Heres another Bush "victory" that needs attention
-------------------------
Bush Hawks Down
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service
Tuesday 06 June 2006
The takeover of Mogadishu this week by Islamic militias marks a major defeat for the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which had secretly backed a coalition of warlords that has reportedly been routed from the Somali capital.
While the victors, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), sought to assure the international community that they have no intention of setting up a Taliban-style fundamentalist state, U.S. officials have expressed strong concerns about their possible ties to al Qaeda associates believed to be in Mogadishu, including at least one individual who allegedly helped organize the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.
"We do have real concerns about the presence of foreign terrorists in Somalia and that informs an important aspect of our policy with regard to Somalia," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormick on Monday. U.S. officials say their biggest fear is that the UIC will offer safe haven to al Qaeda and other radical Islamists as the Taliban did after it took control of Afghanistan.
Some independent analysts, on the other hand, said the outcome could actually contribute to Somalia's stabilization after 15 years of rule by rival warlords, and even make way for the transitional national government that has been based in Baidoa since its formation in 2004 as part of a national reconciliation process to set up shop in Mogadishu.
"The so-called Islamists provided a sense of stability in Somalia, education and other social services, while the warlords maimed and killed innocent civilians," Ted Dagne, a Horn of Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service, told The New York Times. He said radical Islamists within the UIC were unlikely to wrest control from more-moderate factions.
"In the short term, this is good news in that the warlords in Mogadishu have been dealt with, but, in the long term, it depends on what the courts' agenda is," one knowledgeable foreign diplomat told IPS. "They're probably looking at least for stronger roles in the education and justice sectors within the transitional government, but what their specific terms of negotiation will be is at this point anyone's guess."
The UIC's victory Monday capped two months of fighting against the forces of three Mogadishu warlords who called themselves the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. The violence, described as the worst since 1991 when starvation and anarchy provoked the dispatch of a U.S.-led U.N. peacekeeping operation to Somalia, is believed to have killed at least 300 people over the past several weeks.
The warlords, who since the outset of the U.S. "global war on terror" have reportedly been paid by the U.S. to monitor and help "snatch" suspected terrorists in Somalia, began receiving more cash-100,000-150,000 dollars a month, according to the International Crisis Group-to challenge the UIC's militias that were expanding their control over the capital earlier this spring, just as the transitional government in Baidoa was to convene parliament for the first time.
While the operation was reportedly organized by the CIA, the cash reportedly was funneled through the Pentagon's Joint Combined Task Force (JCTF), a 1,800-troop force based in neighbouring Djibouti since shortly after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Defence Department. The JCTF is apparently charged with carrying out surveillance, "snatch", and related operations against suspected terrorist targets in Yemen and the Horn.
"Support for the warlords came at a really bad time and made a lot of people, particularly the Europeans who were trying to support the government, very angry," noted the diplomat, who asked not to be identified. "Convening the parliament was a big objective for everyone, but then it's overshadowed by the fighting in Mogadishu that followed the injection of money for the warlords."
The U.S. move also provoked some controversy within the U.S. government, although at relatively low levels that did not gain the attention of senior policy-makers.
In one case, a Kenya-based U.S. diplomat, Michael Zorick, reportedly submitted a dissent paper to both his State Department bosses and the Pentagon in which he complained that support for the warlords was counter-productive to U.S. aims in Somalia. He was subsequently transferred to the U.S. embassy in Chad.
Indeed, State Department officials and independent analysts have long argued that Washington's single-minded focus on catching suspected terrorists in Somalia, combined with its failure to support efforts to rebuild state institutions and, most recently, to provide real support to the transitional government, would prove self-defeating. But they were overruled by hawks in the White House and the Pentagon.
"The U.S. now has nothing to show for three years of investing in these warlords as the sole element of their counterterrorism strategy in Somalia," noted John Prendergast, a Horn expert at the International Crisis Group here. "It's a travesty that this has been the only strategy Washington has followed after 15 years of no government, no state, in Somalia."
"There simply hasn't been a U.S. comprehensive policy on Somalia; just a counterterrorism policy that takes no account of the political context," noted the foreign diplomat. "Do you give priority to snatching individuals by any means necessary, including backing warlords, at the expense of a wider political process? That's essentially what the U.S. has done. One would hope that this could get them to broaden their thinking, but I think that may be a naïve."
