Mitchel Cohen writes: "With the President of the United States about to revisit and complete the missions that his father left hanging, we will need more than an oedipal understanding of why the US military is about to be deployed in Somalia nine years after the first go-round, and possibly against Iraq as well.

Somalia, & the Cynical Manipulation of Hunger

by Mitchel Cohen

"To pull out of Somalia would be] devastating to our hopes for the New World Order ..." - General Colin Powell (now Secretary of State), September 1993

"To give food aid to a country just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason." - Henry Kissinger, 1974

Sept. 11th, 1990: President George Bush, Sr. announces his plan for a "New World Order," as U.S./U.N. troops begin amassing in Saudi Arabia shortly before launching the horrendous bombardment against Iraq. One of Bush’s last decisions before leaving office in the Winter of 1992-3 was a large military operation in Eastern Africa, posing as a massive "humanitarian effort" under the aegis of the United Nations as well as the United States to feed the allegedly starving Somali people.

By the time the troops had finally been removed from Somalia in the mid-1990s, 10,000 Somalis had been killed by U.N. occupying troops under U.S. command. President George Bush -- who had instigated the alleged "humanitarian" mission as his parting salvo before leaving office -- had originally projected it to last a few months at most. But, like all such "interventions," it quickly turned into a year-and-a-half military occupation, with serious repercussions still being felt today. Meanwhile, the U.S. government never truthfully outlined its purpose in Somalia nor whether it had been accomplished.

Despite many secondary motives, the primary mission of the US/UN occupation of Somalia was to continue to develop an effective international policing mechanism capable of forcing recalcitrant regions into the International Monetary Fund's "Structural Adjustment Programs," co-opt or crush resistance to it, and -- militarily, if necessary (in fact, militarily might be the option of choice, at this time) -- prepare the groundwork needed to reshape whole areas of the world in the image of the New World Economic Order.

On September 9, 1993, for example, U.S. helicopter gunships and tanks opened fire in Somalia on an unarmed crowd that had gathered to maintain a roadblock. More than 100 Somali people were massacred.

Three months earlier, in one of the military actions that first prompted people to begin building roadblocks, Pakistani troops under U.N. command opened fire on a crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 demonstrators. Witnesses said the "troops opened fire without being provoked" when the crowd was still a block away from the Pakistanis. "The Pakistani soldiers shot not only at the crowd, which immediately dispersed, but also at a vehicle in front of their compound where some people sought cover. A bullet tore off the top half of a boy's head as he hid behind a tree. Several women were killed as well. At a nearby hospital, wounded people lay in the hallways as doctors tore pieces of cardboard and slipped them under patients' heads for operations performed on the floor."[1]

A few days later, an artillery and missile attack on Digfer hospital killed at least 9 patients.

Even at that stage, British media were estimating that at least 3,000 Somalis -- mostly civilians -- had been killed by the U.S./U.N. forces supposedly there to feed them.

Jamie McGoldrick of the Save the Children Fund said: "the relief work is dead. This has become a purely military operation."[2] One U.S. soldier said: "It's not like I saw on TV, we didn't deliver any food, it was mostly patrolling, searching houses and burning stuff."[3]

Of the $1.5 billion earmarked by the United Nations for Somalia in 1993, only ten percent of that amount was allocated for "humanitarian" work.[4] More than 28,000 troops occupied Somalia. The U.S./U.N. deployment included over 100 tanks and armored vehicles, attack helicopters, airborne gunships and an aircraft carrier. Gen. Colin Powell approvingly called Operation Restore Hope "a paid political advertisement" for maintaining the Bush/Clinton $1.4 trillion 4-year military budget.[5]

Former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin followed in step, urging the allocation of billions of dollars for revamping overall military strategy so that the U.S. would be prepared to fight two or more wars at the same time in different parts of the globe. That August, he approved sending an additional elite Army Ranger unit, basically a 400-person SWAT team, to Mogadishu, Somalia's capital. While many believed its task would be to kidnap or assassinate Somali Gen. Mohammed Aidid (who opposed U.N./U.S. military intervention), in effect -- intentional or not -- the Ranger unit's activities strengthened Aidid's hand in Somali politics and crushed resistance to centralized authority.[6]

Even Southern Air Transport, exposed during the mid-1980s as a shadowy CIA operation running cocaine and death squads between Central America and the southern U.S. (using, among others, a base in Arkansas while Clinton governed there), re-surfaced in Somalia, contracted by the U.N. for $25,000 per day to transport water from Israel, beer from Germany and, undoubtedly, CIA personnel from the U.S., to troops stationed in the town of Belet Uen, Somalia.[7]

How Many Liberals Can Dance on the Tip of a Warhead?

