Mr Brecher’s flawed Twit-rant for intervention in Mali

Ordinarily I have a very high respect for the Exiled’s Gary Brecher (a.k.a. the War Nerd), but here he’s playing the pot against the kettle. Apparently, in his view, having a basic demographic knowledge of Mali is sufficient to formulate an educated opinion on whether or not an intervention is needed - every bit as much of a ‘childish binary processor’ as Greenwald’s. (50% + 1 of the natives say they want an invasion? Saddle up and LOCK AND LOAD, baby!!) But then, I'm a monarchist and not a majoritarian, so I don't fall prey so easily to such idiocy.

It is also, very uncharacteristically for WN, historically illiterate. Well, at least he got it right that the political instability in Mali’s north, which al-Qaeda found readily exploitable, is the direct outcome of the American-backed Anglo-French ‘intervention’ in Libya, but his new logic seems to be - well, it was a total bloody genocidal disaster once, let’s do the exact same thing from the other side and hope the outcome will be different. Well, I guess it is already different - after all, it isn't Touaregs and black Africans who are being indiscriminately massacred and piled into roadside mass graves by NATO and its allies this time around... oh, wait, yes it is. Never mind.

But he REALLY doesn’t wonder where all of those unemployable rich Salafi kids in North Africa actually came from? They were trained by the CIA back when they were fighting NATO’s proxy war in Afghanistan, and they were supported by the Malian government for a long time as a way of discrediting the Touareg separatists in the north of the country, who had been kept in check by the presence of Gaddafi’s Libya. And the real aim of France in all of this appears to be to radicalise the Malian populace in just such a fashion as WN points out, so they can better reassert the colonial privileges of la Françafrique (see also here, here and here for a bit of background, apologies in advance for the paywall). The modern Malian government’s proper analogue would be the Nguyen Dynasty of Vietnam, who were using French ‘volunteers’ (fighting for strictly liberal and enlightened ideals, of course) to fight off both the Khmer and the peasant rebels led by the populist Nguyen Hue (later Emperor Quang Trung). It ended, of course, in the total annexation of Vietnam (and the Khmer) by French colonisers.

And what’s this? We also have noted humanitarian and friend of democracy Rupert Murdoch getting this fluffy puppy and unicorn-hugger to write in support of it. That’s right; that Tony Blair, one of the unrepentant leaders of the murderous folly (amongst a great many others), rather than being just one of its less-important cheerleaders.

See, War Nerd? Stop playing with the small fry. This is where the real supporters of the Iraq fiasco are coming from. And if that's not reason enough to oppose intervention in Mali, I don't know what is.