Libya fiasco was not enough for Stephen Harper ...now he takes us into Mali .... after that, what ?

Maybe he likes going alphabetically:  Libya, Mali,  N..... long way to  S   and Saudi Arabia .... the real culprit who has spread wahhabism to illiterate Muslims who are  not only creating havoc all over Africa and the ME but in the Western world as well.

We would not be in this situation and Mali would not be under islamist control if NATO had not invaded Libya.  This is a domino effect and it's not over.  We are just picking at the first crop of the first harvest and there are many, many more to come.

Our Prime Minister is unable to tame the natives in Canada but he thinks he can foray forth into Muslim ganglands and tame the most  illiterate murdering dregs of humanity?   I was crediting more smarts to the chess master than he deserves.  Involving Canada in Mali, even if he says we are only lending  a C-17 cargo plane for just a week ... it  is still  "involvement" and that means everything that goes with that word when a country interferes in the affairs of other countries.

I listened to BBC a few minutes ago and according to reports, after all the  bombing and blasting by the French in the last 2 days,  the mighty French machines have managed to kill a mere 60 islamists.  This is the problem with these missions in swaths of the world which are far too big to trap islamists  in an area or areas where the  bombs can do the most damage.  The islamists will scatter, alive and well,  all over the landmass and live to come back and continue with their quranic holy tasks.

This is one of the reasons why I think Obama is doing a great job deploying drones as and when intelligence reports a gathering of allah akbars at a  location somewhere.  Cheaper and more effective and the body count is more satisfying than the tonnes of bombs and loss of helicopters for a full scale onslaught that gets just 60 dead islamists.

Scott Taylor writing at TheChronicleHerald:
....The fact is that,  since Canada lent such a helping hand in letting the genie out of the bottle, one could easily argue that we are morally obligated to help Mali contain the resultant damage.
How exactly did Canada help al-Qaida establish a secure area of operations in northern Mali?
This winding, bumbling path began on Dec. 14, 2008, just outside of Niamey, the capital of Niger, where two Canadian diplomats, Robert Fowler and Louis Guay, were abducted by a terrorist group known as the al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)......
.....As Canadians are well aware, our nation took a leading role in supporting the anti-Gadhafi rebels with the combined might of NATO’s air power.
Although there was a UN arms embargo in effect, this was a one-sided affair because Britain and France flooded weapons and munitions to the ill-disciplined Libyan rebels. The embattled Gadhafi also cracked open his armouries and distributed weapons to countless untrained Libyan volunteers.
The result was that, by the time of Gadhafi’s capture and public execution, Libya was awash in uncontrolled, unregistered weaponry of all calibres.
The Tuaregs took their newly acquired arsenal and fled Libya for northern Mali. Here, they reinforced the already simmering separatist movement and Mali’s military proved unequal to the challenge.
After a series of bloody rehearsals at the hands of the rebels, the Mali military mutinied and the democratically elected government collapsed. AQIM helped to co-ordinate the Tuareg victory and were quick to seize the spoils.
To date, Canada has provided AQIM with ransom money, ensured that some of their key personnel were released from incarceration and then, by failing to follow up and secure weapon stocks in Libya, allowed the terrorist group to amass a windfall of weapons that enabled their subsequent seizure of northern Mali.
To admit our culpability in this fiasco would make it easy to explain Canada’s participation in a future international intervention against the AQIM in Mali.
However, such an admission of blunders is unlikely any time soon from a government that keeps insisting that our campaign in Libya was an unmitigated success.