The current chairman of the African Union, Congolese President Denis Sassou Nguesso, also criticized U.S. support for the warlord alliance during a White House visit Monday.
"We think, and what we told President Bush, [is] that most important [goal] is to establish a government that must help the Somali people to have a real government. We think that if this effort is needed, we have to move in this direction, in order that the Somali government can truly be established in Mogadishu," he said.
Ironically, some of the warlords who have benefited from U.S. backing fought its troops in 1993 when Washington was trying to crush resistance to U.N. efforts to pacify the country following the ouster in 1991 of President Siad Barre, a U.S. client during the Cold War, according to Dagne.
A disastrous raid in October 1993 by U.S. forces against another Mogadishu warlord in which 18 soldiers-as well as hundreds of Somalis-were killed, the subject of the book and blockbuster movie, "Blackhawk Down," led to Washington's withdrawal from Somalia and its subsequent refusal to commit U.S. ground troops to peacekeeping operations in Africa.
Regarding the warlords' recent ouster, Amb. Robert Oakley, who acted as special advisor on Somalia for the U.N. during the intervention in the early 1990s, told IPS, "That's a good riddance. If the provisional government can work out some kind of understanding with the Islamic courts, it does create the possibility of some stability."
He also said the U.S. "should work with the African Union, the U.N., and the neighboring states" to promote such an understanding. "I wouldn't expect us to put a huge effort in there, but there's some possibility (of the U.S. doing so). I think it's worth exploring."
To Prendergast, Washington's most recent misadventure in Somalia recalls earlier debacles. "During the Cold War, U.S. officials armed strongmen to carry out our perceived national interests, and the consequences for Africa were disastrous," he said.
"It appears they've learned nothing since, as they're repeating the same strategy of arming strongmen and ignoring institutions. The consequences, predictably, are equally disastrous."
--------
Jim Lobe is Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service.
I have one question. What standards are you using to declare a booming economy. You say that only part of the stry is being told. Well the truth is that the so called booming economy is partisan propoganda in itself. How is it that when they say 77,000 jobs were created lat month and it is 100,000 less than projected a good number? Also where is the net number which would indicate how many jobs are lossed during that timeframe. The truth is jobs are being cut to maintain profit levels companies are making cutbacks essentially doubling the workload of their working and cutting labor costs in half to combat and I quote "increased operational costs" also known as higher gas prices and inflation. Bush has a low approval rating because he is less concerned with long term domestic stability and more concerned with expansion of his power.
Getting your nominations approved by a Senate controlled by your party is not big news. We expect our Presidents to fill positions with competent individuals (like Brown & Meyers just kidding).
A war gone bad is news.
What do you expect, Matt? The drive-by media latched onto the Hayden and Cavanaugh nominations and hearings until it was evident that no real fight from Chuckie and the usual idiots was going to develop. So the DBM moved on to anything that could be used to drive the poll numbers down.
I said it before, and I'll say it again: When Kerry was running against "W," an editor from one of the weekly news rags, Time, I think, said that the media was worth 15 points in the polls for Kerry. Today, I'd give the media 20 points against Bush, the way they pummel him daily.
Let's go guys; we don't want Nancy Piglosi as House Speaker!!! War
Sorry, Matt, I meant "Kavanaugh." See, kooks, it's easy to correct mistakes. Well, when you make so few, that is...
Muahahaha
But mainly the 2 Supremes and UN Bolton. Whatever happened to Lame Duck charges and The Party of Corruption? Every agenda presented by the Dims always evaporates. The only part presented by the MSM however are the baseless concoctions.
06 elections will follow the above. Baseless glee by the Dims over taking both houses, only to have more elections "stolen" even though pre election polls indicated a Dim landslide. Diebold and Rove again.
Bush Victories Get Minimal Attention
Could be because he gets minimal victories. keebler, Bush is his own worst enemy. How can anyone take him seriously after listening to him "talk" for 30 seconds? The DBM (your term) only needs to write down what that moron says.
It's gotta be hard for you liberals to have your @$$ whooped by someone so dumb so frequently!
For a "lame duck" Bush sure is gertting a lot of his agenda through.
While liberals like to tout their dedication to "tolerance" their posts here are ample proof that in real life they represent anything but. I have never seen a more small-minded,intolerant, mean-spirited group in my life.
