Brit Dee, Contributing Writer
Following last year's successful NATO mission in Libya, the Western corporate and political power structures forging a "new world order" have turned their sights on another strategically important African country -- Somalia.
As reported in yesterday's The Guardian, the use of air strikes is being considered against "pirates and Islamic insurgents" operating in the country.
An armed insurgent group called Al-Shabaab, which has allegedly pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda, is currently waging a war against the shaky Western-backed Somali transitional government. US unmanned drone strikes against suspected militants have been taking place for some time -- last month British national Bilal el-Berwaji was killed in a strike near Mogadishu -- but now the West is considering "over the beach" airstrikes, using heavily armed helicopter gunships to attack purported Al-Shabaab training camps.
Such strikes have so far been resisted, the article tells us, because:
Claims of a concern for civilian deaths seem disingenuous, considering the thousands of innocents killed during NATO's relentless bombing of Libya last year -- and no doubt the situation will indeed "change", as Somalia is strategically important in the war for resources currently being fought on the global Grand Chessboard.planners have...flagged the likelihood that civilians could be caught up in any fighting. That has been one of the prime considerations militating against pre-emptive military action, though sources said that situation could change.
Somalia is rich in natural resources and believed to possess vast unexploited oil reserves, including in Puntland Province, said to hold between 5 and 10 billion barrels of oil, and in which Western oil companies began drilling earlier this year.
Somalia is also important in terms of the transit of oil and other goods, the British government estimating that annually 23,000 ships transit the adjoining Gulf of Aden, carrying $1 trillion of trade. Somalia's pirates have been a persistent annoyance to those using such vital oil shipping routes.
To justify yet more overseas military action, officials have been hyping the supposed terror threat posed to Britain by Al-Shabaab. It is claimed that Somalia is the new Afghanistan/Pakistan, attracting young British Muslims who seek training in Al-Shabaab's camps so that they can wage jihad against the West. States The Guardian states:
Some have been caught and are facing trial in the region, but intelligence agencies say it is only a matter of time before one of them attempts to bring terror back to their homeland
As well as utilizing drone strikes, and the impending helicopter gunship strikes, the West has been using food as a weapon of control in Somalia. Susan Garth details how the US:
...has denied aid to all areas of Somalia that are not under the control of the US-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG), meaning that aid is restricted to a few square miles. 'We are committed to saving lives in Somalia and we are already working in any area not controlled by al-Shabaab,' Donald Steinberg, deputy administrator of USAid told a press conference in London. 'Unfortunately, about 60 percent of people affected are in al-Shabaab territories.' One could not have a clearer statement of Washington’s intention to use food and famine as weapons of war against a civilian population.
Thus we again see imperialists killing foreign civilians in order to secure access to natural resources, using the excuse of terrorism and "humanitarianism" to justify illegitimate warmongering, and appease the traditionally anti-imperial, but increasingly pro-interventionist, Western liberal left.
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