Until yesterday's bombing, the last time America cared about Somalia was October 3, 1993, when 19 Americans were killed while trying to arrest local warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

  I saw the movie "Black Hawk Down" and really liked it. The realistic battle scene, the bravery of the American troops. It even had an almost happy ending.

  What it didn't have was a motivation for the Somalis who fought those brave American soldiers. Between the movie, the political rhetoric, and the MSM, all you can tell is that the Somalis hated us for no particular reason.

  In other words - they are acting like primitive savages. You don't have to understand them.

  That's different from "it's too complicated". "It's too complicated" implies that we are out of our depth and shouldn't be there.

Any place with 4,000 years of civilization is going to have an excess of motivations (often conflicting) rather than a lack of them.

  For those of us who actually look for reasons and motivations, you might want to check the news from September 10th, 1993, just three weeks before "Black Hawk Down".

In the latest incident, at least 200 Somalis -- mainly women and children -- were killed when a US Cobra helicopter gunship opened fire on a crowd in Mogadishu on September 10. (Cobras have not been used in inner city combat since the Vietnam War.)

  In a grotesque attempt to justify the slaughter, UN military spokesperson Major David Stockwell told reporters that ``the women and children were combatants'' and that they posed ``an imminent threat against our soldiers''.

  The massacre began as a bulldozer accompanied by three tanks, four armoured personnel carriers and 100 ground troops started removing barricades in south Mogadishu. Armed resistance to the attack was followed by tank reinforcements. But when barricades were re-erected, largely by Somali children, the Cobra cannon attack started. According to Stockwell, the decision to fire on the Somalis was ``regrettable but a last resort''. One UN soldier was killed, bringing the UN death toll to 48 since May.

  A day earlier, hundreds of patients, doctors and nurses were forced out of one of Mogadishu's main hospitals as UN Cobra and Black Hawk helicopter gunships attacked.

While the 19 American soldiers had their deaths made into a movie, the 200 dead Somali woman and children are completely forgotten in the western world. No wonder we don't understand their motivations - we never cared enough to look for them.

  Yesterday American gunships attacked alledged al-Qaeda targets in Somalia. This is the culmination of an Ethiopian military operation to kick out the Islamists who were in control of most of southern Somalia. Ethiopia just happened to have met with the Bush Administration in 2002 in order to sign up for the Global War on Terror. Shortly afterwards Ethiopia started getting about $800 million a year in military aid from the American taxpayer.

  If that sounds like the Ethiopian invasion is a proxy war for America, you should remember that this wouldn't be the first time. Somalia was used as a Cold War proxy both in the 1960's and the bloody Ogaden War of the 1970's.

  How did the Islamists get into power in Somalia? It was the Bush Administration policies that put them into power.

  Oh, not intentionally. It required incompetence that only the Bush Administration could provide. This whole war was started over a worthless patch of scrub land almost exactly one year ago today.

Making a mountain out of a molehill

Our story begins with two warlords from the Abgal sub-clan. One warlord is named Bashir Raghe. He was a waste contractor with the U.S. military forces in Mogadishu before the United States pulled out in 1994. After 9/11 he became one of America's top allies in Somalia. He was paid handsomely to capture alledged terrorist and turn them over to U.S. officials.

Raghe strode through Mogadishu wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses on his head and a pistol strapped to each hip. And in the months leading up to the fighting in Mogadishu, he was seen using crisp, new $100 bills to buy machine guns and heavily armed pickup trucks.

  The rival warlord is named Abukar Omar Adan, a devoutly Islamic and heavily armed clan elder with ties to the Islamic Courts Union (now named Supreme Islamic Courts Council).

The trouble began late last year when Adan paid $30,000 for land that straddled the airport road, intending to build a development including homes and warehouses.
  Fearing the loss of control over lucrative airport traffic, Raghe objected, according to Adan's brother and son. After several verbal confrontations, the two sides began fighting in the open Jan. 13, moments after the U.S. intelligence officials -- most accounts put the number at four -- had landed at Esaly.

  After a six hour battle Raghe's forces had killed seven of Adan's men and captured the land and four of his gun trucks. The U.S. officials, at the airstrip just three miles away, wrongly concluded that they were under attack by Islamic terrorists and abruptly fled. Adan had no idea the Americans were nearby, but soon learned of it.

