The United States is backing a group of warlords in Mogadishu, the capital of the nearly stateless nation of Somalia. With U.S. cash, the warlords have launched attacks on Islamic organizations that are attempting to establish Islamic law in Mogadishu, which has had no rule of law at all for at least the past fifteen years. The weak interim government of Somalia has appealed to the U.S. to stop funding the warlords. But Washington claims it is funding anti-terrorism. The warlords are saying, “me, too” – and have cynically styled themselves as an anti-terrorist alliance. Meanwhile, most of the dead are civilians, slaughtered in American-facilitated street fighting.

Forget about the romanticized heroics “Black Hawk Down,” one of the most racist movies of the 21st Century. The U.S. is up to the same thing in Somalia as it is in Afghanistan: collaborating with criminals and warlords to further American policy and profits. Those states it cannot control, it destroys – and then blames the natives for their inability to run a government. U.S. intelligence agencies always ally themselves with criminals, warlords and drug kings. Such has been the case on every continent, in every nation that the U.S. sought to dominate, especially since World War II. From mafiosa in Italy and France, to ex-Nazis in Germany, former collaborators with the Japanese in postwar Vietnam and Korea, mass murderers of millions in Indonesia, thieves and assassins in the Congo, thug generals throughout Latin America and Haiti, cocaine barons in Colombia, kleptocrats in the Philippines, a fascist military junta in Greece, a torture regime in Iran, a Baathist gang in Iraq, drugs for guns in Central America, with a direct line to South Central LA….

Have I left anything out? Yes, most of it. American abominations against law and civilization are so voluminous, it would take much longer than a brief broadcast just to read the place names of U.S. crimes of the past 50 years.

Destabilization of sovereign nations is not an aberration of U.S. policy – it is the core of U.S. foreign policy, dating back to before the founding of the republic. Fueled by racial and quasi-religious notions of Manifest Destiny, the American imperial mission began at Jamestown, Virginia, and now circles, patrols, and punishes the planet.

Regime change is official U.S. policy. In Somalia, there is hardly a regime to change, but this does not matter. The Somali people will be punished, for not organizing themselves according to U.S. dictums. Even Europeans cringe at the seemingly pointless slaughter that the U.S. has now instigated once again in Somalia. But of course, there is a point, a method to American-fostered madness. The horrors of Mogadishu, of post-Aristide Haiti, of Colombia, of central Africa, all make sense if one understands that the Bush men – and their mascot, Condoleezza Rice – are pirates. Like all pirates, they seek to destroy international norms, and to substitute their own version of chaos. In such a world, raw military power will rule – or at least, that’s the theory. Given this perverted logic, warlords, drug kings and criminals are Washington’s perfect allies and surrogates. Criminals do, after all, share a common world view. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.

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