Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is John Glazer, assistant editor at antiwar.com.
Mali coup has us interventionism written all over it.
And, uh, I guess this is another example of proving the old adage.
Certainly in my case, proving the old adage that, uh, the empire is how Americans learn geography.
I didn't know where the hell Mali was.
I'll give myself half credit.
If you'd asked me, where's Mali, I would have said somewhere in like Northern Africa, maybe near Chad somewhere.
Probably I probably would have said something like that because I know where it's not, but I didn't know where the hell it was now.
I do because of the empire.
Welcome to the show.
John, how's it going?
Very good.
Thanks for having me.
Uh, now what in the world could uncle Sam have to do with what's going on out there in the middle of the Sahara desert?
Well, at this point, it seems, uh, rather indirect.
Uh, the main thing, the main story that came out, uh, when this Mali coup happened, um, is that, uh, blessed mercenaries from the Libyan war.
Uh, Marmar Gaddafi hired Tuareg mercenaries.
Tuaregs are minorities in Mali that are in the North and basically have been fighting an on and off insurgency against the Southern government for decades.
Um, but, uh, Marmar Gaddafi hired them as mercenaries to fight against the NATO backed rebel rebel troops, uh, fighting Gaddafi trying to overthrow him.
And after that war ended not too many months ago, uh, the Tuaregs returned and they were armed and sort of strengthened and we started to wage the insurgency stronger than ever.
Um, and this started to piss off a bunch of people in the Mali army, uh, especially because they say that the, the president, uh, or the slightly former president now, um, was not sufficiently arming them.
It was not sufficiently, uh, giving them enough, uh, capacity to actually fight the rebellion in the North.
Um, and this caused, according to the, uh, coup leader, them to seize control in Mali and, uh, overthrow the president and he's now arrested and reportedly in a safe place.
We don't really know where, um, but the, the, the after effects of the Libyan, uh, war and, and the NATO intervention, US led NATO intervention.
Um, this is, this is one of those after effects.
And it's interesting.
I looked back and there was a UN report released in February long before this coup that claimed that the impact of the NATO backed rebel victory over Gaddafi reverberated across the world, uh, in such neighboring countries as Mali, uh, that's one of the countries that they named.
It said that I'm quoting the governments of these countries, especially those in the Sahel region, which is where Mali is, uh, had to contend with the influx of hundreds of thousands of traumatized and impoverished returnees, as well as the inflow of unspecified and unquantifiable numbers of arms and ammunition from the Libyan arsenal.
So this is what sort of pushed the, um, uh, rebel troops in Mali to, to commit the coup.
And then a couple of days after the coup happened, we found out that the coup leader, uh, last name Sadogo, uh, was actually funded and trained by the United States.
He participated in several US funded, uh, military training programs, including basic officer training.
Uh, those trainees are hand picked by the US embassies for that training.
Um, and it wasn't, he received that training from 2004 to 2010.
Um, so it seems that, uh, in, in at least, uh, indirect ways, uh, the Mali government was subject to a coup because of US interventionism in Africa.
Well, all right.
So there's a lot there already to talk about.
Um, I guess it's really not clear or is it clear, uh, whether, well, I guess maybe it's not clear.
Is there any reason to really believe that the Americans went ahead and maybe encouraged these guys to do the coup in the first place?
I read somewhere they had a training mission coming up that now was going to have to be canceled because they had to deal with these rebels.
And, uh, so I guess it's pretty easy to imagine a situation where the military, their military complained to our military about it.
And then, so the Americans responded with, well, go ahead and do something about it.
Then if the president's not giving you enough authority to fight these guys, go ahead and take the authority yourselves.
Right.
I think, I think there's a couple reasons to believe, um, different sides of this.
And on the first hand, the United States is very inept and all sorts of unintended consequences occur because of interventionist foreign policy all the time.
I mean, when you get this much involved in the world in such a military fashion, uh, you know, you can't foresee all of the consequences.
On the other hand, um, it's interesting that we should note that the coup leaders, uh, justification or supposed motivation for committing the coup was that the twerag, they didn't have enough, enough capacity to fight the twerag.
And what's interesting about that is that that line of reasoning would follow Washington if it had that, if it was actually talking about it, because the president who's now arrested, um, was saying for the last couple of years that the twerags were out aligned with Al Qaeda.
