Why Is No One Talking About the ‘New War’ Trump Is Waging in Somalia?
While the administration hounds Somali immigrants at home, it’s pummeling Somalia with an ‘unprecedented’ volume of airstrikes, but you might not know it given the silence from our media and Congress.
Ask the average person to name the major war that Donald Trump started, and they’ll understandably say Iran, now rounding out its fifth month with no end in sight. But entirely in obscurity, Trump has launched what one think-tank expert terms an “unprecedented increase” in strikes in Somalia – so unprecedented as, in his view, to represent an entirely new war emerging from the U.S. inability to defeat an adversary that it has fought for an entire generation.
It is no longer a surprise that Somalia garners little attention. But it should be scandalous, because such neglect has permitted the U.S. military to wage an adjunct forever-war against jihadists in Somalia for 20 years, ever since a U.S.-backed and long-forgotten Ethiopian invasion in 2006. That ties Somalia with the 2001-21 Afghanistan war as America’s longest foreign conflict. But since the U.S. fights in Somalia without conventional ground forces, it has never faced any pressure to demonstrate success, let alone end operations. The U.S. war in Somalia has become a signal case of the so-called “War on Terror” launching an imperial police action uninterrupted by any need to justify itself. In another six months, this invisible, politically frictionless campaign will rank as the longest foreign war the U.S. has ever fought.
Congress certainly isn’t demanding any justification – or even devoting much in the way of scrutiny.