"My approach to Africa is in some ways like the Japanese approach to Asia, and my approach is not necessarily humanitarian. It is in the long-range interests of access to resources and the creation of markets for American goods and services." - Andrew Young, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the presidency of Jimmy Carter

Most people understandably want to reach out and comfort those who are in pain, feed those who are starving, house those who are homeless. We want the government to work that way; but it doesn't, and it won't. Nor will it reveal its own crucial role in creating all the misery to begin with. Andrew Young's viewpoint, like that of the odious Henry Kissinger printed at the beginning of this essay, accurately represents the way U.S. policymakers think about (and create) hunger: by using food as a weapon. The new "humanitarian warfare" exhibited by the US, Germany and Britain in Yugoslavia, and that same configuration of forces with the addition of Japan in Afghanistan today, was preceded and tested in the killing fields of Panama, Iraq, and Somalia; it is the Trojan Horse inside of which the ruling class visits its New World Order on non-compliant populations.

In Somalia, liberals and assorted "pwogwessives" (as Alex Cockburn mocks them) desperately needed to believe the U.S. government would, for the first time, use its military to actually feed people instead of killing them. The pages of the nation's newspapers, along with the Congressional Record, were filled with pitiful self-righteous calls for what can only be described as neo-colonialism. Once-liberal columnist Murray Kempton wrote that he was "proud to be an American" again and imagined himself sauntering the corridors of the U.N. "fairly swollen with the majesty of a United States that could at last glory in its conscience instead of its might."[8] Randall Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica, Rep. John Lewis, and other Black officials, criticized President Bush's objectives in Somalia not for its neo-colonial objectives, but for being too limited! They called "for U.S. military forces to maintain order in the famine-stricken African country until an effective government can be established."[9] Aryeh Neier of Human Rights Watch and organizations like SANE/FREEZE (now Peace Action) lined up alongside the government, calling on it to use military force to "insure the safety of aid shipments and relief workers."[10] Instead of developing an analysis of the role of the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank in the New World Order, the American Friends Service Committee saw U.S./U.N. intervention only as "mistaken" but, overall, well-intentioned. The Committee, which opposed U.S. troops in Somalia, nevertheless called for an "increased ... multinational force under UN command, to give better protection to the relief effort ... [including] deployment of the 3,000-person UN-commanded multi-national contingent approved by the Security Council in August with the mission of protecting humanitarian relief efforts with a minimum use of force; [and] creative efforts to disarm the rival Somali groups, by purchase of weapons or exchange of food for weapons, and serious multilateral action to halt the arms flow into Somalia."[11] Jesse Jackson "brushed aside suggestions that it would amount to neocolonialism for the United States or the United Nations to oversee Somalia until a new government can be formed. ‘If this were a unilateral U.S. presence searching for some material, some oil or some minerals or for some geopolitical positioning, one could justify those fears,' Jackson said. ‘This simply is not the case.'"[12]

As images of U.S. troops in foreign lands again filled our t.v. screens, we in the U.S. were being primed for the latest round of imperialist colonization under the pretext of "feeding starving people" at the point of a bayonet. From the start we were inundated with breathless propaganda about "evil Somalian warlords," soon to be exposed, no doubt, as "worse than Hitler," just in case Somali resistance forces put up a fight against the uninvited machine-gun toting "guests." Coverage of Somalia was, and continues to be, laced with terms like "warlords," "gangs," "violent bands," "chaos" and "random violence." NBC News Executive Producer Jeff Gralnick termed Somali "warlord" Mohammed Farrah Aidid an "educated jungle bunny." Every Somali killed by U.S. troops was portrayed as a mugger of some sort, usually "high on drugs." (The "drug" many Somalis chew, "kat," is actually less stimulating than coffee.) The demonization of "bad Negroes" versus those seemingly more docile and compliant with the interests and intentions of international capital has become a regular feature of U.S. imperialism's propaganda machine; it is used to make armed intervention palatable to the sensitive home audience, remaining well within the bounds of the dominant liberal discourse.