  Adan travelled to Nairobi to reassure the Americans that the gunfight was about land, and to ask for his trucks back.

  But over the next several weeks, in numerous discussions in person and on the phone, U.S. officials accused Abukar and his family of being terrorists, he said. "They said, 'You were ready to kill us.' . . . They said, 'Your file will be put in Washington, and you will be recorded as a terrorist group.' "
  A third Somali, speaking on condition of anonymity, recounted a separate but similar conversation with a U.S. intelligence official who said of the officers at the airstrip on Jan. 13: "They were ambushed. This was a terrorist who was trying to kill American officers."

  The Bush Administration couldn't let a terrorist attack go by unanswered, and so began funding regional warlords, including Raghe. These were some of the exact same warlords that killed American soldiers in 1993. Anti-Americanism, stoked by the Iraq War, intensified in Mogadishu. Warlords had been raping, robbing and killing for over a decade, and now they were being funded by the Bush Administration. Public opinion swung in favor of the islamic courts, which were originally created as a judicial system by regional businessmen, but gradually became a local police force, and even provided services such as education and health care.

Blowback

  On February 18, Raghe and at least six other warlords created the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT). Four of the warlords were also part of the Somali Transitional Government. American support money flooded into this group, estimated at about href="00,000 a month. However, the popular reaction was even more swift. Battles between homegrown Islamic militias and a hated U.S. proxy force started the very same day.

Only a few months ago, this would have been impossible for lack of public support, experts said.
  But the US support for the warlord Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism -- hated by the population -- sparked a wave of anti-American sentiment that massively boosted support for the Islamists, they said.
  Karin von Hippel, a former UN expert on Somalia and member of the US Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that by backing the warlords, Washington encouraged the Islamic courts to take up arms.

  A month later the forces of Adan and Raghe met again. This time Adan was backed by the islamic courts, and the ending was very different. Raghe's forces were routed despite the backing of American military aid. It was the start of the blowback against Bush's Somalia policy. On May 7th an outright war began between the U.S. backed warlords and the islamic courts, and by June 5th the warlords had been driven from Mogadishu. A few weeks later Raghe and another warlord fled to a waiting American warship. The fighting had cost about 350 lives.

Nothing new under the sun

  This is not to say that the Somalis are innocent lambs. I'm merely pointing out something that so many in the press, and even on the progressive blogs, are loath to admit: that the Somalian people have legitimate grievances with the west and historic motivations not to trust them. Because once you admit that then you can't justify funding and supporting a war of occupation against the Somali people.

  These grievances didn't start in 1993. They actually started in 1898. I want to introduce you to what is probably the most famous Somali that you've never heard of: Mohammed Abdullah Hassan.

"Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

  - Rudyard Kipling, 1899

"That curse of the dervish under his last breath, Watson," recalled Holmes.
  - Sherlock Holmes, The Memoir of the Dervish Curse

The Mad Mullah

  Haji Sayyid Mohammed Abdulla Hasan was born in 1856 as part of the Ogadeen warrior sub-tribe. He grew up in a very religious family and became a scholar of the islamic religion. After several years performing the Haj and visiting religious schools, he returned to northern Somalia in 1895 to find his homeland changed.

  The British had done the "primitive savages" the favor of bringing western civilization to Africa in the form of colonization and exploitation. The British needed meat for their troops, and instructed the Ethiopian governor to send out raiding parties to plunder cattle and sheep from Somali tribesmen. He was also disturbed by the inroads that the Christian religion was making into Somalia.

  Once back into his native region he adopted the name Dervish, which means "a Muslim believer who has taken vows of poverty and a life of austerity in the service of God". His influence soon spread.

  Then a very minor incident happened that was totally mishandled in much the same way that America mishandled the incident at the Mogadishu airport I listed above.

Some soldiers of the British armed forces met him and sold him an official gun. When questioned about the loss of the gun they told their British masters that Sheikh Sayyid Mohammed had stolen or snatched it from them. On 29 March, 1899, the British Vice-Counsul wrote a very insulting and stern letter to him asking him to return the gun immediately which someone in the Sayyid's camp had reported stolen. This enraged the sensitive Sheikh and he sent a very brief and curt reply refuting the allegation.

