US Intervention in Syria by Stephen Lendman
Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 30 Apr 2011
imperialism
US Intervention in Syria - by Stephen Lendman
Despite genuine popular Middle East/North Africa uprisings, Washington's dirty hands orchestrated regime change plans in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria as part of its "New Middle East" project.
On November 18, 2006, Middle East analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya's Global Research article headlined, "Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a 'New Middle East,' " saying:
In June 2006 in Tel Aviv, "US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (first) coin(ed) the term" in place of the former "Greater Middle East" project, a shift in rhetoric only for Washington's longstanding imperial aims.
The new terminology "coincided with the inauguration of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Oil Terminal in the Eastern Mediterranean." During Israel's summer 2006 Lebanon war, "Prime Minister Olmert and (Rice) informed the international media that a project for a 'New Middle East' was being launched in Lebanon," a plan in the works for years to "creat(e) an arc of instability, chaos, and violence extending from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the borders of NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan."
In other words, "constructive chaos" would be used to redraw the region according to US-Israeli "geo-strategic needs and objectives." The strategy is currently playing out violently in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria, and may erupt anywhere in the region to solidify Washington's aim for unchallengeable dominance from Morocco to Oman to Syria.
Partnered with Israel, it's to assure only leaders fully "with the program" are in place. Mostly isn't good enough, so ones like Mubarak, Gaddafi, Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, likely Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh (now damaged goods), and Syria's Bashar al-Assad are targeted for removal by methods ranging from uprisings to coups, assassinations, or war, perhaps in that order.
Nazemroaya now says Syrian "protesters are being armed and funded by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states via Jordan and Saad Hariri in Lebanon," besides US and Israeli involvement.
Pack Journalism Goes to War with Washington
America's pack journalism never met an America imperial initiative it didn't support and promote, no matter how lawless, mindless, destructive or counterproductive. For example, an April 28 New York Times editorial headlined, "President Assad's Crackdown," saying:
He "appears determined to join his father in the ranks of history's blood-stained dictators, sending his troops and thugs to murder anyone who has the courage to demand political freedom."
Whether about Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine, Syria, Haiti's Aristide, former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, Venezuela's Chavez or others for many decades, Times "journalists" and opinion writers have a sordid history of supporting America's imperial ruthlessness, including perpetual wars killing millions for power, profit, and unchallengeable dominance.
Now Times writers laud Obama for intervening in Libya and trying "to engage Syria....in hopes that Mr. Assad would make the right choice," meaning get "with the program" by surrendering Syrian sovereignty.
Despite clear evidence of US intervention, Obama "issued a statement condemning the violence and accusing Mr. Assad of seeking Iranian assistance in brutalizing his people. That is a start, but it is not nearly enough."
War is always a last choice so The Times endorses "international condemnation and tough sanctions, (as well as) asset freezes and travel bans for Mr. Assad and his top supporters and a complete arms embargo."
However, "Russia and China, as ever, are determined to protect autocrats. That cannot be the last word."
Times opinions are shamelessly belligerent, one-sided, wrong-headed, and mindless on rule of law issues, including about prohibitions against meddling in the internal affairs of other countries except in self-defense until the Security Council acts.
Instead, the "newspaper of record" remains America's leading managed news source, backing the worst of Washington's imperial arrogance and ruthlessness. As a result, it omits inconvenient facts to make its case, including America's notorious ties to numerous global despots on every continent.
WikiLeaks Released Cables Expose America's Regime Change Plan
Though widely reported since mid-April, The Times hasn't acknowledged information (though sketchy) from Washington Post writer Craig Whitlock's April 17 report headlined, "US secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by WikiLeaks show," saying:
Through its Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), "The State Department has secretly financed Syrian political opposition groups and related projects, including a satellite TV channel (London-based Barada TV) that beams anti-government programming into the country, according to previously undisclosed diplomatic cables."
"Barada TV is closely affiliated with the Movement for Justice and Development, a London-based network of (pro-Western) Syrian exiles."
Funding began at least after the Bush administration cut ties with Damascus in 2005. In April 2009, a diplomatic cable from Damascus said:
"A reassessment of current US-sponsored programming that supports anti-(government) factions, both inside and outside Syria, may prove productive."
In February 2006, Bush officials announced funding to "accelerate the work of reformers in Syria." Nonetheless, Barada TV denied receiving money, its news director Malik al-Abdeh saying:
"I'm not aware of anything like that. If your purpose is to smear Barada TV, I don't want to continue this conversation. That's all I'm going to give you."
