Washington's chicken-and-egg war in Somalia

We are at war in Somalia because we are at war in Somalia; American foreign policy is both the chicken and the egg.

The site of a car bomb in Somalia.
(Image credit: Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP/Getty Images)

Somalia is, for most Americans, known only as the location of the disastrous 1993 Battle of Mogadishu depicted in 2002's Black Hawk Down. But the east African country has also become the site of Washington's latest escalation of the amorphous war on terror.

U.S. airstrikes and boots on the ground have dramatically increased in 2017. This is happening without any public debate, congressional authorization, or the most basic argument from the White House as to how, exactly, this military intervention is obligatory. To all appearances, it is a new theater of war without end or focus, undertaken without due consideration of necessity, unintended consequences, or realistic prospects of conclusion.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.