Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [39]
By November 1977, Somalia had confirmed that Cuban combat forces were not only in Ethiopia but fighting on Ethiopia’s side! With that Siad Barre expelled the four thousand Soviet advisers who had been training his forces and maintaining his aircraft. Most of the departing advisors went straight to Ethiopia.11 In February 1978, Somalia’s military dropped all pretense of distance from the fight and formally joined the Western Somali Liberation Front in an “all-out bitter war with Ethiopia.” The new offensive took huge swaths of the Ogaden.12
In Ethiopia, the Dergeu faced calamity: the loss of nearly one-third of the Committee’s territory threatened national collapse. To stanch the bleeding, Soviet and Cuban aid came pouring into Ethiopia. The Soviets airlifted in millions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated military hardware, while Cuba sent more infantry and pilots—twenty-four thousand troops in all.13 Ethiopia’s foreign-led counterattack crushed the invading Somali army and even pushed the air war into northern Somalia.14
Now, Siad Barre was on the ropes. Needing weapons to counter the Russian and Cuban forces, he went to the teetering shah of Iran, then called on the United States to “fulfill its moral responsibility” to help Somalia. President Carter had said he would “aggressively challenge” the Soviet Union for influence, and the fighting between two socialist states gave the United States an opportunity to do that. With its regional allies, the United States now pulled Marxist Somalia into the so-called moderate Arab camp, though Siad Barre was neither.15 US military aid during the short war totaled more than $200 million, while economic assistance exceeded $500 million.16 With much of this assistance, Somalia bought weapons in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan.
By 1980, Siad Barre had abandoned scientific socialism, which, though it had led to some wealth redistribution, did not yield economic growth commensurate with population growth. By the mid-1980s, the Siad Barre regime was implementing International Monetary Fund–inspired economic liberalization. This led to a substantial increase in banana exports, with most of the benefits accruing to the main exporter and regime insiders. Siad Barre’s wife and daughter both became plantation owners.17
Though US grand strategy was ultimately concerned with protecting market economies worldwide, the specific American interest in Somalia was not economic. Somalia’s importance came not from the modest profits a few international firms might make there but rather because the country offered a political and military salient overlooking East Africa and the Indian Ocean. In addition, taking the Somalia Paladin broke up that developing “Pax Sovietica” in East Africa. American involvement was about the US versus Soviet balance of power internationally, as fought through regional proxies.
Fallout
Officially, the Ogaden War wrapped up in 1978 with tens of thousands dead. Yet, all through the 1980s Ethiopia and Somalia continued a low-intensity conflict, and the Western Somalia Liberation Front fights on to this day. The US Army maintained at least two training teams in Somalia, and Moscow poured $5 billion into Ethiopia over the 1980s, creating sub-Saharan Africa’s largest army. The Cubans stayed in Ethiopia; and during the 1980s, Ethiopian troops would occasionally cross into Somalia or send planes to bomb towns.18
Somalia never recovered from its stunning defeat in the Ogaden, and that cataclysm set off the country’s national disintegration. Foreign Affairs summarized war’s the impact: “Soviet support