Afghanistan and Iraq have monopolised the headlines but Somalia is arguably an even greater victim of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived and lamentably executed War on Terror. America’s interventions have proved so catastrophic that its best hope of salvaging something from the wreckage is a president it chased from power three years ago, who controls a few square miles of a country three times the size of Britain.
[...]
In 2006 a grassroots movement called the Islamic Courts Union emerged [in Somalia]. Fearing that the Courts would become a new Taleban and Somalia another Afghanistan, Washington sought to stop the Islamists by giving the warlords millions of dollars for arms — the same warlords who had humiliated America in 1993 and subsequently caused such carnage. The plan failed. The Courts drove the warlords from Mogadishu and imposed order for the first time in a generation. The city’s roadblocks and machineguns vanished. Exiles returned, businesses reopened and people ventured out at night.
[...]
Europe broadly favoured engagement with the Courts’ moderate leaders. The Bush Administration backed an invasion by Christian-ruled Ethiopia, Somalia’s bitter enemy, which replaced the Courts with a deeply unpopular transitional government of former warlords. After six months of relative peace Somalia was plunged back into war, with al-Shabaab portraying themselves as nationalists fighting a puppet government. Revisiting Mogadishu in April 2007, I saw how the hopes of peace had evaporated.

Today al-Shabaab controls much of Somalia and most of Mogadishu. It has morphed into a jihadist movement with ties to al-Qaeda.

I guess when Bush called the War on Terror a ‘crusade’, he wasn’t kidding. What HAS the War on Terror achieved other than corporate profits from bogus wars and a legion of radicalised Muslims?