Plans for intervention in Mali, already contentious within the international community, now have potentially been set back by the second coup within the county in less than twelve months.

Soldiers in the Malian Army arrested Prime Minister Cheikh Modibo Diarra last night at his home, prompting him to later appear on national television to announce the resignation of his government. According to reports from the capital, the soldiers acted on the order of Capt. Amadou Sanogo, a low-level officer who engineered the short-lived coup in March that set off the current chain of events within the West African state. While forced to abdicate power officially in May, the coup orchestrators have continued to wield significant influence in Mali, as indicated by last nights’ incidents. President Diouncounda Traore has appointed Django Cissoko as prime minister in Diarra’s stead.

Diarra’s resignation portends an increased level of difficulty in winning approval at the United Nations for an African Union-backed plan for military intervention. In particular, the plan revolves around a relatively small number of international forces providing support to a bolstered and retrained Malian army in a push to reclaim territory in the north of the country from Islamist and ethnic Tuareg rebels. Sanogo had disagreed with Diarra’s desire to see the plan come to fruition, believing that the Malian military was able to handle the situation on its own.

The plan had already hit a road block in the U.N. Security Council as U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice has expressed considerable concern with the plan and a French initiative to transform the A.U. request into a U.N. mandate. Rice believes that France’s desire — which syncs up with that of the African Union — to approve intervention as soon as possible is premature, according to reports from a closed-door meeting of the Council. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has also voiced reservations about the plan’s viability, noting in a report to the Council that many details remain unresolved.

Reservations come in contrast to declarations that the situation grows increasingly dire due to the presence of terrorist organization Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) within areas of the North. The Washington Post on Monday ran an editorial calling for an immediate commencing of military strikes within Mali, to prevent AQIM from gaining further footholds.

Despite the sudden nature of the coup, and the deleterious effect it may have on Mali’s ability to reclaim territory, the reassertion of the army into Malian politics is not entirely surprising according to political scientist Jay Ulfelder. A forecaster of political turmoil, Ulfelder earlier this year listed Mali as number eleven among the top twenty most likely states to suffer a coup in 2012. In a blog post following the most recent events, Ulfelder noted that coups tend to be recursive, with attempts both successful and unsuccessful begetting further attempts.

On a conservative radio program over the weekend, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) went on an anti-Muslim tirade, making accusations about Muslims that ranged from the offensive to the absurd. Within her long conversation with host Jan Markell and co-host Eric Barger, Bachmann suggested that Americans read Islamic study materials to learn about Muslims’ supposed plot to conquer Western civilization, comparing the tactic to reading Adolf Hitler’s infamous book, Mein Kampf.

During the interview, Bachmann said she had proof that there was creeping sharia law — or, Islamic law — infiltrating the United States. That proof? A letter signed by groups of Muslim-Americans asking the Department of Homeland Security to stop distributing anti-Muslim materials:

BACHMANN: That’s right. That’s why we need to know what their belief system is; we need to know what they truly believe. That’s why the most important thing a person could do in WWII was to read the book that the leader of Germany wrote.

BARGER: Mein Kampf.

BACHMANN: Because he laid out very clearly what his intention was, he wasn’t hiding it, the Islamist does the same thing. They do not hide it, they lay it out very clearly. But what we’ve never seen before is the United States aiding and abetting that goal.

Listen:

Bachmann’s Islamophobia has been an important part of her congressional repertoire. Most recently, Bachmann lost a lot of favor among her congressional colleagues when she led the witch hunt of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin, with accusations that Abedin was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

(HT: Right Wing Watch)

A bipartisan group of lawmakers are circulating a letter on Capitol Hill asking the White House to punish Palestinians for their successful statehood bid at the United Nations last month. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Ed Royce (R-CA), Eliot Engel (D-CA), and Howard Berman (D-CA) have signed on to the letter imploring President Obama to shut down the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) office in Washington, D.C. and “call our Consul-General in Jerusalem home for consultations.” The letter, which is supported by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, says to use “every means at our disposal to ensure that this General Assembly vote does not serve as a precedent for elevating the status of the PLO in other UN bodies or international forums.”

Ros-Lehtinen last month called for cutting aid to the Palestinian Authority in response to the statehood bid (a move that isn’t a very good idea). And a Senate amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act last week would have done just that and also called on the U.S. to shut down the PLO’s diplomatic mission in the U.S.

CAP’s Matt Duss wrote that responses like these are mistaken and could potentially help groups like Hamas:

“U.S. policymakers and legislators should consider the words of several former Israeli officials who have come out in support of the Palestinian bid, including former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who said in a recent interview that “the Palestinian request from the United Nations is congruent with the basic concept of the two-state solution. Therefore, I see no reason to oppose it.” Writing in Foreign Policy this week, former deputy Israeli defense minister Ephraim Sneh warned that efforts to punish [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas and the Palestinian Authority over the U.N. bid — which would likely redound to the benefit of Abbas’ more hardline rivals in Hamas — “would be a shot not in the foot but in the liver — Israel’s.”

In the end, the Senate amendment did not make its way into the final Senate NDAA. Groups like J Street, who heavily opposed the amendment, celebrated the move, saying that closing the mission would be too extreme and is “usually reserved for instances in which the United States is responding to deadly acts committed against our country or citizens, or gross violations of human rights by the government in question.”

CAP’s Duss adds that “rather than punishing Mahmoud Abbas’s government for the U.N. effort, Congress should recognize the considerable work it has done in building institutions and creating security in the West Bank. Congress should also support the Obama administration in bringing Israelis and Palestinians back into a credible negotiating process, with clear terms of reference in which both sides are held accountable to their commitments.”