This World Politics Review piece is less an article and more of an indictment of American policy toward Somalia, which most recently featured the mind-bogglingly bad decision to sell 40 tons of arms to a government that might not sustain itself long enough to jimmy open the boxes. Of course the article is long on diagnosis and short on solutions, but it is hard to deny the basic argument that US policy in Somalia has amounted to “Eighteen years of meddling.”