18 December 2002

They're Back

I was working on a homework project for my son last night and did not get to bed until after the local news ended. I checked the e-mail before I went down and got this from a friend on the West Coast, where the El Nino rains are sweeping cars down the creek beds:

"ALL K-MART AND WALMART STORES WILL BE CLOSED IN IRAQ

THEY WILL BE REPLACED WITH TARGETS."

I had expected to get up bleary this morning with Vicky Barker, the reader of the BBC News. Her unaccented and chipper English is the voice of the world to me. I prefer the thought of Vicky to that of waking with Carl Castle from NPR, though after a few minutes his dulcet tones are comforting enough. Vicky's lead story was about the three men the Indians sentenced to death this morning for the attack on the Parliament. The court gave the wife of one of them five years for not ratting them out.

I am tired, but still wired from plowing through Catch-22, the subject of a long fact sheet designed to prevent the kids from finding a paper on the internet and handing it in as original work.

I found just the right summary on the internet, all the info I need, and am doing enough cutting and pasting that it might as well be original. Yossarian and Doc Daneeka and Major Major Major and Nately and his whore have been swirling around my brain with my dreams. And Milo Minderbinder, of course, who got the medals for missions other people flew and contracted out airstrikes for the Americans and air defense for the Germans. Carl Castle gave me the update this morning on Milo's lineal successors, the Canseco Financial Group of Chicago. It probably once meant something like the "Canadian Securities Group" but lost the actual words with the acquisition fever of the '90s. They filed the third largest corporate bankruptcy in American history, trailing only Enron and Worldcom. Their stock had once been worth $58 a share and is tading this morning for less than a nickel. Whew. I can't even get my bleary brain around that amount of money.

When Vicky came back to relieve Carl on the radio, and before the traffic, she took me to Africa. Military adventures are a bit of a theme there today. The crisis on the ground in Cote D'Ivoire is deepening. Refugees are flowing in and around, the lost of Liberia are still homeless and cannot go home. Ivory Coast is the second largest economy in West Africa. A consortium of Francophone states called ECOLAS is trying to keep the country from sliding into the chaos of other sub-Saharan post-colonial entities. Liberia is anarchy, and Sierra Leone not much better. Senegal is the largest and most successful independent country in the region, leader of the French speaking community. It is chairing a summit this morning. They are very nervous. Ivory Coast was the economic engine that kept places like Burkino Faso afloat by providing guest laborers decent jobs and money to send home. It is to be determined if the rebel groups seeking to overthrow General Gay will be successful! . It is an appropriate time of the year. General Gay seized power on Christmas Day three years ago.

The interesting wrinkle is that the French, the former colonial power, is back and willing to commit prestige, resources and troops to bring stability and a return to constitutional rule. We will see how they do. But that is part of a trend across Africa. To the east, on the Red Sea, the gray hull of the USS Mount Whitney has appeared off the coast of the former French colony of Afars and Isis. It was named after the two largest tribes who live there. We call the place Djibouti today, and it has a very nice port. Excellent base, if you need one just inside the Bab al Mendeb strait that connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. There is an island there in the strait called Great Socotra. The Russians used to anchor there. It is where the Socotras come from, and I have a warm feeling for the ancestral home.

This is a tough and troubled neighborhood. To the north is Eritrea, whose wars go back to the comic-opera Italian campaign before World War Two, and the decades-ling struggle for independence. To the West is the rich ebony tradition of Haile Salassi, whose monarchy stretched back to the days before the colonialists and the Prophet and Christ. He was replaced by another Haile, this one Haile Miriam. He was not a king, but a garden-variety indigenous Marxist. To the south is the wasteland that was once French Somaliland, and the current fiction of the independent state of Somalia.

Across the straight, on the Arabian Peninsula is Yemen. The FBI just arrested three more Americans of Yemeni descent for transferring a half million dollars from Lackawanna, New York, to the terrorist network.

Vicky Barker told me that the U.S. military had vowed to end terrorism in the Horn of Africa. I remembered the words of the outlaw Ned Pepper in the movie True Grit. Robert Duval played Ned, who was asked to surrender by the aging John Wayne. Duval stood tall in the saddle and said: "That's bold talk for a one-eyed fat man."

Speaking of which, the French never really left the region. When I first traveled in the region le Legion Etrange- the French Foreign Legion- was still sitting surly in its off hours in the sidewalk cafes of Djibouti. This was one of those places that remained in the wreckage of the great Empires, of interest because the Russians deployed a fleet to the Indian Ocean to counter the Americans, who were replacing the British on the oil lanes and counter-balancing the rising independent power of India, and its desire to have a blue water Navy of their own.

Somalia. The beauty of the endless strand, the breaking pastel waves of the Indian Ocean front a nation dissolved into anarchy. It is a state which had no original reason for existence except for the French. Somali life was built on clan loyalty. Our military disaster there was a hallmark of American hubris. Flush with our victory in the Desert, our leaders apparently through we could stride across this impoverished and starving land like a Colossus. We wound up rolling back out of Mogadishu without some of our dead, tail tucked firmly between our legs.

But this morning, Vicky and Carl are telling me the powers are coming back. The French are coming back in the West. And in the East, the once-and-future Colossus is returning as well. We are building a base ashore in Djibouti, and General Tommy Franks is John Wayne, trimmer and leaner. We are going to do it right this time, and clean up a very rough neighborhood.

In closing, Vicky mentioned that Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones is 59 today. If he can make sixty, maybe anything is possible. Even the cleansing of the Horn of Africa. Hell, we might even build a missile defense system that works!