{"id":3161,"date":"2006-12-27T08:52:22","date_gmt":"2006-12-27T15:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2006\/12\/27\/ethiopia-the-model\/"},"modified":"2006-12-27T15:42:36","modified_gmt":"2006-12-27T22:42:36","slug":"ethiopia-the-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2006\/12\/27\/ethiopia-the-model\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethiopia, the Model?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clifford May, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — a neocon nest explored in\u00c2\u00a0an excellent 2003 piece<\/a> by Dan McCarthy in The American Conservative<\/em> — opines<\/a> that the Ethiopians, currently fighting and\u00c2\u00a0supposedly beating “Islamist” militias in Somalia,\u00c2\u00a0could teach us a thing or two about how to defeat The Enemy:<\/p>\n

More \u00e2\u20ac\u0153boots on the ground\u00e2\u20ac\u009d may be part of the explanation. The Ethiopians are not attempting to have a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153light footprint.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d They are not worried about whether they will be seen as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153occupiers\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or whether their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153occupation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d will be viewed as benevolent.<\/font>Secondly, the Ethiopians are not overly concerned about whether their tactics will win approval from the proverbial Arab Street \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or the European Street or Turtle Bay. They are fighting a war; their intention is to defeat their enemies; everything else is secondary or tertiary.<\/font>Anyone have an alternative interpretation?<\/font>\u00c2\u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, uh, yeah<\/a>:<\/p>\n

As\u00c2\u00a0Ethiopia<\/font><\/strong> and Somalia’s<\/strong> Islamic Courts movement inch closer to all-out conflict, a widespread view among people here in the capital is that Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is using the conflict to distract people from a vast array of internal problems and to justify further repression of opposition groups, including ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In particular, opponents of war<\/strong> say he is playing up the claim that there are Al-Qaida operatives within the Islamic Courts in order to maintain the support of the U.S. government, which relies on a steady flow of Ethiopian intelligence that some regional analysts say is of dubious value.
\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ethiopia is a dictatorship<\/a> and U.S. ally<\/a> that regularly jails political opponents and brutalizes its own people, as well as its neighbors. In the Bizarro “conservative”<\/a> worldview of Senor May and the Foundation for the Defense of “Democracies,” this is a model to be emulated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clifford May, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — a neocon nest explored in\u00c2\u00a0an excellent 2003 piece by Dan McCarthy in The American Conservative — opines that the Ethiopians, currently fighting and\u00c2\u00a0supposedly beating “Islamist” militias in Somalia,\u00c2\u00a0could teach us a thing or two about how to defeat The Enemy: More \u00e2\u20ac\u0153boots on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3161"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}