US Backs African Intervention Force in Mali

The United States wants soldiers in Mali to accept an African outside intervention force to help fight al-Qaida affiliated terrorists in the north.

The Obama administration says the international community can not allow Muslim extremists in northern Mali to create a separate Islamic state.

“We do not need to see a fragmentation of Mali,” noted Johnnie Carson, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. “We do not need to see a Mali which has a Caliphate in the north. Nor do we need to see another state created which would not be economically sustainable or viable.”

When troops in the south toppled Mali’s government in a March coup, ethnic Tuareg fighters in the north expanded territory under their control. Militant groups Ansar Dine and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa have moved to enforce a strict version of Islamic law.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

The terrorist group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb has become more active. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says Mali-based extremists played a role in September’s attack on the U.S. mission in the Libyan city of Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Carson said terrorists are too powerful for transitional civilian authorities in Mali.

“Many of their senior leadership and membership are comprised of non-Malians,” he said. “People who have come in from the region, who have come in Algeria, who have come in from Mauritania, who have come in from Libya and other places. This is a terrorist group and the response to that must be a security, military response.”

Johnnie Carson, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs

In an interview with VOA, Carson said Mali’s military should accept an intervention force from the Economic Community of West African States, because the army is fractured by the flight of soldiers to Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania.

“The Malian military has been broken. It is now in need of restructuring and repair and rehabilitation,” Carson explained. “It should accept the support, the camaraderie, the mentoring and the friendship of other ECOWAS states as it attempts to get itself together so that it can help address the issues of terrorism in the northern part of the country, as well as humanitarian support.”

Regional mediation agreed to elections within one year of the coup. Secretary Clinton says Mali should meet that April deadline “because only a democratically-elected government will have the legitimacy to achieve a negotiated political settlement in northern Mali, end the rebellion, and restore the rule of law.”

Many Malians believe the country should be reunited before holding elections for a new civilian government. Voting otherwise, they say, legitimizes Mali’s partition, giving northern extremists greater claim to a separate state.

City of Corpus Christi Tells Man It’s Illegal To Clean Sidewalk

A business owner in Corpus Christi, Texas, is at a loss for what to do after the city informed him: He cannot wash bird poop off the sidewalk in front of his restaurant. The city claims the droppings go into the storm drain and then into the bay, polluting the water.

John Webb, manager of Crawdaddy’s, has been washing the sidewalk for 18 years, but recently he was told it was against the law.

“If I can’t wash my sidewalk off, what am I supposed to do? I’m at a loss at how to clean this up,” he said. “Now I’m stuck with having dirty sidewalks and this bird poop. It’s nasty,”

Officials say that Webb is violating the city storm water ordinance. Hosing off the sidewalk could result in a $2,000 fine.

City officials believe that it’s OK for rainwater to wash away the bird poop because that is a natural occurrence.

“It just seems kinda foolish that rain washing it off is a natural occurrence, but a water hose washing it off is a pollutant. It just really doesn’t make much sense to me,” said Webb.

It is a government decision…it doesn’t have to make sense!

US Special Forces Deployed in Iraq…Again

Despite the official US military withdrawal last December, American special forces “recently” returned to Iraq on a counter-terrorism mission, according to an American general in charge of weapons sales there. The mission was reported by the New York Times, in the fifteenth paragraph of a story about deepening sectarian divides.

The irony is that the US is protecting a pro-Iran Shiite regime in Baghdad against a Sunni-based insurgency while at the same time supporting a Sunni-led movement against the Iran-backed dictatorship in Syria. The Sunni rebellions are occurring in the vast Sunni region between northwestern Iraq and southern Syria where borders are porous.

During the Iraq War, many Iraqi insurgents from Anbar and Diyala provinces took sanctuary in Sunni areas of Syria. Now they are turning their weapons on two targets, the al-Malaki government in Baghdad and the Assad regime in Damascus.

The US is caught in the contradictions of proxy wars, favoring Iran’s ally in Iraq while trying to displace Iran’s proxy in Syria.

The lethal complication of the US Iraq policy is a military withdrawal that was propelled by political pressure from public opinion in the US even as the war could not be won on the battlefield. Military “redeployment”, as the scenario is described, is a general’s nightmare.

In the case of Vietnam, a “decent interval” was supposedly arranged by the Nixon administration to create the appearance of an orderly American withdrawal. During the same “interval”, Nixon massively escalated his bombing campaign to no avail. Two years after the 1973 Paris peace accords, Saigon collapsed.

It is unlikely that the Maliki regime will fall to Sunni insurgents in Iraq, if only because the Sunni population is approximately twenty percent of the population. However, the return of US Special Forces is not likely to restore Iraqi stability, and they may become trapped in crossfire as the sectarian tensions deepen.

The real lesson may be for Afghanistan, where another unwinnable, unaffordable war in support of an unpopular regime is stumbling towards 2014.