America's National Endowment for Democracy: A Global Regime Change Initiative
Besides covert CIA activities, US-government funded organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and International Republican Institute (IRI) operate as US foreign policy destabilizing instruments. They do it by supporting opposition group regime change efforts in countries like Syria, despite claiming "dedicat(ion) to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world....in more than 90 countries."
In MENA nations (Middle East/North Africa) alone, NED's web site lists activities in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait, Morocco, Lebanon, Bahrain, Libya, Sudan, and Syria.
The IRI's web site includes (destabilizing anti-democratic) initiatives in Afghanistan, Egypt, GCC states, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Palestine.
Other US imperial organizations are also regionally active, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), operating contrary to their stated missions.
In January 1996, based on firsthand knowledge, former CIA agent (from 1952 - 1977) Ralph McGehee discussed covert NED efforts in Cuba, China, Russia and Vietnam, saying:
The government-funded organization "assumed many of the political action responsibilities of the CIA," including:
-- "efforts to influence foreign journalists;"
-- money laundering;
-- isolating "democratic-minded intellectuals and journalist in the third world;"
-- distributing propaganda articles "to regional editors on each continent;"
-- "disseminating an attack on people in Jamaica;"
-- funding anti-Castro groups in South Florida as well as Radio and TV Marti, airing regime change propaganda;
-- anti-communist grants; and
-- much more while claiming its mission is "guided by the belief that freedom is a universal human aspiration that can be realized through the development of democratic institutions, procedures and values."
In a 2005 interview, another former CIA agent (1957 - 1968), Philip Agee, author of "Inside the Company," explained NED's origins and covert efforts to destabilize and oust Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, calling efforts "similar to what (went on) in Nicaragua in the 1980s minus the Contra terrorist operations (that) wreaked so much destruction on the Nicaraguan economy."
Founded in 1982, NED distributes government funds to four other organizations, including the IRI, NDI, Chamber of Commerce's Center for Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the AFL-CIO's American Center for International Labor Solidarity.
In fact, a 2010 Kim Scipes book titled, "AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?" discusses its covert anti-worker "labor imperialism," including regime change initiatives.
Manipulated Popular Uprising in Syria
Since late January, popular uprisings began, suspiciously orchestrated by outside forces to destabilize and oust Assad. In fact, Richard Perle's 1996 "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," prepared for Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu during his first term, stated:
"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli objective in its own right."
It added:
"Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An affective approach, and one with which America can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizbollah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon...."
"Given the nature of the regime in Damascus (much the same today), it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan comprehensive peace and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction programs, and rejecting land for peace deals on the Golan Heights," Syrian territory colonized by Israel since 1967.
Perle's report was a destabilization and regime change manifesto, implemented in Iraq, Libya, elsewhere in the region, and now Syria. The strategy includes managed news, funding internal and external dissident groups, and other initiatives to oust leaders like Assad.
On March 30, 2011, Haaretz writer Zvi Bar'el headlined "Why did website linked to Syria regime publish US-Saudi plan to oust Assad?" saying:
"According to the report....the plan was formulated in 2008 by the Saudi national security advisor, Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Jeffrey Feltman, a veteran US diplomat in the Middle East who was formerly ambassador to Lebanon and is currently the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs."
Dividing Syria into large cities, towns and villages, the plan involved "establishing five recruitment networks," using unemployed youths, criminals, other young people, and media efforts "funded by European countries but not" America, as well as a "capital network of businesspeople from the large cities."
Training included "sniper fire, arson, and murdering in cold blood," journalists reporting it by hard to monitor satellite phones depicting "human rights activists....demanding not the regime's fall," but need for social networks training "as a means for recruitment."
"After the recruitment and training phases, which would be funded by Saudi Arabia for about $2 billion," thousands of "activists" would be given communications equipment to begin public actions. "The plan also suggest(ed) igniting ethnic tensions between groups around the country to stir unrest," including in Damascus "to convince the military leadership to disassociate itself from Assad and establish a new regime."
"The hoped-for outcome is the establishment of a supreme national council that will run the country and terminate Syria's relations with Iran and Hezbollah."
The Jordan-based Dot and Com company was named as the behind the scenes recruiter, a company run by Saudi intelligence under Bandar to destabilize Syria and oust Assad.
Whether or not the plan was implemented, some of its features are now playing out violently across the country. Orchestrated in Washington, it's to install a totally "with the program" regime, the same war strategy ongoing in Libya.
A Final Comment
On April 28, Russia and China blocked a US-backed UK, French, German and Portugal proposed Security Council resolution condemning Syrian violence. Damascus' UN ambassador, Bashar Ja'arari, said it failed because several members were fair-minded enough to reject it, knowing Libya's fate after Resolution 1973, calling only for no-fly zone protection.
