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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Fri Apr 22 2011 - 00:13:30 EDT
Libya: another neocon warhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/david-swanson
Liberal supporters of this 'humanitarian intervention' have merely become
useful idiots of the same old nefarious purposes
David Swanson
Thursday 21 April 2011 19.00 BST
The US department of justice (DOJ) has submitted a written
defence<http://davidswanson.org/node/3171>of the US role in this new
war in
Libya <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/libya> to the US
Congress<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/congress>.
The DOJ claims the war serves the US national interest in regional stability
and in maintaining the credibility of the United
Nations<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/unitednations>.
Who knew?
The regional stability line would be a stretch for the UK but is
downright nuts for the US. Who, outside of US strategic command types
working on weapons in space, thinks Libya and America are in the same
region? (In fact, the US is in Northcom and Libya in Africom, in the lingo
of the Pentagon's structure of global domination. Europe is in Eucom.) And
what has done more good this year for the region that Libya is actually in
than *in*stability (think Tunisia, Egypt)?
The bit about the credibility of the United Nations is really cute coming
from a government that invaded
Iraq<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/iraq>in 2003 – despite
UN opposition and for the express purpose (among others) of proving the UN
irrelevant <http://www.progressive.org/mag_rothschild0303>. This also
comes from the same government that just this month
refused<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/11/bradley-manning-juan-mendez-torture>to
allow the UN special rapporteur to visit a US prisoner named Bradley
Manning to verify that he is not being tortured. How does that maintain UN
credibility? And how exactly does authorising the CIA to violate the UN
arms embargo<http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/30/us-libya-usa-order-idUSTRE72T6H220110330>in
Libya maintain UN credibility? How does violating
the UN ban<http://blackagendareport.com/content/euro-american-land-invasion-libya-imminent>on
"a foreign occupation force of any form" in Libya maintain UN
credibility?
So, one of the main justifications offered to the first branch of the US
government is that the war in Libya is justified by a UNresolution, the
credibility of which must be maintained even while violating it. But the DOJ
memo also stresses that such a justification is not needed. A US president,
according to this memo, albeit in violation of the US Constitution, simply
has the power to launch wars. Any explanations offered to Congress are, just
like the wars, acts of pure benevolence.
The DOJ memo also argues that this war doesn't really measure up to the
name "war", given how quick, easy and cheap it's going to be. In fact,
President Obama has already announced the handover of the war to
Nato<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/nato>.
I think we're supposed to imagine Nato as separate from the US, just as
Congress does when it conducts no investigations of any atrocities in
Afghanistan <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/afghanistan> that the US
attributes to Nato. Do the other Nato nations know that this is the purpose
Nato serves in US politics?
But how quick and easy will this war really be? One expert predicts it
will last 20
years<http://davidswanson.org/content/prediction-20-years-war-libya>,
with the US eventually pulling out and allowing the European
Union<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/eu>to inherit the illness of
empire it had earlier shared with us. Certainly,
the promise of a quick and easy war in Iraq in 2003 was based on the same
baseless idea as this one, namely that killing a president will hand a
country over to outside control (excuse me, I mean, flourishing democracy).
The blossoming democracy in Iraq has just banned public demonstrations. The
fact is that Gaddafi has a great deal of support, and making him a martyr
would not change that.
Popular "progressive" US radio host Ed Schultz argues, with vicious
hatred in every word he spits out on the
subject<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXDZ2AogetA>,
that bombing Libya is justified by the need for vengeance against that Satan
on earth, that beast arisen suddenly from the grave of Adolf Hitler, that
monster beyond all description: Muammar
Gaddafi<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/muammar-gaddafi>.
But you can't really fight a war against one person. The last time we did
that to Gaddafi, we killed his little daughter, while he survived.
Even if you had the legal or moral right to assassinate foreign leaders,
and even if you independently and rationally worked up your passion to kill
a particular dictator by sheer coincidence in the same moment in which your
government wanted to bomb him, you couldn't do it without killing innocent
people and shredding the fabric of international law (with or without UN
complicity). Hatred of a single individual is great propaganda – until
people begin to question what killing him will involve and what will come
next.
