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
* * Glenn Greenwald
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 January 2013 08.45 EST
French troops board a transport plane in N'Djamena, Chad, bound for Mali.
Photograph: Handout/REUTERS
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 steadfastly ignored.
First, as the New York Times' background account from this morning makes clear,
much of the instability in Mali is the direct result of Nato's intervention in
Libya. Specifically,
"heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat
in Libya" and "the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different,
more Islamic fighters who came back" played the precipitating role in
the collapse of the US-supported central government. 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?
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." And 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."
In other words, the west is once again at war with the very forces that it
trained, funded and armed. Nobody is
better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of
endless war, than the US and its allies. Where the US cannot find
enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them.
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. Back in December, after the
UN Security Council authorized the intervention in Mali, Amnesty
International's researcher 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."
As always, western governments are well aware of this consequence and yet
proceed anyway. The NYT notes that the French bombing campaign was
launched "in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western
assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the
world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe." 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. As Bradford University professor Paul Rogers told
Jones, the bombing of Mali "will be portrayed as 'one more example of an
assault on Islam'". Whatever hopes that may exist for an end to the
"war on terror" are systematically destroyed by ongoing aggression.
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. Writing about the
participation of the British government in the military assault on Mali, Jones
notes that "it is disturbing – to say the least – how Cameron has led Britain
into Mali's conflict without even a pretence at
consultation." Identically, the Washington Post this morning reports that
President Obama has acknowledged after the fact that US fighter
jets entered Somali air space as part of the French operation there; the Post
called that "a rare public acknowledgment of American combat
operations in the Horn of Africa" and described the anti-democratic
secrecy that typically surrounds US war actions in the region:
>"The
US military has based a growing number of armed Predator drones as well
as F-15 fighter jets at Camp Lemonnier, which has grown into a key
installation for secret counterterrorism operations in Somalia and
Yemen. The defense official declined to identify the aircraft used in
the rescue attempt but said they were fighter jets, not drones. . . . .
>"It was unclear, however, why Obama felt compelled to reveal this
particular operation when he has remained silent about other specific US combat
missions in Somalia. Spokesmen from the White House and the
Pentagon declined to elaborate or answer questions Sunday night."
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. "The president is totally
determined that wemust 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."
The French bombing of Mali, perhaps to include some form of
US participation, illustrates every lesson of western intervention. The
"war on terror" is a self-perpetuating war precisely because it
endlessly engenders its own enemies and provides the fuel to ensure that the
fire rages without end. But the sloganeering propaganda used to
justify this is so cheap and easy - we must kill the Terrorists! - that it's
hard to see what will finally cause this to end. The
blinding fear - not just of violence, but of Otherness - that has been
successfully implanted in the minds of many western citizens is such
that this single, empty word (Terrorists), standing alone, is sufficient to
generate unquestioning support for whatever their governments do in
its name, no matter how secret or unaccompanied by evidence it may be.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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