UN Undersecretary General for Political Affairs Lynn Pascoe reported about 400 deaths so far. Other estimates are higher. Russian, Chinese and Syrian representatives say government security forces killed by armed extremists are among them. According to RT.com:
"Russia's Foreign Affairs Ministry had clearly outlined its position: it condemned all those responsible for the deaths of protesters during the clashes with the police. But, it urged (no intervention) in Syria's internal affairs," that could easily escalate to Western regime change plans.
Federation Council to the Asian Parliamentary Assembly, Rudik Iskuzhin, believes Syrian intervention may mean Iran is next, saying:
"We very well understand that the hidden motive of all of the recent revolutionary processes is Iran, to which the destabilization in Syria will eventually ricochet. Libya, just like Syria, was an important ally of" Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Western powers and Israel want the alliance subverted.
On April 29, China ruled out force against Syria, Foreign Affairs Ministry Vice-Minister He Yafei saying it "cannot bring a solution to the problem and will only cause a greater humanitarian crisis." Insisting proposed solutions comply with the UN Charter and international law, he added:
"Any help from the international community has to be constructive in nature, which is conducive to the restoration of stability and public order and ensuring the maintenance of economic and social life."
American intervention assures "constructive chaos," the agenda Washington pursues globally, focusing mainly on controlling Eurasia's enormous wealth and resources. Either one or multiple countries at a time, it includes turning Russia and China into vassal states, a goal neither Beijing or Moscow will tolerate.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
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Showing posts with label defend libya against imperialist attack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label defend libya against imperialist attack. Show all posts
Monday, May 02, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
From The Internationalist Group Website-From Messengers for Qaddafi to Cat’s Paws for Imperialist Intervention-Libya and the Opportunist Left
From Messengers for Qaddafi to Cat’s Paws for Imperialist Intervention
Libya and the Opportunist Left
Qaddafi TV speech, March 2. In the 1970s, most of the left hailed him as an “anti-imperialist” while authentic Trotskyists gave no political support to the bourgeois nationalist strongman. Today the opportunist left supports the pro-imperialist opposition, paving the way for U.S./French/UK bombing. (Photo: Moises Saman for The New York Times)
Over the decades authentic Trotskyists have defended Libya against imperialist attack while giving no political support to Muammar al-Qaddafi. For opportunist leftists in the early years, however, it was enough that Qaddafi taunted Washington. They portrayed the Libyan leader as a paragon of the “Arab Revolution.” This was a strange “revolution” that was not aimed at toppling the local ruling classes – in fact, its protagonists were bourgeois nationalists – but instead was directed mainly at an external enemy, Zionist Israel. Thus Intercontinental Press (8 December 1969), published by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, carried an article noting that “The leaders of the Libyan revolution of September 1 are continually disavowing Marxism and the class struggle.” Still, it declared the foundation of the Libyan Arab Republic to be “A Step Forward of the Arab Revolution.” [1] The laws of uneven and combined development, the SWP argued, would force Qaddafi to abandon his “narrow, nationalist” version of a Koran-based Arab Socialism. Instead, the laws of the market induced Qaddafi to abandon his socialist claims in favor of free-market capitalism.
Most groups in the petty-bourgeois left in the early 1970s portrayed Qaddafi as an “anti-imperialist,” but one tendency went further. That was the organization led by Gerry Healy which claimed to be the International Committee of the Fourth International. Although Healy had once labeled Qaddafi a fascist, by the mid-1970s his British organization, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), and his U.S. subsidiary, the Workers League, positively lionized the Libyan leader. They also swooned for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. This was no accident. The WRP put out a daily newspaper, Newsline, which seemed far beyond the organization’s financial means. For years there were rumors of funny money behind it. But when in 1985 Healy’s lieutenants staged a coup and ousted the WRP’s “founder-leader” they revealed that the party had received over 1 million pounds over seven years from various Arab dictators and petro-sheiks, including rulers of Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Iraq and particularly Qaddafi’s Libya. Here is the breakdown:
Libya ........................ £542,267
Kuwait ....................... 156,500
Qatar .............................50,000
Abu Dhabi ...................25,000
PLO ...............................19,997
Iraq ................................19,697
Unidentified or other
sources .......................261,702
Total ......................£1,075,163
–reprinted in Workers News, April 1988
In exchange, the WRP performed certain services, including photographing Iraqi leftists who protested in London against Hussein’s executions of Iraqi Communists.
