[Peace-discuss] AWARE - Sat's demo (& flyer, for re-view) and Sunday's meeting at White Horse

[Stuart Levy]

First: yes we do plan to meet at the White Horse bar again.

Yesterday's demonstration - well I see Karen just wrote about it too.  
Thanks to everybody!

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.

Maybe hers is a common way of thinking - one we should keep directly 
confronting as we talk about war.

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.

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.


-------



Mali? Libya? The Phillippines? Somalia?
Yemen? Iraq? Afghanistan? Pakistan?
Haven't we been here before?

(excerpts below from Glenn Greenwald writing in The Guardian, Jan 14th 1)

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that 
provides the key context: 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 (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.

First, as this NY Times' account makes clear, much of the instability in 
Mali is the direct result of Nato's intervention in Libya. [...] As Owen 
Jones wrote in an excellent column in the Independent:

    "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."

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?

Second, the overthrow of the Malian government was enabled by 
US-trained-and- armed soldiers who defected. From the NYT: "commanders 
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." Then: "an 
American-trained officer overthrew Mali's elected government, setting 
the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of 
Islamic extremists." [...]

Third, western bombing of Muslims in yet another country will obviously 
provoke even more anti-western sentiment, the fuel of terrorism. 
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 researcher on West Africa, 
Salvatore Sague?s, warned: "An international armed intervention is 
likely to increase the scale of human rights violations we are already 
seeing in this conflict." ...

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". 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.

Fourth, 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. [...] 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. 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".

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. 
[...] 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." [...]

(and, from a Jan 22nd article by Seumas Milne, also in The Guardian2)

[...] 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 legitimizing aggressive war.

[1] 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/14/mali-france-bombing-intervention-libya
[2] 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/22/mali-fastest-blowback-war-on-terror/ 


It doesn't have to be this way. Let your elected representatives know 
you oppose the pattern of endless intervention and war. In this area: US 
Rep. Rodney Davis (R IL-13), (202) 224-3121, and US Senators Richard 
Durbin (D-IL) (202) 224-2152, and Mark Kirk (R-IL) (202) 224-2854.

This flyer comes from AWARE, the Anti-War, Anti-Racism Effort of 
Champaign-Urbana -- on Facebook at: http://on.fb.me/WHYaje 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. Meetings? 5PM Sunday 
evenings. Write us at aware at anti-war.net for more info.

flyer2013-02-02-greenwald
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