WHA' HABBIN?

Once again, the west wages the wrong war (Rageh Omaar, 05 February 2007, New Statesman)

The Islamic courts were feared, but the presence of Ethiopian troops in the Somali capital is hugely unpopular. Islamist fighters, many of whom melted into the civilian population, recognise this, and see the semi-nationalist desire to expel foreign occupiers as an opportunity to foster insurgency guerrilla movements.

Ethiopia knows how successful such movements can be. It has itself been wracked by decades of guerrilla wars, and its current government sprung from such a movement. It is urgently encouraging other African countries to send peacekeepers so that it can leave. [...]

Somalis have been guest workers in the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, for decades, giving Saudi Arabia considerable economic and cultural influence over the people and institutions of the as yet unrecognised Republic of Somaliland. One influence has been the financing of schools based on the puritanical Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. Western governments seem unperturbed. They are more worried, in the case of Somalia, by the emergence of a loose alliance of home-grown Islamists who came to power because they got rid of hated warlords, than with the large sums of money being spent by Saudi institutions to spread an austere version of Islam.

This is the stance that led Tony Blair's government to call off the investigation into alleged corruption in the BAE System's arms deal with Saudi Arabia, which Blair declared played a key role in the war on terror. Saudi Arabia has for so long been forgiven almost anything by western governments that the kingdom has become wilfully blind to its own role in promoting the very thing that the British and American governments so readily go to war to stop.

So we do nothing about the root cause while giving the people a legitimate grievance against us. Savvy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 1, 2007 7:56 AM