Healy’s American acolyte during this period was Workers League leader David North, now head of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) which runs the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). Today, the WSWS poses as champions of Trotskyism, with articles such as “Libya and the bankruptcy of Arab nationalism” (23 February) exposing Qaddafi’s “socialist” pretensions and hailing the anti-Qaddafi, pro-imperialist rebels. Nowhere do the Northites confess to the fact that they were once paid propagandists for Qaddafi, receiving blood money to hail his “revolution.” We have documented how North & Co. (in another incarnation he is the head of a non-union commercial printing operation) oppose unions, fingered supporters of the U.S. SWP for repression by Khomeini’s Islamic Republic in Iran and engaged in a host of anti-working-class actions.[2] But in the litany of crimes of these cynical imposters, it should not be forgotten that they were once messengers for Qaddafi.[3]
For many years, the staunchest defenders of Qaddafi on the U.S. left were the followers of ex-Trotskyist Sam Marcy in the Workers World Party (WWP). Marcy broke politically with Trotskyism in defending the Kremlin’s repression of the 1956 Hungarian workers uprising. A few years later he broke organizationally as well in siding with Mao Zedong’s China against the USSR in the Sino-Soviet split. The Marcyites typically sing the praises of hard-line Stalinist regimes (Kim Il Sung’s North Korea is a favorite) and of “Third World” nationalist strongmen such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi, while “at home” they organize protests with liberal Democrats such as Jesse Jackson and assorted popular-front antiwar movements. Lately, however, they have been waffling over Libya. An editorial in the 3 March issue of Workers World (published February 23) declared, “Of all the struggles going on in North Africa and the Middle East right now, the most difficult to unravel is the one in Libya.” On the one hand, it stated:
“Getting concessions out of Gadhafi is not enough for the imperialist oil barons. They want a government that they can own outright, lock, stock and barrel. They have never forgiven Gadhafi for overthrowing the monarchy and nationalizing the oil.”
On the other hand:
“Progressive people are in sympathy with what they see as a popular movement in Libya. We can help such a movement most by supporting its just demands while rejecting imperialist intervention, in whatever form it may take.”
Conclusion: “It is the people of Libya who must decide their future.” I.e., don’t ask the WWP.
Opportunist leftists push fiction of a “Libyan Revolu¬tion” that is opposed to imperialist intervention. Yet Libyan rebels have pleaded for U.S./French/British/NATO/U.N. forces to strike Qaddafi forces. Here rebel fighters atop bombed tank. (Photo: Patrick Baz/AFP)
A 2004 split-off from the WWP, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), continued the Marcyite tradition of political support to Stalinist and bourgeois nationalists and domestic reformism. In fact, their overall politics are still virtually identical to those of the WWP, although the PSL tries to give it a more hip radical veneer with portraits of Che Guevara while pursuing crass electoralism. But the PSL, too, has been having stomach pains over Libya. An article titled “Libya and the Arab revolt in perspective” (Liberation, 24 February) stated: “At present, the revolt has not produced any organizational form or leader that would make it possible to characterize it politically.” It also opined that “Gaddafi is not a puppet of imperialism like Mubarak was,” but “developments in the last decade have greatly and understandably diminished his credibility among progressive and anti-imperialist forces in the region, almost all of which have declared their solidarity with the Libyan revolt.” As in the case of the WWP, the conclusion is: “it is the people of Libya and the Arab world who will determine their future.” This is a “perspective”?!
The Marcyites continue to hail Qaddafi’s supposed “strong anti-imperialist positions” in the past, ignoring the evidence of his collaboration with Washington in the 1970s (see “Qaddafi and the Imperialists: On and Off”). But since the U.S. invasion of Iraq (according to the WWP), or “in recent years” (so says the PSL), Libya “finally succumbed to U.S. demands” (WWP) and “has made many concessions to imperialism” (PSL). A subsequent article in Workers World (10 March) details how Libya slashed billions of dollars of subsidies for basic necessities and sold off hundreds of state firms. But they seem to have discovered this fact only after February 17, for at the time of Qaddafi’s visit to the U.N., Workers World (24 September 2009) published an article gushing over Libya’s “40 years of revolution.” What changed was not Libya, which has avidly sought imperialist favor since the mid-1990s. Rather, the Marcyites’ recent mealy-mouthed positions reflect the fact that two different forces they tail after (liberal imperialists and semi-colonial bourgeois nationalists) have come into conflict. That’s why WWP and PSL now talk with marbles in their mouths.
If the Stalinoids are feeling conflicted over their one-time putative “anti-imperialist” hero Qaddafi, the social democrats are solidly for the pro-imperialist rebels. First and foremost is the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which seized on the WWP and PSL’s embarrassment to tweak their reformist rivals with whom they organizationally compete in the antiwar, student and other “movements.” An article by the ISO, “Taking Sides About Libya” (Socialist Worker website, 28 February), takes the Marcyites to task for not endorsing pro-rebel demonstrations in San Francisco and elsewhere, declaring that WWP/PSL “allegiance to police states” has “no place in the fight for social justice.” No place? Hmm. This was the line of openly pro-Democratic Party groups like the moribund United for Peace and Justice who insisted on no cooperation with the WWP (via the International Action Center) and PSL (via International ANSWER). But the ISO hastens to add, “Of course, socialists and radicals of all stripes must continue to work together to oppose U.S. military intervention” despite disagreements.
