One of the few enlightened souls who graces the pages of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq is General David Petraeus, now named commander of the American forces in Iraq.  In the book, he argued that the goal of the American forces should not be to kill as many terrorists as possible but to win the hearts and minds of as many Iraqi civilians as possible.  The United States has belatedly accepted his advice and sent him to repair the damage there.  But it appears that this lesson only applies to Iraq because in the Horn of Africa, the United States is listening to the advice of Meles Zenawi.  Not for him, the battle for the hearts and minds; he is old school: the way to win wars is to kill as many people as possible.

And the explanations for the pre-emptive invasion of Somalia:  Oh, my!  If I can borrow the words of a correspondent who was not happy with something I wrote, �I am going to a children�s party and I am going to twist balloons in the shape of your logic.�   It is based on the flawed logic of "there are only two kinds of Muslims: secular Muslims and terrorists."

When the war against Somalia was waged, it was terrible deja-vu, 2000 all over.  Same series of lies and half-truths; same cockiness; If Ethiopia was mimicking the announcements of the Generals of Desert Storm in 2000; it is mimicking the Generals of Shock and Awe in 2006-7: �our forces are chasing them�; we are doing �mop up operations�; �we have broken their back� we will be done �in a couple of weeks.�  Except this time there was no Selome Taddesse � Meles was the MC and the guest of honor and, in this war, the US was persuaded to enter to get 3 targets in the so-called mop up.

Which brings us to the first big mistake in the War Against Terror in general and the disaster in Somalia specifically. If you have 3 legitimate targets and you use a frightening machine that can kill 3000 and end up killing 30; and a terrorist uses a crude machine that can kill 300 and kills 30, doesn�t it make it harder to refute the claim that your approach is no different from those you are fighting? You may say that the key difference is intent�you had no intention of killing 3000 whereas a terrorist, by definition, intends to do so�you may recoil at the �moral relativism� suggested by the comparison.  But that is small comfort to a parent who loses a child in your �collateral damage� and another in a suicide bombing.  

Here�s how the Economist described American attack of Southern Somalia:

The Americans used the AC-130, a behemoth designed to shred large areas instantly, in the knowledge that the killing fields would be cleared before journalists and aid workers could reach them. The Americans said that their first overt action in Somalia since 1993 was limited to stopping �al-Qaeda terrorists� from escaping.  But that label hardly describes the bulk of the Islamist fighters, many of whom are little more than boys. 

It was so 2003!  It wasn�t just Meles Zenawi applauding it; it was also the �government� of Somalia, which became the first in the world to actually welcome the bombing of its own citizens. It didn�t even go through the requisite sovereignty contortions of whining that its airspace had been violated, etc.

When you have no interest in winning hearts and minds and adopt a �kill�em all; let God sort�em out!� approach, you create a vicious cycle. The unintelligent way that the �war against terror� has been waged so far has resulted in the radicalization of the Muslim.

Ethiopia just helped get rid of people who closed movie theatres, and brought to power people who close media outlets, perhaps the most independent in our region.  In the tit-for-tat world the regimes of Eritrea and Ethiopia live in, I can�t wait for the surreal Shabait.com, which wrote 17 editorials, commentaries and national news about Somalia in December, to write an editorial about the dangers of closing the independent media.

There is nothing in the history of Meles Zenawi that indicates that he has a bias against Muslims or what they value; there is plenty to indicate that he has a strong bias for staying in power and that he�ll do whatever it takes to stay there. (In a recent interview, he indicated that this is the last time he will be prime minister which means we will now have to go through the Hosni Mubarek farce: I will do it just this time, but please don�t beg me for one more term after that, wink, wink.)  

To say that someone does not have a bias against something does not mean he is automatically comfortable with it. Most left-wing organizations and individuals are uncomfortable with any religion, as an organizing force or even as their people's primary identity since it contradicts with their goal of whatever social engineering they are up to. In Eritrea, for example, we do not have Muslims or Christians; we have �followers of the Islamic faith� and �followers of the Christian faith,� according to the State media.  Using this avoidance language, we can say that you are not "Eritrean", you are "possessor of the Eritrean nationality."

If they invested any time to understand their people, they would know that their Muslims are not divided into Secular Muslims and Potential Terrorists. They include the secular (the ones they know because most "secular muslims" are in the state machinery and the arts), traditional Muslims (their fathers, whom they call �backward�), ideological Muslims (Islamists who present Islam as a political ideology that is capable of bringing a just government, whom they call Jihadists) and extremists Muslims (terrorists, whom they also call Jihadists.)

Such are the new crop of Bush's Neo Buffalo Soldiers: waging wars on behalf of the dominant establishment, against their own people, against people like them, to get funding, military bases, or alliances.  They are best situated to educate America about Islam, but they choose to swim in the confusion they create.  We Eritreans have been listening to this type of ignorance or misinformation of calling every Muslim you don�t understand �Jihadist� since 1994. Now Meles Zenawi has enlisted in this Jihad for Dummies school. Unfortunately for him, it appears that he has a more determined, more motivated and heavily-armed and financed adversary than Isaias ever did.

General Patton once told his soldiers, �your job is not to die for your country; your job is to make the other son-of-a-bitch die for his!�  If Meles were to make that speech, his soldiers might say, �what if it is not your country? And what if the other son of a bitch refuses to die but goes underground to fight another day?�

Wars for hagerawi dehn�net (national security) are more glamorous than wars against d'henet (poverty.)  If Meles Zenawi doesn�t withdraw soon, he is going to miss the boring but bloodless war against d'henet he was engaged in with mixed results for the last 15 years. Unless, using the American policy in Iraq, he starts saying: �we are fighting them there, so we don�t have to fight them here� which had a great comeback line from a naughty comedian once: �don�t they have mapquest?�  They do; and the longer he stays in Somalia, the more they commit it to memory.

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