Popular US commentator Juan Cole supports the very same war that Ed
Schultz does, but supports it as a gentle act of humanitarian generosity.
The Libya war has become less popular more quickly in the US than any
previous US war <http://pollingreport.com/libya.htm>, but it has its
supporters. And to them, it doesn't matter that half their fellow war
supporters have a different or even opposing motive. For years, Americans
cheered the slaughter of the hated Iraqi people while other Americans
praised the Iraq war as a great act of philanthropy for the benefit of the
Iraqi people (whether *they* wanted it or not).
But let's examine Cole's claims about Libya, because they are quite
popular and central to the idea of a "good war". One claim is that the Nato
countries are motivated by humanitarian concern. Another is that this war
might have humanitarian results. These have to be separated because the
former is laughably absurd and the latter worthy of being examined. Of
course, many people in Nato countries are motivated by humanitarian concern;
that's why wars are sold as acts of philanthropy. Generosity sells. But the
US government, which has become a wing of the Pentagon, does not typically
intervene in other nations in order to benefit humanity. In fact, it's not
capable of intervening anywhere, because it is already intervened
everywhere.
The United States was in the business of supplying weapons to
Gaddafi<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110307/ap_on_re_us/us_arming_libya>up
until the moment it got into the business of supplying weapons to his
opponents. In 2009, Britain, France and other European states sold Libya
over $470m-worth of
weapons<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/medea-benjamin/instead-of-bombing-dictat_b_839068.html>.
Our wars tend to be fought against our own weapons, and yet we go on arming
everyone. The United States <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa> can no
more intervene in Yemen or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia than in Libya. We are
arming those dictatorships. In fact, to win the support of Saudi Arabia for
its "intervention" in Libya, the US gave its
approval<http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD02Ak01.html>for Saudi
Arabia to send troops into Bahrain to attack civilians, a policy
that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly
defended<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/medea-benjamin/instead-of-bombing-dictat_b_839068.html>
.
The "humanitarian intervention" in Libya, meanwhile, whatever civilians
it may have begun by protecting, immediately killed other civilians with
its bombs<http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/20/us-libya-idUSTRE7270JP20110320>and
immediately shifted from its defensive justification to attacking
retreating troops and participating in a civil
war<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/world/africa/21benghazi.html?_r=2>.
The United States has very likely used depleted uranium weapons in Libya,
leading American journalist Dave Lindorff to
remark<http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/530>:
"It would be a tragic irony if rebels in Libya, after calling for
assistance from the US and other Nato countries, succeeded in overthrowing
the country's long-time tyrant Gaddafi, only to have their country
contaminated by uranium dust – the fate already suffered by the peoples of
Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo."
Irony is one word for it. Another is hypocrisy. Clearly, the military
power of the west is not driven by humanitarian concerns. But that still
leaves the question of whether, in this particular case, such power could
accidentally have humanitarian results. The claim that a massive massacre of
civilians was about to occur, on careful review, turns out to have been
massively inflated<http://articles.boston.com/2011-04-14/bostonglobe/29418371_1_rebel-stronghold-civilians-rebel-positions>.
This doesn't mean that Gaddafi is a nice guy, that his military wasn't
already killing civilians, or that it isn't still killing civilians. Another
irony, in fact, is that Gaddafi is reportedly using horrible weapons,
including landmines and cluster bombs, that much of the world has renounced
– but that the United States has refused to.
But warfare tends to breed more warfare; and cycles of violence usually,
not just occasionally, spiral out of control. That the United States is
engaging in or supporting the killing of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere, while ignoring the killing of civilians in
various other countries, is not a reason to tolerate it in Libya. But
escalating a war and doing nothing are, contrary to Pentagon propaganda, not
the only two choices. The United States and Europe could have stopped arming
and supporting Gaddafi and – in what would have been a powerful message to
Libya – stopped arming and supporting dictators around the region. We could
have provided purely humanitarian aid. We could have pulled out the
CIA<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/cia>and the special forces and
sent in nonviolent activist trainers of the sort
that accomplished so much this year in the nations to Libya's east and west.