One example is the blatant bias, evidently based on a perceived (and totally erroneous) concept of intellectual superiority to anyone who does not speak the way they do. I noticed early in 2000 the condescension of the self-styled "intellectual elite" toward Bush based on his very typical Texan way of speaking. This exends to a great extent to all Southern speech patterns.
Jeff Foxworthy has made jokes about it, about how the last think you want to hear from your brain surgeon is a comment in a deep Southern drawl, using Southern phrasing.
It's just snobbery. And what I have noticed is the liberal determination to feel superior no matter what. As they have yet to produce ideas which can be argued on their merits (choosing instead to merely sit by till someone ELSE has an idea and then make fun of it) and as their efforts in the past have proved to be so disasterous, I guess I can see why they will grasp at straws at anything, no matter how superficial, to use as the basis of a claimed intellectual superiority.
But it's tiresome. So is the name-calling.
Bush has quietly and somewhat under the radar accomplished a lot in spite of the yip-yapping of the ankle-biters. I have predicted for years now that in the future, away from the distractions of the hysterical libs and the biased press, history will find him to have been an honest, dedicated, and astoundingly effective President, as well as a visionary and a man of courage. Not that history will see him as always correct---his stance on immigration is a mess---but hindsight will reveal him to have been an excellent and for the most part effective leader whose actions shaped the country for decades to come. And those history books will probably have a chapter on the self-styled smarty-pants who sneered at the way he spoke. (They will certainly address the bizarre fabrications invented to malign him, and the inherent silliness of those stories and those who believed them.)
Exactly. I keep hearing how dumb Bush is yet they can't beat him. What happens in 2008 when the GOP runs someone "not dumb".
Looking bad for the liberals again.
A war gone bad is news.
Especially when it's the liberal media defining "bad".
Too much time focused on Bush is depressing for America, it just reminds them how dumb a president they have and what a sad states of affairs the country is in.
Too much time focused on Bush is depressing for America, it just reminds them how dumb a president they have and what a sad states of affairs the country is in.
Everyone, with the exceptions of Ash-hole and axis of stupidity, read axis' post above, and tell me if axis should be calling anyone "dumb." If I wrote as poorly as this, I would refrain from calling others stupid.
Axis, if you were my child, I'd lament my pro-life stance...
keebler, you are the poster child for all style and no substance.
When Bush's policies hit the rocks, there is something to be debated and covered. When the policies pass, what is there to debate... it's over.
Victories? That's a good one.
I love how Almi looks to how "history" will judge King George. Umm, Almi, why don't you ask the actual *historians*:
"Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant."
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/the_worst_president_in_history
The only thing I'm unsure of with the booming economy is the amount of consumer debt. Of course, that's been in steady climb lib and conservative administrations alike. However, the amount of money in home equity was previously unavailable to borrow against and spend to support the economy.
I don't know enough about it to make the case, but I do worry.
maf -
I did enjoy that article, but I really can't say that historians have any credibility to make predictions on present events.
maf,
Rollingstone.com
Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
The only thing I'm unsure of with the booming economy is the amount of consumer debt. Of course, that's been in steady climb lib and conservative administrations alike. However, the amount of money in home equity was previously unavailable to borrow against and spend to support the economy.
-- Indeed, consumer debts at an all time high in America with interest rates on the rise and wages flat or declining.
Isn't it reassuring that President Bush is looking after you and made it more difficult or impossible to discharge all your debts and get a clean start after bankruptcy.?
that bankruptcy bill was a shining achievement for the conservatives. All people love being caught in a web of inescapable debt while their banks continue to make billions in profits a year.
Maf...people hated Lincoln when he was President too. Elected with only 40% of the vote. Truman had a 22% rating, lowest in history.
Yet both, today, are considered some of the best presidents we ever had. You don't judge a presidency solely by polls or what is happening during the presidency. Sometimes you have actually have a vision, something you are incapable of.
I have no doubt in my mind that Bush will be better received years after he is gone then right now. You know what, I think he's the type of leader who absolutely gives a crap about what his polls are. Just like Churchill.
You appreciate these leaders when you look back and say "Man, I didn't like that guy back then but I sure wish we had him now"
Axis
Maybe if politicians didn't tax the hell out of investments and savings, people would save more. Instead we penalize people for investing and saving...a really stupid idea.
Lower the capital gains tax!!!
Maf...people hated Lincoln when he was President too. Elected with only 40% of the vote. Truman had a 22% rating, lowest in history.
