Get A Grip, Mr President--It's A Real War---

And you are in charge of it. You may not like the idea, Mr Obama; it may perturb your tidy little lawyerly mind; it may disrupt even more your visions of transforming the US into a socialist republic, but the world insists--there is a war out there. A war which if lost by the US and the rest of the civilized states means the blackest of dark days will be upon us.

It appears that the al-Shabaab inspired if actually indigenously conducted bombings during the World Cup finals which littered Kampala with blood and body parts has convinced you that al-Qaeda and its ilk have no respect for the "lives of Africans." This particular outrage, unlike all the others perpetrated by practitioners of violent political Islam during your administration's life, has persuaded you that they "do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself."

The spectacle of maimed and murdered black bodies has moved you, Mr President, to violate your own prohibition against naming names and pointing the finger of guilt at those who deserve it--the jihadists, the suicide bombers, the exploders of remote controlled lethal machines, the people who believe above all else that their particular and perverted notions of the Will of Allah both makes right and necessary the killing of any convenient civilian target--provided the killing garners headlines and invokes fear. The innumerable deaths, the countless wounded resulting from other attacks directed against Israelis, Westerners, Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis, and oh so many others may not have rubbed your nose in the reality of the war declared by the True Warriors of The One True Faith, but this time they went too far--they slaughtered people of black skin.

Well, Mr President, get a firm grip on this ground truth: War is race neutral. The Mighty Men of the Koran are equally willing to kill regardless of race, creed, national origin, age, or any of the other federally recognized categories for defining victims in need of protection. The Always Brave And Victorious Fighters Of Islam know no exempt classes--any who are not of us are against us is their motto.

The devotees of political Islam, regardless of name, place of origin, or specifics of agenda are linked by the web of hatred for any and all who oppose them, any who refuse to submit to the True Faith as they define it. They make no distinctions between Americans and Ugandans, between Africans and non-Africans. For the jihadis, all infidels are equally deserving of death.

(Of course, historically, Arabs, and al-Shabaab is predominantly comprised of Arabs, have shown a particular predilection for holding black Africans in contempt. Black Africans were for many centuries seen only as fit candidates for enslavement. The terrible trade in human flesh was conducted by Arabs for generations before the Europeans arrived. And, there is powerful evidence that the Arab lust for purchasing black Africans as chattel continues to the present day. This gives a real piquancy to your remarks on South African television. African life is of value to Arabs only insofar as it is a marketable commodity.)

The reality which you have yet to admit is that the war being waged against us by the jihadi and those states which harbor, facilitate, and to some extent direct and control their actions is global in nature. It is not limited to Afghanistan. Nor is a simple and necessary extension of the war's area to Pakistan sufficient. Even adding Somalia to the list of war zones is insufficient.

As today's attacks in southern Yemen makes manifest, the new, improved, and renamed al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP), has a very real capacity to kill and, by so doing, further destabilize the very fragile country of Yemen. Given the several armed threats confronting the corrupt, inefficient, broke central government of which AQAP is far from the least, there is a great likelihood that Yemen will soon join Somalia in the roster of failed states.

When, not if, that happens, the jihadis will have a stranglehold on the entrance to the Red Sea with the negative implications for global trade that ability brings with it. As a failed state, Yemen will provide a safe haven for the jihadis who hold the House of Saud in the greatest contempt as an apostate regime with a record of truckling to the infidels of the West. This potential is guaranteed to perturb the sleep not only of the Saudi royals but the equally apostate heads of states throughout the Gulf region.

And--need it be written?--as a failed state Yemen will prove a fertile ground for the Iranians. The mullahs have an unsurpassed record in effectively developing proxies. Adding AQAP to the roster would provide a new level of flexibility and horizontal escalation potential to Tehran's quiver.

The dark potentials resident in the collapse of Yemen will demand that some state or group of states intervene. The most directly threatened are Saudi Arabia and other Gulf littoral countries, but, the notion of actually fighting a war, particularly one with the jihadis of AQAP, may be more than the very cautious Saudis can stomach.

