fighting for a suddenly invented "Palestinian nationalism" but rather, serving as the shock troops for all the Arabs and Muslims who cannot abide, and that is almost all of them, the idea that Israel, an Infidel nation-state, can continue to exist anywhere within Dar al-Islam, no matter what its size or borders.

It would be fascinating to find out what Van Evera knows about Islam. Has he read Schacht on Islamic law, or Antoine Fattal on the legal status of non-Muslims in Dar al-Islam? Has he read Sheik al-=Azhar Tantawi's 700-page screed on Jews according to Muslim theology? Has he read Georges Vajda's summary of the view of Jews, accused not only of poisoning Muhammad, but of always and everywhere being the most implacable enemies of the early Muslims, friends of Dajjal, or as some Muslims believe, perhaps Dajjal was a Jew. Or has he studied the Hadith, understood the ranking system of al-Bukhari and Muslim of the hundreds of thousands of available tales of Muhammad? Has he read the Sira, and understood the exemplary role of Muhammad, that Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil? Has he even read, with understanding, the Qur'an (and by understanding I mean employing the same interpretive device, naskh, or abrogation, that is used by Muslims to reconcile seeming contradictions in the text)? Has he understood the handful of passages that are repeatedly employed by Muslim apologists, and what they are taken to mean by unwary Infidels, and what they are taken to mean by Believers (e.g., "There is no compulsion in reliigon."). No, none of that. After all, he's only a professor of international relations at MIT. That keeps him very busy. Don't expect him to write about the "Israeli-Palestinian" dispute and still have time left over for Islam. What's Islam got to do with it?

What does Steve van Evera think the United States should do in Somalia? Oh, he wants more American intervention -- of the right kind. Of the bringing prosperity kind. Of setting the country back on its feet kind. Of the winning hearts and minds kind. You see, if we make Somalia a prosperous safe place, the people will no longer attend to Al Qaeda's attempt to whip them up. For after all, the only thing that makes them hostile to us and to other Infidels is -- Al Qaeda. That's it. Nothing else. Not what they read in the Qur'an. Not what they read in the Hadith. Not what the Perfect Man, Muhammad, said and did.

Steve van Evera wants even more money spent, more troops sent, more of everything to bring toys and good things to eat to the boys and girls on the other side of the mountain. We mustn't do, as we have been doing, "things on the cheap." (Apparently the $500 billion spent or irrevocably committed so far in Iraq and Afghanistan is "on the cheap"). Americans must get right on in there, wherever there are "failed states," because if we allow them to continue as "failed states," instead of rescuing them with our men and our money, and putting them on some sort of path to prosperity and happiness, they will be permanently vulnerable to that siren-song of Al Qaeda. In Steve van Evera's world, one is not thinking of such "failed states" as Burma, or the Congo, or Haiti. No, what he has in mind is Muslim states. And even though other Muslim states have been the recipients, unmerited, unearned, of the largest transfer wealth in human history, even though 10 of the 11 members of OPEC are Muslim states (or, as Nigeria, controlled by a Muslim military), it is Infidels who are asked by Steve van Evera to assume the Infidel Man's Burden and make sure that no Muslim state is a "failed state."

For in his view, if a Muslim state is prosperous, it will not cause harm. That this is not true, that it is the very opposite of the truth, is something he cannot realize because he does not bother to actually look at histroy. Jihad is a permanent part of Islam, a duty that is central and not tangential. How would Steve van Evera ever find that out? By studying the texts of Islam, and studying the studies of Islam by hundreds of non-apologist Western scholars of Islam, of every nationality -- such as Arthur Jeffery, St. Clair Tisdall, C. Snouck Hurgronje, Schacht and Margoliouth and Vajda and Fagnan and Dufourcq and many others. And then one would also have to study the subject of Jihad-conquest, and then the study of the institution of the dhimmi, the formalized status of all non-Muslims under Islam. Here the most important scholarly work, which brings together work by other scholars and adds greatly to it, has been done by Bat Ye'or, in her "The Dhimmi," and "Islam and Dhimmitude," and "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam." Only then can someone comment intelligently on the Arab-Israeli "dispute" or whatever one wishes to call what is essentially an endless siege, by Muslim Arabs (with some help from compliant, dhimmified islamochristians, useful in disguising the nature of the conflict for gullible Westerners and, for a while, gullible Israelis as well). Steve van Evera has not done so. And if one has not studied Islam, he must be asked to listen to Ludwig: "Whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak."

