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| Home Front: WoT |
| The way to win a war |
| 2007-01-06 |
| Jack Kelly IT’S hard to win a war if you quit fighting in the middle of it. That’s the lesson we should learn from Ethiopia’s New Year’s message to us. Six months ago, when the militia of the Union of Islamic Courts seized the Somali capital of Mogadishu, it appeared that the al-Qaeda-affiliated radicals were on the verge of a major triumph. The redoubtable StrategyPage declared them “unstoppable,” and the usual hand-wringers were urging us to negotiate with them. All Islamic extremists are unlovely, but the Union of Islamic Courts are a particularly nasty bunch. They modeled themselves on the (now deposed) Taliban in Afghanistan, and imposed their harsh version of Sharia (Islamic law) on the territory they controlled. Movies and the playing of music were banned. So were smoking tobacco and chewing khat, a mild hallucinogen. Women were barred from beaches. People who didn’t pray five times a day were threatened with beheading. More than 20,000 Somalis fled in small boats across the Gulf of Aden to seek sanctuary in Yemen, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Thousands more clogged refugee camps in neighboring countries. In November, the Union of Islamic Courts began an offensive against the provincial capital of Baidoa, where the U.N.-recognized government of Somalia had taken refuge, and announced plans to extend its “jihad” to Ethiopia, Somalia’s neighbor to the west, and Kenya, its neighbor to the south. But all that changed in the last week of 2006. A Reuters dispatch Dec. 28 indicates why: “The bloated corpses of Islamist fighters and an unbroken line of tank tracks along the Baidoa-Mogadishu highway tell the story of a swift advance for the Somali government and its Ethiopian allies.” |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 Never gonna happen. We'll be lucky if Bush doesn't give them a temporary worker program and SS benefits. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2007-01-06 20:22 |
| #2 While I agree with most of this piece I think the real test for the Ethiopians and the farce that is the UN recognized government is yet to come. How will these forces react once the suicide bombings start and the aid agencies object to any attempt to stop them; let alone once CNN puts a "reporter" in whatever passes for a decent hotel in Mogadishu. More ruthless killing of jihadis, please. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2007-01-06 16:45 |
| #1 "the surest way to win in war is to kill the enemy" The Dems and Leftists (but I repeat myself) know this. Which tells us that, since they don't want our military to do that, they don't want us to win. At anything. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2007-01-06 14:45 |