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james mentioned: “Oh yeah, the US leaving Somolia really did wonders for those peasants who stayed (and probably were praying for an end to warlord rule).”

Actually, it did; the best thing that the U.S. ever did for Somalia was to get the hell out and leave them alone.

There are many, many problems in Somalia; the country is poor and life is hard. But the civil war has long since evaporated, things are much better than they were in the mid-1990s, and in fact Somalia is doing considerably better by many measures (such as availability of food or percentage of the population living in extreme poverty) than neighboring countries. Better, in fact, than many richer African countries.

Once the prospects of looting foreign aid dried up, the warlords gave up and the civil war petered out. Somalia has been without any effective central government for 13 years, and things seem to be going well precisely because they haven’t got any government. This should not, actually, be very surprising, if you keep in mind the sort of governments that most countries in the area have.

For more, see Andrew Cockburn’s feature on Somalia in the National Geographic @ http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0207/feature3/ and the recent report “Anarchy and Invention: How does Somalia’s private sector cope without government?” from the World Bank @ http://rru.worldbank.org/Documents/280-nenova-harford.pdf

Hope this helps.