This mindset was driven home by a Marine Corps colonel, Bob Agro-Melina, who described the various bands and communities in Somalia as similar to "gangs like the Bloods and the Crips in Los Angeles." He added, "To secure the area, we've got to disarm them."[13]

From the start the quick rationalizations and sound-bites required to rally Americans around U.S. policy were hammered home, overriding their occasional squeamishness over the bloodier episodes of imperialism that sometimes (though rarely) leaked through the TV onto their living room carpets. This purported general consensus included most progressives, who called for the U.S. to, "as non-violently as possible," remove the weapons from the hands of those "natives" who, never knowing what's best for themselves, sought to resist attempts to "modernize" their communities and pull them against their will into neo-liberalism's version of the 21st century. Thus, when "the Defense Department confessed that intelligence reports indicating the whereabouts of Aidid's lieutenants were incorrect and that U.S. troops [which included some of the 400 elite Army Rangers sent on special mission to Mogadishu] erroneously apprehended eight U.N. workers instead,"[14] international non-governmental agencies could only express "concern" that the "wrong" people were arrested, still harboring the illusion that capital "wants" to do the right thing if left to do so without government interference.

What world are they living in? Haven't they learned anything from history? Apparently not. Fresh from supporting the "well-meaning but fruitless mistake" in Somalia, many liberals -- including the Congressional Black Caucus -- called for a repeat: They supported the sending of U.S. troops to Haiti, allegedly to protect exiled President Aristide! As if U.S. troops would ever be used to defend the revolutionary rights of the people against capital. As we have seen, in Haiti -- as elsewhere -- U.S. troops were used, instead, to crush whatever indigenous popular movements arose and pave the way for the privatization of the Haitian economy. Just as was their purpose in Somalia.

Back in 1983-84, the Trans-Century company scoured the northwestern regions of Somalia, ostensibly searching for heavy metal deposits (and, secretly, oil), under the guise of trying to find water. In 1983, the Saudi sheiks had given tons of free oil to the Barré military regime in Somalia to maintain him in power against concerted and community-based opposition. In exchange, the Arabic language was forced on Somalia; workers were required to learn it, and resented this cultural imposition.

In fact, oil has always and continues to be the driving force in the region. Even during the supposed "humanitarian" food mission, the U.S. government's special envoy to Somalia staged the military "humanitarian" landing from the Mogadishu headquarters of Conoco, the giant multinational oil company, a fact hidden from most U.S. news-watchers. John Geybauer, spokesman [sic] for Conoco Oil in Houston, said the company was acting as "a good corporate citizen and neighbor" in granting the U.S. government's request to be allowed to rent the compound. "The U.S. Embassy and most other buildings and residential compounds here in the capital were rendered unusable by vandalism and fierce artillery duels during the clan wars," he said. [15]

What he forgot to mention was that, Conoco, as a good corporate citizen, had -- surprise! -- discovered large deposits of oil in Somalia shortly before the invasion.[16]

Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise

The "oil connection" slid right past Jesse Jackson. In fact, aside from one brilliant story in the L.A. Times, it was not printed anywhere else. And yet, Conoco officials in Houston readily, even proudly, admitted their culpability. They described the company's logistical support for the invasion of Somalia as an innocent "business relationship," since the U.S. government was apparently "paying rental for its use of the compound" in Mogadishu.[17]

"In its in-house magazine last month," The L.A. Times continued, "Conoco reprinted excerpts from a letter of commendation for [Raymond] Marchland [Conoco's Somalia-based general manager] written by U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Frank Libutti, who has been acting as military aid to U.S. envoy Robert B. Oakley. In the letter, Libutti praised the oil official for his role in the initial operation to land Marines on Mogadishu's beaches in December, and the general concluded, ‘Without Raymond's courageous contributions and selfless service, the operation would have failed.'