Now he might've been saying that just because it got him more military and economic aid from Washington.
Um, but either way, Washington seems to have believed it.
And if Washington believed that the president was not sufficiently hard on the rebels who were supposedly aligned with Al Qaeda, then they certainly would have an interest in fomenting a coup in which the military leadership, uh, brutal as they are in other respects would support, would, you know, do Washington's bidding and be much harder on the Al Qaeda, uh, supposed Al Qaeda presence in Mali.
So that's one reason to believe that Washington might have had a hand in this that is more intentional rather than unintentional.
One other thing, which is interesting as well, is that the United States, unlike European Union and many other, uh, UN agencies has not fully suspended the economic and military aid to Mali.
It had suspended some aid, um, but has kept the rest of it going and saying it's fair to spending about $67 million in aid.
Uh, but that, but aid for food and humanitarian assistance will continue.
And this is significant because if the United States recognizes what happened in Mali as a coup, then by law it has to suspend all aid, has to stop all aid from going into Mali.
But the reason that it hasn't might be interesting.
The Obama administration incidentally took a similar position towards Honduras after the military coup there in 2009.
It first declined to officially categorize it as a coup so that it can continue to spend military and economic aid to a regime in Honduras that became increasingly violent and corrupt.
Um, and now Washington's ties to Honduras are as strong as ever.
Uh, and the U S is using it as, you know, one of its many satellites in the region to dominate Central America, uh, mainly under the rubric of the war on drugs.
But needless to say, Honduras, which is a brutal military regime that came to power because of the military coup that was illegal and unconstitutional is receiving mountains of us aid.
And they taking this, they took the same strategy towards Honduras back in 2009 that they're now taking towards Mali, which is again, another reason to believe that possibly, um, the U S has had an intentional hand in this, but there's no direct evidence for that.
There's circumstantial evidence, which is what I've been getting.
Sure.
Well, and as you say, they at least are indirectly responsible, um, since this is all blow back and blow all around from the, uh, uh, catastrophe ongoing in Libya.
Uh, are these, uh, this group got so much, uh, better armed under Qaddafi and then came home with all their weapons after he lost.
Uh, all right.
Hold it right there.
It's John Glazer, assistant editor at antiwar.com.
You can find them at news.antiwar.com and antiwar.com/blog.
Talking about the Mali coup and the Libya war.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Glazer, assistant editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com and antiwar.com/blog.
And we're talking about his Mali articles.
US suspends some aid to Mali, refuses to call it a coup and Mali coup, cause that is what it is, has us interventionism written all over it.
Uh, the guys that did the coup trained by the U S maybe got a green light to do what they did.
Maybe we're asked to don't know for sure yet, but at the very least, uh, this is consequences from the regime change in Libya.
Because, uh, the rebels of Mali had been hired by Gaddafi to be in his own little personal Gestapo there.
And then, uh, when his government was falling, they took off, but they brought a bunch of his weapons with them and they went home and at least the official story has it.
This is the excuse.
Um, obviously personal ambition is the driving factor in all of these things.
But, uh, the excuses, the, uh, sorta kinda elected president of Mali wasn't doing enough, wasn't giving the military enough authority to fight the rebels.
And so they had to topple him and arrest him and seize power from him.
That way they can wage their war against the Tuareg, uh, rebels.
And, you know, Dan McAdams noted at the Lew Rockwell blog that, um, they actually called it something like the coup to restore democracy and freedom or something like that, that these guys must've really been paying attention at their state department classes, that whenever you do a military coup, you have to call it liberty and that's good enough for, you know, American media purposes, basically.
I guess I don't really know where to go from here.
Other than, I guess I'll ask you this.
What the hell does the empire care about?
Who rules Mali?
Do they even have oil or anything under the sand they live on there?
Well, you know what?
It's interesting.
Um, Africa has been coming up a lot in terms of US grand strategy.
Uh, it was just sort of a dark continent for a while.
You know, we didn't even have, I mean, after World War II, when the Pentagon drew up war plans for like the entire world and CENTCOM and, you know, EUCOM and, uh, CENTCOM and all these different areas, they basically divvied up the world, um, and Africa didn't even have one.
During the past, uh, so I think it was 2007 that AFRICOM came along.
