I think you're on to something there. Too bad it probably won't get upvoted enough.

They dragged Gaddafi through the streets like a dog. So much for justice...

Yeah, if you dig a little deeper into Libya before the war, you see that Gaddafi really was making Libya a much better country. The west really fucked things up there - on purpose.

There are world leaders that were VERY upset about what we enabled to be done to Gaddafi.

We did what we did to him because he wouldn't play ball with our demands. Nothing more. If you want proof, look at all the cartels and dictators we STILL support who are worse then Gaddafi ever was. If you want proof, look at our long history of destabilizing and removing democratically elected leaders that choose the welfare of their people over paying upward their resources in the name of enriching their upper class only and further supporting the global economy as currently structured.

If you want to see the actual blueprints of what the West has done there, you need only read up on the French study of modern warfare and how they incite the locals against the regime in order to bring about changes favorable to US foreign policy. You're damned right it was on purpose. We should be ashamed.

How can you be a great leader and stay in power for decades?

Gold and uranium also play a huge role in Mali I think. Together with Ghana, Mali has about 7-8% of the worlds gold in possession and the French are guarding an uranium mine since a few days.

Mali produces about the same amount that Germany wants back from the US every year. Coincidence?

Yep, Mali is rich in gold and with Germany repatriating a lot of its gold fom the Fed, both England and France are positioning themselves so they have access to gold that will be mined from Mali once a pro-west government is established.

How are you expected to sell mops if there's no mess?

So, while I feel terrible for Mali which has been under invasion for months now, it pains me how few people realize this whole issue is direct blowback from our involvement in Libya.

Although such kind of blowback from the Libyan intevention was nearly universally predicted by antiwar advocates, I am unsure if unitended consequences describe the situation in Mali correctly.

While the US ally Saudi Arabia supports the Wahabi islamists, the US had trained those Mali officers who initiated the coup d'etat against the elected president Amadou Toumani Touré in 2012. This coup happened just 5 weeks before an election. The appointed interrim government reached out to foreign powers and called for help in the fight against the rebels.

So in a way the US and NATO supports one side in a proxy war, while the allied Saudi Arabia supports the other side. I no longer buy the humanitarian reasons (support for fundamentalists in Syria, but opposition to them in Mali). Destabilization and chaos might not be the dreaded outcome, it might be the goal.

Chaos usually goes hand in hand with a military presence and an undemocratic government. This makes it easier to ignore the will of the average Malian. Neocolonalistic corporations can loot Mali's resources (for example uranium and gold) without the necessity to outbid the Chinese competition. Furthermore African independence is subverted, and the military industrial complex is greased.

In this context it is also interesting to note that Gaddafi was very active in his attempts to emancipate Libya and Africa from corporate control. The revenue from sweet crude oil allowed Gaddafi to support various African nations and projects like for example the plan to build an African satellite (RASCOM) and the introdcution of a gold dinar as African currency.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity might be a nice saying, but in these geopolitical situations the same kind of stupidity happens again and again. Those who push for intervention and covert support always seem to benefit from these scenarios. I believe more sinister motivations of the involved players describe the scenario much better.

The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad or the Azawad National Liberation Movement [4] , formerly National Movement of Azawad[6] (French: Mouvement national de l'Azawad; MNA) is a political and military organisation based in Azawad/northern Mali. The movement is made up of Tuareg, and some of them are believed to have previously fought in the Libyan army,[7] during the 2011 Libyan civil war (though other Tuareg MNLA fighters were also on the side of the National Transitional Council[citation needed]) and returned to Mali after that war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Movement_for_the_Liberation_of_Azawad

While he may have been a terrible person who sponsored violence himself, he also considered himself a vanguard against radical Islam and al-qaeda in Libya and throughout North Africa (and helped fund the African Union for that very cause).

Just like Assad now, these dictators are cool with AQ when they are killing Americans in Iraq but when the tables turn they talk about global conspiracies.

NATO overthrew Libya, and then Al-Queda announced that it sees Libya as an excellent new breeding ground for recruiting.

AQ is going to recruit and train anywhere that there is an absence of the rule of law. Chechnya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya is not exactly special.

Flash forward a few months, and neighbouring Mali gets invaded by said radical groups.

It isn't that simple. The Tuareg of Mali were being used as mercenaries to kill Libyans opposed to Gaddafi. Once they realized NATO was getting involved they took as much weapons and ammo as they could carry and came back home. They teamed up with the local jihadist and created their own little country. Within about 48 hours they realized just how bad they had fucked up (the Islamist were sawing people's hands off) and tried to kick them out. By then the Islamist had outside support and had basically taken over the whole operation.

So, while I feel terrible for Mali which has been under invasion for months now, it pains me how few people realize this whole issue is direct blowback from our involvement in Libya.

By HUGE majorities the locals want the French there. The local Islamic clerics have even been calling out Arab clerics who are calling this a Zionist plot to destroy Islam.

the Tuareg of Mali would not have been dragged into the mess as effectively as they were anyway.

Dragged? They were paid mercenaries. They were hired specifically because they had no qualms about spraying peaceful Libyan protests with 7.62 fire. They allied themselves with the Islamist and are feeling the blowback for that choice right now. Mali was already a coop waiting to happen, fucking Mauretania was sending aircraft to bomb Islamist training sites inside Mali like a year before all this shit kicked off.

Someone took an international event that doesn't involve the U.S. and spun it to be the U.S.'s fault? This is a shocking post