I suppose that is one way of looking at it.
"US inadvertently creates a terrorist haven in Mali" By Stephen Kinzer | July 15, 2012
I take exception to the description of inadvertence.
News from Timbuktu is rare, but these days there is too much of it.
Religious fanatics have been destroying exquisite ancient tombs that are cultural icons of universal value. Women who used to walk freely now fear to leave their homes without veils. Schools, clinics, and banks have been looted and burned.
I always like to say every evil has a little good in it.
Related: Mali Goes Islamist
I'm not opposed to the veil, and I know that is a serious point of contention for some; however, that is not the source of your problems. The source of the problems are the last thing they burned and looted there.
Btw, does bombing them into oblivion and killing their loved ones (lot of kids for people who are so repressed and filled with hate) while shattering their villages improve the whole situation?
Militants who embrace the rigid Salafi brand of Islam are on a rampage in Timbuktu and other parts of Mali, an ancient, landlocked North African nation that was once the seat of a trading empire. They are allied with Al Qaeda.
If you will please excuse me, readers, I have to go take a CIA-Duh crap. It's also why I'm sour on controlled-opposition Kinzler here.
Already they control a thinly populated region larger than Texas. It is not difficult to imagine this region becoming an incubator of terrorism and transnational crime — or to imagine that the United States will react by making Mali the newest front in its ever-expanding drone war.
Yes, and that has to be one of the BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENTS regarding the OBAMA PRESIDENCY! He has EXPANDED the DRONE PROGRAM beyond BUSH! He has WAGED and is CONTINUING TO WAGE MORE WARS.
I know no one likes it, and I know some view him as the peace candidate compared to Repug Romney (with Bushes pushing from behind), but THE GUY is a WAR CRIMINAL! Just goes to show you that the Nobel Peace Prize is useless, and I' now glad they never gave one to Gandhi.
Also see: Do You Hear a Buzzing Sound?
Yeah, I do! Every time I buy a Globe.
This catastrophe did not “just happen.” It is the direct result of an episode that may at first seem unrelated: the US-led intervention in Libya last year. Rarely in recent times has there been a more vivid example of how such interventions can produce devastating unexpected results.
Under the regime of Moammar Khadafy, who was killed during the Libyan war, a portion of the army was made up of Tuaregs. They are a nomadic people whose traditional homeland is centered in northern Mali. After Khadafy was deposed, they went home — armed with potent weaponry they brought from Libya. Seeking to press their case for a homeland in Mali, they quickly overran the lightly armed Malian army.
Into this upheaval stepped another group, shaped not by ethnicity but by devotion to an extreme form of Islam. It has attracted Al Qaeda militants from many countries, including Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, and Algeria. They seek to create a pure Muslim state — and are destroying mosques and Islamic monuments that they believe represent the wrong kind of Islam.
In other words, the CIA has established a terrorist training camp, 'er, base.
This is an emerging crisis that could engage the world for years. A vast region has fallen out of the control of central government and into the hands of violent radicals. They may cause far more death and suffering than Khadafy ever did.
Four officials in Washington pressed hard for intervention in Libya last year and managed to persuade President Obama that it was necessary to avoid a humanitarian disaster. When the four of them — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Ambassador to the United Nation Susan Rice, and two staff members at the National Security Council, Samantha Power and Gayle Smith — decided to lobby for this intervention, did they consider the possible consequences?
The four women pressed for military intervention in Libya? Yeah, this world would be so much better if women were runn.... I thought I could get through it, sorry. What a load of horse shit if it is going to be these absolutely ghoulish gals. I literally picture them in my mind with blood running down their chins after what happened in Libya.
It is tempting to imagine that the four knew about the role of Tuaregs in Khadafy’s army, understood that the Tuaregs would return to Mali if Khadafy were overthrown, and realized that this would throw a swath of North Africa into chaos. It is also unlikely. Americans rarely consider the possible negative consequences of foreign interventions.
Ummm, actually, WE DO, Steve. It is our CRAP HOLE GOVERNMENT and its STRING-PULLERS in Tel Aviv that are the DINKS!
I believe I speak on behalf of the American people even if they don't know it, and we say NO MORE F***ING WARS!! Time to START TAKING CARE of OUR NEEDS HERE at HOME with OUR OWN TAX DOLLARS!!
Can I BE ANY CLEARER?
By building a jihadist army in Afghanistan, the United States helped create a transnational terrorist force that has plunged an entire region into war.
Yup, that's where CIA-Duh was born. They simply took the list of their assets and made them into the "enemy" -- with the help of a little false-flag operation known as 9/11.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq set off a shattering civil conflict. Now Mali can be added to the list of countries that have been pushed into instability by American-led military action.
One begins that is the PLAN! What did someone once say, divide and conquer?
Intervening violently in the politics of another country is like releasing a wheel at the top of a hill: you have no idea how it will bounce or where it will end up. Perhaps it is too much to expect that well-meaning amateurs like the “gang of four” who pushed the United States into war in Libya would know enough about the country to understand what the consequences of their action might be.
Pretty harsh on the "ladies." I'm sure they had plenty of male agreement in that cabinet and administration. I'm sure they didn't have to twist a lot of titties, I mean, arms.
