Category: Uncategorized

Mali: The Next Afghanistan!

Mali is one of those places we’ve all heard of but, without Google, can’t actually find on a map.  (I tried and only got close.)  In fact, it’s not exactly a country so much as an ill-defined area with poor people in it.  Most Westerners’ knowledge of Mali starts-and-stops with Timbuktu, the proverbial name for nowhere from our childhood.  At one time, it was the centre of a great trading empire (built on slaves and ivory) but by the time the French marched their Foreign Legion there at the end of the 19th century, all they found was a mud and waddle village.  According to all reports, they were deeply disappointed.

For the last half century, since independence from France in 1960, Mali has been kept in permanent poverty by UNICEF and a number of other well-meaning humanitarian agencies.  Unfortunately, since the Malians as just soul-suckingly poor, and not actually starving, people like Bono and Geldof give them a miss, and Oprah hasn’t built them any schools.  The only real distinction Mali has in the family of nations is it’s generally listed as the poorest place on the planet.  Mostly it flies under the radar — at least until now.  You can read about it here.

Mali is rapidly becoming a future destination for Western military might, and, like Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq before it, many of our young people won’t be making the return journey vertically.  This deadly adventure is going to be brought to you by the dithering diplomats of the United Nations who are practically digging the graves even as we speak.  If it sounds as though I’ve lost my girlish laughter over these relentless debacles, it’s because I have.  I’m fed up to the eyeballs with career politicos weeping crocodile tears over the honoured dead, when they are the ones doing their incompetent best to stretch the casualty lists to the breaking point.  Let me explain.

Recently, a Moslem fundamentalist group (read Al Qaeda) has taken control ofPeople who have fled fighting in Mali rest at the Banibangou refugee camp in Niger northern Mali.  That’s the deserty bit that runs from Timbuktu to the Algerian border.  They now control a patch of real estate that’s roughly the size of Afghanistan.  Hmmm?  These boys (No Girls Allowed) are working flat out, to establish a safe haven for anybody with a homicidal grudge against the 21st century.  To that end, they’re collecting tons of Libyan weapons that NATO neglected to inventory after they bombed Gaddafi out of business.  They’re loading up on food, vehicles, oil, etc., creating safe routes in and out of Algeria, and generally digging in for the duration.  Basically, because nobody’s asked them to leave (the Mali military isn’t up to the task) they’re going full throttle Taliban and telling the legitimate Mali government to take a hike.

Cut to the chase: our world doesn’t exactly need yet another band of frontline fanatics hell-bent on destroying anything that doesn’t happen to fit their 7th century view of reality.  Nor, having seen the results in Somalia and Sudan, do we need another pack of heavily armed jihadists spreading their mutant Arab Spring across the lower Sahara.  Why?  Because recent history has shown us that, once these folks get established they tend to branch out.  Argue black is white all you want, but this Mali crew (actually, many of them aren’t locals) are eventually going follow the trail of their older brothers to London, Madrid and New York mali1and bring the battle to us.  Why?  They don’t like us.  They think we’re evil.  Everything we do sets their teeth on edge.  They don’t like our consumer society, our liberal education, our divorce rate, our homosexuals or our half-naked women.  They don’t like our social structure or our crazy adherence to the notion of democracy.   Plus, and most importantly, they don’t like our live-and-let-live brand of tolerance.  In the jihadist world, it’s their way or the highway.  No amount of reasonable discussion is going to change that.  These are facts, and anybody who hasn’t come to terms with them by now is either an abject apologist or a complete dolt.

The bottom line is at some point we’re going to have to fight these people.  Our only choice is where and when.  We can dick around like we did (and are still doing) in Afghanistan.  That’s basically waiting until all hell breaks loose and then getting tangled up in an Orwellian series of never-ending counterattacks with the resulting continuum of casualties.  Or we can exercise some political will and decide to commit our military and economic resources to the novel notion of victory — minimize the casualties (on both sides) and then go back to real life.

Unfortunately, it looks like the United Nations and the Western world are, once again, going to stick with Plan A.  So, I suggest you get out the Google Maps, folks — because Bamako, Kidal and Gao are going to be as familiar to our children as Darfur, Kabul and Mogadishu are to us.  And they are going to be there for a long time.

