From 1993 when the first Bush was sending troops to Somalia:

Nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.

Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the U.S. corporate oil stake.

But corporate and scientific documents disclosed that the American companies are well positioned to pursue Somalia's most promising potential oil reserves the moment the nation is pacified. And the State Department and U.S. military officials acknowledge that one of those oil companies has done more than simply sit back and hope for pece.

This could easily be the motto of America:

this is America come out with your hands up!

this is America come out with your hands up!

Salim Lone, the former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq yesterday on Democracy Now:

Somalia sits at the tip of what is called the Horn of Africa. This is one of the most strategic regions in the world, after the Middle East, because through the Red Sea, you have daily, you know, scores of oil tankers and warships passing back and forth, because of the wars in the Middle East. It also is newly oil-rich. There are extensive reports, terrible reports, that Somalia now also has oil, just like most other countries in the region have.

The US has a huge military base in Djibouti, which is neighboring Somalia. And, in fact, so important is Africa to the US now, especially this region of Africa, which also contains, by the way, Sudan -- you know, there was a big long civil war, brutal civil war, in southern Sudan. There's another brutal civil war in Darfur in Sudan. Ethiopia itself is a dictatorship. It lost the election last year, but by true force continued to assume power, Meles Zenawi, with the help of the US. The US has very close ties; it's training the military in Ethiopia. So the US in now going to have a new army command, like CENTCOM, for Africa. There's never been a US command specifically for Africa, but there's going to be one now, and it is going to be in the Horn of Africa.

This is a very turbulent region. And the best way to look at this region is to imagine for a second that this very narrow Red Sea doesn't exist, and then you see that Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, all these countries are just a few miles from Saudi Arabia and Yemen and Iraq. And so, this region is very much a part of the Middle East, has centuries of trade, and also with India and the countries over there. It's a crossroads. And the US wants to make sure it dominates it fully, and it wanted a client regime in Somalia. And that's what it has managed to do, although I'm sure it's going to be temporary. There is going to be a lot of fighting against this regime.

January 10, 2007, Strategy Page:

Ethiopia apparently sent in only about 5,000 troops. As is often the case in peacekeeping missions, these trained soldiers quickly dispersed the untrained militias of the Islamic Courts. Dispersed, but not destroyed.
...
The Islamic Courts proved to be more talk than action during December, when they enthusiastically trash-talked the Ethiopians, then quickly folded when pressed. Now the Islamic Courts leadership has been advised, by al Qaeda, to launch a guerilla war against the Transitional Government.
...
Without peacekeepers, or perhaps even with them, Somalia seems likely to slide back into its constant, centuries old, cycle of clan feuds and anarchy. This makes al Qaeda inspired guerilla war redundant. And the neighbors know that, and don't want any part of it. Looks like Somalia is going to have to supply its own peacekeepers, or slide back into chaos. In this respect, they may be aided by U.S. Special Forces. These fellows are from a counter-terrorism task force that has been operating up north (in Djibouti) for five years.

San Jose Mercury News also has this to say today (you'll need to pass the registration wall)
Four-nation effort targets Al-Qaida forces in Somalia:

U.S. officials said they did not know whether any Al-Qaida operatives were killed Sunday in a U.S. airstrike -- the first known U.S. offensive action in Somalia in more than a decade -- or in other encounters over the past few days.

``We have nothing that gives us truth. There's lots of speculation,'' said a U.S. official in Washington who requested anonymity because the operations were ongoing. ``We know who we thought we were targeting, and . . . we don't know who we hit.''

In an interview published Tuesday in the French newspaper Le Monde, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said that suspected terrorists from Canada, Britain, Pakistan and elsewhere were among those captured or killed during recent military operations.

It's pretty plain that Ethiopia understands that if Somalia falls to the radical moslems it will be  next on their list. They have attacked and driven the terrorists south into a compact area that lends itself to air operations.

said a U.S. official in Washington ... "We know who we thought we were targeting, and . . . we don't know who we hit."

Somalia seems likely to slide back into its constant, centuries old, cycle of clan feuds and anarchy. This makes al Qaeda inspired guerilla war redundant. And the neighbors know that...

But what you appear to be saying is that if the radical moslems attack, a country should not be defended because that would harm "stability."