The US has not been directly threatened by the imminent success of al-Shabaab in Somalia. It will be only indirectly threatened when Yemen goes down the Islamist tubes. But, as Mr Obama noted in his indignation on South African national television, the US was attacked indirectly when its embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed during the Clinton years. The line between indirect and direct threats in thin, wavy, and hazy.

This implies that the US does have a palpable stake in both Yemen and Somalia. When the responsibility of the US during both the Clinton and W. Bush administrations for the creation of current Somalia is considered, the nature of the stakes is enhanced.

We and the rest of the Civilized States created Somalia in its present form by a combination of ill-considered intervention and even less well advised retraction. The dynamic behind the Somalian mess is essentially identical to that which assured the creation of Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan--robust intervention followed by hasty retraction. In recent months the same pattern has been clearly observable in US policy toward Yemen. The result is virtually foreordained.

Wars--like foreign policy generally--are successful only if there is a clearly stated goal, a definition of success which is organic to the goal, and a resolutely followed consistent focus on orchestrating the instruments of national power to achieve the goal. Hesitation, irresolution, vacillation, the alternating tough words and outreach are each and all guaranteed to assure failure.

The US under several successive administrations has followed the same route--the way of robust entrance and hasty exit, the avenue of tough words and soft deeds. The result has been the creation and strengthening of the advocates of violent political Islam. The consequence has been a war which has deepened and widened until it comprises much of the world.

Unless President Obama is willing to enlarge his personal "teachable moment" and see that the US is engaged in a war which we most assuredly did not seek but absolutely must win, there is no hope of reversing the dangerous trend of the past twenty plus years. While there is little realistic reason to conclude the current man in the Oval will see the light, it must be hoped (prayed?) that he do so as time is not on the side of the good guys in this war to the death.

"The Kids" Are Getting Plumb Dangerous

Al Shabaab, (the youth, if you prefer English) has hit outside its home turf of Somalia for the first time. It was a hard hit. A hard hit which "The Kids" had promised if Uganda did not remove its "occupying" troops from the few blocks which comprise the writ of the Transitional Federal Government.

The High Minded and Lofty Thinking diplomats of the West created the fiction of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and then abandoned the field to the forces of the African Union. The AU is notoriously long on ambition and delusions of adequacy. It is equally short on competence, funding, able armed forces, and consistent political will.

When all the AU promises had been made, only Uganda and Burundi sent peacekeeping forces. Of these, the Ugandans have done the most freight hauling. Uganda has done this for several reasons, none of which are altruistic. In large measure the Ugandan government has kept its presence in Mogadishu as an emblem of its enlarging status on the continent.

With the discovery and proving of significant oil reserves, Uganda has been announcing its ambitions to be a major player in African affairs. New visions of prosperity and the status which such will bring in its wake have been accompanied by apparent success in finally defeating the long running sore caused by the Lords Resistance Army's insurgency. Muscle flexing in Somalia can be seen as a natural extension of these factors as well as a counter to the influx of refugees from Somalia.

The deadly triple bombing during the World Cup final game in Uganda's capital Kampala gives the country's government a stark choice: withdraw from Somalia or enlarge the effort. Neither option is good.

Al Shabaab is riven at present between two major competing factions. One wants to focus on the final elimination of the TFG and the installation of a shariah compliant Islamist regime. The other, the internationalist wing which is aligned with al-Qaeda and numbers hundreds of foreign fighters in its ranks, wants to export the war to other countries in the Horn of Africa including not only Uganda but Kenya as well. The Kampala attack hints that the internationalists are either winning the internecine struggle or are both willing and able to go it alone.

Either of these two alternatives indicates that the very dynamic the US feared when it employed the Ethiopian army as a proxy to eliminate the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) is coming to pass. The ICU was seen by the US as providing another safe haven for violent political Islamists of the al-Qaeda variety. The extirpation of this potential was seen as both necessary and high priority.

The failure of the US and other Western governments to look one day beyond that upon which the ICU was deposed guaranteed that the aftermath would be worse. As Somalia has never been other than a mere geographic expression in which all politics were local and clan based, the avenue of chaos was wide open to any group sufficiently motivated and willing to kill. Of the various groups so oriented, al-Shabaab was the most dedicated and most willing to pile up corpses.

