Have we learned the lesson of history.

Taken from RedState.

It's a quagmire.

It's an untennable mess.

It's a civil war.

We should have never gotten involved.

I'm speaking, of course, about Somalia.

For those who subscribe to the 3-Step Democrat Plan for "Victory" in Iraq® - which is, to recep:

1. Cut


2. Run


3. Blame Bush

Somaila is in fact an object lesson of what happens to a country in which we have involved ourselves and then fail to "finish the job". Among the latest in a long string of nightmares:

Fighting surged in Mogadishu on Monday between Islamist militias and fighters loyal to the city's last warlords, pushing the death toll over two days to at least 60 and pounding a key hospital with artillery and gunfire.

Let us parse that sentence a bit.

• Islamist militias - well, we've certainly seen their type before, no?


• The city's last warlords - I suppose like this guy, though he is certainly not comming down for breakfast any time soon


• Death toll over two days to at least 60 - sounds like the NY Times definition of a civil war to me


• Pounding a key hospital with artillery and gunfire - oh, you mean to say these folks don't follow the Geneva Conventions? Shocked, am I.

My thesis is simple: if you want to know what Iraq will look like if we leave "before the job is done" - as in, before we've established a stable, functioning, reasonably secular representative government - just take a quick peak at Somalia.

Or, get used to Iraq becoming Talibanistan 2.0 - complete with large quantities of black gold, the sale of which can be used to fund their operations.

But what do we need to fear from that? After all, we all know Islam is a Religion of Peace™, right?

The Islamists want to impose sharia law across the country and oppose the deployment of foreign peacekeepers, which interim President Abdullahi Yusuf says is essential to get his government on its feet and pacify the Horn of Africa country.

Right.