"But the close relationship between Conoco and the U.S. intervention force has left many Somalis and foreign development experts deeply troubled by the blurry line between the U.S. government and the large oil company, leading many to liken the Somalia operation to a miniature version of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led military effort in January, 1991, to drive Iraq from Kuwait and, more broadly, safeguard the world's largest oil reserves.

"‘They sent all the wrong signals when Oakley moved into the Conoco compound,' said one expert on Somalia who worked with one of the four major oil companies as they intensified their exploration efforts in the country in the late 1980s. ‘It's left everyone thinking the big question here isn't famine relief but oil -- whether the oil concessions granted under [deposed dictator] Siad Barre will be transferred if and when peace is restored,' the expert said. ‘It's potentially worth billions of dollars, and, believe me, that's what the whole game is starting to look like.'"

But a Conoco executive tried to play down the connection between the Marine invasion of Somalia and the oil interests: "With America, there is a genuine humanitarian streak in us ... that most other countries and cultures cannot understand," he said.[18]

Here's what the former Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Major General Smedley Butler, had to say about the "humanitarian" role of the U.S. military "that most other countries and cultures cannot understand," in testimony before Congress in 1938:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force -- the Marine Corps. I served in all the commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to major general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

"I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical of everyone in the military service.

"Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for the American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

"The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right' for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

"During those years I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We marines operated on three continents."

One of Butler's successors, General David Shoup, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps (1960-63) and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, expressed similar thoughts:

"I believe that if we ... would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. ... And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the ‘have -nots' by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."

You Provide the Collateral, We'll Provide the Damage

The Bush administration piled up lie after lie about Somalia in order to rationalize its military and economic intervention there. Clinton was quick to follow suit. His lies included:

Lie 1: Somalia was at the peak of famine and only U.S. troops could save it. Actually, the peak had passed months before, and the country was on the road to recovery -- without the U.S. or its puppet despot Siad Barre, who was overthrown.

Lie 2: Starvation was everywhere, due to widespread chaos, random anarchy and lack of a central governmental authority. Actually, famine was limited to those areas where the IMF, World Bank and USAID had been able to impose its structural adjustment programs most forcefully -- precisely those areas where strong central government had overthrown the agrarian clan communities and was consolidating its power, just the opposite of what we were told.

Somalia as a whole was NOT wracked by generalized mass-starvation and random violence. "In fact," explained Rutgers professor Said Samatar, who is from Somalia, "these horrors are occurring only in a limited portion of Somalia, notably in the ... southwest between Mogadishu, the capital [where all the press are clustered], and the regions surrounding Baidoa and Kismayu. The rest of the country is relatively peaceful and well-governed by an alliance of traditional elders and local leaders that has re-emerged in the wake of the collapse of the central authority."[19]

Lie 3: That up to 80 percent of the food supplied by charities was being confiscated by "warlords," who had to be met with a more impressive display of force. Contrary to such U.S. government statements, Rakiya Omaar, the former director of Africa Watch, cited relief organizations such as Save the Children and the International Committee of the Red Cross as enduring a loss rate of only 5 to 10 percent, a fairly constant figure in all famine relief. Before the U.S. troops first landed, Mogadishu -- which was in the most desperate situation of all the Somalian cities -- was "totally flooded with food" and "anybody can buy rice; it's very cheap."[20] The mortality rate, Omar said, had dropped and the overall situation had been improving before the troops were sent.

Many relief workers in Somalia went even further, complaining that their efforts were being hindered by the U.S. military intervention: "We can't get to people we used to, and they are dying," said James Fennell of CARE.[21] Before the troops hit the beaches, relief agencies had hired guards "to ride shotgun on trucks, losing some supplies to looters -- but also reaching many thousands of people who were too weak to seek help in feeding centers. [But] the Marines' first move in Baidoa was to disarm the airport security force, tough ex-soldiers CARE had hired as escorts. ... Tibebu Haile Selassie, deputy director of UNICEF in Mogadishu ... said, ‘the situation is worse than it was before.'"[22]

Lie 4: Without a strong central government, there will only be chaos and anarchy. In actuality, neither chaos nor famine is accidental. A USAID representative in the 1980s, who quit the Agency and became a journalist, wrote: In 1981 "I was working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. I was one of many aid workers warning that food aid pouring into Somalia was unnecessary and destroying the country, upsetting the balance of clan power by enriching friends and family of the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, who were stealing much of the food. In addition to Barre and his pals, the main beneficiaries of the food aid were relief organizations (or NGOs -- nongovernmental organizations -- as they are now called), who received funding for delivering the food, and the American and European governments, who were able to dump surplus food while calling it foreign aid. ...

