In principal, I put moral considerations first. That is the opposite of realpolitik, but Henry Kissinger was never my mentor. Just look at where his behavior has led us!

In the present case, I am putting morality aside because there is a more effective argument against US policy-making exemplified in Somalia: our leaders are just not smart enough to run an empire.

One can look at the individuals who have led us in the past two decades, just to put an arbitrary time-frame on the study: WJC, GWB, BHO, and their underlings; or one can look at the agencies responsible for policy-making: State, Defence, CIA, NSC and their cohorts in the congress.

The CIA has been asleep at the switch since before the collapse of the USSR, which it failed to see ahead. In Afghanistan, it created the Taliban. In Somalia, it brought Al Shabab from a minor role in the Courts with only a few Al Quaeda in its ranks to being the rulers of the Somalian country-side. It did this when the CIA and Pentagon destroyed the Courts in favor of a few war-lords on the CIA payroll. Al Shabab became the only alternative to the corrupt and nefarious war-lords, our friends.

We are too short-sighted, badly informed and unintelligent to run an empire. We really ought to give it up and see if we can manage to run our own country. At present, BHO and Congress are doing a very poor job of that and offer little hope of improvement. Maybe we need a radical change, doing away with corporate personhood - a real scam on the 14th amendment. Or maybe we ought to have a Constitutional Convention. BHO has shredded the Constitution. Let's redo it!

i Agree in franchised independence, the friendly 800 lb. gorilla, five hundred years ago. Modernity ruined it for America and Somalia. Now we torment each other. ..Thanks for sharing!
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The full boat invoice for Somali piracy should be faxed to the corporations who (since they’re “people” now) financed the floating fish processing factories that dredged up and sterilized the entire fisheries ecology off the Somali coast: the fisheries equivalent of the BP Gulf Coast petroleum disaster. They laughed all the way to the bank and got off scot free thanks to total media anonymity.

Now, everything’s the demonized Somali pirates’ fault. Today’s pirate was yesterday’s fisherman and likely the son of a 1980’s inland refugee evacuated to the coast during a quite successful humanitarian program back in the day. Now ruined for the profit of thugs in suits.

The World Court should arraign their board of directors for crimes against humanity, try them and fine them for everything they’re worth, the proceeds to go directly back into the Somali coastal economy. That would serve as an example for the next wolf pack of disaster capitalists and ecocide specialists.

Otherwise, these continental rip-offs and their sociopath experts will continue at our expense, until everyone except billionaires is turned into a gutted-economy “Somali pirate” ripe for globalized, preferably privatized, paramilitary repression.

Then we can line up the same treatment for whoever just happened to ship so many military assault weapons into one of the poorest countries on Earth, enough to re-equip the North Korean Army with small arms.

And what role CENTCOM and State played (whether passively or actively) in that travesty. There seems to be more than enough incompetence and criminality to go around.

And as usual with our global sociopathocracy, no-one is to blame but the victims.

with the job of running Somalia. Whatever they might have thought of the US, at least they were the only people capable of governing the country and maintaining it as something other than a haven of piracy.

Now they have an open sore on their hands and a purported government that is capable of exercising authority over an area about the size of two basketball courts during the daytime. Of course, its also worth noting the warlords in that purported government were the same ones firing RPGs at American soldiers in the incident portrayed in the movie "Black Hawk Down".

You really have to wonder what kind of idiots are running American foreign policy.

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