Moderators: Alyrium Denryle, Edi, K. A. Pital
So what isn't stupid, wasteful, cretinous, and dishonest about this war?weemadando wrote:They were against a stupid, wasteful, cretinous and dishonest war in Iraq. As were most people who didn't stand to profit/watch Fox.
Mali asked for help. That alone makes this more legitimate then Iraq.CaptHawkeye wrote:So what isn't stupid, wasteful, cretinous, and dishonest about this war?weemadando wrote:They were against a stupid, wasteful, cretinous and dishonest war in Iraq. As were most people who didn't stand to profit/watch Fox.
This is not an unfair initial assessment to make of any western invention either. The West has a history of ambiguous or downright amoral handling of African wars. They better sell this shit well.
More simply, Hollande could just be trying the same thing Sarkozy did in Libya: attempting to shore up his falling approval ratings with what he may hope is seen as a benign, defensible intervention."In the long term, France has interests in securing resources in the Sahel - particularly oil and uranium, which the French energy company Areva has been extracting for decades in neighboring Niger," said Sold.
But much time will pass before Mali's resources can be extracted, so Sold believes security interests really are at the forefront in France's current military strike.
Africa expert Delius agrees, noting that when it came to military involvement in Libya, many countries had an interest there, especially in oil. With Mali, he said, it's different, and Paris seems to be following a concrete set of goals.
But sending troops to Mali represents a tightrope walk for France. The country may be out to defend its political and security interests, but there's a danger of seeming neo-colonialist. However, France is sticking to the demands of a UN mandate passed in December 2012.
"There is a defense agreement between France and Mali that was written for exactly such cases," stressed Alexander Stroh, a researcher at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
As such, France could be said to be simply fulfilling its obligations to Mali's government by preventing the rebel groups from marching on the capital.
AP feed wrote:TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — For eight days after the Islamists set fire to one of the world's most precious collections of ancient manuscripts, the alarm inside the building blared. It was an eerie, repetitive beeping, a cry from the innards of the injured library that echoed around the world.
The al-Qaida-linked extremists who ransacked the institute wanted to deal a final blow to Mali, whose northern half they had held for 10 months before retreating in the face of a French-led military advance. They also wanted to deal a blow to the world, especially France, whose capital houses the headquarters of UNESCO, the organization which recognized and elevated Timbuktu's monuments to its list of World Heritage sites.
So as they left, they torched the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, aiming to destroy a heritage of 30,000 manuscripts that date back to the 13th century.
"These manuscripts are our identity," said Abdoulaye Cisse, the library's acting director. "It's through these manuscripts that we have been able to reconstruct our own history, the history of Africa . People think that our history is only oral, not written. What proves that we had a written history are these documents."
The first people who spotted the column of black smoke on Jan. 23 were the residents whose homes surround the library, and they ran to tell the center's employees. The bookbinders, manuscript restorers and security guards who work for the institute broke down and cried.
Just about the only person who didn't was Cisse, the acting director, who for months had harbored a secret. Starting last year, he and a handful of associates had conspired to save the documents so crucial to this 1,000-year-old town.
In April, when the rebels preaching a radical version of Islam first rolled into this city swirling with sand, the institute was in the process of moving its collection into a new, state-of-the-art building. The fighters commandeered the new center, turning it into a dormitory for one of their units of foreign fighters, Cisse said. They didn't realize only about 2,000 manuscripts had been moved there, the bulk of the collection remaining at the old library, he said.
The Islamists came in, as they did in Afghanistan, with their own, severe interpretation of Islam, intent on rooting out what they saw as the veneration of idols instead of the pure worship of Allah. During their 10-month-rule, they eviscerated much of the identity of this storied city, starting with the mausoleums of their saints, which were reduced to rubble.
The turbaned fighters made women hide their faces and blotted out their images on billboards. They closed hair salons, banned makeup and forbade the music for which Mali is known.
Their final act before leaving was to go through the exhibition room in the institute, as well as the whitewashed laboratory used to restore the age-old parchments. They grabbed the books they found and burned them.
