Samir's Amin has come out with a defence of French intervention in Mali, which has surprised many of his admirers and friends.

I am one of those who out of principle condemn all military interventions by Western powers in the countries of the South, these interventions being by nature subject to the requirements of the deployment of control of the planet by the capital of the monopolies that dominate the system.

Prof. Vijay Prashad discusses with Prof. Aijaz Ahmad the recent developments in the war-torn African country of Mali. On January 11 this year, the French troops launched an offensive on Mali. Prof. Prashad questions the so-called "humanitarian visions" of France and places the French bombardement in Mali in the category of "resource wars". Prof. Ahmad calls the French involvement as "an old colonial hangover" and also, a strategy of expanding the Euro-American military presence in the African continent. Is Mali another Afghanistan in the making?

The French military cannot seem to stay away from Africa. Two years ago, French helicopter gunships entered the standoff in Ivory Coast and French aircraft pummelled the Libyan army.

“In other days France was the name of a country. We should take care that in 1961 it does not become the name of a nervous disease.”

-- Jean Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.

Military intervention in foreign countries always leads to unintended consequences.

The reports filtering out of Northern Mali are appalling: a young couple stoned to death, iconic ancient shrines dismantled, and some 365,000 refugees fleeing beatings and whippings for the slightest violations of Sharia law.

Algeria is coming under significant foreign pressure as it is pushed toward military intervention in North Mali in an attempt to eliminate religious movements seeking to turn the area into an Islamic Salafi emirate. These movements have begun imposing their version of Islamic Sharia rules against “the disobedient" and destroying all religious shrines they deem as blasphemous to the one God.

Here’s an odd question: Is it possible that the U.S. military is present in more countries and more places now than at the height of the Cold War?  It’s true that the U.S.