Mali Citizens Attack French and National Troops Jihadists

Well this is a nice story.

Malian troops bundled the men into an army truck, their hands bound behind their backs. For the better part of a year, the al-Qaida-linked extremists had banned music, insisted women cover themselves and began carrying out public executions and amputations in the towns of northern Mali that they controlled…

Most fled as French and Malian troops advanced, but some stayed behind. Local militias began hunting them down, to turn them over to the troops.

In further Give The People What They Want (Until They Rebel and Begin Beheading Jihadists) news, some cock-eyed optimist thinks that Egypt may be heading for a counter-revolution.

Paul Rivlin, an economist and senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, says Egypt is a wreck and that insight can be drawn from the two consecutive revolutions in Russia.

The February Revolution of 1917 toppled the Russian monarchy and established a provisional government which was overthrown in October 1917 by the Bolshevik revolution led by Vladimir Lenin.

And Egypt is a horrible wreck, so.

This is actually a neat insight (one of those insights that's extremely obvious... once you point it out). While a great many revolutions manage to grab up all power and thus establish stable (if dreadful) tyrannies, there are a lot of revolutions which are followed, lightning-quick, but counter-revolutions.

This chiefly seems to happen to intensely anti-human, fervently ideological movements which don't really care about what people want; they just want to make people behave the way they think people ought to behave.

And that leads to another bit of optimism: How enthusiastic will Obama's Zombie Mobs be for more of the same in 2 or 4 years?

One thing I've come to realize about a basic point of Ron Paul's foreign policy -- he was right about this, and I was wrong -- is that populations really do need to make their own mistakes. Our foreign policy is often geared to attempting to ensure that foreign populations don't do anything foolish or terrible... and, as with teenagers resentful of the authority of adults, that seems to make them just want to do foolish and terrible things even more.

Sometimes it might just be better (assuming no direct threat to ourselves) to let them massacre each other, and spasm from one authoritarian tyranny to the next, until they're so badly beaten up they actually seek outside counsel.

That doesn't mean I buy into the doctrinaire Strong Form version of his stuck-in-the-60s flower-child peacenik spiel.

But I thought this during Iraq, and I'm sure many of you thought this as well: We seem to be losing a lot of good American lives in order to make sure that one barbaric group in Iraq doesn't massacre another barbaric group in Iraq.

If they're keen on a bloodletting, maybe it's counterproductive to keep trying to prevent it. Maybe they need to learn, through the vicious school of experience, that bloodletting is something to be avoided.

You can explain something to someone but you can't understand it for him.

posted by Ace at 07:48 PM

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