Okay. To boil this Somalia business down to a simpler question, I read “American officials acknowledged that they tacitly supported Ethiopia’s approach because they felt it was the best way to check the growing power of the Islamists, whom American officials have accused of sheltering terrorists tied with Al Qaeda.” Way back when the Islamists first took over, I read “Already American officials have said that a handful of foreign fighters with links to Al Qaeda are being shielded by Mogadishu’s Islamist leaders.”

What are the names of these people the Islamists are sheltering? How many of them are there? Who are they? What have they done? What diplomatic efforts has the United States made to get the Islamists to turn them over? Pardon me for being cynical, but in this day and age my suspicion is that names aren’t involved in these articles but there’s no one in particular the Bush administration is worrying about and this is mostly hype and paranoia. But maybe not. So name some names.

This sounds incredibly ill-advised to me: “American officials acknowledged that they tacitly supported Ethiopia’s approach because they felt it was the best way to check the growing power of the Islamists, whom American officials have accused of sheltering terrorists tied with Al Qaeda.”

There’s just no way that a foreign invasion by a Christian army of a Muslim country is going to check the growing power of the Islamists in any meaningful sense. The exact quantity of acreage under Islamists control is no skin off our backs. We need to worry about people plotting against the USA being sheltered somewhere in that acreage. Encouraging Ethiopia to go to war with the Islamists merely encourages them to collaborate in efforts to attack the United States. If the Ethiopian military could somehow eliminate Somali Islamism as a social and political force, that would be one thing, but there’s just no way they can do that.

As I’ve said previously, expanding the number of soldiers in the Army is a reasonable idea. But it’s also a very expensive proposition: “every 10,000 new soldiers add about $1.2 billion in personnel costs to the Pentagon’s annual budget. On top of that, equipment for 10,000 new troops would cost an additional $2 billion, according to Army statistics.” What’s more, we’re not talking about 10,000 new troops:

Instead, civilian and military officials said, they are drawing up tentative proposals that would make permanent the 30,000-troop temporary increase approved by Congress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and then add 30,000 more troops to the Army over the next five years, resulting in an active-duty Army with 542,400 soldiers by 2012.

So this is a $19.2 billion annual commitment that we should probably round up to more like $20 billion since unless you want standards to drop you’re going to have increased recruiting expenditures. Under the circumstances, I just can’t see the case for an increase of that scale in the defense budget which is already giant in a global context. You could easily find the money by cutting back other DOD programs, and that kind of shift in resources would be a good idea. It’s pretty clear, though, that the driving force behind embrace of this idea is mostly about politics and posturing rather than a serious effort to set priorities so I think pessimism is warranted.