  While the Sheikh had really been against the Ethiopian imperialist plunderers of Somalia this small incident made him clash with the British. The British and Ethiopian emperor Menelik joined together to crush the Dervish movement of Sayyid Mohammed and some antagonistic Somali Ogadeens also cooperated with Menelik against the Somali interests.

This blunder by the British would cost them a two decade war that resulted in the death of an estimated one-third of northern Somalia's population (approximately 100,000 people) and the near destruction of its economy. The British tried to dismiss him with the nickname "the Mad Mullah", but his military tactics turned out to be extremely effective.

  In his speeches, poems and letters he emphasized that the British infidels "have destroyed our religion and made our children their children" and that the Christian Ethiopians in league with the British were bent upon plundering the political and religious freedom of the Somali nation. He issued a fatwa that any Somali national who did not accept the idea of unity of Somalia and fight under his leadership was be considered as kufr or gaal.

  Within no time at all he had thousands of soldiers under his command and he launched his first campaign.

He sent one of his men to Berbera in disguise for reconnaissance. That man went to the market and approached some shopkeepers sitting there and requested them to give him a matchbox. One of the shopkeepers asked him, "What will you do with the matchbox?"

  He replied, "With it we will burn Berbera". At this all the shopkeepers laughed. They asked him,  "Where do you come from?" He replied, "I come from the Dervish." They asked him, "Then why do you need the matchbox?" He replied again, "To burn this city." People thought it just a joke and gave him the matchbox.

After one hour, indeed the Berbera city was attacked and burnt by Sayyid Mohammed's soldiers - the so-called Dervish.

People began joining his movement, some enthusiastically, others out of fear.

  He then made a political blunder. He killed one of the chiefs of the Dulbahante tribe after he complained to the British about Sayyid Mohammed. The Dulbahante tribe was one of his largest followings and they abandoned his campaign. He was forced to flee to his paternal kin in Ogadeen.

  In 1900 an Ethiopian army was sent to kill Sayyid Mohammed. While on the way they looted a large number of camels from a neighboring tribe. Sayyid responded to this outrage by attacking an Ethiopian garrison at Jigjiga on 5 March, 1900, and successfully recovered all the looted animals. Besides enhancing his reputation, he also found a new method of resistance. A few months later he attacked a British protected clan and looted their camels.

  However, things quickly went bad when a Mohammed Subeer Chieftain plotted to kill him. The plot leaked, but two of Sayyid's friends were killed. Some weeks later Mohammed Subeer sent a peace delegation of 32 to the Sayyid. Sayyid had them all killed. Mohammed Subeer appealed to the Ethiopians for help and the Dervish withdrew to new areas.

  Towards the end of 1900 the Ethiopians and British decided to crush the Dervish uprising once and for all. They assembled an army of nearly 17,000 and started from Burao on 22 May 1901. From 1901 to 1904 the battles raged and the Dervish movement inflicted heavy losses on the British and Ethiopian army. His successes attracted new followers from people who didn't share his beliefs. In January of 1904, the Dervish suffered a terrible defeat and had to withdraw to safer country again. But the resistence continued.

During 1910-1914 Sayyid's capital moved from Illig to Taleeb in the heart of Nuggal where he built three garrison forts of massive stone work and a number of houses. He built a luxurious palace for himself and kept new guards for his palace drawn from outcast clans.

This was to be a tactical mistake for reasons he could not have guessed at the time.  Early in 1920 the British attacked his forts with a combined sea and airplane campaign. They inflicted devastating losses on the Dervish in the first use of air war on the African continent. He hastily withdrew his army to Ogadeen and started rebuilding his movement. The British sent a peace delegation to him offering to give a government subsidy and a land grant in the west of the British Somaliland where he could settle with his followers, but he spurned the proposal. He even raided the returning delegation. A smallpox outbreak in Ogadeen killed half of his followers shortly afterwards. A tribal raid organized by the British then killed most of his remaining followers and looted his animals, but Sayyid escaped. Before he could rebuild his following he died of influenza in February 1921 at the age of 64.

"For 20 years, from 1901 to 1921, the peace of the Protectorate was disrupted by the activities of the Mohammed Bin Abdulle Hussan, a fanatical Somali mullah who preached "Holy War" against the British. He raised forces of ruthless devilishness and administered them with great skill..."
  - a British report