Well, it's Friday and I wish I had something intelligent to post about. I don't feel like writing about Anna Nicole Smith or Nancy Pelosi's plane, and those seem to be the biggies today. Maybe two posts, one serious and one not? I think we have a winner. And so I give you...

Somalia

I don't even know how to begin this. It seems like a really ugly repeat of 1992. Other than the news report from a couple weeks ago that the US executed a supposedly successful bombing campaign there where we killed an al-Qaeda official, what do Americans know about Somalia? Not much, I think. We're very preoccupied, and maybe righfully so, with Iraq. I don't necessarily support the war in Iraq, but Somalia is a powerful example of what might happen if we don't finish what we started. Simply put, Somalia is a mess. This is one of those situations where arbitrary boundaries imposed by colonial powers split up ethnic groups and started a fire between groups.

I honestly think the Bush Administration is at a loss for a response to what's going on there. I don't think they understand why this would be bad if the situation in Somalia/Ethiopia/Chad worsened. The establishment of an Africa Command is a major step in the right direction, but we have to get people in the command who know what they're doing. It is deplorable that so few military and State Department officials in the Middle East speak Arabic or have any training in Middle Eastern culture or history. How do we expect these people to function there?

The Africa Command will likely begin the same way. But without a major event like September 11 to spur interest in Africa, where will the new experts come from? 5 years after the attacks on America, Arabic classes are full, and they're offered everywhere. Suddenly everyone wants to take Middle Eastern history. In 1998, I had to hunt down an Arabic tutor, and my knowledge of Middle Eastern history came from books.

How will we get kids to learn about Africa? At my undergrad graduation, a guy got an award for extraordinary studies. He was planning on going to med school, and he had learned Hausa so that he could go to Nigeria and practice. There are enough gifted kids in the world to make this far more common than it is. Kids need to know where Nigeria is, period. Without ranting about the state of our country's education system, there are many areas where we need to improve. First and foremost, we need to be citizens of the world. Let's all do our part to make this happen.