There's another word for that, "surrender."

the question is, who should do the defending? is this in our national self-interest? in this case, probably so, for reasons beyond oil. of course, it would be easier to see this with a more trustworthy administration in the white house.

anytime you have a country in chaos (and somalia was in chaos, in spite of the islamacist court) it leaves it wide open for exploitation by terrorists and criminals. clearly, this is not in our self-interest. that it has significant oil reserves certainly made it more attractive (and probably tipped the balance) to decide to use our military resources.

Naw,

GWBush is simply following the script laid out ever so carefully by bin Laden.

You know, the one from bin Ladens speech where he said:

All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

in his taped message of October, 2004.

Funny they do this on the eve of his prime time event.

News of the attack immediately set off new waves of anti-American anger in Mogadishu, where the United States has a complicated legacy. A target of the U.S. strikes was Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, shown in an FBI poster.

Barwaqho Mohammed Osman, a mother of two, stood in the street this morning with plastic bags of groceries in her hands and no way to get home.

Ethiopian soldiers told her that her neighborhood had been sealed off because of the raids. When Ms. Osman tried to plead with them, witnesses said, the soldiers clicked the safeties off their guns and told her to go.

"Why did our president bring in these people?" she fumed. "They are occupiers, and if they keep this up, they will fail at every step."

Not that we should mock. At first blush, the Somalia raid (or raids) looks like just the kind of action that a global war on terror should entail, had it not been diverted by the unrelated nonsense about WMD and Iraq.

After all, the Americans say they aimed their fire on Sunday at al-Qaida bigwigs, thought to be responsible for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Zapping bad guys like them is exactly what the war on terror was supposed to be about.

But Sunday's operation carried serious risks. There is the propaganda coup - with the jihadist enemy represented by the US, once again, bombing a Muslim country.

If the Americans have bungled, and civilians have been killed, then the recruiting impact for al-Qaida and others will be even greater. And the precedents suggest such raids from the sky are horribly inaccurate.

It appears that there is nothing the US can do that will satisfy these critics.

jim, let's be very clear about this: it isn't the US, it's the bush administration. up until recently, the republican controlled congress as well. both deserve the scorn heaped upon them, for their lies, corruption and ineptitude.

after the past 6 years, suddenly, we're supposed to take them at their word? well pal, you may have swallowed a hearty helping o' that koolaid, but i haven't. nor, have the majority of the country's adult population, if the latest polls are to be believed.

CAIRO, Jan 10 (Reuters) - The Arab League said on Wednesday U.S. military action in Somalia had killed "many innocent victims" and demanded that Washington refrain from such attacks.
...
...U.S. officials said there had been no new U.S. air strikes in Somalia since an operation on Monday, and Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi also said there had been only one U.S. air attack with no civilian casualties.

U.S. government sources said U.S. ally Ethiopia, which defeated Islamist forces in a lightning war last month, had conducted further air strikes since Monday.

In Cairo, the Arab League's Assistant Secretary-General Ahmed Ben Hilli said: "We demand that these strikes which now target civilians and led to the killing of many innocent victims be stopped."

"There was no U.N. Security Council authorisation for the U.S. forces to hit Somali areas," he told reporters.

No new U.S. air strikes since Monday? How nice. Don't be so hard on these guys. They care. :-/

The recent attacks, part of an intensified attempt to establish American hegemony over the entire Horn of Africa, have heightened the threat that the conflict in Somalia will ignite a regional war with unforeseeable consequences. ...

The direct US military intervention is in part a product of the Bush administration's inability to rely on various proxies it had hoped would be able to advance Washington's plans.

The US response to the driving out of its military from the capital Mogadishu in 1993 was first to turn to the UN in an effort to subjugate the country, then to back various warlords and finally to sponsor the creation of the TFG. However, this only fuelled anti-US sentiment and encouraged popular support for the Union of Islamic Courts.

The US-backed December 24 invasion of Somalia by up to 15,000 well-armed Ethiopian troops, backed by MIG jet fighters, appeared to easily sweep away the poorly-equipped Islamist militia. But having successfully ousted the UIC regime by using Ethiopia, Washington has nothing to replace it with that can stabilize the country. Instead, the conflict unleashed in Somalia together with Washington's plans to encourage other states to act as its military proxies threatens to destablise the entire Horn of Africa.

