Gonna make me work today, huh?If Eritrea were able to get rid of the Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi, then what does this do to US policy and objectives in the Horn?
Well, my first thought is that "US policy" towards that entire region is substantially being driven by Lord Palmerston's quote of “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”
Problem is, we appear to have conflicting "permanent interests". Nobody back here in the US wants to get too tight with any governmental entity in the Horn area where the government has any real "dirty hands" from being involved with ethnic cleansing, no matter how limited. But, then they also apply the exact same rules to nations dealing with Islamic extremists (GWOT).
Well, if you base everything you do as a nation on both those two principles in the Horn of Africa, there's just about nobody out there you can deal with. And I'm hard pressed to see how a policy of "talking to and dealing with nobody" is a better alternative.
My second thought is that the US government appears to have realized to some extent that there are some pretty severe limits to force projection into that entire area. In fact, the extremely limited US involvement with supporting Ethiopia in dealing with the ICU in Somalia looks to have been relatively effective, at least in the sense that we didn't have "Blackhawk Down Part II".
The real problem I see a little further down the road is that any new administration here in the US will automatically decide that US troops in Iraq = Bad, but US forces in Darfur = Good. And they will not realize how this affects everything in the Horn.
Smart As**d Answer: There Is Any?What does this do to stability in the region?
Real Answer: ""Power abhors a vacuum". Say goodbye to the now removed autocrat, say "Hi, good to see you" to the new successor. Truthfully, we're really not going to have too much say, because you know that there's going to have to be retribution if something like that were to happen. National honor, not to mention tribal influences will demand it. And we're hamstrung anyway with our two contradictory principles (noted above) being applicable directly to what can best be described as an "ethnic fault line area".
Short answer: I don't think we can. Our only real chance at having an affect would be if any alleged and completely unverified special operations training programs were happening within the Horn area, and such alleged and completely unverified operations would make all the parties stop and think before they did something really stupid.How would the US government prevent this from happening?
And yes, I really did get a picture of that Unicorn this morning.
Let me pitch an idea back to you. It strikes me that one of the most useful things we could do in the entire Horn area would be to mount an active naval crackdown against piracy, which has seriously increased around Somalia. Such a crackdown could have a really positive effect. You wouldn't be talking about massive military forces, and that could have a substantial amount of positive effects (safer transportation, fishing, aid shipments into Somalia, etc.). Now, the most immediate downside of this would be the potential for a massive outflow of refugees from Somalia wanting to take refuge under the protection of the US led anti-piracy forces.
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