With the exception of former British Somalia, which peeled itself away from the rest of the mess assembled by Western diplomats at the UN a half century earlier, Somalia rapidly fell under the shariah clad heel of al-Shabaab. Resistance to "The Kids" was just enough to ensure the group became more and more extreme, more willing to kill, more dedicated to winning--and more willing to call for outside support.

It was the political equivalent of a person taking just enough antibiotic to assure the weak bacteria were killed and the survivors made stronger, more resistant, and more deadly. Al-Shabaab is comprised of battle tested and slaughter hardened survivors.

These indigenous survivors have been reinforced in recent months by equally battle tested and slaughter hardened fighters from other theaters including Iraq and Afghanistan. They have also been joined by recruits from the twenty plus years of Somalian diaspora. Arabs, Afghans, Uzbeks, returning refugees or the children of refugees, all are united by the ideology of violent political Islam, by the vision of a global caliphate or, at the least, by a deep and abiding hatred of the infidels of the West and all the baggage those infidels carry.

The less than half-hearted measures taken to date by the US and other Western countries to bring, or, to err on the side of accuracy, impose, stability on Somalia have done absolutely nothing useful. All have been counterproductive. From the cut-and-run decision taken by President Clinton in the wake of the killing of nineteen special forces troops in an ill-conceived and worse executed attempt to "arrest" a Somalian warlord nearly twenty years ago to the present time, the actions of the US could not have been more carefully calculated to produce an Islamist victory and the dreaded new safe harbor for al-Qaeda.

The triple bombing in Kampala should serve as a wakeup call not simply for Uganda or the AU but for the US and the West generally. The hope that proxies would provide a low risk, low cost way of preventing an Islamist takeover of Somalia has been proven disastrously wrong. Al-Shabaab has shown a will and ability to engage in significant horizontal escalation of the war. It is no longer an internal matter, resident in Somalia alone.

With the Kampala attack "The Kids" have shown their threats to Kenya and elsewhere must be taken seriously. The Bad Boys Of The True Faith can and will make good on their threats. The proof is in the mangled bodies of those who died, shredded by al-Shabaab's bombs. "The Kids" own the initiative now. They can choose when, where, and how to strike. No country, certainly not Kenya, nor Yemen is safe.

It will not be sufficient to leave the task up to the AU. While the association may want that to be the case, the bitter ground truth is that the Union is not up to the job. Not even a massive influx of foreign money will change that. Only years of careful training backed by shipments of modern equipment can spin up the AU forces to a level of skill which would allow them to undertake either effective stability operations in Somalia or adequately guard against replays of the Kampala attack.

That leaves the usual fall back--the US and the West. Considering that the US is still neck deep in the Big Muddy of Afghanistan, it is not in the cards for Washington to send in the Marines or the airborne. Considering the West is locked in a losing contest of wills with Iran on the rather critical matter of the mullahs getting their Mahdi Bomb, it staggers the imagination to conclude that the European Union or any member state will decide to send troops to Somalia.

To go completely outside the box--how about Russia? That's a non-starter considering that the Kremlin cannot even deal effectively, "clarify and put to order" in the words of Vladimir Putin, the Islamist insurgency in the Caucasus--and that is conveniently close to Russia.

To keep on pushing the envelop of theoretical possibilities--what about China? Well, China always needs more oil and Uganda has oil. Perhaps China can form its version of Blackwater security and contract with Kampala. That would assure one country could be held harmless against "The Kids."

No. The Geek was being jocose. Even as a hedge against the loss of Iranian oil, China is quite pleased to sit back and watch--as it deals with its own homegrown Islamists.

In short, there will be no volunteers from anywhere willing and able to take on "The Kids." Any way the political-military cake is sliced, al-Shabaab looks to get the biggest piece. Worse, the auguries point to the better organized, more resolute, more ambitious internationalist faction winning out over the provincials so as to assure that Somalia will be both the long feared safe haven and a major exporter of both violence and political Islam.

Oh, well, as Allah wills.