Um, and now, I mean, we're involved in Somalia with the drone campaign and that proxy campaign and funding the African union armies to fight the, you know, regional war with Somalia.
Um, we're, we just finished a war of regime change through NATO in Libya.
Uh, we're in Uganda, uh, trying to get the LRA and basically support brutal dictatorships in that region of East Africa.
Uh, now we're in Mali.
We're also in Nigeria.
Um, US, uh, the Pentagon's Africa command is now training and equipping militaries I wrote a couple months ago.
Uh, I just brought up my, my article from a couple months ago.
It's training, um, and equipping militaries in countries, including Algeria, Burkina Faso, which I don't even know what that is.
Chad, Mali, uh, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisia.
Uh, all of this is in the name of, you know, preventing terrorists from establishing sanctuaries, of course, but this, that's an interesting justification because, um, the, the strategy right now towards Africa is starting to resemble that, which we employed, uh, towards the Middle East for decades.
Namely it's characterized by military aid and reliance on brutish, undemocratic regimes, proxy militias, and targeted special operations, uh, all over the region.
And right.
And then using any resistance as the excuse for intervention in the first place.
Precisely.
And not to mention the fact that resistance and so-called, you know, quote unquote terrorism is only fueled by this type of policy.
Um, so it obviously can't be terrorism and preventing terrorists from establishing sanctuaries that that's, uh, justifying all this new focus on Africa.
But, you know, if we look in the broader context of geopolitics, China is trying to have a larger presence in Africa and even so forth like this, and we, more than anything else, this is evident in Obama's so-called shift to Asia.
He wants to prevent China from getting anywhere, from extending its economic base, from extending its ties with Africa or the Middle East and so on and so forth.
And so the Pentagon and the higher ups in Washington view Africa as another way to establish its dominance, uh, to get there before others do and maintain global hegemony.
It's the same old story that we've heard.
It's why the, this is underlines our policy towards the Middle East.
It underlined our policy towards Central America, uh, and so on and so forth.
And the presence in Africa is just expanding and expanding and expanding.
And we should see more of it.
And this Mali thing is always the latest development.
So it could be that they want all this just so they can have one airbase there or something ridiculous.
It could be.
Just to expand one little toe on their footprint.
Right.
But we shouldn't, we shouldn't discount the notion of, you know, being able to bribe a brutal government to behave and behave is, you know, a synonym for obeying Washington.
Um, that's what we did in the Middle East.
This is how we maintained hegemony in the Middle East.
We pet, we make brutal dictatorships dependent on our aid, uh, and prevent them from, you know, maintain getting independence or having some sort of democratic reform because that would threaten our control over the region.
And the same thing happens in Africa.
I suppose no African population will be, uh, allowed to, uh, maintain independence or democratic progress and so on and so forth.
If the United States prevents it.
And if we prevent it, we maintain control over this dark continent, which does have a lot of resources, not just oil, but mineral deposits that are used in, you know, high tech devices and so on and so forth.
Uh, it's a valuable stretch of land, massive.
Um, and the U S wants to maintain control over that just as it does the rest of the world, it seems.
Yeah.
Full spectrum dominance and all that.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Full spectrum dominant.
We should also note an interesting aspect of this is that it's totally in the shadows.
I mean, remind me if Congress, uh, you know, uh, approved that we should just be focusing on, uh, a military efforts on the whole of Africa.
Oh, no, this is all just done, uh, by executive policy decisions inside the Pentagon and inside the white house.
Of course, it's done secretly with drones, with the CIA, with Jay stock.
Yeah.
Congress will come with a rubber stamp about, you know, one humanitarian concern or another, you know, as we trudge through here, but, uh, that's right.
But the American people certainly don't have a say in any of this.
Right.
Of course not.
Well, and the thing is there's always so many unfortunate situations going on in Africa anyway, that any of them can be used as an excuse.
I mean, just think of, it's really kind of fascinating, right?
The most successful, just in terms of numbers and what have you, uh, most successful internet meme ever was, and after a decade of the terror war was, come on, everybody, let's go feel really good about ourselves wearing bracelets and sending the army to go and save sub Saharan Africa from itself.
And in like a week or two, this thing took over the world, took over the West.
Anyway, I don't know.