"The reports we wrote predicted disaster, but no one paid them much mind. Food kept coming even as Somalia could have fed itself. As a result, the nation's food supply was controlled by corrupt officials at the docks, not by farmers in the countryside."[23]

Enter the International Monetary Fund

Dumping food onto local markets under the guise of aid is a recurrent tactic used by USAID, among others, to undermine local agriculture while forcing the development of export crops. Dumping destroys local self-sufficiency and dispossesses small-plot farmers, who are unable to compete with the low (or free) prices, driving them out of the market and off their lands. It enables ownership of land to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As these lands are taken over by international agribusiness conglomerates, more and more cash crops are produced for export, increasing the dependency of previously self-sufficient people on staples from abroad.

Whatever hunger exists in Somalia is a direct result of U.S./IMF/World Bank policies over the years, policies that have spawned a strong resistance movement in Somalia, like everywhere else -- though we hear nothing of it in the press. None of capital's goals can be accomplished without first disarming and crushing (or co-opting) those movements.

But in Africa, colonialism has not yet fully succeeded (as it has in much of Central and South America) in breaking the back of the village structures on which that resistance has been based. Attacks on the village structure, which go on continuously in order to seize the land the proletarianize the population, must be cloaked in "humanitarian" garb. Thus, when elite U.S. forces blew up a building in 1995, they claimed it was the headquarters of the much-vilified Aidid. But the bodies blown to smithereens were not Aidid's lieutenants as reported, but were actually communal village and clan elders from around the country who were meeting to create an alternative to the central government authority the U.S. in the guise of "nation building", was so keen to install. This information was reported in the Italian press, but not in the U.S.

Imperialism gains its general domestic consensus by promulgating the idea that "human nature" -- always portrayed as competitive, greedy, warlike -- requires a strong central government to "keep everyone in line." It must maintain that "it's always been this way, it will always be this way, and that that's the way it is everywhere." Any exception to that inevitability shatters the illusion. Communal village structures in Somalia, despite problems, were anathema to the spread of capitalism -- er, "globalization" there. Where they existed, they served as barriers to the "proletarianization" of the workforce that capital desperately needs in order to extract value. In order for capitalism to spread, communal and clan formations must be crushed.

"The survival of communal ties [in Africa overall] and the lack of a tradition of wage dependence have ... fostered a sense of entitlements with respect to the distribution of wealth in the community and by the state," writes Hofstra University professor Silvia Federici. They are "responsible for the fact that most African proletarians fail to experience capital's laws as natural laws, even though the demand for what industrial development can provide is now a general factor of social change.

"Africans' resistance to capitalist discipline must be emphasized given the tendency in the U.S. to see Africans either as helpess victims of government corruption and natural disasters or as protagonists of backward struggles revolving around tribal allegiances (a myth perpetrated by the Western media). In reality, from the fields to the factories, the markets and the schools, struggles are being carried on that not only are often unmatched for their combativeness by what takes place in the ‘First World' but are most ‘modern' in content. Their objective is not the preservation of a mythical past but the redefinition of what development means for the proletariat: access to the wealth produced internationally, but not at the price capital puts on it."[24]

European colonialism's failure to break the back of the village structures in Africa, including much of Somalia, cut deeply into potential world capitalist profits from that continent. Beginning in 1977, when Somali dictator Siad Barre was dumped by the Soviet Union and became a client of the U.S., the International Monetary Fund imposed a series of stringent regulations on Somalia, causing the per capita GNP to drop from an already wretched $250 to $170 over five years. "Rather than proposing development and the introduction of democracy, [the IMF and the World Bank] used free-market tactics: slashing government spending, privatizing state-owned companies and banks, eliminating price controls and wage subsidies and freeing up exchange rates."[25]

