Blowback in Minnesota
Today’s Times has a fantastic article about a group of young Somali refugees in Minnesota who went off to Somalia to join the Shabaab, a Somali Islamist insurgent group with loose ties to Al Qaeda. The article is very explicit on the point that these young men weren’t particularly anti-American and were instead incensed by US support of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 to unseat the Islamic Courts Union:
Most of the men are Somali refugees who left the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in two waves, starting in late 2007. While religious devotion may have predisposed them to sympathize with the Islamist cause in Somalia, it took a major geopolitical event — the Ethiopian invasion of their homeland in 2006 — to spur them to join what they saw as a legitimate resistance movement, said friends of the men.
Now, even so, it’s still unclear why it really matters for our national security that Somali refugees are joining an insurgent group that’s fighting in an interminable civil war that’s lasted for nearly 20 years, but there’s still a possibility that actually fighting in Somalia with Islamists could further radicalize these young men and give them the skills and organizational support to start doing stuff outside of Somalia. On balance, it would be better if fewer American citizens were part of Shabaab.
But anything that comes of these young men would be a textbook example of blowback, a direct result of our poor decision to assist Ethiopia in their invasion of Somalia because the Ethiopians were able to convince us that the Islamic Courts Union was significantly or potentially linked to al Qaeda.
The question of blowback in this case has nothing to do with “morality” or “moral seriousness” or “moral equivocation” or any other concepts that hawks like to throw around when confronted with this problem. Blowback is simply a risk of becoming involved in these conflicts, and it’s one that neoconservatives and their allies are generally blind to.
PS – Here’s more on our stupid intervention in Somalia.
