Exports up as missiles rain down
by Tom Sullivan
“Does anyone remember Congress voting to authorize a war in Somalia? Did I miss that?” Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes in a tweet this morning. Bunch was reacting to an Associated Press report on U.S. air strikes in the Horn of Africa:
In a statement issued Monday, the U.S. military’s Africa Command said it carried out four strikes on Dec. 15 in which 34 people were killed and two more on Dec. 16 which killed 28. All the air attacks were in the Gandarshe coastal area south of the capital, Mogadishu, it said.
No civilians were injured or killed in the attacks, it said.
All six strikes were carried out in close coordination with Somalia’s government, it said. The airstrikes were “conducted to prevent al-Shabab from using remote areas as a safe haven to plot, direct, inspire, and recruit for future attacks,” it said.
With these attacks, AP reports, the U.S. has carried out “at least 46 airstrikes” so far this year in Somalia against the al-Qaeda-linked group.
The CNN account adds:
In March 2017, President Donald Trump authorized the US military to carry out precision strikes targeting al-Shabaab in an effort to bolster the federal government of Somalia.
Prior to that, the US military was only authorized to carry out airstrikes in self-defense of advisers on the ground.
Self-defense is no longer “operative,” as this older tweet shows.
A US airstrike in Somalia kills more than 100 al-Shabaab militants https://t.co/EjrRwcbIDV pic.twitter.com/wpWfRTnHg7— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) November 22, 2017
Like Bunch, I guess I missed all that too. Where has my mind been?
Even with yuge Trump defense budgets “the likes of which the Pentagon has never seen,” exporting death and destruction to “Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Niger, Libya, Somalia and an untold number of other global hot spots” largely goes as unnoticed at home as The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism at the New York Times.