One would like a definition by those who use this term with such self-assurance, of "failed state." What is a "failed state"? Does it matter if the state is a "failed state" because of the belief-syustem of its inhabitants? Would that make it less likely that those from outside could transform that "failed state" permanently, into something un-failed, unless they address the root causes of that failure? What if the "root cause" of Muslim "failed states" is Islam itself? What if the despotism to be observed everywhere in the Muslim lands, with the sole exception of the handful that have either had large non-Muslim populations (Lebanon), or and then to get right in there, wherever there are "failed states" (a phrase that, whenever dropped self-assuredly into remarks by someone, we must at once stop that someone and insist that he tell us exactly what he means by a "failed state"), that is "failed states" that might listen to the siren song of Al Qaeda (it was all, on this program, Al Queda this and Al Qaeda that, as befits those who cannot begin to recognize merely the most prominent and mediagenic avatar of the Jihad-conquerors of yore, and who apparently think that Al Qaeda comes out of nowhere, or that its promptings are strange misreadings of Islam). There was no mention of terrorist groups other than Al Qaeda, no mention of the fact that the non-Western Infidels suffer from attacks by Muslim terrorists just as the West, just as America, does (there was plenty of focus by Steve van Evera on America, as one might expect -- his view of things would crumble into dust if made to account for Muslim behavior in southern Thailand, Sudan, Nigeria, the Philippines, India, and so many other places -- he's not quite of the "why do they hate us" school now, having learned not to put that on, but still of the "we have to convince all those people in the failed states not to listen to Al Qaeda when it tells them to hate us."

He went on and on. Apparently it was a terrible thing for the Americans not to throw men and money into Somalia but rather to try to work their will, such as it is, through local warlords. We were told that it is not enough that we are spending so much, in lives, money, materiel, in Iraq and Afghjanistan, but that we should be right there, helping rebuild that "failed state" of Somalia, and indeed wherever there is a Muslim "failed state" we must be doing more, spending hundreds of billions more, sending tens of thousands of troops more, all to do what? To make sure that when that lone terrorist group, Al Qaeda, tries to whip up otherwise perfectly well-disposed Muslims by offering them a "narrative" claiming that the West is "trying to destroy Islam," those Al Qaeda propaganda efforts will not work.

So if the Steve van Everas of this world are listened to, America will be locked into expensive "nation building" for all time - and the "nations" we will be building, spending money on, risking lives on, will be those nations that otherwise would turn against us -- that is, Muslim nations.

Steve van Evera gave not the slightest hint of understanding that the "failed states" perhaps fail for reasons having often to do with Islam itself. The despotism that is the rule, and always has been, in Muslim polities, is based on the fact that the ruler is to be obeyed, even if despotic, as long as he is a Muslim. Legitimacy of government can never be located in the people, or in their votes (though of course voting will sometimes be engaged in, even by so-called "Islamists," if they think it will propel them to permanent power. Exploitation of the most primitive and obvious manifestation of Western democracy, elections, but without any ideological or emotional commmitment to that idea, can be observed. Just look at Iraq, where the Bush Administration couldn't get enough of that blue-thumbed supposed revolution, acoompanied by all that nonsense about Democracy Being on the March (that "democracy" on the march stuff consisted of good-looking Maronite girls in crowds photographed in Beirut -- that Cedar Revolution that has dissolved into a collective cowering by Christians and Sunnis and Druse before the feared Hezbollah; consisted of a farcical election carried on by Mubarak, in which wherever it could stand up a candidate the Ikhwan won, followed by attacks on the true democrats, and the imprisonment, on trumped-up charges, of the best candidate, Ayman Nour; in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, much huffing and puffing about "democratic reforms" but with nothnig much coming of it save for the participation of women in the recent Kuwaiti election, voting for men as their husbands directed. Democracy On the March.

