"A blink of an eye, and a million killed"

How? How was it completely obvious to you that they didn't understand Somalia?

First of all, Somalia descended into the state that it was in during the civil war largely because of foreign intervention -- the pouring of weapons into the area during the Cold War and a lot of U.N. policies that had caused trouble for the country. When UNOSOM started, I don't think anybody believed that they would be able to put Somalia back in two years. The parallels with Iraq are rather stark. The declaration that the guerrilla war is going to end "now," and we're going to have the New York head of police running the country's police forces, and law and order will be restored .... it's just fiction. Did anyone know what course Iraq would be taking in the last few weeks? It was obvious that it wasn't going to be plain sailing from the day that the war was declared ended, surely. You can't imagine in a country that has been ravaged by dictatorship and doesn't have any kind of history or structure or Westminster or American democracy to suddenly create a democracy in a couple of years.

Basically what foreigners have got to understand when they go into something like that is that they have to be in for the long haul, that it's a long process of give and take, and maybe, in the end, countries like Somalia don't want to be Western democracies. That's the sad truth of it.

Do you think that's true?

Put it this way, I don't think there's going to be a Western-style democracy in Somalia in the foreseeable future. It has a few hospitals run by NGOs, but it has no police force, no schools, none of the infrastructures of government, and it hasn't since 1990.

Have you been back?

Yes, lots of times. And I always find it fascinating how a country so off the map has continued to exist. Life goes on in its strange, sometimes wonderful way. The Somalis have created this fully privatized state. It's a sort of libertarian heaven because there are no taxes, no controls. It's just a smoking hole that the world has done nothing about.

Is it still as violent as it was in the early 1990s?

After the fury of the civil war, it sort of died down. Every now and again one militia takes a series of potshots at another militia, and a few people get killed and another building gets destroyed. It sort of just ticks along. It's kind of offensive to me how the Western world hasn't done anything about it. There are all these pronouncements about places like Afghanistan and Iraq, but the reality is, they leave work undone in places like that. Somalia supplies refugees to the rest of the world who work in taxis and 7-Elevens and send money back to their relatives in Somalia -- where the problems continue.

It's often been said that the last decade of neglect in Africa, and perhaps elsewhere before Sept. 11, has a lot to do with what happened in Somalia in 1993 when 18 American soldiers died.

Certainly after Somalia that is why [America didn't get involved in African conflicts]. Until now, possibly, in Liberia. Before that there was very little interest in intervening in conflicts. There was a terrible conflict in Liberia in 1990 and there was no suggestion in getting involved there. The one turning point was under the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He said, "Give me your battalions for peace." He thought that the world could come down to end famine, dictators, civil wars, that sort of thing. They'd be using the might of the West for the good -- to deliver bags of food and come between warring armies. So there was this blip moment toward the end of George Bush Sr.'s administration, when the Balkans were regarded as too risky, that Colin Powell said that Somalia was a good idea. Because they didn't think it would be problematic.

It was a gesture, and one in the right direction. And I'm not ever going to criticize the good intentions that America had when it went into Somalia. They weren't after oil; they were out to do the best thing possible. But they didn't go in with any sort of dossier of advice. You can't ask an artillery general to expect to understand what's going on in Somalia's politics or society. Half of those guys are Vietnam veterans -- they had amazing problems understanding where they were. I think sometimes they thought they were in Vietnam. And after the [1993 disaster] you had the Mogadishu effect, where [the United States] didn't want to get involved in anything in the continent. That's what happened in Rwanda. That's the single largest reason why there wasn't more of an armed response to the genocide. Since then there hasn't been anything that matched Rwanda in its fury and it's hard to see how big military intervention would do a great deal in the Congo to stop a war that has allegedly killed 3 million people. In terms of the West being proactive in a peacemaking role, Somalia ended it.

Do you think we're seeing something changing now with Liberia?

It seems to me that the Mogadishu effect is over with this sort of new neoconservative movement in the States. But I think the same mistakes are being repeated. In the case of Liberia, no, you won't see the same sort of aggressive peace imposition that took place in Somalia. You would only see a small liaison force. For many reasons, I would say that's probably a good idea. Maybe a West African force can lead that problem better. I'm quite cautious about there being a strong Western peace imposition force in Liberia because, once again, there's very little infrastructure there. It's very difficult to say you can impose peace unless you say, "We are just going to run this country. We're not even going to have any kind of pretense that we're going to hand it over to a democracy within a certain period." But once you say you're just going to run everything according to military rules, then you've got an empire. America has never wanted to have one of those. But it's interesting, because you're being sucked in that direction, against your will.

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