Risking the deaths of innocents while employing nonviolent tools is commonly
viewed as horrific, but isn't responding with violence that will likely
cause more deaths in the end even more so?
Washington imported a leader for the people's rebellion in
Libya<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/26/111109/new-rebel-leader-spent-much-of.html>who
has spent the past 20 years living with no known source of income a
couple of miles from the CIA's headquarters in Virginia. Another man lives
even closer to CIA headquarters: former US Vice President Dick
Cheney<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/dickcheney>.
He expressed great concern in a speech in 1999 that foreign governments were
controlling oil <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/oil>. "Oil remains
fundamentally a government business," he said. "While many regions of the
world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle
East<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middleeast>,
with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the
prize ultimately lies."
Former supreme allied commander Europe of Nato, from 1997 to 2000, Wesley
Clark claims that in 2001, a general in the Pentagon showed him a piece of
paper and said<http://securingamerica.com/printready/Univ_Alabama_061013.htm>
:
"I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the secretary
of defence upstairs. It's a, it's a five-year plan. We're going to take down
seven countries in five years. We're going to start with Iraq, then Syria,
Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we're going to come back and get Iran
in five years."
That agenda fit perfectly with the plans of Washington insiders, such as
those who famously spelled out their intentions in the reports of the
thinktank called the Project for the New American Century. The fierce Iraqi
and Afghan resistance didn't fit at all. Neither did the nonviolent
revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. But taking over Libya still makes perfect
sense in the neoconservative worldview. And it makes sense in explaining war
games used by Britain and France to simulate the invasion of a similar
country<http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1104/S00139/when-war-games-go-live.htm>
.
The Libyan government controls more of its
oil<http://www.economist.com/node/10091402?story_id=E1_TDDJTQDN>than
any other nation on earth, and it is the type of oil that Europe finds
easiest to refine. Libya also controls its own finances, leading American
author Ellen Brown to point out an interesting
fact<http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/libya-all-about-oil-or-all-about-banking>about
those seven countries named by Clark:
"What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking,
one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks
of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them
outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers' central bank in
Switzerland. The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two
that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr, writing on
Examiner.com, noted that '[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take
down Saddam Hussein <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/saddam-hussein>, the
oil nation had made the move to accept euros instead of dollars for oil, and
this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve
currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.' According to a Russian
article titled 'Bombing of Libya – Punishment for Gaddafi for His Attempt to
Refuse US Dollar', Gaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a
movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African
nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gaddafi suggested
establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using
this single currency. During the past year, the idea was approved by many
Arab countries and most African countries. The only opponents were the
Republic of South Africa and the head of the League of Arab States. The
initiative was viewed negatively by the US and the European Union, with
French President Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial
security of mankind; but Gaddafi was not swayed and continued his push for
the creation of a united Africa. […] If the Gaddafi government goes down, it
will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank [created by the
rebels in March] joins the BIS, whether the nationalised oil industry gets
sold off to investors, and whether education and healthcare continue to be
free."
It will also be interesting to see whether Africom, the Pentagon's Africa
Command, now based in Europe, establishes its headquarters on the continent
for which it is named. We don't know what other motivations are at work:
concerns over immigration to Europe? Desires to test weapons? War
profiteering? Political calculations? Irrational lust for power?
Overcompensation for having failed to turn against Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak until after he'd been unseated? But what about this one: actual fear
of another Rwanda? That last one seems, frankly, the least likely. But what
is certain is that such humanitarian concern alone did not launch this war,
and that the continued use of war in this way will not benefit humanity.
The United Nations, far from being made credible, is being made the
servant of wealthy nations making war on poor ones. And within the United
States, where the United Nations is alternatively held up as a justification
or mocked as irrelevant, the power to make war and to make law has been
decisively placed in the hands of a series of single individuals who will
carry the title "president" – precisely the outcome American revolutionaries
broke with Britain in order to avoid.
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