The very worst part of the Bush policy is all that Iraq the Model, Iraq the Light Unto the Muslim Nations stuff. It squanders resources -- men, money, materiel, attention. We should be working to instruct ourselves, all over the Infidel world, in the tenets of Islam. One did not have the feeling that Steve van Evra has spent much time with Qur'an, Hadith, or Sira. One did not have the feeling that he has dipped into "The Legacy of Jihad," much less followed up and read the great Western scholars of Islma such as Joseph Schacht, Arthur Jeffery, C. Snouck Hurgronje, K. S. Lal, and others who are not included in that text.

What does Steve van Evra know? He knows that there are places called "failed states." He knows that Afghanistan was a "failed state" not because of the innate violence and aggression of the tribes, which led to a kind of anarchy, which allowed the malevolent Pakistanis to train up, and supply with arms, Afghan "students" (talib=student), who then were sent back into Afghanistan to promise what Hitler and Mussolini promised: Order. In this case, it was the Order of Islam. Women accused of adultery were stomped to death in soccer stadiums. Singers of Afghani songs were forbidden to sing, or sometimes summarily executed. Kite-flyers were imprisoned or killed. Islam, and nothing but Islam. That is what Steve van Evera and others on the show seemed to suggest was the fault of the United States, for it was apparently up to the United States ot always and everywhere save Muslim states from their own failures, and to come in, build them up, and then, without touching Islam, leaving Islam with its inshallah-fatalism and its denial of the significance of the individual, with its Total Regulation of Life and its Complete Explanation of the Universe, with its central, not tangential, division of the world between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslim and Infdiel, somehow we are required, it is our duty, to supply these states -- the ones that do not happen to sit on billions of barrels of oil or trillions of cubic feet of natural gas -- with the kind of economic wellbeing that has eluded all Muslim states, and that some havee been rescued from only by an accident of geology.

Not a hint, in any of this, that perhaps some of those ten trillion dollars that Muslim oil states have received since 1973, might be shared with poorer Muslims, and that it was hardly the task of Infidels to ensure the prosperity of Somalia, or any other "failed state."

It was like discussing the data amassed by generations of star-gazers, and then some stuff that had just come in from Tycho Brahe, and not only avoiding mentioning Kepler, but also continuing to insist that the universe revolved around the earth, that the Copernican Theory explained nothing, that we had to stick with that good old Ptolemaic model.

But the Copernican Theory -- that which identifies the tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam, as a menace not merely to us, but to all Infidels everywhere, whether they live within Muslim countries (those Hindus in Bangladesh, those Christians in the Moluccas, in southern Sudan and southern Nigeria, or in what is still Dar al-Harb (Buddhhists murdered in Thailand, and in Western Europe, assaults on the laws, and customs, and freedoms, of Infidel peoples, from the Danes and Dutch exercising their right of free speech, and threatened with murder, and some of them indeed murdered, to France where the laic state is under assault, to Italy, where signs of Italy's civilization are attacked and giant mosques sprout up, defiantly, in the midst of small Tuscan towns.

This program on "failed states," in which there was not a hint of the other instruments of Jihad -- not a hint about vast, well-financed campaigns of Da'wa in the Western world, targetting the psychically and economically marginal, not a hint about the plans, even the boasts, of inevitable demographic conquest of the countires of Western Europe -- all of this was missing.

Just "failed states." Just "the American duty" to engage much more "robustly" (the adverb of the hour) in "nation-building." Just more messianism, of the kind that Bush and Rice and Rumsfeld have shown in Iraq.

We're sick of messianism that ignores the nature of Islam. We want the tenets of that belief-system held up for inspection and analysis, we want the history of Jihad-conquest, over 1350 years, studied and restudied, so that no more nonsense can be spouted, as it was tonight, on this truly hideous performance, by the uncomprehending -- whether wilfully so, as I suspect, or not -- Steve van Evra.

