Why my cats eat but Somali children starve

We have two cats here at Falling Downs. We don't see mice in the house. These girls earn their keep.

Five hundred years ago Mogadishu was one of the great cities of the world. A prosperous trading hub that sat astride the major trading routes linking Europe and Africa and India and China. It was multicultural long before multiculturalism was invented. Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians all prospered in Mogadishu.

Chloe is the old girl. She's been with me for well over ten years. The new cat is the sole survivor of a litter of barn cats from a couple of years ago. One of the dogs ate all her siblings. We gave her a promotion to house cat, a tip of the hat to her survival skills.

From the 19th till the middle of the twentieth century Somalia and Mogadishu were carved up between Italy and Britain, two of the former colonial powers now liberating Libya. After independence in 1960, Somalia immediately became a pawn in the Cold War between the evil empire and the other evil empire.

Not hard to feed the cats. Pick up a box of Meow Mix and a couple tins of the canned stuff at the grocery once a week. I figure it's a bit under two bucks a day.

With the end of the Cold War America lost interest in Somalia, our former ally. Except for an ill-fated intervention in the early 90's (see Black Hawk Down) we've pretty much left the various factions in Somalia, all of whom we armed, to fight it out amongst themselves.

They're still fighting it out amongst themselves. Whenever the local Islamist militias appear to get the upper hand we do a little arm-twisting to make sure that one of our loyal allies in the neighborhood intervene. We would much prefer a continued state of anarchy than any semblance of stability as an Islamist state. We fear Islam more today than we feared the commies fifty years ago.

Somalia remains a failed state, a failed state in famine. That's OK; better a starving  failed state than an Islamic one. Their per capita income wouldn't feed my cats. The Islamic militia, the Al-Shabaab, are in the news because they see the NGOs as just another manifestation of the Western imperialism that has been destroying their country for 150 years.

Maybe they have a point.