Nobody could accuse him of inconsistency. In one of his last actions as US ambassador to the United Nations before being obliged to resign by the new Democratic leaders of Congress, John Bolton sought and won support for yet another armed intervention in a Muslim country.

This time around, it was not Iraq or Afghanistan or Lebanon. And American troops will not be doing the intervening. But there are similarities in Bolton’s plans for Somalia. He remains a believer in the neo-conservative vision of externally imposed political reformation. And the opposition of regional experts to the intervention scheme was again largely ignored.

Bolton’s words, uttered during a question and answer session with reporters at the UN earlier in December, speak for themselves: Bolton: “So. We’re going to pass this resolution on Somalia to see what we can do to improve the situation there”.

Reporter: “A lot of NGOs think this (the UN resolution authorising an African-led ‘protection force’) is going to inflame tensions and provoke the Union of the Islamic Courts (Somalia’s largest political and military movement)?” Bolton: “Yeah. I mean, the other option is that the instability we see in Somalia for over 15 years now would spread to the region as a whole... The choice of doing nothing is really not a choice at all... We’re siding with the people of Somalia.” Many if not most Somalis would rather do without the Bush administration’s tendresse. Anti-US feeling is running high in the country — and if anything unites its people, it is hostility to foreign intervention, from whatever quarter.

According to one western diplomat, UN Security Council resolution 1725 which subsequently unanimously approved the creation of an African protection and training mission in Somalia was the product solely of pressure from one country, the US, supported against their better judgment by the 14 other Council members. That hardly means it is going to work, especially when Washington’s recent record in Somalia is considered. Former president Bill Clinton famously pulled the plug on operations there in the 1990s after US soldiers were killed in Mogadishu in murderous clashes later recreated in the film Blackhawk Down.

US arming and funding of Somali warlords and clan chiefs in the past two years or so in their battles with the Islamic Courts militias (which the US link to al-Qaida) has increased the popularity of the latter. The warlords’ expulsion from the capital, Mogadishu, in June was widely welcomed, according to the independent International Crisis Group (ICG). The US was forced to look on impotently from its former French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti.

Likewise, US (and British) support for the rump transitional government that is presently subsisting in the central town of Baidoa may only have helped the Islamists. They now control most of southern Somalia. Only the presence of Ethiopian troops in the country, there with tacit US encouragement, allows this Iraqi-style fiction of a government to maintain its pretence of power.

Despite an endorsement by the African Union’s commission, there is little enthusiasm among African countries for contributing troops to the new protection force. Only Uganda has shown interest, and cautious at that. Resolution 1725 was in any case careful to bar Somalia’s immediate neighbours from participating. Such is the long history of bad blood, it was agreed that their presence might only make matters worse. It is possible that the protection force will never deploy.

The resolution’s approval of the force and its linked provisions for a loosening of the embargo on arms supplies to Somalia, were condemned in advance by the ICG. “The Bush administration must ... engage in a multilateral effort to negotiate an agreement between the Ethiopian-backed transitional government and the Islamic Courts,” it said.

‘State-building and counter-terrorism are not mutually exclusive and the US approach of supporting warlords that served its interests has been short-sighted.’ While US policy still appears to be focused primarily on curbing the Islamists by whatever means possible, talks between the government and the Islamic Courts are scheduled to resume shortly. Intense pressure from the African Union and the UN may get negotiations back on track. But the transitional government’s evident weakness may tempt the Islamists to go for the kill.

They have set a deadline for Ethiopian troops to leave. If they fail, the Islamists say they will attack Baidoa and seize control by force of arms. But if it comes to war, the likely outcome will not be so simple. Ethiopia is militarily superior. It has western and African backing. The Islamic Courts is backed by Eritrea, Arab jihadis and money.

Bolton was not wrong in trying to bring stability to Somalia. But as has been the case elsewhere, US involvement there has served to highlight the limits of superpower — and the blundering Bush administration’s uncanny ability to make bad situations very much worse. —The Guardian