The attack on the AMISOM compound AND DynCorp office — good luck finding much coverage of the latter or any discussion of its ramifications — were a preemptive strike against foreign fighters in Mogadishu, reportedly timed during a meeting b/w several international representatives, at a stage where reports of AMISOM’s enhanced mandate to wage counterinsurgency operations abound.

Same situation that took place in Beledweyn a few months back when a hotel bombing took out the TFG’s security minister and others who had just returned from Ethiopia leading fresh forces planning on conducting operations in Central Somalia as they were holding meetings.

It was only the western media that “billed” the attacks last week as revenge, leaving out, among other important contexts, that of its strategy. That’s essentially propaganda – you leave out the context to shape the reader’s perception of what took place, which in this case strips one of the parties of any logical catalyst, substituting, instead, that of irrational & reactionary behavior.

This then sets up the opportunity to cherry pick quotes from select individuals — assuming they exist at all & were not constructed out of whole cloth — that reinforce the framing of a narrative that biasedly supports one of the parties in the conflict at the expense of the population at large, relying on several unquestioned premises to do so: the TFG is a legitimate, constituted govt of the people of Somalia; the foreign fighters propping it up on behalf of its foreign sponsors are “peacekeepers” and wearing the white hats; the rebels are extremists, unpopular in Somalia, and should be destroyed.

This blog entry is no different. It purports to tell us that we can learn (“may be instructive”) from the quoted reaction of a businesswoman, trying to make sense of the reason provided her for the bombing, that there is likely popular support for “a real international force” to invade Somalia and “[take] the fight to them in Mogadishu and elsewhere,” w/ “them” being conflated into “al Qaeda” in the third-from-last paragraph.

The real instructive lesson to be learned from all the attacks against foreign forces in Somalia is that the people of Somalia are just like most everybody else on the planet – they do not like uninvited foreign militaries in their neighborhoods, especially when they have been sent their to protect rulers imposed on them by outsiders. Advocation of sending “a real international force” – one supposes that this implies U.S. leadership – into “Mogadishu and elsewhere” only indicates a failure of comprehension at the most fundamental levels.