
Image credit.
The German caption translates into: Get ready for blind flying!! Yet again?
Killing people all over the world has become a sort of half thrilling, half boring pastime for the Western consumer of government propaganda (see also Panem et Circenses).
As a manoeuvre in self-importance, Western governments kill and create havoc in hapless foreign countries, carefully chosen for being the weakest and poorest in the world.
Who would risk, say, his job to safe a few lives in Mali? And if they kill one another, why should we not share in it, at least we bring the right values to the brawl.
The habit is so fashionable nowadays, i.e. politically correct, even the Germans put a toe in the pond.
It is the failure to understand that heavy handed intervention itself
creates new problems has been the central failure of American policy
makers ever since 9/11, witness the debacles in Iraq, Libya, and
Afghanistan. Blowback is the intelligence term used to describe the
development of a new and larger problem due to a military or political
action that is not carefully considered.
In order to avoid making a mistake, Washington inevitably and
automatically magnifies every hiccup internationally into a threat,
mobilizing massive resources that lead to the proverbial flea being
smashed with a sledge hammer. That there is some kind of existential
threat resulting from international terrorism is pretty much a myth.
There are lethal insurgencies and terrorist groups to be sure but most
have strictly local agendas and nearly all are being hunted and hounded
successfully by every police and intelligence agency in the world.
Terrorists ready, willing, and, most important, able to travel to Europe
or the United States and successfully undertake a terrorist action are
few, which means that the United States alone is spending some hundreds
of billions of dollars to counter at most a handful of extremists.
Which brings us to the alleged terrorist threat in Africa in general
and to Mali in particular, which might well be considered a case study
of how non-traditional military engagement driven by interventionist
policies can develop willy-nilly when some bad choices are made. What
kind of terrorist threat does Mali actually represent and how did the
current situation come about?
Read on at the source.
See also:
The Fuzzy Image War ..., Libya - Is It the Oil? as well as The Sport of Facile Killing - A Democratic Pastime (note, to read the article by P.T. Bauer scroll downward until the advertisement is out of sight.)
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