Kenya Invades Somalia: World War III?

On Saturday, October 15, 2011, Kenya invaded Somalia. Earlier in the week President Barack Obama announced he was sending U.S. combat troops to Uganda [See Obama Sends U.S. Gunmen to Uganda]. Uganda and Burundi already have troops occupying part of Somalia. Meanwhile the U.S. occupation army has not quite left Iraq. The U.S. is now in an undeclared war with Pakistan [as I predicted in U.S. Close to War with Pakistan on April 23, 2011] and has operations in Oman and other nations. Iran, too, is on U.S. target lists.

Note that the United Nations (U.N.) is not going to protect Somalia. The U.N. does not exist to protect weak nations from invasions by stronger ones. The U.N. exists mainly to further the agendas of the Great Powers, and right now the only powers of any global importance are the U.S., Europe, and China. None of them care for the current de facto government of Somalia, the militia/political party Al Shabaab. Surprisingly the Kenya military did not announce it was "invited in" by the "provisional government" of Somalia, a hand-picked group of U.S. puppets backed by hundreds of genuine supporters and those Ugandan troops already mentioned.

Maybe the U.S. forgot to order President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed to invite in Kenya as an ally in the civil war. Don't forget the formidable Ethiopian army invaded Somalia in 2006, financed by the U.S., with the same purpose, with the brilliant result of destroying the moderate Islamic de facto government, leading to the rise of Al Shabaab as the dominant popular government. [Sharif Ahmed, now a U.S. puppet, was a leader of the regime destroyed by Ethiopia, the Islamic Courts Union.]

Sure, there are a lot of moving parts to keep track of, but this is really beginning to look like World War III, with the United States playing the role Britain played in World War II: an imperialist power about to be bankrupted.

Neither World War I nor World War II started on a single day. Both had their preludes and aftermaths. A smart and strong U.S. President could defuse the situation by withdrawing from Afghanistan, apologizing to Iran, Pakistan, and Oman, recognizing Al Shabaab, and recognizing the state of Palestine and the right of Palestinians to have their private property returned to them. Obama can't do that; he has become a subservient tool of the U.S. corporate security state, and was certainly vetted for that role before being allowed to become the Democratic Party frontrunner in 2008.

A single incident, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is said to have started World War I. More important than the spark were the stacks of powder kegs all around: the rivalries of the imperialist, industrialist powers, most notably between the British capitalists and their German cousins.

World War II is more instructive. It is generally marked as starting when German armies attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, or when Great Britain declared war on Germany the next day, escalating a regional conflict into a global war. But in East Asia the anti-imperialist war of Japan and its allies against the European colonialists had long been underway, and would last until the United States withdrew, defeated, from Vietnam in 1975. In Europe World War II probably became inevitable when Britain, France, and the United States refused to support the democratically elected government of Spain in its civil war with General Franco (with support from his fellow Catholics Pope Pius XI, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini), leading to Franco's victory in March 1939.

Al Qaeda is not a great industrial power that can have its factories bombed into impotence, as happened to Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II. The strategy of Al Qaeda has always been based on Osama Bin Laden's analysis of the fall of the Soviet Union. It was caused by a lopsided militaristic economy, aggravated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda's goal has always been to cause a similar collapse of the United States economy by irritating the U.S. into asymmetrical expenditures. It has largely succeeded. At this point the only way Al Qaeda can fail is if the U.S. severely cuts back its military and homeland security expenditures and starts taking care of its own people. Instead our leaders continue to fall into the Al Qaeda trap.

Al Qaeda, however, will not be the ultimate winner in this global contest. Al Qaeda has proven it knows how to fight, but not how to govern. When Germany and Britain fought for world dominance in World War II, it was the U.S. that inherited the earth. Who will dominate the economy and culture of the next century is not easy to predict, although the easy bets are on India and China. Hopefully no nation will be stupid enough, after the lessons of the 20th century, to try to become the global superpower. That is just a recipe for eventual bankruptcy.

The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, only two weeks after the German invasion (in fairness, Poland did not exist before the end of World War I, so both Germany and the U.S.S.R. claimed to be reclaiming lost territory). Yet the British Empire did not declare war on the U.S.S.R. Germany was seen as more of a threat to the British Empire, short run. Britain (and its ally France) was in no position to fight both Stalin and Hitler at the same time. So they chose to fight Hitler. Even that kind of pragmatisim did not save the British Empire (or the French, or Dutch empires) in the long run. When the French, after the briefest face-saving hint of battle, were brought over to the German side (by Marshal Petain, another Roman Catholic fascist), that should have meant global dominance for Germany. That, in turn, would have required more patience than Hitler had. The Catholic armies of Europe, instead of finishing off the British, attacked the athiest U.S.S.R., cheered on by the Pope. Everyone forgets that some 30 million athiests died before Hitler's Catholic hords were defeated.

If the United Nations were about peace, it would sanction Kenya and, if necessary, send in troops to expel the Kenyans from Somalia. Watch it do nothing, just as its predecessor, the League of Nations, consistently did nothing to prevent World War II. Again, there was a reason: Woodrow Wilson designed the League of Nations to be a racist, imperialist institution, and it stuck to that design.