Covering its left flank with this fig-leaf (the ISO claims to oppose U.S. intervention while supporting a “movement” which is crying for it), the polemic also serves to ward off any internal dissent over its support to the Benghazi “democrats,” portraying any opposition as “siding with the tanks.” Earlier (February 22), the ISO ran an incredible string of outright falsehoods taken from Andrew Solomon in the New Yorker portraying Qaddafi’s Libya as identical to the usual U.S.-backed African dictatorship (it “does not take care of even the most basic government obligations,” makes “no effort to provide adequate public accommodation,” does nothing to “raise the standard of living for the population as a whole,” etc.). While of late, the regime has presided over mounting unemployment, increasing concentration of wealth, falling real income and other consequences of the U.S./IMF “free market” economic policies it has adopted, unless one understands that Libya has far and away the highest standard of living in Africa, one can’t understand why Qaddafi continues to have substantial support in much of the country.
Check out those wheels: this isn’t the wretched of the earth. Rebels flee from Ras Lanuf on March 30.
(Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP)
Proof? There are the reports of residents joining loyalist troops and militias to fight the rebels, even in Benghazi. As for the standard of living, there is the fact that there are (or were) more than 1.5 foreign-born workers in Libya, mostly from Egypt and Tunisia. Or just take a gander at the photos of the cars the rebels are driving to battle: those are some pretty hot wheels. In most of Africa and the Near East, virtually nobody among the impoverished masses has a car, new or old, much less late model Toyotas, Nissans, 4x4 Land Rovers and Land Cruisers, etc. The “pro-democracy” rebels are hardly the downtrodden wretched of the earth but a well-to-do layer of businessmen, engineers, bankers, imams and managerial employees of “multi-national” corporations, plus some of their counterparts from the Qaddafi regime. In fact, a good part of Qaddafi’s travails are due to the fact that his regime didn’t carry out a social revolution and left the eastern bourgeoisie in place. Meanwhile, his economic policies created a substantial middle class which considers Qaddafi and his cohorts to be uncouth country bumpkins, wants to live like Europeans, and has been hard-hit by the regime’s new Western-inspired economic policies.
The ISO printed a piece by Richard Seymour (author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb and a supporter of the British Socialist Workers Party), “The West’s Fear of Qaddafi’s Fall” (Socialist Worker website, 24 February). Seymour insisted that “the trouble for the U.S. and UK governments in this revolt is that they really, really don't want Qadaffi to fall.” The trouble for the ISO is that the U.S. and U.K. governments really, really do want Qaddafi to fall. Barack Obama said so, Hillary Clinton said so, David Cameron said so, and now they’re trying to do so, while piously pretending to protect the civilian population. More fundamentally, the ISO’s “trouble” is that their “third camp” politics – taken from their mentor, the late Tony Cliff, who called the USSR “state capitalist” and during the anti-Soviet Cold War summed up his position as “neither Washington nor Moscow” – inexorably place them in the “first camp,” that of imperialism. As they focus on “democracy” while blithely crossing the class line, these “State Department socialists” end up with State Department-sponsored “youth movements,” and mercenary mujahedin (holy warriors) who want back on the CIA payroll like they were in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan (and the Cliffites praised them as “freedom fighters”).
Cliff’s SWP in Britain (with which the ISO was initially allied in the International Socialist Tendency, until they parted ways in 2001 accusing each other of being insufficiently opportunist) has been at the forefront of those who – while peddling imperialist war propaganda against the Qaddafi regime and hallucinatory tales of “new forms of democracy” in Benghazi – claimed that “Libyan revolutionaries” are opposing Western interference. It quoted Abdel Hafidh Ghoga, the spokesman for the rebels’ Transitional National Council, saying, “We are against any foreign intervention or military intervention in our internal affairs” (Socialist Worker [UK], 5 March 2011). That was when the rebels thought that the Qaddafi regime would simply collapse, but a few days later, this same Ghoga was singing a different tune: “The Libyan people are facing genocide…. We demand a bombardment of the camps where he (Qaddafi) keeps his mercenaries and the roads he uses to transport them and his security forces” (Reuters, 10 March). So much for the myth of an anti-intervention sector of the Libyan rebels.
