If you begin with this: What happened in Mali, one of West Africa’s most vibrant nations, is a primer on containing radical Islam. But it wasn’t the U.S. that got it right. It was Africa’s old colonial nemesis, France. And you end with this: With armed jihadi groups leaving Mali only to regroup in other parts of Africa, including Somalia, it’s clear that military force merely buys time. Within the borders of Mali, the unresolved problems of the Tuareg pose a threat to the country’s newly re-established order. ...have you not merely contradicted yourself completely! I love this particular trait of such writers - they pose a hysterical / sensationalist headline and then proceed to under cut it as they close their article! This was a fine example of reductive, generic and completely idiotic reporting. Devoid of all history, and any sense of the continuities of intervention, violence and political shenanigans of both France, and the USA, in the region, its attempts to suggest that French colonial arrogance, is a force of good and that something the American imperial arrogance can learn from. It begins by celebrating the sharp, fast military response of the French to a rebellion on Northern Mali, and moves into the now-mindlessly repeated arguments about the bogeyman of Al-Qaeda - going so far as to suggest that they are in possession of modern surface-to-air missiles according to some analyst - and ending on a dire note that all is not well, that the intervention has only staved off matters, and that the dangers are growing. So basically the conclusion is: the intervention did not work other than a band aid. The piece uses no facts, but merely unconfirmed statements by analysts and officials, and it quote the ridiculous eliza griswold whose own recent book contradicted her central these of the 10th parallel as a muslim/christian divide, and who has done years of hysterical work about Islamic fundamentalism. This entire piece erases all history, all society, all grievances, all corruption of politics, all French intervention in Mali, all consequences of massive wars in the region. It screams bloody murder about arms with Al Qaeda, while barely batting an eyelid over this fact in the same piece *The Sahara has been on the U.S. anti-terrorism agenda since 2007, when the Pentagon established the Trans-Sahara Initiative as part of the newly created United States Africa Command. i.e massive American militarization of the region, and a propensity to see all issues as military issues. But as always, the few AK 47s of so-called Islamists are the real concern, not the massive military forces and bases of the Americans and the French. Mali has a colonial history, and the French are no benign humanitarians, just as they were not in Rwanda where their forces and their politics and their interests had a deep and powerful collusion with the genocidiares. This ridiculous loss of memory, this hideous curtailing of colonial legacies, this infantile insistence on re-casting colonialism as gone, this insane refusal to see that Europe / USA have agendas that are hidden behind a cheap, public language of rights and humanism, an agenda laid bare in Iraq and Afghanistan and for which simple-minded writers and journalists have become the chief disseminatrrs :(
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 14:38:47 +0000
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