Not a sign that he realizes that Al Qaeda is only one group, of a thousand groups, and these groups in turn are endlessly replaceable, and their membership endlessly replenishable. Not a sign that he understands how Islam itself explains the "failed" in the phrase "failed state" and that even those countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and the U.A.E. and Libya, only appear to thrive because of purely accdental, unmerited, wealth -- and were that wealth to be removed, they would look like Somalia, look like Afghanistan.

The failure of Islam was understood by Ataturk. That is why he systematically tried to constrain it. That is why he gave women the vote, passed the Hat Act, commissioned a Qur'an and a tafsir in Turkish, established total control over the contents of the weekly khutbas all over
Turkey, created a myth of the "the Turk" (subsequently elaborated upon, after his death, with an enlarged cult of Ataturk, pobviously intended to replace the cult of Muhammad as uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil). And that is why the democracy tempered by coups in Turkey permitted that country without the fabulous crutch of oil wealth, to emerge as something other than a "failed state." And there is one other example -- Tunisia, which under Bourguiba, who felt about Islam the way Ataturk did, as an obstacle to development, and not merely economic development, and under his Destourian successors, some of whom, like Ben Ali, have not hesitated to use police-state methods at times to crush Islamists (using the term here to mean those who take their Islam seriously).

That is the kind of thing that might have been discussed. There might have been some discussion of what constitutes a "failed state" and how we, the United States, might continually insist in making the connection betweeen Islam itself and the "failures" of those "failed states." But that would have required guests of a knowledge, and capacity for thought, quite different from Steve van Evra, and a host quite different from the intolerably ignorant, jumpy, over-eager Tom Ashbrook.

Please do go to NPR, find that program, and listen to it. If you are looking for one more example of the failure of NPR programs to instruct, of hectic vacancy and vacuity, Ashbrook and van Evera will not disappoint.

Has anyone forgotten Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu? Al Qaeda has now taken over Somalia just like it did Afghanistan and we did nothing to stop it. They'll be directing attacks at us from there soon. Oh yeah, they're also going for world domination just like Hitler.

May God help the people of Somalia.

As for the other "nation-builders" -- the current Administration, perhaps it will be forced to realize that resources are finite, and that one of the goals of Muslims engaged in Jihad (and not merely "Al Qaeda") is to economically exhaust its Infidel enemies. So far it has been doing wonderfully. Hundreds of billions of dollars are now spent, in North America and in Western Europe, monitoring mosques and madrasas and Muslim groups, guarding more vigilantly every airport and putting marshals on airplanes, and guarding with more guards every train and subway station, and individual trains, and subway cars, and churches, and synagogues, and Christian and Jewish day schools, and government buildings, and major office buildings, and monitoring ports, and shipping containers, and... well,you fill it in.

And in deciding that the Jihad is merely military, and forgetting that training even for terrorist ventures hardly requires Afghanistan, or Iraq, but can take place anywhere -- very few, almost none, of those who had bombed the Atocha subway station in Madrid, or bombed the synagogue in Djerba, or seized the Moscow Theatre, or the hospital in the Caucasus, or the school in Beslan, or flew into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center, or attempted to poison the water supply of Turin, or plotted to blow up a Christmas market in Strasbourg, or have been killing Buddhist monks and schoolteachers in Thailand, or killing Christians and destroying thousands of churches in the Moluccas, or assassinating Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, or putting bombs in Bali, or bombing in Mumbia or attacking the Indian Parliament in New Delhi -- well how many of these participants in terror (only one of the instruments of Jiahd) really, were ever in Afghanistan? And we know that none of them trained, under Saddam Hussein's iron rule, in Iraq. So why does the Administration keep telling us, and no one has the wit to answer them, that "we have to fight them over there so we won't have to fight them over here."

This is as stupid an idea as the notion that we Infidels should be taking every Muslim "failed state" and making it happy, healthy, prosperous, because -- say the Steve van Evras of this world -- this will prevent them from heeding that siren song of "Al Qaeda." How true. Just look at how such countries swamped with oil wealth, Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the U.A.E. and Kuwait, Libya and Algeria, have no one who feels the Jihadist influence, no one who expresses deep and permanent hostility to the Infidels. All we need do is keep all the Muslim peoples -- a billion or so -- steadiloy prosperous, happy, healthy, and there will be no problem.