However, they didn't bother searching the old building, where an elderly man named Abba Alhadi has spent 40 of his 72 years on earth taking care of rare manuscripts. The illiterate old man, who walks with a cane and looks like a character from the Bible, was the perfect foil for the Islamists. They wrongly assumed that the city's European-educated elite would be the ones trying to save the manuscripts, he said.
So last August, Alhadi began stuffing the thousands of books into empty rice and millet sacks.
At night, he loaded the millet sacks onto the type of trolley used to cart boxes of vegetables to the market. He pushed them across town and piled them into a lorry and onto the backs of motorcycles, which drove them to the banks of the Niger River.
From there, they floated down to the central Malian town of Mopti in a pinasse, a narrow, canoe-like boat. Then cars drove them from Mopti, the first government-controlled town, to Mali's capital, Bamako, over 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from here.
"I have spent my life protecting these manuscripts. This has been my life's work. And I had to come to terms with the fact that I could no longer protect them here," said Alhadi. "It hurt me deeply to see them go, but I took strength knowing that they were being sent to a safe place."
It took two weeks in all to spirit out the bulk of the collection, around 28,000 texts housed in the old building covering the subjects of theology, astronomy, geography and more.
There was nothing they could do, however, for the 2,000 documents that had already been transferred to the new library, to its exhibition and restoration rooms, and to a basement vault. Cisse took solace knowing that most of the texts in the new library had been digitized.
Even so, when his staff came to tell him about the fire, he felt a constriction in his chest.
The new library is housed inside a modern building, whose sheer walls are made to resemble the mud-walled homes of Timbuktu. Cisse braved his fear to slip through the back gate on the morning of Jan. 24.
The alarm was still screaming. The empty manuscript boxes were strewn on the ground outside in the brick courtyard. All that was left of the books was a soft, feathery ash.
Cisse then entered the library. The glass cases in the exhibit room were empty. So was the manuscript restoration lab, its white tables blanketed in dust. The manuscripts left out were gone.
But the librarian knew the bulk of the books was in a storage room in the basement. With the alarm still screaming, he walked down the flight of pitch-black stairs.
The room had been locked shut. And he was too afraid to open it, because the mayor of Timbuktu had warned residents that the retreating rebels had mined the town and booby-trapped strategic buildings.
So he waited.
On Jan. 28, a column of more than 600 French troops rolled into the city.
The same day, they came to inspect the institute. They spraypainted in pink the word "OK" in front of each room they cleared, working their way to the basement. They pummeled the locked door. When the door slapped open, Cisse felt as if his chest was about to explode.
They beamed a flashlight into the darkness. In the pools of light, he made out the little bundles of parchments sitting on the rafters. They were where they had left them nearly a year ago, in a room the Islamists had never discovered.
The director-general of UNESCO toured the damaged library this weekend, alongside French President Francois Hollande, who made a triumphant visit to Timbuktu. She described the manuscripts as a global treasure. "They are part of our world heritage," said Irina Bokova. "They are important for all of Africa, as well as for all of the world."
Cisse estimates that what was lost in the end is less than 5 percent of the Ahmed Baba collection. Which texts were burned is not yet known.
He stresses that all the manuscripts, which date back over 700 years, are irreplaceable. They are hand-written in a variety of scripts, and include ornate illustrations embedded within the text.
The collection is itself only a portion of the estimated 101,820 manuscripts stored in private libraries here, the product of the confluence of caravan routes which passed through Timbuktu and fostered an extensive trading network, including in books. Among the most valuable are the Tarikh al-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash, chronicles which describe life in Timbuktu during the Songhai empire in the 16th century.
"We lost a lot of our riches. But we were also able to save a great deal of our riches, and for that I am overcome with joy," Cisse said. "These manuscripts represent who we are.... I saved these books in the name of Timbuktu first, because I am from Timbuktu. . Then I did it for my country. And also for all of humanity. Because knowledge is for all of humanity."
