Heavy gunfire in Mogadishu. Again. The latest election dispute has Somalia teetering on the brink of yet another civil conflagration.
And what does Britain do? It stands by stability. Admirable, perhaps, but also terribly quixotic.
One cannot help but draw parallels to the late Roman Empire's proconsuls propping up frontier kings, only to see them toppled by the next barbarian incursion. Somalia is not a nation in any meaningful sense; it is a collection of clans and warlords, a Hobbesian state of nature where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Our intervention, no matter how well-intentioned, is a band-aid on a bullet wound.
The gunfire in Mogadishu is not a symptom of a broken political process; it is the natural condition of a land that has known little else. And yet we persist, because to do otherwise would be to admit that our post-colonial conscience is built on sand. History will judge us, as it always does, by our illusions.