Yet both, today, are considered some of the best presidents we ever had. You don't judge a presidency solely by polls or what is happening during the presidency. Sometimes you have actually have a vision, something you are incapable of.
-- But thats what you are missing. You see the 29% poll numbers, but you miss all the polls rating him from a far below average president to the worst president in history.
No good is coming from him at all.
Maybe if politicians didn't tax the hell out of investments and savings, people would save more. Instead we penalize people for investing and saving...a really stupid idea.
Lower the capital gains tax!!!
- Agreed, over taxation is a bad thing, however until we get government in that are fiscally responsible, like Clinton was, you cant lower taxes without passing the debt created to the next generation, which is what is being done now. $8.3 Trillion debt. It was 5.20 Trillion when clinton left.
Once you have that, then the task is to cut government waste, like studies on what material makes a better toilet seat and silly wastes of monies like that.
I'd say that taxes have nothing to do with it as there are plenty of tax sheltered investments that the average middle class person does not take advantage of because they don't have the money to invest because they spent it all.
It has nothing to do with the president, it is about the stupidity of people blindly following all the pretty advertising. Can we really help it thugh since we've pretty much been conditioned by advertising - we see something like 40 ads a minute now. Heck, I'm staring at two while I post this below the box!
There are plenty of things I'd say that I don't like about bush, but I cannot blame this on him.
I'd say that taxes have nothing to do with it as there are plenty of tax sheltered investments that the average middle class person does not take advantage of because they don't have the money to invest because they spent it all.
It has nothing to do with the president, it is about the stupidity of people blindly following all the pretty advertising. Can we really help it thugh since we've pretty much been conditioned by advertising - we see something like 40 ads a minute now. Heck, I'm staring at two while I post this below the box!
There are plenty of things I'd say that I don't like about bush, but I cannot blame this on him.
Axis, I'd be careful about calling Bush "dumb". In college he had better grades than Kerry. What would Kerry have been as president, retarded? I am guessing that anything you disagree with is “dumb.”
Maf, quoting Rollingstone? Now that’s a stroke of genius! Like that rag doesn’t have it’s bias. LOL According to a UCLA study the media is liberal to moderate at best. It’s humanly difficult to not express your bias and when a media outlet is either liberal or moderate you can be sure that what they cover will be covered from that biased point of view. There is no checks and balances in keeping the media unbiased, and there is no effort to do so even if they claim they are. Frankly I don’t think they even claim that. We assume that they will be. I no longer expect a media outlet to not be biased, liberal or conservative.
Heres another Bush "victory" that needs attention
-------------------------
Bush Hawks Down
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service
Tuesday 06 June 2006
The takeover of Mogadishu this week by Islamic militias marks a major defeat for the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which had secretly backed a coalition of warlords that has reportedly been routed from the Somali capital.
While the victors, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), sought to assure the international community that they have no intention of setting up a Taliban-style fundamentalist state, U.S. officials have expressed strong concerns about their possible ties to al Qaeda associates believed to be in Mogadishu, including at least one individual who allegedly helped organize the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.
"We do have real concerns about the presence of foreign terrorists in Somalia and that informs an important aspect of our policy with regard to Somalia," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormick on Monday. U.S. officials say their biggest fear is that the UIC will offer safe haven to al Qaeda and other radical Islamists as the Taliban did after it took control of Afghanistan.
Some independent analysts, on the other hand, said the outcome could actually contribute to Somalia's stabilization after 15 years of rule by rival warlords, and even make way for the transitional national government that has been based in Baidoa since its formation in 2004 as part of a national reconciliation process to set up shop in Mogadishu.
"The so-called Islamists provided a sense of stability in Somalia, education and other social services, while the warlords maimed and killed innocent civilians," Ted Dagne, a Horn of Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service, told The New York Times. He said radical Islamists within the UIC were unlikely to wrest control from more-moderate factions.
"In the short term, this is good news in that the warlords in Mogadishu have been dealt with, but, in the long term, it depends on what the courts' agenda is," one knowledgeable foreign diplomat told IPS. "They're probably looking at least for stronger roles in the education and justice sectors within the transitional government, but what their specific terms of negotiation will be is at this point anyone's guess."