Libyan rebels threaten black African workers. Opportunist leftists alibi lynchings, claiming racism was due to Qaddafi. (Photo: AP)
While the ISO and SWP/UK are the largest and most outspoken left groups in championing the cause of the monarchist, Islamist, ex-Qaddafi and pro-imperialist Libyan rebels, they are joined by the whole of the social-democratic milieu in portraying these reactionaries as fighters for “democracy.” Socialist Action (March 2011) calls for “Victory to the Workers' and Peasants' Uprising Against Qaddafi!” while adding a ritual call, “US Hands Off Libya!” It says it must give its “political support” to the workers, peasants and youth who are supposedly separate from the “middle-class professionals—doctors, lawyers, academics, etc.” and defecting military officers who “would turn over Libya to imperialist intervention.” SA’s claim that it is only the latter who are pleading for aid from the U.S. and Europe is a fairy tale. Despite the single banner against foreign military intervention and a few quotes from youth interviewed by liberal media, there is no indication of any significant sector of the rebels opposed to the U.S./UK/U.N./NATO “no-fly” zone or to calls on the imperialists to use their bombs to get rid of Qaddafi and his regime.
Another social-democratic group, Socialist Alternative (SAlt), likewise calls, in a March 19 statement, for “Victory to the Libyan Revolution!” while adding “No to Western Military Intervention!” An earlier article by SAlt’s mentor and leader of the Committee for a Workers International, Peter Taaffe, hailed “Herculean efforts to remove Gaddafi dictatorship in Libya” (CWI web site, 8 March). SAlt and the CWI are less hot on promoting an imaginary anti-intervention, worker-peasant sector of the “revolution” and admits that “people’s committees” in the east are “not fully based upon the real involvement of working class people.” But while professing opposition to Western military intervention, SAlt/CWI calls for workers in the West to implement economic sanctions against the Qaddafi regime: “trade unions should block the export of Libyan oil and gas” and “bank workers should organise the freezing of all the Gaddafi regime’s financial assets.” Whether trade-unions or governments carry out such measures to strangle Libya economically, the Taaffeites are calling for imperialist sanctions which proletarian revolutionaries and class-conscious workers resolutely oppose.
Still another denizen of the social-democratic swamp, the Workers International League (WIL), a satellite of the Allan Woods’ Socialist Appeal group inside the British Labour Party and his International Marxist Tendency (IMT), is even more open about the fact that “reactionary bourgeois agents” are running things in Benghazi, and that the rebels are led by “direct representatives of imperialist interests” (“Libyan Interim Government – agents of imperialism,” In Defense of Marxism web site, 1 April). At the beginning, however, Woods was ecstatic: “Uprising in Libya: Tremble, tyrants!” (IDoM, 23 February). “The revolution has already spread to the west,” and “the fall of Gaddafi is now only a matter of time,” proclaimed Woods, who is forever announcing revolutions here, there and everywhere, from Venezuela to Argentina, Bolivia, Iran and now Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. While saying sotto voce (in a stage whisper) that “we must oppose imperialist aggression,” whether bombing or in other forms, the IMT is strangely low-key about this. As over Iran, which led to a split in Woods’ international, their big problem is that their hero Hugo Chávez is a big pal of Qaddafi’s.
In claiming to support the “Libyan Revolution” while simultaneously opposing imperialist military intervention, it should have occurred to the various social democrats that the very people they’re seeking to tail after in Libya won’t appreciate this pro-forma opposition to Western bombardment of Qaddafi, which the rebels see as their only hope of survival, much less victory. In fact, along with the “cruise missile liberals” and Labour Party leaders, a few Western leftists, of sorts, have come out for the imperialist bombing campaign – or at least against denouncing it. Like a number of left apostates did over the bombing of Yugoslavia by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in 1999, they want to “give war a chance.”
Chief among them is the British Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) of Sean Matgamna, who developed a passion for the anti-Trotskyist renegade Max Shachtman, who refused to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism in World War II and went on to become a propagandist for the U.S. government in the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the Vietnam War. Matgamna recently wrote an essay, “Why we should not denounce intervention in Libya” (Solidarity, 23 March). He takes his stand on the basis of “any humanitarian, socialist or even decent liberal point of view.” Of course, the imperialists “humanitarian” concern “is not unconnected with their concern for Libyan oil. Of course they are hypocrites.” Of course, the humanitarian “decent liberal” Matgamna would “not give positive political support to the governments and the ruling capitalists” while supporting their war. But of course. (He also backed the imperialist-backed Kosovo Liberation Army in ’99, and notoriously supports Israel in its war against the Palestinians.) Going a step beyond the reformists of the antiwar movement, the AWL are outright apologists for imperialist war.
