[Peace-discuss] AWARE demonstration this Sat., and an article we might pass out on Mali and the War on Etc.

[Stuart Levy]

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....

     2-4PM, Saturday, Feb. 2nd, at the usual corner of Main and Neil in 
downtown Champaign.

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.

Some quotes from a review of this situation by Seumas Milne in the 
Guardian --
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/22/mali-fastest-blowback-war-on-terror/
*    "Mali: the fastest blowback yet in this disastrous war on terror*"
/    French intervention in Mali will fuel terrorism, but the west's 
buildup in Africa is also driven by the struggle for resources/

I think this one could make a decent flyer.


> 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.
>
> 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.
...
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.

-----

Another, somewhat longer article also worth reading is this from Glenn 
Greenwald, also in the Guardian (& republished 
<http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/14-6> in Common Dreams on Jan 
14th)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/14/mali-france-bombing-intervention-libya

    "*The Bombing of Mali Highlights All the Lessons of Western 
Intervention*"
/   The west African nation becomes the eighth country in the last four 
years alone where Muslims are killed by the west/

including

> As Owen Jones wrote in an excellent column 
> <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> 
> this morning 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?
>
... and ...

> 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.
>
> 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."




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