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AWARE will be back on the streets this Saturday - yep, Groundhog
Day. Please come by if you can, and stand to protest the endless
repetition of endless war....<br>
<br>
2-4PM, Saturday, Feb. 2nd, at the usual corner of Main and Neil
in downtown Champaign.<br>
<br>
At Sunday's meeting we talked about this month's message. Looking
at the extension of the war on etc. into a Western intervention in
Mali could be a good way to go.<br>
<br>
Some quotes from a review of this situation by Seumas Milne in the
Guardian --<br>
<a
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/22/mali-fastest-blowback-war-on-terror/">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/22/mali-fastest-blowback-war-on-terror/</a><br>
<b> "Mali: the fastest blowback yet in this disastrous war on
terror</b>"<br>
<i> French intervention in Mali will fuel terrorism, but the
west's buildup in Africa is also driven by the struggle for
resources</i><br>
<br>
I think this one could make a decent flyer.<br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">You'd think the war on terror had been a
huge success, the way the western powers keep at it, Groundhog
Day-style. In reality, it has been a disastrous failure, even in
its own terms – which is why the Obama administration felt it had
to change its name to "overseas contingency operations", until US
defence secretary Leon Panetta revived the old title this week.<br>
<br>
Instead of fighting terror, it has fuelled it everywhere it's been
unleashed: from Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Iraq to Yemen,
spreading it from Osama bin Laden's Afghan lairs eastwards to
central Asia and westwards to North Africa – as US, British and
other western forces have invaded, bombed, tortured and kidnapped
their way across the Arab and Muslim world for over a decade.</blockquote>
...<br>
<blockquote type="cite">The French may have been invited in by the
Malian government. But it's a government brought to power by
military coup last year, not one elected by Malians – and whose
troops are now trading atrocities and human rights abuses with the
rebels.<br>
<br>
Only a political settlement, guaranteed by regional African
forces, can end the conflict. Meanwhile, French president François
Hollande says his country will be in Mali as long as it takes to
"defeat terrorism in that part of Africa". All the experience of
the past decade suggests that could be indefinitely – as western
intervention is likely to boost jihadist recruitment and turn
groups with a regional focus towards western targets.<br>
<br>
All this is anyway about a good deal more than terrorism.
Underlying the growing western military involvement in Africa –
from the spread of American bases under the US Africa Command to
France's resumption of its post-colonial habit of routine armed
intervention – is a struggle for resources and strategic control,
in the face of China's expanding economic role in the continent.
In north and west Africa, that's not just about oil and gas, but
also uranium in countries like Niger – and Mali. Terrorism has
long since become a catch-all cover for legitimising aggressive
war.</blockquote>
<br>
-----<br>
<br>
Another, somewhat longer article also worth reading is this from
Glenn Greenwald, also in the Guardian (& <a
href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/14-6">republished</a>
in Common Dreams on Jan 14th)<br>
<br>
<a
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/14/mali-france-bombing-intervention-libya">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/14/mali-france-bombing-intervention-libya</a><br>
<br>
"<b>The Bombing of Mali Highlights All the Lessons of Western
Intervention</b>"<br>
<i> The west African nation becomes the eighth country in the last
four years alone where Muslims are killed by the west</i><br>
<br>
including <br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">As Owen Jones wrote in <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-war-in-libya-was-seen-as-a-success-now-here-we-are-engaging-with-the-blowback-in-mali-8449588.html">an
excellent column</a> this morning in the Independent:<br>
<br>
<blockquote>This intervention is itself the consequence of
another. The Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story
for liberal interventionism. Yet the toppling of Muammar
Gaddafi's dictatorship had consequences that Western
intelligence services probably never even bothered to imagine.
Tuaregs – who traditionally hailed from northern Mali – made up
a large portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected from
power, they returned to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as
black Africans came under attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an
uncomfortable fact largely ignored by the Western media. . . .
[T]he Libyan war was seen as a success . . . and here we are now
engaging with its catastrophic blowback.<br>
</blockquote>
Over and over, western intervention ends up - whether by
ineptitude or design - sowing the seeds of further intervention.
Given the massive instability still plaguing Libya as well as
enduring anger over the Benghazi attack, how long will it be
before we hear that bombing and invasions in that country are -
once again - necessary to combat the empowered "Islamist" forces
there: forces empowered as a result of the Nato overthrow of that
country's government?<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
... and ...<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Finally, the propaganda used to justify all
of this is depressingly common yet wildly effective. Any western
government that wants to bomb Muslims simply slaps the label of
"terrorists" on them, and any real debate or critical assessment
instantly ends before it can even begin. "The president is totally
determined that we must eradicate these terrorists who threaten
the security of Mali, our own country and Europe," proclaimed
French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.<br>
<br>
As usual, this simplistic cartoon script distorts reality more
than it describes it. There is no doubt that the Malian rebels
have engaged in all sorts of heinous atrocities ("amputations,
flogging, and stoning to death for those who oppose their
interpretation of Islam"), but so, too, have Malian government
forces - including, as Amnesty chronicled, "arresting, torturing
and killing Tuareg people apparently only on ethnic ground." As
Jones aptly warns: "don't fall for a narrative so often pushed by
the Western media: a perverse oversimplification of good fighting
evil, just as we have seen imposed on Syria's brutal civil war."</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
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