Another of this ilk is the Lebanese academic Gilbert Achcar, a long-time spokesman for the USec and a fellow at the International Institute for Research and Education founded by USec leaders Ernest Mandel and Livio Maitan. In an interview which Achcar “gave to my good friend Steve Shalom” of Z Magazine and was reposted on the web site of the USec’s International Viewpoint (March 2011), Achcar claims that “given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would have inevitably resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it” [U.N. Resolution 1973, calling for military action against the Libyan regime in the name of protecting civilians]. This set off a flurry of responses, including from the SWP/U.K. leader Alex Callinicos, who in reply agrees with “my old friend Gilbert Achcar” that sometimes asking for help from the imperialists is okay, just not in this particular case. That such an oh-so-collegial “debate” between a coterie of “left” academics could even take place is proof positive that none of them have the remotest connection with revolution or Marxism.[4]
For revolutionary Trotskyists such a “discussion” is an abomination: it is not only necessary to fight against imperialist intervention tooth and nail, it is an obligation to defend a semi-colonial country under attack, whatever the pretext or its internal regime, and to seek the defeat of the imperialist attackers, no matter how “democratic” or “humanitarian” they claim their mission to be. Leon Trotsky defended Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) under the feudalist and slave owner Haile Selassie against imperialist Italy in the mid-late 1930s. French Communists stood on the side of the Rif rebellion in the early 1920s, and Communist-led dock workers refused to ship munitions to the French troops defending the colony of Morocco. Was Berber tribal leader Muhammad Abd al-Krim a progressive? Hardly. V.I. Lenin defended the “Boxer Rebellion” in China in 1900 which sought to restore the Manchu Qing dynasty. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defended the Sepoy Rebellion in India in the late 1850s, even while noting that it was sparked by a mutiny of mercenary soldiers who carried out no small number of atrocities and was led by feudalist Muslim forces.[5] In all these cases, the fundamental issue was the fight against imperialism. As Lenin wrote in his pamphlet, Socialism and War (1915):
“If tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, those would be ‘just’ and ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who attacked first; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘great’ powers.”
Today the overriding issue in Libya is the struggle against imperialism. For decades the dictatorships of this strategically vital region, as well as the Zionist oppressor state in Israel, have rested on the support of imperialism. The uprising in Libya was fueled precisely by Qaddafi’s adoption of the dominant capitalist economic policies as a part of his alliance with imperialism. To call on the imperialists to intervene, militarily or through punishing economic sanctions, is to guarantee that at this moment of great and potentially revolutionary upheaval, the dominant imperial powers, first of all the United States, will continue to be the arbiters, exploiters and oppressors of the Arab masses. It is necessary to organize a struggle for workers revolution throughout the region not only against the strongmen such as Qaddafi but also against imperialism and the “democrats,” monarchists and Islamists who would serve as its front men.
Those leftists who openly call for Western military action, such as the AWL and Achcar, are what Lenin called social imperialists, like the German Social Democrats who voted for war credits in 1914 in the name of fighting tsarist reaction. Once the Maoists might have called them “running dogs” of imperialism, although in this case “lap dogs” would be more to the point. On the other hand, by drumming up political support for the pro-imperialist Libyan rebels whose rebellion is dependent on and who call for U.S./UK/U.N./NATO intervention, the social-democratic and other “social pacifists” in the “antiwar” movement are serving as cat’s paws, that is to say dupes or stooges, who have paved the way for imperialist attack. Today as in the past, a real struggle against imperialist war and domination requires fighting to smash the imperialist system by socialist revolution throughout the region and the world. ■
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[1] The American SWP was fraternally tied to the United Secretariat of the Fourth Internation (USec). Today, the Socialist Action group, which is similarly linked to the USec, writes that “much of the left fell for his [Qaddafi’s] rhetoric, as they had—and still do—for other bourgeois populists in neocolonial countries” (Socialist Action, March 2011). They neglect to mention that the cheerleaders for the Libyan leader included the SWP, to which most of the Socialist Action leadership belonged at the time.
[2] See “Where Were You, David North?” The Internationalist No. 29, Summer 2009; “Socialists in Bourgeois Electionland,” The Internationalist No. 28, March-April 2009; and “SEP/WSWS: Scab ‘ Socialists’” (December 2007) available on our web site, www.internationalist.org.
[3] This sordid history is documented in several articles published by Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the Spartacist League, when it was the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism, which can be found on the web site Anti-SEP-tic. These include: “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” WV No. 158 (20 May 1977); “More from Healy, Messenger of Qaddafi,” WV No. 174 (23 September 1977); “Healyites Got Blood Money,” WV No. 517 (4 January 1991); “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523 (29 March 1991); “Northite Fool's Gold ,” WV No. 533 (22 November 1991).
