Workers League - Behind the US invasion of Somalia - Mehring Books

carried out by the US in Iraq. Far from restoring imperialist 'stability,'
it will ultimately fuel the flames of popular revolt against
colonial-style oppression throughout Africa." This prognosis is being
dramatically confirmed in the streets of Mogadishu.
There is no end in sight for this occupation. Even after the
proposed transfer of military forces in Somalia to a UN command,
5,000 US troops are to remain indefinitely on the ground. Meanwhile,
a "rapid deployment force" of marines, tanks, attack helicopters
and other war planes is to be kept in ships off shore, ready to
intervene.
Anyone still harboring illusions about the "humanitarian" motives
of this intervention should ask themselves: What role can such a force
possibly play in feeding the hungry? Its sole conceivable purpose is
the bloody suppression of an uprising by the Somali people.
The blood shed in the streets of Mogadishu is on the hands of Bill
Clinton. The intervention in Somalia, like earlier US invasions and
wars of aggression in Grenada, Panama and Iraq, was carried out with
the bipartisan support of Democrats and Republicans.
Clinton, who was inaugurated as president in the midst of US
bombings in Iraq and the occupation of Somalia by tens of thousands
of US troops, fully endorsed the militarism of the Bush administration
and has continued the interventions which it began.
The antiwar protester of the 1960s has exerted every effort to
prove himself even more aggressive than Bush in the use of military
force to defend the interests of US imperialism abroad.
Even as this aggression erupts in the massacre in Mogadishu, the
Clinton administration is embarking on another military intervention
under the cover of a humanitarian mission — this time in the
Balkans. The proposed airdrop of relief supplies to Bosnia is motivated
not by a desire to reduce the suffering of the Yugoslav people,
but to create the conditions for a provocation which will allow direct
US intervention into the region.
The source of the eruption of US militarism lies in the profound
economic crisis of American and world capitalism. Mired in a global
recession, beset by sharpening trade conflicts with its imperialist
rivals and confronting the worst domestic social crisis since the 1930s,
the American capitalist ruling class and its political representatives,
Democratic and Republican alike, have turned to a desperate policy
of military aggression. It is seeking to use America's remaining
military superiority to offset its economic decline.
American capitalism's aim is to assert hegemony over world
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