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First: yes we do plan to meet at the White Horse bar again.<br>
<br>
Yesterday's demonstration - well I see Karen just wrote about it
too. Thanks to everybody!<br>
<br>
I thought the most interesting comment was from a woman who said,
"Everybody's against war - no one goes to war because they *want*
to." As if war were one of those winds that blows nobody good. I
offered some examples of people who might see war as a great way to
promote their own interests.<br>
<br>
Maybe hers is a common way of thinking - one we should keep directly
confronting as we talk about war.<br>
<br>
No ground hogs came by, but our new mascot mouse -- hardly the size
of the last joint of your thumb -- was awfully cute. Scrabbling
hard for seeds in the austerity of winter.<br>
<br>
We handed out a bunch of flyers, using fragments from Glenn
Greenwald's and Seumas Milne's recent Guardian articles on Mali and
the cycle of endless war. Sorry these weren't passed around in
advance, but please see attached.<br>
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<p align="center"><span style="font-size: 23.000000pt;
font-family: 'Georgia'; font-weight: 700">Mali? Libya? The
Phillippines? Somalia?<br>
Yemen? Iraq? Afghanistan? Pakistan?<br>
</span><span style="font-size: 24.000000pt; font-family:
'Georgia'; font-weight: 700">Haven't we been here before?
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-style: italic">(excerpts below from Glenn Greenwald
writing in The Guardian, Jan 14th </span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-style: italic; vertical-align: 4.000000pt">1</span><span
style="font-size: 15.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-style: italic">)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'ArialMT'">As </span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt;
font-family: 'Arial'; font-weight: 700">French war planes
bomb Mali, </span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt;
font-family: 'ArialMT'">there is one simple statistic that
provides the key context:
</span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'Arial'; font-weight: 700">this west African nation of 15
million people is the eighth country in which western
powers - over the last four years alone - have bombed and
killed Muslims - after Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the
Philippines </span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt;
font-family: 'ArialMT'">(that does not count
the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in
that region). For obvious reasons,
the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic
world grows increasingly hollow with
each new expansion of this militarism. But within this new
massive bombing campaign, one
finds most of the vital lessons about western intervention
that, typically, are ignored.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: 700">First, </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">as this NY Times'
account makes clear, </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial'; font-weight: 700">much
of the instability in Mali is the direct
result of Nato's intervention in Libya. </span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">[...]
As Owen Jones wrote in an excellent column in
the Independent:
</span></p>
<blockquote>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">“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.”
</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: 700">Over and over, western intervention ends
up - whether by ineptitude or design - sowing
the seeds of further intervention. </span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">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 </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial'; font-weight: 700">that
</span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'ArialMT'">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?
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: 700">Second, the overthrow of the Malian
government was enabled by US-trained-and-
armed soldiers who defected. </span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">From
the NYT: “commanders </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">of this
nation's elite army units, the
fruit of years of careful American training, defected when
they were needed most — taking troops,
guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the
heat of battle, according to senior Malian
military officials.” </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">Then: </span><span
style="font-size: 13.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">“an
</span><span style="font-size: 13.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-weight: 700">American-trained
officer overthrew Mali's elected government,
</span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">setting the stage for more than half
of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic
extremists.” [...]
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: 700">Third, western bombing of Muslims in yet
another country will obviously provoke even
more anti-western sentiment, the fuel of terrorism. </span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">Already,
as the Guardian reports,
French fighter jets in Mali have killed "at least 11
civilians including three children". France's
long history of colonialization in Mali only exacerbates
the inevitable anger. In December, after
the UN Security Council authorized the intervention in
Mali, Amnesty International's resea</span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">rcher
on West Africa, Salvatore Saguès, warned: "An
international armed intervention is
likely to increase the scale of human rights violations we
are already seeing in this conflict." ...
</span> </p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'ArialMT'">Indeed, at the same time that the French are
now killing civilians in Mali, a joint French-US
raid in Somalia caused the deaths of "at least eight
civilians, including two women and two
children". </span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt;
font-family: 'Arial'; font-weight: 700">To believe that
the US and its allies can just continue to go around the
world,
in country after country, and bomb and kill innocent
people - Muslims - and not be
targeted with "terrorist" attacks is, for obvious reasons,
lunacy.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: 700">Fourth, </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">for all the
self-flattering rhetoric that western democracies love to
apply to
themselves, it is extraordinary how these wars are waged
without any pretense of democratic
process. [...] </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial'; font-weight: 700">The
Obama administration has, of course, draped its entire
drone and
global assassination campaign in an impenetrable cloth of
secrecy, ensuring it remains
beyond the scrutinizing reach of media outlets, courts,
and its own citizens. </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">The US
and its western allies do not merely wage endless war
aimed invariably at Muslims. They do
so in virtually complete secrecy, without any transparency
or accountability. Meet the western
"democracies".
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: 700">Finally, </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">the propaganda used
to justify all of this is depressingly common yet wildly
effective.
</span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'Arial'; font-weight: 700">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. </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">[...] 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 </span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: 700">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." </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">[...]
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-style: italic">(and, from a Jan 22nd article by
Seumas Milne, also in The Guardian2)
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'ArialMT'">[...] </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial'; font-weight: 700">All
this is anyway about a good deal more than terrorism. </span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">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 </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial'; font-weight: 700">a
struggle for resources and strategic control, in the face
of China's
expanding economic role in the continent. </span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">In
north and west Africa, that's not just about oil
and gas, but also uranium in countries like Niger – and
Mali. </span><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt;
font-family: 'Arial'; font-weight: 700">Terrorism has long
since
become a catch-all cover for legitimizing aggressive war.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'ArialMT'">[1] </span><span style="font-size:
11.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'"><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>
[2] <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>
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'Arial';
font-weight: 700">It doesn't have to be this way. Let your
elected representatives know you oppose the pattern
of endless intervention and war. </span><span
style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">In
this area: </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt;
font-family: 'Arial'; font-weight: 700">US Rep. Rodney
Davis </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt;
font-family: 'ArialMT'">(R IL-13), </span><span
style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'Helvetica'">(202)
224-3121,
and </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt;
font-family: 'Helvetica'; font-weight: 700">US Senators
Richard Durbin </span><span style="font-size:
11.000000pt; font-family: 'Helvetica'">(D-IL) </span><span
style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'ArialMT'">(202)
224-2152, </span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt;
font-family: 'Helvetica'">and </span><span
style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'Helvetica';
font-weight: 700">Mark Kirk </span><span
style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'Helvetica'">(R-IL)
</span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family:
'ArialMT'">(202) 224-2854.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family:
'ArialMT'">This flyer comes from AWARE, the Anti-War,
Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana – on Facebook at:
</span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family:
'Arial'; font-weight: 700"><a
href="http://on.fb.me/WHYaje">http://on.fb.me/WHYaje</a>
</span><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family:
'ArialMT'">Watch our weekly Urbana Public TV (channel 6)
program, “AWARE on the Air”,
Tuesdays at 10PM – or join us in the Urbana City Council
Chambers for the live unrehearsed recordings at
noon Tuesdays. </span><span style="font-size:
11.000000pt; font-family: 'Helvetica'">Meetings? 5PM
Sunday evenings. Write us at </span><span
style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'Helvetica';
font-weight: 700"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:aware@anti-war.net">aware@anti-war.net</a> </span><span
style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'Helvetica'">for
more info.
</span></p>
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<title>flyer2013-02-02-greenwald</title>
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