Steve van Evera and Bush and Rumsfeld -- soul brothers.

I for one think we have a score to settle with Somalia for Mogadishu and wouldn't mind seeing U.S. troops stamp these Muslims into a bloody pulp as an object lesson.

GaryK-

We only need control of the skies, not boots on the grubby ground.

And, since their air force is two flatulent camels and one dismantled helicopter, we can bomb them at will.

No troops, just Hellfire.

No aid but first aid.

And that only long-after the Sharia psychopaths are subdued from the skies.

We can bomb them for years at our leisure, to keep them disoriented, dispiritied and unable to congeal any external threat.

What happens within the country is meaningless.

They wanted hell, let them have it.

With a little help from our Air Force.

And Navy cruise missiles, if need be.

(Plus air-dropped pamphlets advising that the harassed populace to oppose Islamic terror.)

We have bigger turkeys to roast, first hand.

If the people won't fight for themselves against this Muslim madness, maybe a harsher taste of the reality of homicidal Islam will wake their instincts to resist, rebel and destroy the maniacs of Mohammad.

"Hugh's 'leave them to stew in the own grease'theory breaks down. Somalia is all set to become another Taliban Afghanistan - they've already got Arab fighters in the country."
-- from a psoting above

What "theory" is that? I don't have a "theory." I have merely suggested that the war in Iraq (and now in Afghanistan) to the extent that it is based on the idea that Infidels should be working to dampen local rivalries, to lessen sectarian, ethnic, and economic tensions and divisions either within Muslim countries (ethnic, sectarian), or among Muslim countries (here I am thinking of the need to stir resentment by the poor Muslim states against the rich Muslim states). How does the case of Somalia prove me wrong?

There seems to be a notion about that if an Islamic country dissolves into chaos and confusion, that this is a bad thing, because somehow it will magically turn into Afghanistan under the Taliban, and then, just as magically, those Al-Qaeda training camps, apparently deemed so indispensable to Muslim terrorism, will magically appear.

Let's take those assumptions, so easily repeated, so seldom challenged, in turn. First, is it necessary for there to be an Afghbanistan for terrorists to train? Can not training be received almost anywhere, even in a gym in Brixton, or a pine woods in Oregon, or things planned and plotted from safe houses in Spain or France? How many of those involved in the Madrid and London bombings, or among those who seized the Moscow theatre, or the hospital in southern Russia, or the school in Beslan, or put bombs on the trains in Mumbai, or killed Pim Fortuyn or Theo van Gogh, or plotted to poison an Italian city's water supply, or to bomb a Christmas market in Strasbourg, or any of a thousand other plots uncovered and foiled the details of which we do not all know and there is no need to list them here -- how many of those people would have been unable to plot and plan and stab and kidnap and bomb had they not been to "training camps" in Afghanistan, or not "fought in Iraq"? A dozen of them? Any of them? The whole world is now a training camp for most kinds of terrorism. True, the experience with I.E.D.'s in Iraq has helped Muslim terrorists improve certain technical aspects of things, as they respond to the American defensive improvements, but is that an argument for invading Somalia to "prevent it from becoming another Afghanistan"?

The example of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan is made too much of, as if that is the only way that Muslim would-be terrorists can proceed. It's as silly to focus on this "Afgnanistan" threat, this "failed-state" nonsense, as it is to focus only on one, admittedly mediagenic group, Al Qaeda, which is no different in its aims than Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Gemaaa Islamiyya, Jemaah Islamiyya, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islammic Jihad, and a thousand others, with names and without. Only fools now limit their concern to something called Al Qaeda. And in so doing, Infidels play into Muslim hands -- for they do not wish Infidels to realize that all these groups, whatever their immediate local emphasis, are essentially conducting Jihad, and their final goal remains the same, and what prompts them -- the texts and tenets and attiudes of Islam -- are identical.

