Why the U.S. won’t intervene in Mali

Al Qaida–affiliated groups are sowing mayhem all over Africa.

“Al Qaida is back—big time,” said Janet Daley in The Telegraph (U.K.), but the U.S. can’t be bothered to fight it. Al Qaida–affiliated groups are sowing mayhem all over Africa. In Egypt and Libya, they’re working to “exploit the instability created in the wake of pro-democratic uprisings.” Elsewhere, including in Nigeria, Somalia, and now Algeria and Mali, they have actually taken up arms, hoping to rout the governments and ultimately set up Islamist states. Mali, where Islamists have taken over the north and destroyed much of Timbuktu, is currently the front line of their offensive, yet the U.S. is content to let France, Mali’s former colonial ruler, handle the problem. Anyone who pleads that “this ought to be America’s moral business too” is met with “only one stony-faced reply: We killed Osama. We settled the score. We are no longer the world’s bodyguard.”

That’s bad news for Africa, and for the world, said Tim Montgomerie in The Times (U.K.). The U.S. is still the only country with sufficient military reach to police the globe. Nobody wants to return to the Bush era, of course, when “the world’s policeman was a little too like a trigger-happy character from a SWAT movie.” But this “lightly armed, all-smiles policeman of the Obama years” is not going to cut it. Syria, for example, has imploded while President Obama keeps his weapons holstered. In the Mali conflict, the U.S. has pledged only to help France refuel its planes—and at first it actually intended to charge its NATO ally for that piddling assistance.

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