Pirates me hearties, pirates!

[kandrathe]

It's a mess, and I don't see any damn answer. Fixing Somalia doesn't even solve the issue as there are other countries there that will just cause issues as well.

It can be solved, but foremost, the people of Somalia have to want it solved and agree to the solution. The starting point is martial "Security". You need to control the borders and the ports to deny or starve any insurgency of their means of external support. Simultaneously, you need to remove the motivation for the people to fight, and this means provide food, clothing and shelter. Once you have enforced stability, then you can start to implement civilian run agencies at the local levels, then start to sew them together into a civilian authority which will eventually become their new government. Once you have a functioning civilian authority, you can ease back on the martial law.

That is the theory at least, and it has worked for Britain, and the US on a few occasions. It's very expensive, and as we've seen in Iraq, a million things can go wrong. I don't think the USA can afford to borrow more money from China to fix Somalia. The key to success is that during the transition from chaos to civilian control, the population are content with the transitional authority. If not, then you end up with the population fighting, and terminally disrupting the transitional authority.

It seems the UN has lost its gonads, or maybe its as I suspect that the power of the UN = USA + a few friends - a few 3rd world self absorbed dictators. The UN is like a basketball team with Michael Jordon (who pays most of the bills), Yao Ming, some decent earnest college players, and a whole mess of goof balls who just disrupt the game. Micheal Jordon is now frustrated and refuses to pay or play. I would imagine that the USA also has some credibility issues at the UN now. Next time we cry wolf, the security council will probably laugh at us.