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And now … other news

Thursday, September 17, 2009

ONE OF THE ODDITIES for me in US politics and political coverage has been an apparent inability to concentrate on more than one topic at a time.

A hallmark of good government, and of the best journalistic surveillance over those who govern - I’ve always thought - is to maintain an eagle-eyed 360-degree alertness. So much so that I was deeply puzzled in the earliest days of the Barack Obama Administration when friends of mine and fellow-commentators expressed fears that the White House newbies were “trying to tackle too much at once”.

 

It seemed to me that a lot had to be tackled, and no-one had the luxury of setting a calibrated time-line of relative priorities.

 

Now, eight months or so later, such discussion is moot – or I am maybe just proven wrong. For, certainly as far as the media are concerned (and maybe the White House too now, though I remain more hopeful about those guys) the “single-issue” topic of health-care overhaul (with all its accompanying cacophony) is crowding everything else out.

 

(“Single-issue” may sound too loaded a political label for it, with its echoes of the incendiary, sometimes even murderous, abortion conflict; but I feel it’s horribly apt.)

 

To judge by print headlines, broadcast running-orders, and websites’ top-lining content, other powerfully pressing subject-matter is definitely getting a media down-grade. We have to drill down quite a bit further for coverage of, say, banking reform (despite a nearly-but-not-quite hectoring Presidential speech to Wall Street this week) or even the looming re-escalation of US involvement in Afghanistan – or, still less prominently reported, our seriously wobbling departure-plans from Iraq (despite Vice President Joe Biden’s very nearly mortar-bombed talks in Baghdad two days ago).

 

Alertness to other vital matters, especially in the international arena, is being relegated, too.

 

It seems like it’s time for one of my periodic scannings of under-reported horizons. And unsurprisingly given my predilections and interests, those horizons are African.

 

I look to Somalia, the Horn of Africa country from where the US so ignominiously withdrew back in 1994 after the traumatic "Black Hawk Down" episode. The country continues its degeneration - for all the struggling efforts of a relatively moderate Islamic,  and inevitably very fragile, “government” under President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmad - into the kind of anarchic chaos that can nurture growth for the likes of Al Qaeda. Only this morning, in the capital Mogadishu, the headquaters of the African Union force, which along with the United Nations supports Ahmad's rule, was hit by a suicide bombing.

   

 

  

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US SPECIAL FORCES, HELICOPTERED into Somalia from a Navy ship in the Indian Ocean (said to be disguised as French, oddly enough) may this week have killed the Kenya-born bomb-expert Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan (above left) who functioned as Al Qaeda’s most direct link with Somalia’s home-grown jihadist militia, Al-Shabab. But US policy as a whole is looking uncertain in the region - and such one-off, darting attacks could, it’s strongly feared, rebound negatively.

 

We need only recall the last major American strike in Somalia 16 months ago, which killed al-Shabab's military leader Aden Hashi Ayro, plus at least 10 others. In the end it has had little effect on the group’s capabilities, and local media report that it has, quite adversely, helped to recruit many more Somalis to al-Shabab. (Recruits have also included, intriguingly, young Somali-American men from Minneapolis – some of whom are now known to have been trained in explosives tactics by Nabhan.)

 

Just to quote yet more evidence of the amoral turbulence - the sheer inchoate mess in fact - that increasingly typifies Somalia as that ominous entity, a "failed state", I'd like you consider this recent event. Last weekend, shells fired by jihadist forces toward Mgoadishu's port facilities landed devastatingly on a nursing home for - of all people - disabled veterans of the country’s long-lasting wars.

 

In the mortar-smashed wards, 15 dead bodies were found (above right) and many already paralysed or limbless residents were badly injured.

 

In the broad scheme of things, it's perhaps a relatively small story – and it's true you would have had to look pretty hard to find it among America’s general news-outlets.

 

But besides the US State Department and the White House, I’d sure like American reporters and editors to ponder the omen-filled reaction of Red Cross representative Benjamin Wahren to this latest example of Somalia's interminable horrors: “Violence remains a feature of everyday life … as armed conflict and total lack of respect for human life continue to affect the population on a daily basis".

 

A decade ago, seasoned international observers were saying much the same about Afghanistan, as time ticked away unnoticeably toward September 11, 2001. 

 

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