The tide of war is not receding
The French seem willing to accept what Barack Obama cannot, writes TERRY GLAVIN. That the struggle against fanaticism must go on.
It seems to take quite a lot for a spectacular state-failure catastrophe to attract the attention of the civilized world these days, what with U.S. President Barack Obama’s persistent and absurd reiterations of his administration’s fantasy that “the tide of war is receding” and everything.
In the case of Mali, it took the better part of a year and the loss of two-thirds of the country to a grisly alliance of Tuareg slavers, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa and Ansar Dine, the “Defenders of the Faith.”
It took the seizure of the ancient city of Timbuktu and the burning and demolition of a still-unknown quantity of that ancient city’s priceless library collections and classic shrines. It took a military coup, more than half a million refugees, two million Malians at risk of starvation and an impending insurgent advance on Bamako, the capital city.
After French Mirage jets and helicopter gunships finally arrived on the scene Jan. 11, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was helpfully clear about the point of it all. “The goal is the total reconquest of Mali,” he said. “We will not leave any pockets of resistance.” Very good then. Just because Canada’s contribution to the French-led multinational intervention in Mali to date has been so paltry and inconsequential that the governing Conservatives have even found support for their timid approach from the New Democratic Party’s Paul Dewar, this does not mean that Canada needs to do much more, militarily, at least for now. This is simply because the French and their British and African allies appear to be handling things splendidly.
So far, Canada has contributed the use of one of the Canadian Forces’ C-17 transport planes to ferry military hardware from France to Mali, a $13-million boost in humanitarian relief and not much else. But even this has been enough to cause the undead of Canada’s “antiwar” movement to moan and howl. The Canadian Peace Alliance asserts that Ottawa is putting Canada to use as “a junior partner to a NATO aggression in Africa,” and as for all this stuff about Islamist terror groups taking over so much of the country, it’s all just “Islamophobia.”
This is rather at odds with the way African Union chairman Yayi Boni explained the situation last week to Zimbabwe’s crackpot strongman Robert Mugabe, whose paranoid view, ventriloquized by the Canadian Peace Alliance, is that France has embarked on a “colonialist venture” of some sort. Here’s Yayi Boni: “The rebels, as a result of religious intolerance, are killing people. They cut the hands, arms and the legs, everything, the women, the youths and so on.”
While a small contingent of British troops has joined the 2,000-strong force of French soldiers in Mali and the United States is playing a small role in logistical support, France was invited in by the African Union and by Mali’s provisional government on the strength of a UN Security Council resolution. As many as 8,000 soldiers from the 16-member Economic Community of West African States are expected to join the French imminently.
This doesn’t have the ring of an imperialist adventure about it somehow, but neither do events in Mali conform with the new article of American faith that “the tide of war is receding.” President Obama first spoke those words on June 22, 2011 in the East Room of the White House in a speech that brilliantly reconfigured an accelerated drawdown of American troops from Afghanistan as cool policy calculus, rather than the cynical capitulation that it really was.
President Obama has since reassembled those words in many ways and on many occasions, not least his address that September to the UN General Assembly, two months later on Veteran’s Day, then four months later when he announced cuts to the U.S. military budget, then during his State of the Union address last January. By last week’s inaugural address, Obama had fulfilled his own prophecy, “A decade of war is now ending.”
But war is neither ending nor is its tide receding in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have murdered roughly 1,100 ill-equipped and ill-trained Afghan security forces over the past six months. Last week, a party of Taliban emissaries was in Qatar, wandering around, scouting out office space, ready and eager to accommodate NATO’s Obama-led “transition” out of Central Asia.
In Syria, the bodies of 79 men and boys were found in a canal in Aleppo on Tuesday, the latest victims in a campaign of atrocities Bashar Assad has waged against his own people that has taken more than 60,000 lives since President Obama’s East Room speech.
Iran is well on its way to acquiring the capacity to build a nuclear bomb. In the absence of some sort of intervention, diplomatic or military or something in between, Tehran will in all likelihood cross the nuclear threshold within a year or so.
One could go on like this. But for now, in the matter of Mali, all that need be said is what thousands of jubilant Malians have been shouting in the streets of Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal and other desert towns in recent days: Vive la France.