For over a decade, the communal village provided bases of resistance throughout Somalia to the hardline U.S./IMF policies. Two weeks before U.S. troops first arrived in Somalia, "well-armed" and "generously-funded" Islamic fundamentalists were reported trying to "establish a stronghold for militant Islam," with the strongest group, Ittihad, making "significant inroads" in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.[26] Investigative journalist Andy Pollack explains the conditions under which opposition to capital's expansion, however retrograde, arose: "Under IMF programs in 1981 and 1983 these measures [listed above] were adopted by the Somalian government. The reaction from the people to the new hardships was too great, and the government backed off partially, lowering the exchange rate, and reimposing price controls. But the IMF pressed on and, as a result, more social programs were cut. For instance, Barre abandoned the policy of guaranteed employment for school dropouts.

"The reporting on the social consequences of IMF and World Bank policies has been extremely scarce. The Times, for instance, has had articles on Somalia every day for the last two months on the famine, with not one single word about its roots. It's as if the country didn't exist before two months ago. All of the coverage is focused on the ‘feuding clans' and the difficulties they present to relief efforts.

"But it is the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank which are the roots of the hideous levels of illiteracy (60 percent illiterate in Somalia), inequity, illness, malnutrition and famine in Africa. These policies cause a greater reliance on market forces to ‘adjust' the country's economy into the structure of the Western-dominated world market. Even in times of adequate rainfall Africa's food production capability is distorted by this system."[27]

Much of Somalias' income came from relatives working the oil fields in Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. When the monarchies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia forcibly replaced Palestinian, Arab and African workers en masse with cheaper, less class-organized labor from southern Asia after the 1991 Gulf war -- in effect reconfiguring the working class in the entire Persian Gulf region -- the loss of all those jobs cost Somalia around $300 million a year in lost revenue and required thousands of replaced workers to be re-absorbed into the already-strained Somali economy, adding further leverage to the pressures exerted by the IMF. (That was one reason why the U.S. government endorsed the sweeping and dramatic changes in the national composition of the working class in the Middle East -- and some say it helps explain why the U.S. fought that war, slaughtering 200,000 people outright.[28]) Following the UN's "humanitarian intervention" Somalia, which is slightly smaller than Texas in geographic area, owed $2 billion to Western banks.

Even so, only those areas around Mogadishu, Baidoa and Kismayu -- where IMF measures were able to break down the traditional structures and be fully imposed -- and in the town of Baardheere -- occupied by the forces of Gen. Mohamed Said Hersi Morgan, the son-in-law of Siad Barre and, according to Rakiya Omaar, a major war criminal who invaded from Kenya after being resupplied by the Kenyan army -- do we find the kinds of hunger, disease and disruption of domestic life that so powerfully stir our distant compassion.[29] The starvation was caused by the _imposition_ of brutal policies via a central authority in Somalia, _not by its collapse,_ as claimed by most analysts. Somalia under Barre was in as desperate straits as it is today -- perhaps worse. Its misery is a direct result of U.S./IMF measures, imposed in some areas of Somalia more effectively than in others by a central governing authority that no longer exists -- and which the U.S. government is terribly concerned to reestablish.[30]

END PART ONE"Mitchel Cohen writes: "SOMALIA .... PART 2

A1 Housing vs. B1 Bombers

In a land where 82 percent of the labor force works in agriculture, and where the average life expectancy for both men and women is 53 years, people have resisted the foreign attempts to turn their lands into an enormous toxic dump site and to forcibly proletarianize their communities.[31] That resistance, over the past 20 years, prompted the U.S. government to arm troops loyal to now-deposed Somali dictator Siad Barre.

In January 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced that the U.S. was seeking bases in Somalia, Oman and Kenya for U.S. ships and planes patrolling the Indian Ocean. Somalia requested $1 billion in arms and another $1 billion in economic aid. In August, 1980, an agreement was signed giving the U.S. use of military bases and access to the port of Berbera on the Gulf of Aden, in return for $25 million in 1981 in military aid, with pledges of more to come,[32] which would total $600 million by 1985.[33]

"Washington was eager for a strategic outpost near the Arabian oil fields and struck an agreement to take over the old Soviet military facilities. For the next 10 years the U.S. poured hund