Barre, a kind of Saddam Hussein clone, from 1978 through 1990 (so
it’s not ancient history). He was tearing the country apart.
He destroyed the civil and social structures—in fact, laid the
basis for what’s happening now—and, according to Africa Watch [a
human rights monitoring group based in Washington DC], probably
killed fifty or sixty thousand people. The US was, and may well be
still, supporting him. The forces, mostly loyal to him, are being
supported through Kenya, which is very much under US influence.
The US was in Somalia for a reason—the military bases there are
part of the system aimed at the Gulf region. However, I doubt that
that’s much of a concern at this point. There are much more secure
bases and more stable areas. What’s needed now, desperately
needed, is some way to prevent the Pentagon budget from declining.
When the press and commentators say the US has no interests
there, that’s taking a very narrow and misleading view. Maintaining
the Pentagon system is a major interest for the US economy.
A Navy and Marine White Paper in September 1992 discussed the
military’s shift in focus from global threats to “regional challenges
and opportunities,” including “humanitarian assistance and nation-
building efforts in the Third World.”
That’s always been the cover, but the military budget is mainly
for intervention. In fact, even strategic nuclear forces were
basically for intervention.
The US is a global power. It isn’t like the Soviet Union, which
used to carry out intervention right around its borders, where they
had an overwhelming conventional force advantage. The US carried
out intervention everywhere—in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East
and in places where it had no such dominance. So the US had to have
an extremely intimidating posture to make sure that nobody got in
the way.
That required what was called a “nuclear umbrella”—powerful
strategic weapons to intimidate everybody, so that conventional
forces could be an instrument of political power. In fact, almost the
entire military system—its military aspect, not its economic aspect
—was geared for intervention. But that was often covered as
“nation-building.” In Vietnam, in Central America—we’re always
humanitarian.
So when the Marine Corps documents say we now have a new
mission—”humanitarian nation-building”—that’s just the old cover
story. We now have to emphasize it more because the traditional
ann
(Ann)
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