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

Wed Jan 30 12:47:51 UTC 2013

Stuart--

I think the pieces from Milne and Greenwald on Mali are excellent.

We could also borrow some language from the attached ANSWER flyer (without endorsing ANSWER), and add some local specifics, like how to contact our Congressional representatives. 

Will you put them together into a flyer & make copies, or shall I?

--CGE

On Jan 30, 2013, at 3:04 AM, Stuart Levy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 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 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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