It should at least be possible, however, to hope that policy planners would recognize their ignorance. A dose of humility might lead them to realize that military intervention always produces unforeseen consequences.
Why must that dose of humility(?) always be coupled with dead bodies?
The American-led intervention in Libya may have given Al Qaeda one of its greatest triumphs since 9/11. This is especially sobering as the United States contemplates a military attack on Iran or Syria. Overwhelming military power guarantees short-term victory in these interventions.
And that is where Kinzer totally loses me. He buys into the bulls***. As it turns out, Muslims didn't do 9/11; it was Israel and her collaborators inside western governments.
No amount of weaponry, however, can prevent the devastating “blowback” that often follows. The suffering people of Mali are the latest to learn this tragic lesson.
You have been warned.
--more--"
Also see: Afghanistan: MSM Lies and Omissions
U.S. Keeping Kyrgyzstan Base
Obama's Indian Success
Israel's Defense Attorneys
Kinzer is one of them, otherwise he wouldn't make my Globe.
And those suffering under AmeriKa's "inadvertence":
"Malians flee after militant takeover" by Sudarsan Raghavan | Washington Post, July 15, 2012
ABALA, Niger — Tawaye Yatara arrived at the refugee camp here on a recent day after trudging out of northern Mali through the blistering hot desert. In her arms, she clutched her hungry child. In her heart, she carried anger at the hard-line Islamists who had driven her from her country.
“First they ordered women to cover up. Then they ordered us not to enter the market,” said Yatara, a food seller, her voice rising. “I could not make money to feed my child. This is against our traditions. This is against the Islam we know.”
And we kind of know who is behind this.
Every day, several thousand people flee northern Mali to makeshift refugee camps that have sprung up in remote regions of Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Guinea, the United Nations says.
The truth is they are all over the world, especially in or near where the EUSraeli Empire is waging war.
The fortunate can afford to pay for transport. The unfortunate walk across a desolate tableau, seeking refuge in some of the hottest, least-developed nations in the world, already under pressure from a serious food and humanitarian crisis.
It is an exodus unlike any other experienced in West Africa, driven not just by war or famine, but by Ansar Dine, a puritanical, Al Qaeda-linked movement whose Arabic name means “defenders of faith.”
It's a good thing I have a printed Globe because I need to use the crapper again.
Taking advantage of a power vacuum in the capital, far to the south, the Islamists swept through northern Mali earlier this year, piggybacking on a Tuareg separatist rebellion. Today they are in firm control, imposing a strict version of Islam that includes a ban on television and compulsory beards for men, requirements that echo actions of Afghanistan’s Taliban and Somalia’s al-Shabab militia.
Another good idea; first the banks, now television.
Related:
"The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban's reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA," according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. "The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul," adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw "nothing objectionable" in the Taliban's plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: "The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan." "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that," said another U.S. diplomat in 1997."
No kidding?
Oh, that's a real kick to the lower groans, isn't it, ladies?
The TALIBAN was established under U.S. AUSPICES?
We can "LIVE WITH THAT?"
Of course, it's a GOOD THING American missiles have "liberated you" from your ickey-pooh men and children!!
Also see: "Al-CIA-Duh" School in Somalia
Sigh.
The militants have also destroyed ancient mosques in the northern Malian city of Timbuktu, a center of Islam in the 15th and 16th centuries, evoking comparisons to the Taliban’s destruction of the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan.
Yes, and as I remarked before that is only half the story. I tried to nail my eastern religions college professor by pointing out the Taliban desecration and he turned it on me. Here I was thinking I was so smart spewing the spoon-fed Jewish propaganda I had read in the New York Times, and he responded that the Taliban did that because the U.N. came in and said they wanted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to restore the statue. The Taliban said wait a minute, we have starving kids here that need the aid more. U.N. said no, can't do it -- and down went the Buddha.
Less well known is the emotional trauma that Ansar Dine has inflicted on a population that has watched helplessly as its traditions have been upended, leaving no choice but flight.
That trauma can be heard in the quivering voice of Assalim Ag Ehadt, a 46-year-old cartoonist who used to sell sketches for a living. He fled the town of Menaka last month to come here to Abala, a windswept village near Niger’s border with Mali, where a patchwork of UN-erected tents accommodates more than 50,000 refugees.
Ehadt remembers watching children play soccer or enjoy videos on their cellphones. Men would smoke; women would wear light, colorful fabrics, revealing skin. They would speak to each other on the streets. But their new rulers have decreed that such mundane actions are against Islam.
Mali, the largest country in West Africa, is 90 percent Muslim. The strain of Islam practiced there is tolerant, absorbing tribal beliefs and allowing women the freedom to engage in business and politics, mingle freely with men, and choose whether to wear a veil.
Which makes what happened VERY STRANGE INDEED!!!!
Even though northern Mali has seen the rise of ultra-conservative preachers and mosques in recent years, few expected fundamentalist Islam to become a controlling social force there.
Last month, Ibrahim Maiga, 50, witnessed a group of militants chasing a girl in front of his house. Her crime? Not wearing a djellaba, or full-body robe. She escaped, avoiding 10 lashes from a whip, he said. He thought of his wife and eight children, including four girls.
“There’s no work, no food. And they are restricting our freedoms,” Maiga said. “Why should we stay?”
Why should I keep reading this?
--more--"