The area the US planes are bombing is a large jungle stretching for about 200 kilometres along the Somalia-Kenya border where the ICU militias are putting up stiff resistance. The US's main military objective is to crush the remnants of the ICU to a point of no return. The ICU here may still have more than 2,000 men in arms and ready to fight. The Somali media report that Ethiopian troops on the ground took heavy casualties on 7-8 January and hence asked for the US bombardment. Ethiopian MIG jets themselves had been bombing this area for about ten days but are unlikely to have the capacity for the pinpoint strikes that the US's superior technology can guarantee.

In all this military escalation, it is too easy to forget that innocent civilians - including those already displaced by and fleeing from the war - are being killed, perhaps in considerable numbers. Some farmers of the region are also losing the animals that are the foundation of their livelihood. This situation has the ingredients of a humanitarian disaster that compounds Somalia's already endemic human insecurity.

Did you read Utopia, by Thomas More. In it, I believe, he advocates such a policy. But his book should not be taken as a serious dissertation on society.

Look at how Qaddafi stopped being a terrorist after his tents were bombed by Reagan.  

To say "Muslim culture tanked" is to ignore the millions of Muslim scientists, poets, teachers etc ; probobly with good reason as the neocons are nowhere without the un-edgicated.

First, kdog, discussing alternatives to military action wrote in #83:

However...Ghandi didn't tit for tat, MLK didn't tit for tat...they were victorious.  Peace, justice, freedom, equality...thats powerful stuff.  

Endeavoring to address this point, I decided to discuss the efficacy of the methods used by Gandhi and Dr. King. I recalled that these two men successfuly applied techniques of passive resistance against Western societies.

Note that there are two parts to their success: the method and the environments in which they worked. kdog emphasized the abandonment of "tit for tat." Many people advocating passive resistance focus on the details of that method. On the other hand, I emphasized the environment, the societies, on which those methods were successfully applied.

I noted that these Western societies had fundamental ideals that conflicted with the repressive and bigoted actions being opposed. That cognitive dissonance provided a wedge that could be--and was--used to separate the bigots from people able to admit that societal fundamental ideals were not being upheld.

Then, I contrasted these two Western societies with two others: (1) modern Islamists and their supporting societies; and (2) historic Nazi Germans. I noted that in neither case is there a conflict between the fundamental ideals of those societies and the actions we seek to oppose.

So, even were we to adopt the methods of Gandhi and Dr. King, I doubt that the environment--the societies--on which we would apply it, is suitable. To put it simply, countries without fundamental ideals respecting life, property, and civil rights are not fertile ground for passive resistance.

That brings me to the usual suspects. First, of course, is Edger with the usual "Missed the point! Missed the point!" It is noteworthy that he comes back a few hours later and proceeds to...miss the point!

He provides examples the "accomplishments of Islam" as if they were ever in doubt and as if they have anything at all to do with fundamental ideals of freedom, equality, peace, and civil rights. I'm not really sure why he's so interested in contrasting the inventions of the Islamic world with those of the West, but that contrast has nothing to do with whether a conflict exists between the terrorists and the ideals of Islamic society.

Ernesto del Mundo takes a different tactic in #86. He provides examples of US military operations, and accuses me of trying to be "more righteous than any other barbarian." Like Edger's comment, his does not actually address my argument.

When I first read it, I thought he was attempting to claim that the US does not, in fact, have fundamental ideals of respect for life, property, and civil rights. But then I noticed that he never real says that (not to mention it'd be pretty difficult to claim). That parting shot about righteousness was also a nice touch.

The herdsmen had gathered with their animals around large fires at night to ward off mosquitoes. But lit up by the flames, they became latest victims of America's war on terror.

It was their tragedy to be misidentified in a secret operation by special forces attempting to kill three top al-Qa'ida leaders in south-ern Somalia.

Oxfam yesterday confirmed at least 70 nomads in the Afmadow district near the border with Kenya had been killed. The nomads were bombed at night and during the day while searching for water sources. Meanwhile, the US ambassador to Kenya has acknowledged that the onslaught on Islamist fighters failed to kill any of the three prime targets wanted for their alleged role in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.