US “Mulling” Drone Strikes in Mali

Former RAND head: Americans will not care

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Jan 17, 2013

A senior US official has said that the Obama administration is “mulling” over drone strikes in the West African country of Mali, in order to support French military activity against so called “Al Qaeda” operatives.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that a senior defense advisor for the U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) has been touting the possibility of drone strikes, calling them “the least bad option”.

“U.S. counterterrorism officials appear increasingly open to air strikes against insurgents in northern Mali, according to J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center in Washington.” the report stated.

“Drone strikes or air strikes will not restore Mali’s territorial integrity or defeat the Islamists, but they may be the least bad option,” said Mr. Pham, a senior strategy adviser to the U.S. military’s Africa Command.

The Journal followed up on the report yesterday, noting that US surveillance drones, and other equipment have already been sent to aid the French military.

Commenting in a Bloomberg article on the likelihood that the US could become involved in Mali with drone strikes, Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington said that the action probably would not be controversial among Americans.

“It’s boots on the ground that generates controversy,” said Hoffman, a former director of the RAND Corporation.

It is no secret that Obama has vastly expanded the US drone war since entering office in 2009. Daily drone strikes are raining down on Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as another African nation, Somalia.

The Pentagon has been weighing military action in former French colony of Mali for some time

In addition to carrying out an air offensive, the French already have close to 1000 troops on the ground in Mali, and have vowed to deploy another 1,700 troops from French military bases across the region. British forces are also assisting the French military ground invasion.

As we have noted, France openly supported so called Jihadist “revolutionaries” in Libya and is now also doing so in Syria, along with Britain and the US, marking out the new socialist government as highly hypocritical.

The Islamist alliance rising up against the government in Mali is composed of fighters belonging to Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a group extremely closely allied with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), whom France intervened on behalf of during NATO’s 2011 proxy-invasion of Libya. The French helped to provide weapons, training, special forces and even aircraft to support the Islamic extremists in the overthrow of Libya’s government.

The same group is now overrunning the government in Syria.

In addition, US Department of Defense officials have acknowledged that the leader of the military coup in Mali received military training in the United States on “several” occasions.

In reality, the operation in Mali is being sold as part of the “war on terror”, when it is once more about securing power for a puppet democracy in a geopolitically sensitive and strategically important region.

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

This article was posted: Thursday, January 17, 2013 at 5:10 am

Tags: foreign affairs, government corruption, police state, war

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