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You’re probably looking at your screen with bits of spit flecking from your mouth screaming, “Quiet! This Ball Gunner guy knows nothing! The new President is promising all sorts of things, things are ongoing in Israel and Gaza and Afghanistan falls ever further into the gutter. This Ball Gunner guy is clearly off his turret!”
But once you cut through the endless coverage and your CNNs/Fox Newses/MSNBCs slpping any and every blithering, blooming, driveling idiot in front of the camera to repeat the same nonsense and you come to a pretty blasted quiet time, at least on the warfare front.
Now as an entertainer and blogger extraordinare I suppose it’s my sworn duty to come up with something. So here we go:
No one gets too excited about the half-dozen or so bush wars happening in Africa. You get the inevitable celebrity benefit concerts and alot of feel-goodery from the usual suspects, but no one is seriously interested in hopping between your Hutus and Tutsis until the machete arms are tired and everyone gets bored.
But there are few interesting bits kicking about.
Congo is getting steamrolled by the a small army of Tutsis led by dissident general Laurent Nkunda. The War Nerd has a great piece on this guy. Full of the usual diatribe and big boy language that makes the War Nerd so fun to read. I’m trying to catch up on my reading, so I’ll let the War Nerd do the talking here.
The real juicy info is oozing out of the festering wound that Somalia has become on the world scene. The brain trust in the UN decided a while back that the best way to calm Somalia down was by sending in that first-class fighting force, the Ethiopian Army. No one really sat down and thought about all the “wars” (used loosely) the two nations have fought in the past or what a grand idea it was to send in the Christian Ethiopians to rub the Muslim Somalis face in the mud for awhile. There must have just been a poster in some UN room where some general wannabe wrote “Send country A to calm country B” and everyone just went with the idea. I mean, what could go wrong?
Of course there isn’t much trade in sustained warfare out near the horn of Africa. The Ethiopians marched in and handed the Somalians a few humiliating years, now they’re marching right back out. Since the Somali government, never functional to begin with, was pretty much non-existant for that time, the religious nut branch of Islam went in and put into practice all the stuff it’s polished to a fine art in Beirut and Sadr City — it became the courts, the providers and the financiers. It showed the people what a grand old tradition Wahabbi Islam is. Now what was probably a small handful of nuts before the Ethiopians rolled in probably has multiplied into a trans-generational religious wave. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza the nuts have fine tuned the art of working underneath government while throwing just enough of your own people into the grinder to keep tensions high. Having completed defensive, and filling through the stalemate stage it proably won’t be long until we see a bit of counter-offensive in the works. Mao would be so proud.
The good news is that Africa being Africa no one will hold on to power for long. Even if the fundamentalist blaze a swath through to Mogadishu the usual infighting, disappearings and good old mutiny will mean Somalia will remain Somalia through and through. Religions have a way of thinking they deliver civilization, but Somalians have prayed to have a dozen strange gods before they started praying toward Mecca. And at the end of the day East African culture just won’t tolerate religious extremist for long without those long curved blades coming out.
Hopefully there are at least a few people at high level taking notes on flubbing an invasion. There’s sort of a golden moment where you’ve done all you can do and if you stay any longer you start losing ground. If the Ethiopians had gone in there and thrown all the clerics under the tank treads and then about-faced and high-tailed it back inland we wouldn’t be dealing with this now. There’d be just one more warlord grabbing what he could grab until he ran up against another warlord and the world would continue apace.
But as the saying goes, “The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.” Trying to affect an outcome in Africa is an endless and expensive exercise in futility. After a few centuries of colonialism the lesson didn’t stick. But an endless supply of idiots with good intentions means an endless supply of intervention with the same dud results.
So, there. I found something to write about after all.
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