Furthermore, the belief that a "failed state" where man is a wolf to man, where there is constant instability, constant warfare, constant jockeying for power, would be the ideal place for terrorists to go, is nonsense. Afghanistan became useful to terrorists not when it was a failed state, with everyone fighting eveyone else, but when the Taliban managed to defeat all its opponents and impose its will, and even to be recognnized diplomatically, and supported in other ways, by the important money-men and well-wishers of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and of course by a beaming Pakistan, its I.S.I. generals delighted with how things had turned out for them.

The aim of the Americans should be to encourage as much internecine warfare as possible, or rather, to do nothing to discourage it. We have no stake in ending Somalia's poverty. Let them scramble constantly or, if possible, let them demand aid from Saudis and other rich Arabs. Better still, why doesn't the American government publicly demand that the rich Arabs contribute to Somalia and to their "poor brethren" eslewhere? Put them on the spot. Either they will come up with something, which leaves them a little less discretionary income to use to pay for mosques and madrasas in our countries, a little less to pay for campagins of Da'wa, a little less to pay for public-relations campaigns and armies of Western hirelings among the former diplomats, intelligence agents, and present academics, businessmen, journalists, so eager to recycle petrodollars by making the case for the Saudis and for the Kuwaitis and for the Emiratians and for Islam itself. They've gone a good job, those hirelings, so let's try to use up some of that extra OPEC money - let them pour it into Somalia, or let them bear the brunt of Somali resentment. It should not be of concern to Infidels.

We have only one goal. It is not to make Muslims secure or prosperous. It is to weaken Islam. It is to weaken the military capability, to diminish the financial resources, to limit the ability of Muslims to move to the Lands of the Infidels or, in cases where they have already settled deep within what Muslims themselves regard as enemy lines, to think that they can continue to withhold loyalty to the Infidel nation-state without attracting attention, to think that they can continue to make demands for changes in the laws and customs of the Infidel countries they have been negligently permitted to settle in.

It is silly to think that the Marshall Plan, or something like it, is the only model for dealing with other countries to make things better. The Marshall Plan came only after the complete and total defeat of the Axis Powers. Germany and Japan were smoldering, their cities in ruins, their ideologies -- National Socialism and Kodo -- seen to have brought only death and every kind of destruction, economic, social, political, intellectual, moral. That has not happened with Islam.

The best strategy is that which husbands, reather than squanders, the resources of Infidels for what is, in the main, not a military conflict, but one that requires us to learn more, and for Muslims themselves, confronted by Infidels armed with knowlede, being forced to make the connection between teh failures, political, economic, social, and moral, of their own societies. It is not hard to show that connection. It has been discussed so many times here before, and it is late, so I won't repeat it now.

Neither Somalia, nor any other so-called "failed state" among the Muslim lands, is not a place where either we march in with guns and then with billions of dollars in aid, or it will inevitably be comletely beyond our powers of long-distance control. This is nonsense. We will never again be as blase as we were with Afghanistan. We can conduct close surveillance from the skies, within Somalia, and at its borders. We can blockage ports or seal borders, or bomb any suspect training camps, or do any number of things, with technological improvements (such as drones) that have also been improved from testing and use in Iraq (not only the terrorists can learn from battlefield conditions).

And if it should become necessary, we can always do more on land. But there is no need to believe that the example of Afghanistan is the permanent and indispensable template that must be avoided. No particular "failed state" be required for the endlessly replenishable supply of terrorists to train.

Leave Somalia alone and let it become fully Islamic. Give it no aid. Admit no one from Somalia into the Western world -- no one. Let's see how well the new regime does. We know that the Taliban did not endear themselves to the people of Afghanistan, and had we not invaded, the local warlords, if supplied, could have kept the Taliban rule permanently unsettled. It is because there are now Infidels there, that the inevitable disappointments that come from the Afghanis themselves, from the corruption and misrule (Karzai is appealing in a slightly oleaginous way, but what of his brother Walid? What of all the others who are making out like gangbusters? what about those Afghani men, in their 40s and 50s, shown with their little-girl brides, aged 9 and 10 and 11, in the New Duranty Times Sunday Magazine two days ago-- how can such people be the stuff of which American, NATO, Western dreams are made of? The Western governments, including that of the United States, are unprepared to, don't know how to, are afraid to, attempt to constrain Islam even within their own lands, despite the obvious domestic menace, and how much less are they willing to do so in Afghanistan. It is not as much of a mess as Iraq, because we have not squandered as many resources, but it still is a waste, and could be managed with much less direct involvement by Western soldiers and civilians.