Merry Christmas, Everybody

Today is Christmas Eve, and here’s the deal.  If you believe in the Christian Nativity, that’s cool: you can quit reading and get on with it.  If you don’t, if you believe the religion of your grandparents was  a bunch of trash wrapped in Santa Claus paper and tied up with a pretty ribbon to sedate the masses, that’s cool too.  It doesn’t matter.  You see, the reason we have Christmas in the first place is so that people will quit bitchin’ at each other and maybe – just maybe — for one brief, shining moment, there will be Peace on Earth and Good Cheer and all the other stuff we hear in the songs.  And it doesn’t have to be all day; the twenty five minutes it takes to watch Charlie Brown is good enough or the nanosecond of recognition on your kid’s face when she realizes you bought her the iPhone.  We have 364 other days of the year to do each other dirties, so it’s good to take one day out and lighten up.  That’s the true meaning of Christmas and nobody expresses it better than Linus from Peanuts.

http://youtu.be/UZw06AbW6Vw

A Child’s Christmas in Saskatchewan

kid1Christmas never came slowly to the old house on Avenue E.   It didn’t come sneaking on a Christmas card morning, when the night-fresh snow shone sparkling silver in the early sun.  It didn’t whisper Christmas carol cold on the prairie wind.  It didn’t Santa Claus and reindeer jingle with merry little elves laughing like flutes in the faraway air.  Christmas came, bold and fully clothed, directly to our door like a medieval merchant, thick with wonder.  When the mailman brought the Sears Christmas Catalogue, he delivered unto us the loot of princes, and suddenly it was Christmas.

Heavenly hosts of handymen made Kenner skyscrapers high beyond reaching.  Choirs of cowboys sang, Paladin brave with serious black holsters and two guns … that matched.  Crybaby dolls for sisters (who hogged) while the drums of a thousand little plastic Indians attacked Fort Apache (some assembly required.)  But all that was for later — dreamed and re-dreamed as the long/short winter days glaciered away.

First, Christmas was music; foot-pumped piano tunes practiced like Pavarotti,kid our oval mouths glor-or-or-ying like cherubim.   Sweet as angels, we came upon a midnight clear like shepherds watching their flocks near the little town of Bethlehem.  But not me: I was a king.  A bath towel sheik with a dog-hair beard, I carried gold to the Savior so many times, so carefully, that I ripped my throat sick, with worry, and never sang again that season (or any other I can ever recall.)  So it was the choirs I remember, church holy music that surged down the Eaton’s escalator, filling the Men’s Department full and spilling out into the street.  And there were radio carols: Perry Como, Gene Autry, Brenda Lee and the inevitable Elvis — singing forever and again on CFQC.  Or the television Christmases with Our Pet Juliette and Andy Williams and Harry Belafonte, who sang “Mary’s Boy Child” like a stained glass window.  The great choirs of Vienna and Westminster glowed blue into our living room as we lay on the floor, chin-down on parkas between the oil burner and the dog.  Their black and white RCA Victor voices sorrowed and sighed like celestial harps born to us once a year.  But it was “Silent Night” that was really Christmas — and in our town, we could hear it in German.

And Christmas was decorations and cards.  We coloured Santa Clauses and hand-drawn sleighs and made cross-cut Christmas trees that never stood still.  We looped and glued and looped and glued miles of paper chains that hung from the windows and maybe the tree — next year.  There were cards from everyone, kid3painted with Christmases we’d never seen before.  Lovely cottages trapped in the woods with bright lights and deep soft snow that was so white it was blue.  Old-fashioned carolers with long scarves and top hats sang Christmas under streetlamps into someone else’s warm windows.  Jolly flying Santa Clauses with (not enough) reindeer filled plump stockings hung by the chimney with crazy huge nails.   Stacks of square presents with ribbons and bows tucked under perfect triangle trees.  There were angels with trumpets and Wise Men and Bethlehem mangers too numerous to count.  Once, two hands with wine glasses wished us all a Happy New Year, one holiday too soon.  The tall sisters pinned the cards high on the curtains so we’d have room for the rest.  There were always too many, and the leftovers stood crowding the tables like refugees waiting to get in.  They would fall over at the slightest inconvenience, until finally they were folded and stacked.  Every year, some cards would come late and lay orphaned in their envelopes ‘cause there was no room at the inn.  And every year, on the last day of school mother would find the boxes, from no one knew where, that had the Christmas ornaments – the ones for the tree –because nothing was Christmas before there was a tree….

Friday: A Child’s Christmas in Saskatchewan Part 2