The UIC's victory Monday capped two months of fighting against the forces of three Mogadishu warlords who called themselves the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. The violence, described as the worst since 1991 when starvation and anarchy provoked the dispatch of a U.S.-led U.N. peacekeeping operation to Somalia, is believed to have killed at least 300 people over the past several weeks.
The warlords, who since the outset of the U.S. "global war on terror" have reportedly been paid by the U.S. to monitor and help "snatch" suspected terrorists in Somalia, began receiving more cash-100,000-150,000 dollars a month, according to the International Crisis Group-to challenge the UIC's militias that were expanding their control over the capital earlier this spring, just as the transitional government in Baidoa was to convene parliament for the first time.
While the operation was reportedly organized by the CIA, the cash reportedly was funneled through the Pentagon's Joint Combined Task Force (JCTF), a 1,800-troop force based in neighbouring Djibouti since shortly after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Defence Department. The JCTF is apparently charged with carrying out surveillance, "snatch", and related operations against suspected terrorist targets in Yemen and the Horn.
"Support for the warlords came at a really bad time and made a lot of people, particularly the Europeans who were trying to support the government, very angry," noted the diplomat, who asked not to be identified. "Convening the parliament was a big objective for everyone, but then it's overshadowed by the fighting in Mogadishu that followed the injection of money for the warlords."
The U.S. move also provoked some controversy within the U.S. government, although at relatively low levels that did not gain the attention of senior policy-makers.
In one case, a Kenya-based U.S. diplomat, Michael Zorick, reportedly submitted a dissent paper to both his State Department bosses and the Pentagon in which he complained that support for the warlords was counter-productive to U.S. aims in Somalia. He was subsequently transferred to the U.S. embassy in Chad.
Indeed, State Department officials and independent analysts have long argued that Washington's single-minded focus on catching suspected terrorists in Somalia, combined with its failure to support efforts to rebuild state institutions and, most recently, to provide real support to the transitional government, would prove self-defeating. But they were overruled by hawks in the White House and the Pentagon.
"The U.S. now has nothing to show for three years of investing in these warlords as the sole element of their counterterrorism strategy in Somalia," noted John Prendergast, a Horn expert at the International Crisis Group here. "It's a travesty that this has been the only strategy Washington has followed after 15 years of no government, no state, in Somalia."
"There simply hasn't been a U.S. comprehensive policy on Somalia; just a counterterrorism policy that takes no account of the political context," noted the foreign diplomat. "Do you give priority to snatching individuals by any means necessary, including backing warlords, at the expense of a wider political process? That's essentially what the U.S. has done. One would hope that this could get them to broaden their thinking, but I think that may be a naïve."
The current chairman of the African Union, Congolese President Denis Sassou Nguesso, also criticized U.S. support for the warlord alliance during a White House visit Monday.
"We think, and what we told President Bush, [is] that most important [goal] is to establish a government that must help the Somali people to have a real government. We think that if this effort is needed, we have to move in this direction, in order that the Somali government can truly be established in Mogadishu," he said.
Ironically, some of the warlords who have benefited from U.S. backing fought its troops in 1993 when Washington was trying to crush resistance to U.N. efforts to pacify the country following the ouster in 1991 of President Siad Barre, a U.S. client during the Cold War, according to Dagne.
A disastrous raid in October 1993 by U.S. forces against another Mogadishu warlord in which 18 soldiers-as well as hundreds of Somalis-were killed, the subject of the book and blockbuster movie, "Blackhawk Down," led to Washington's withdrawal from Somalia and its subsequent refusal to commit U.S. ground troops to peacekeeping operations in Africa.
Regarding the warlords' recent ouster, Amb. Robert Oakley, who acted as special advisor on Somalia for the U.N. during the intervention in the early 1990s, told IPS, "That's a good riddance. If the provisional government can work out some kind of understanding with the Islamic courts, it does create the possibility of some stability."
He also said the U.S. "should work with the African Union, the U.N., and the neighboring states" to promote such an understanding. "I wouldn't expect us to put a huge effort in there, but there's some possibility (of the U.S. doing so). I think it's worth exploring."
To Prendergast, Washington's most recent misadventure in Somalia recalls earlier debacles. "During the Cold War, U.S. officials armed strongmen to carry out our perceived national interests, and the consequences for Africa were disastrous," he said.
"It appears they've learned nothing since, as they're repeating the same strategy of arming strongmen and ignoring institutions. The consequences, predictably, are equally disastrous."
--------
Jim Lobe is Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service.