Somalia does not provide, as Iraq does, a beautiful blend of ethnic and sectarian divisions. But the system of clans is a kind of substitute. Leave them alone, do nothing to help them, nothing to keep their state from being a 'failed state,' and do not think that the West has any obligation to provide a haven for those who, though they wish to settle in the West, fail to exclude from their mental baggage a belief-system that causes them, once in that generous West, to wish to exploit the Infidel system for all it is worth, but not, in turn, to offer anything more than hostility to those who must be opposed, must be regarded as the enemy, because, you see, they are Infidels. And what else matters?

No theory. Bush has his theory, and now his theory has him. He's on the bridge, Captain Queeg and his mates, of the S. S. Narrenschiff. I'm not captain of anything. I'm just trying to be sensible, trying to be an American Practical Navigator.

Once again, I have the following question. What will it take for the rest of the world to remove the jihadists from power in Somalia?

Christian-

The EU could send in a hundred thousand of their best soldiers. (Do they have 100,000 crack troops?)

But, better, is William Blake's advice:

"If a fool would persist in his folly, he will become wise."

Let the Somalis -as fools for Allah- find out the glories of Islam, first hand, hardcore, full-bore.

And let them save themselves if they don't appreciate the wonders of Sharia law.

What a unique thought that is anymore.

Let them win their own freedom.

With their own guts.

Or not.

As long as the jihadists' chaos stays inside Somalia, and we contain it there, we can get back to worrying about the threat from Islamic Imperialism, worldwide, to our own survival.

Which is more important to the survival of freedom, itself, in the world, than any of these demented skirmishes in petty warlord zones.

The country still continues to impress me as a role model for Black Muslims.

It is time for the world community in general to sort this out before the country and region becomes more unstable and pose problems for others. I am really concerned about the Europe and UK in gneral for the Asylum laws we have. hope Mr. Brown won't increase taxes to pay for this in near future. P.S: If you are lazy and want to have a great life of comforts. All that you need to do is go to UK as a Asylum Seeker. We have so many of them enjoying benefits often meant for needy people in home country. Put that aside for a while. I think we should form a alliance of Infidels army and sort this mess before it becomes too big for us to tackle.

Seal the country, or rather, do not admit Somalis on the hope that one out of a million will turn into Ayaan Hirsi Ali. No more betting on the experience of the West turning people into our sudden friends. Somalia, fortunately, has no oil or gas or other significant resources. It is a mess; it will stay a mess. If some wish to try out the hell of Extreme Islam, what they create will not last for long without opposition (the opposition of those who today may support them because, just like the Taliban, those "Islamic courts" and enforcers promise a respite from the insecurity of warlords). But that Islamic rule will be shaky. Unlike the Taliban, the Trueest Believers starting their own misrule in Somalia have no Pakistan next door to sustain them. Close American observation of what is going on should dampen the enthusiasm of the Saudis, whether of the thieving Al-Saud family, or of their courtiers or others wanting to store up a little goodwill in Paradise by putting some of their loot into supporting a true Muslim regime.

How was it that Iran became the country with the most Muslims who wish to completely separate r4eligion and the state, the most Muslims who detest clerics? The experience of 26 years of the Islamic Republic of Iran did it, that's what did it.

Remember that old anti-drug ad: "This is your brain. This is your brain on Islam." Somalia is unimportant and has no resources. It is not important to the West. Those who purport to rule it today will be overthrown tomorrow -- or at least kept constantly off balance. Nothing can come of nothing -- not in Somalia, not elsewhere in the Muslim world, but for some of that world, the oil revenues disguise the total political, economic, social, and moral failures, a direct result of Islam and nothing but Islam.

Let Somalia stew as it has for the past ten or fifteen years, let everything crumble. It will be a salutary example, most immediately to its black African neighbors, but also to the world.

One more reminder: This is a country (but without oil money). This is a country on Islam.