But really, I hope he’s just dead.

It’s been barely two years, but in that time span, Somalia’s economy and civil society has been gutted as if by fire — and in many cases, the literal sense applies. Of course, many things have changed since early 2007. Some of the more radical Islamists have gained strength after hardening as an armed insurgency. Half of Mogadishu’s population has been displaced by the fighting between the “transitional government” and the Islamist factions.

The tragedy is even more bitter because this is not par for the course in Somalia. Over the 15 years from 1991 after the end of the civil war, Somalia went from famine to having a functioning economy. Somalis enjoyed services such as schools, hospitals, multiple competing electricity, phone and internet companies and even a Coca-Cola bottling plant. It wasn’t Belgium by any stretch, but Somalis did for themselves what decades of foreign intervention never accomplished in any other country. All this despite the United States’ funding and arming of warlords — to “fight al-Qaeda,” of course — who continually threw off any peaceful equilibrium that might have been reached through economic stability. Those warlords now make up much of the foundering “government.”

The pirates that the world has been sweating lately do not exist in a vacuum — Somalia’s slide back down into the pit of poverty at the hands of its UN-installed “government” has forced the toughest among them to make a living where they can. Most of them would surely rather return to making money in another, less dangerous trade.

The Islamist groups have been fighting each other in recent weeks, but even this hasn’t kept one faction or another from snapping up bits of former “government” property and power. It seems the more moderate factions and tribal militias are fed up with the brutal tactics of the al-Shabaab group and are trying to finish them off before the “transitional” regime is officially routed.

I don’t know how this situation will end, except that it’s clear that forcing a state on authority-averse Somalis didn’t work the first 15 times, and likely won’t again in the future. The big question is, why wasn’t that obvious to “the international community”? Or — don your tin foil — maybe it was all along.

The Tibet march poster I saw yesterday mentioned the “atrocities” perpetrated by the Chinese government. How about the atrocities carried out, abetted, enabled, and inspired by the US Government in Iraq? The death toll in Iraq beats last month’s entire cluster of clashes in Tibet practically every hour. Why, outside of a few stickers on newspaper boxes around town, is no significant mention made of what’s going on non-stop in Iraq? Are mainstream liberals just so cowed by the see-through rhetoric of the now completely debunked War Party that they still refuse to criticize a war their military is currently prosecuting?

Why are they demurely and cowardly “supporting the troops” in Iraq while wasting their rage on bullsh*t like a police crackdown against rioters in Tibet? This goes all the way up to top liberals in the country — the disgusting Nancy Pelosi tells the President he should boycott the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. Who is George Bush to express moral indignation about anything? France’s Sarkozy is just as ridiculous — he rubs his face in Bush’s crack as the Decider bends over to destroy another piece of Iraq, but is contemplating a boycott of the Olympics opening ceremonies over a few scuffles in Lhasa?

Sick.

How about some priorities reevaluation?