By Glenn Greenwald
January 14, 2013 "The Guardian" -- 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 Phillipines (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.
January 14, 2013 "The Guardian" -- 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 Phillipines (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 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."
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.
Glenn
Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and
US national security issues for the Guardian. A
former constitutional lawyer, he was until 2012
a contributing writer at
Salon. He is
the author of How Would a Patriot Act? (May
2006), acritique of the Bush administration's
use of executive power; A Tragic Legacy (June,
2007), which examines the Bush legacy; and With
Liberty and Justice For Some: How the Law Is
Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the
Powerful
Article Source: Informationclearinghouse
Article Source: Informationclearinghouse