Walter Russell Mead: Wilsonian Wars, Wilsonian Ruin
Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He also writes a blog for the American Interest.
After we expressed our concerns during NATO’s Libyan war that the afterparty was likely to be chaotic and unpleasant, we’ve been watching the horrific humanitarian and political consequences unwind in several places.
Most recently, Via Meadia has been keeping a careful eye on the growing troubles in northern Mali and the storied historical city of Timbuktu for some time. Two groups — the Tuareg independence movement MNLA and the al-Qaeda affiliated Ansar Dine — are involved in a struggle for control of a large part of northern Mali. Together, both groups put up a united front in dealing with Mali’s feeble and divided central government, with the result that they’ve seized control of large parts of the country. They then declared a “union” and announced their intention to establish an Islamic, well, something, and began the usual persecutions of and reprisals against their enemies. Due to both tribal and religious differences, their alliance is tenuous and they are held together only by their loathing and jealousy of the south — and their fear that outside groups like the group of west African nations known as ECOWAS will send troops against them.
To make matters more complicated, many of Timbuktu’s original residents, who are displeased with the newcomers, decided to establish their own armed movement — the Patriots’ Resistance Movement for the Liberation of Timbuktu. At this point we have something that looks partly like something out of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, partly like a Monty Python sketch, partly like a terrible human tragedy and partly like something much more ominous: a jihadi center organizing itself in an area of weak states and deep regional and ethnic rivalries.
And of course we have hundreds of thousands of refugees, most living in misery far from their homes, various people killed in the fighting and in the revenge killings and reprisals that are taking place, and the destruction of the economy across much of the north. These are all consequences of NATO’s much ballyhooed “humanitarian war” in Libya that, if anybody remembers, was originally launched because of fears that victorious Qaddafi forces would carry out massacres when they retook the rebel city of Benghazi...