There's not much nice to say about Somalia. During 30 years of civil strife, the people in the dry and dust blown land have been drawn from a rural nomadic co-existence into an urban gun run Mad Max battle for food and survival. It was to this Somalia in 1993 that the United States failed so dismally to bring relief in trying to crush the nation's warlords, a failure documented graphically in the book and film Black Hawk Down. Today, as battles in Afghanistan wind up, America's leaders are once again considering military involvement in the lawless horn of Africa, as a new front for their War on Terror. Some Somali voices welcome such a notion, others say it would destroy whatever elements of recovery already exist.
