‘The US, after training and egging on the Ethiopians to intervene in the Somali civil war, is now bombing and strafing Somalis. The government "suspects" they might be al-Qaida.

That is a load of horse apples. You can't identify people, much less their politics, from an airplane or a helicopter. Air power always kills innocent civilians. That obscene euphemism "collateral damage" changes neither the facts on the ground nor the immorality of the act. I assume most Americans still think it is immoral to kill innocent people.

It amazes me how the talking class in this country can agonize, expostulate, groan and moan, condemn and abhor the deaths that result when some desperate youth straps a bomb to his waist and detonates it. Yet, when bombs fall from the sky or are detonated in another country, the talking class shrugs. To paraphrase the poet Gertrude Stein, a bomb is a bomb is a bomb. How it's delivered is irrelevant. A bomb by any other name kills as certainly.

And what are we doing back in Somalia? Chasing so-called terrorists is the party line, but since when does it require a foreign army, helicopter gunships and bombers to chase down a few al-Qaida people? No, the truth is that we backed the warlords against an Islamic group, and when the warlords failed, we brought in the Ethiopians.

It is true, I believe, that one reaps what one sows, and by the time this administration is out of office, it will have sown so much hatred for America that there will be enough to last for generations.’

How It All Began