It didn't really have staying power though.
Did it?
It all kind of fell apart into one big mockery and not in the least because the guy who's the star of the film, um, went nuts.
So in the streets of San Diego, I saw that.
I thought, I mean, I typically am knee deep in news and you know, political science, but, uh, I came across a link where this nutcase was battling to himself nude on the middle of a, in the middle of a California, uh, intersection.
Well, he was under a lot of pressure, but anyway, no, seriously, here we are.
We're taking over Africom.
As you said, there's no, uh, we have Africom taking over the continent of Africa.
I'm already calling the continent Africom Jesus.
Um, and then, and no, as you said, the American public is not involved in any debate about this.
There's no discussion in the Congress whatsoever.
There's no discussion in the media whatsoever.
It's just one of these things that they decided, you know, at a meeting in the tank among the different, uh, leaders of the military or something.
And then the one thing we get to hear about it, it becomes the biggest story.
I mean, this huge story for at least a couple of weeks was this giant campaign to justify the troop movement that we already have there, uh, in the name of hunting down Joseph Kony.
It's a really, it's incredible.
I don't really know entirely what to make of it, how it could have been so successful, but.
It's John Glazer, everybody.news.antiwar.com antiwar.com/blog.
We'll be right back.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton and I'm talking with John Glazer, assistant editor at antiwar.com about, uh, AFRICOM it's a recent past, present, and future.
And, uh, once again, it's just all about China.
I was trying to make a point.
I was trying to make a point.
I sort of got off track talking about the Kony stupid thing there, John.
But my point was they're never going to run out of humanitarian reasons for intervention in sub-Saharan Africa.
And the American people apparently will buy it every time.
Next, we have to go save the poor people of Zimbabwe because their central bank acts like ours and we have to protect them from that.
Yeah.
They might buy it if they're told about it.
I mean, if you remember what happened when Obama sent a hundred combat troops to Uganda, he just wrote it up.
He wrote a little thing.
Yeah.
They announced it to Jake Tapper at ABC.
It got one story and then that was it.
Right.
And by the time the Kony thing came out, they had to admit at the end of the movie that like, okay, well actually the troops are already there, but so call your Senator and make sure they never leave.
Right.
So yeah, the question is again, in this changing landscape of ever increasing government secrecy in the national security state, Washington seems content on doing their activities in Africa under the radar without much.
And yes, it's true when it comes up in the media, bad people or harsh poverty will certainly lend credence and allow, you know, activists or ordinary Americans say, ah, and then yes, we should just totally get involved in militarily dominate the continent.
Um, but, uh, you know, that that's if people hear about it.
Right.
I mean, just look at Somalia.
I mean, this thing in Somalia has been going on for years and obviously there's a lot of that secret.
Uh, Jeremy Scahill uncovered, for example, a CIA JSOC tortured dungeon beneath Mogadishu, uh, fittingly.
Um, but on the other hand, we also only have Jeffrey Gettleman over there writing for the New York times.
There's just white men don't write about what's going on in Africa basically.
And so we just don't ever get to read about Somalia.
They sure as hell.
Well, I don't know really, cause I don't watch, but I bet you they don't ever talk about it on the Brian Williams news that the old people watch, you know, if they did, they would pretend that Al-Shabaab just came out of the ether yesterday.
Not that America has been at war there since 2003 or anything like that.
Right.
And this is, this is the problem.
No, and that's a huge war.
That's not some little covert action.
This is like, you know, the war in Nicaragua in the eighties or something like that.
Right.
Open secret.
Not only does the media not talk about it, but the government doesn't tell us about it, uh, you know, and with regard to Somalia, I mean, it was a few months ago.
I wrote a blog post that I was amazed that an Obama administration official, uh, told, I think the Washington post that they were concerned about, about launching a broader campaign on Al-Shabaab for fear that it would turn Al-Shabaab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out, you know, attacks on us soil, uh, a couple months later, of course, Al-Qaeda formally merged with Al-Shabaab.
Um, it seems like making, making Al-Shabaab who, you know, didn't have the ability to threaten us in any real way.
Uh, the centerpiece of our interventions and wars in East Africa didn't work out so well.
Uh, and we're going to see where, you know, you, especially in everyone else in anti-war.com and me have been, you know, talking a lot about in this post nine 11 era, uh, about the blowback that has caused all of this.