Who cares ? Denmark is... irrelevant, no offense to the Danes out there, but that's the truth (when it comes to global military interventions).Sea Skimmer wrote:Funny, a later article from the same site says Denmark actually bought weapons from Israel to drop on Libya because nobody in Europe could supply them. So much for Europe having enough ammo; the Danes were only flying four F-16s too, hardly a lavish force for someone else on the European side of NATO to support.
http://www.acus.org/natosource/report-n ... ld-country
France clearly has enough military resources for its military endeavours. Of course, help helps, too. No foreign aid would have meant a slower advance after the djihadists were stopped in their tracks by French troops on the ground (SF teams and prepositioned regular units).France clearly does not have more then enough resources for its military endeavours. That is why they have sought and gotten support US and UK transport aircraft, and now US KC-135 refueling tankers too. Please get a fucking clue.
This. This is politics, people, not a macho contest. The whole reason for having an alliance is cooperation in order to get shit done. Jesus, if Stalin thought like you, you'd all be speaking German now.Of course France asked for the help. Why have allies otherwise ?
France has no tactical airlift capability larger than a C-130 (The A400M Atlas isn't in service). They could not have airlifted the forces in to the airfields that they did without US, UK, & NATO support. While Armée de l'Air has strategic lift in the form of A310s, A340s, & KC-135s, they don't have the ability to do the things the C-17s have done.iborg wrote:France clearly has enough military resources for its military endeavours. Of course, help helps, too. No foreign aid would have meant a slower advance after the djihadists were stopped in their tracks by French troops on the ground (SF teams and prepositioned regular units).
Of course France asked for the help. Why have allies otherwise ?
Name one major capability that was brought by non-US forces into those two conflicts.iborg wrote:Or does it mean that America didn't have the resources for its military endeavours because they had foreign help in Iraq and Afghanistan ?
Islam is, and always has been, more concerned with internal purity than converting the unbelievers, and it's not just the extremist sects that are more offended by "false" interpretation of the Koran. I mean look at how vicious the disputes between Shia and Sunni get, or the internal conflicts of the four major sects of Sunnism. It's an odd quirk of the religion.hongi wrote:What sort of Muslim burns calligraphied copies of the Qur'an? What sort of Muslim destroys their own intellectual heritage?
Of course already people are taking this as another example of barbaric Islam, ignoring the fact that it was Muslims who wrote these manuscripts in the first place, copied them, transmitted and discussed them, and it was Muslims who kept them safe for centuries upon centuries. Same with the Bamiyan Buddhas, strange how they survived untouched in a Muslim land for well over a thousand years.
Fundamentalism hurts those who it claims to protect. More Muslims are killed by self-proclaimed defenders of the faith than non-Muslims, though the deaths of brown people are less well represented in the media. That's how it is with hate and suspicion, it's self-destructive bullshit.
Fixed for you. I need not remind how Europe drowned itself in blood because some believed the Pope was cool and others believed he was not or simply wanted their own pet church to get more power. Christianity and Islam are quite similar, and violent sectarian disputes are not exclusive to the latter - far from it.Block wrote:It's an odd quirk of the fundamenal problem with religion.
You mean apart from the thousands of british troops?TimothyC wrote:France has no tactical airlift capability larger than a C-130 (The A400M Atlas isn't in service). They could not have airlifted the forces in to the airfields that they did without US, UK, & NATO support. While Armée de l'Air has strategic lift in the form of A310s, A340s, & KC-135s, they don't have the ability to do the things the C-17s have done.iborg wrote:France clearly has enough military resources for its military endeavours. Of course, help helps, too. No foreign aid would have meant a slower advance after the djihadists were stopped in their tracks by French troops on the ground (SF teams and prepositioned regular units).
Of course France asked for the help. Why have allies otherwise ?Name one major capability that was brought by non-US forces into those two conflicts.iborg wrote:Or does it mean that America didn't have the resources for its military endeavours because they had foreign help in Iraq and Afghanistan ?
It's not like NATO has a shared pool of transports or anything. It's just funny that when America wanted help in Iraq/Afghanistan they basically asked all of NATO. But heaven forbid someone else ask for assistance.Stark wrote:Too bad the existence of the capability in an alliance makes it pretty wasteful for everyone to maintain it, I guess.
Do people really need to big talk the largest military force in history? It's a bit sad. Damn those people for not maintaining huge airlift capacity that they know they can borrow from someone else! FREE MARKET!
