Statesmen ought to have a special prize just for themselves, like fools have the Darwin Awards. The Darwin Awards commemorate very stupid people who did a service to human evolution by accidentally removing themselves from the gene pool.

The statesman's equivalent could be called something like the Cheney-Zenawi Award.

The shining stupidity of the United States vice-president and the Ethiopian prime minister are on display this week, as the Ethiopian army prepares to withdraw from Somalia two years after its foredoomed invasion.

We need negative role models too.

Getting Ethiopia to invade Somalia smells exactly like a Dick Cheney idea - crude, violent and barking up entirely the wrong tree. Just like invading Iraq, in fact.

As for Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, he had already distinguished himself by becoming obsessed with the stupidest border war in modern African history.

It wasn't his fault to start with: Ethiopia was attacked out of the blue in 1998 by the insanely aggressive regime in Eritrea, but Ethiopian troops drove the Eritreans back.

By the ceasefire in mid-2000, Ethiopia had recovered all the ground it lost at the start.

Going to war with Eritrea again would mean defying the United Nations ruling, so Zenawi needed the backing of some great power that could protect him from the UN's censure.

Who better than the United States, which has assiduously ignored and belittled the UN under the Bush administration?

Now what could Ethiopia do for the Bush administration in return?

Well, it could invade Somalia.

Washington didn't want to put American troops into Somalia again, having had its nose bloodied in 1993, but it did want to overthrow the civilian regime and put its favourite warlord in power instead.

Ethiopian troops would do the job just as well.

The job was to overthrow the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a mass movement funded by merchants in Mogadishu who wanted to end the constant robberies and kidnappings that made life impossible in the Somali capital.

The UIC mobilised the desire of ordinary Somalis for an end to the violence that had ravaged the country for 15 years, and the peace they brought to Mogadishu soon spread over most of southern Somalia.

Unfortunately the courts were "Islamic" and they wanted to enforce sharia law, which in Washington's book made them practically terrorists.

They did have a few unsavoury allies, notably an extremist militia called al-Shebab, but they gave people in Mogadishu their first real hope of security and justice.

The Ethiopian army invaded Somalia in December 2006, drove the Islamic Courts out of Mogadishu, and installed Abdullahi Yusuf, the president of the "Transitional Federal Government" of Somalia, in power.

Now the Ethiopians are going home, which will leave Mogadishu in the hands not of the Union of Islamic Courts, alas, but rather of the extremist militias that have pushed the UIC aside during their struggle against the foreign troops.

The world needs a Cheney-Zenawi Award for Gross Political Stupidity, and I know who the first nominees should be.

GWYNNE DYER

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