Uh, but that's mainly in the Middle East and now we're, we're, we're, we're waging, we're, you know, embarking on another such campaign in Africa and we shouldn't be surprised if it causes, you know, another massive, uh, movement of blowback and terrorism and, uh, you know, regional hatred towards the United States.
Yeah.
Well, and we can already see the imbalance of power where we helped build up the Ugandan military and dictatorship bigger and badder than it, you know, has its own, as its own natural power with all our foreign aid to them, bribing them to occupy Somalia for us.
We see the, uh, the unintended and intended consequences of the Libya catastrophe, um, already, uh, you know, beginning to flow, uh, out from there.
And, um, you know, it won't be long before the disaster in Congo is entirely on our hands.
Uh, somebody's got to send in the Marine Corps there to quell whichever group decides to insurge against us first.
That could be a big one.
Nigeria too could be a real big one because there are plenty of people with plenty of reason to, to test their government in Nigeria and, uh, put a few JSOC guys on the ground there.
You'd have all kinds of factions, nevermind Boko Haram or whatever.
You could have, uh, all kinds of factions and no one ever even heard of before come out of the woodwork to fight us in a place like that.
In fact, uh, as featured in commercials for join the Navy already, here we are obviously fighting in Western Africa.
It's interesting to note too, that, you know, this, this new sort of approach to Africa is a bit, is sort of embryonic.
It's very new.
It's very young.
And Washington hasn't really figured out a good, you know, talking point line of, of, of, for these into justifying these interventions.
I mean, um, there, there is no, Oh, we're going in to set up democracies and, you know, free, uh, you know, cut the chains that are holding down Africa and so forth.
I mean, yeah, Gaddafi was a bad guy, including when we supported him and gave him weapons and money.
Uh, but now it's even worse.
Uh, the militias that we helped, you know, oust Gaddafi with their committed systematic widespread abuses, including torture, extrajudicial executions, and other war crimes.
And, uh, they're, they're potentially having an influence on the government sooner or later, uh, which is not going to lead to the sprawling democracy that president Obama heralded as a justification for supporting them against Gaddafi's regime.
The Ugandan, uh, state has gotten even more oppressive since, uh, our intervention there, since we sent a hundred combat troops, they've clamped down on press freedoms.
They've, uh, uh, you know, uh, attacked people for protesting and so forth.
Um, there is no really other side of this where the U S gets the point and say, look, look at what, you know, wonderful things we're doing.
Look at how important and justified our military interventions are in this region.
They're just doing it under the radar and they're shutting up about it.
It's amazing that they can just get away with it.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, part of that has to do with the democratic president and, um, you know, where you and I see the Supreme irony, maybe, or maybe it's just a stupid little irony that our first openly black president, uh, is, you know, the one overseeing the great leap forward on this project.
Um, others see cover, you know, he's a black guy and he's a Democrat.
So whatever he's doing in Africa has got to be on the up and up or he wouldn't be doing it.
Everybody knows that John.
Yeah.
And this is interesting as well for the upcoming presidential election.
I mean, I have doubts that any of the Republican candidates, I have doubts that say, let's say Romney gets the nomination that he's going to be able to, uh, become more liked than Obama.
Uh, and I think that we're, we have yet to see just how fervent the pro Obama leftists become, because when, when the crap hits the fan and the election starts towing along, you know, we're going to see even more, uh, justifications for his basically Bush style foreign policy and abuse of civil liberties and so on and so forth.
I mean, the, the support of this man is pure blind tribalism, uh, one party against the other.
They just don't care about the consistency that we've seen from Obama and Bush.
Um, and they're going to use, they will say, well, Romney will be worse.
That's probably true, but they will cease to admit, um, Obama's continuous, uh, tyranny in support of all kinds of tyrannies in Africa and the Middle East and elsewhere.
Yep.
Well, and then in four more years, when it's a Republican, Jeb Bush or whoever, it'll switch around and it'll be exactly the same thing, only the other way.
That's how it goes.
And then the libertarians will catch those who wash out, who say, Hey, this whole system's dishonest.
All right, we got to go.
Thanks, John.
John Glazer, everybody, news.antiwar.com, antiwar.com/blog.