[4] Achcar is at least consistent in his support for imperialism: in 1980 he – along with Tariq Ali – put forward a resolution in the USec calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the face of the CIA-sponsored Islamist onslaught (see Gilbert Achcar, Eastern Cauldron [Monthly Review Press, 2004]). And in 2006 he supported the pseudo-elections being held under the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
[5] See “Lenin on the ‘Boxer Rebellion’” and “Marx on the Sepoy Revolt” in The Internationalist No. 21, Summer 2005.
Libya and the Opportunist Left
Qaddafi TV speech, March 2. In the 1970s, most of the left hailed him as an “anti-imperialist” while authentic Trotskyists gave no political support to the bourgeois nationalist strongman. Today the opportunist left supports the pro-imperialist opposition, paving the way for U.S./French/UK bombing. (Photo: Moises Saman for The New York Times)
Over the decades authentic Trotskyists have defended Libya against imperialist attack while giving no political support to Muammar al-Qaddafi. For opportunist leftists in the early years, however, it was enough that Qaddafi taunted Washington. They portrayed the Libyan leader as a paragon of the “Arab Revolution.” This was a strange “revolution” that was not aimed at toppling the local ruling classes – in fact, its protagonists were bourgeois nationalists – but instead was directed mainly at an external enemy, Zionist Israel. Thus Intercontinental Press (8 December 1969), published by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, carried an article noting that “The leaders of the Libyan revolution of September 1 are continually disavowing Marxism and the class struggle.” Still, it declared the foundation of the Libyan Arab Republic to be “A Step Forward of the Arab Revolution.” [1] The laws of uneven and combined development, the SWP argued, would force Qaddafi to abandon his “narrow, nationalist” version of a Koran-based Arab Socialism. Instead, the laws of the market induced Qaddafi to abandon his socialist claims in favor of free-market capitalism.
Most groups in the petty-bourgeois left in the early 1970s portrayed Qaddafi as an “anti-imperialist,” but one tendency went further. That was the organization led by Gerry Healy which claimed to be the International Committee of the Fourth International. Although Healy had once labeled Qaddafi a fascist, by the mid-1970s his British organization, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), and his U.S. subsidiary, the Workers League, positively lionized the Libyan leader. They also swooned for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. This was no accident. The WRP put out a daily newspaper, Newsline, which seemed far beyond the organization’s financial means. For years there were rumors of funny money behind it. But when in 1985 Healy’s lieutenants staged a coup and ousted the WRP’s “founder-leader” they revealed that the party had received over 1 million pounds over seven years from various Arab dictators and petro-sheiks, including rulers of Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Iraq and particularly Qaddafi’s Libya. Here is the breakdown:
Libya ........................ £542,267
Kuwait ....................... 156,500
Qatar .............................50,000
Abu Dhabi ...................25,000
PLO ...............................19,997
Iraq ................................19,697
Unidentified or other
sources .......................261,702
Total ......................£1,075,163
–reprinted in Workers News, April 1988
In exchange, the WRP performed certain services, including photographing Iraqi leftists who protested in London against Hussein’s executions of Iraqi Communists.
Healy’s American acolyte during this period was Workers League leader David North, now head of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) which runs the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). Today, the WSWS poses as champions of Trotskyism, with articles such as “Libya and the bankruptcy of Arab nationalism” (23 February) exposing Qaddafi’s “socialist” pretensions and hailing the anti-Qaddafi, pro-imperialist rebels. Nowhere do the Northites confess to the fact that they were once paid propagandists for Qaddafi, receiving blood money to hail his “revolution.” We have documented how North & Co. (in another incarnation he is the head of a non-union commercial printing operation) oppose unions, fingered supporters of the U.S. SWP for repression by Khomeini’s Islamic Republic in Iran and engaged in a host of anti-working-class actions.[2] But in the litany of crimes of these cynical imposters, it should not be forgotten that they were once messengers for Qaddafi.[3]
For many years, the staunchest defenders of Qaddafi on the U.S. left were the followers of ex-Trotskyist Sam Marcy in the Workers World Party (WWP). Marcy broke politically with Trotskyism in defending the Kremlin’s repression of the 1956 Hungarian workers uprising. A few years later he broke organizationally as well in siding with Mao Zedong’s China against the USSR in the Sino-Soviet split. The Marcyites typically sing the praises of hard-line Stalinist regimes (Kim Il Sung’s North Korea is a favorite) and of “Third World” nationalist strongmen such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi, while “at home” they organize protests with liberal Democrats such as Jesse Jackson and assorted popular-front antiwar movements. Lately, however, they have been waffling over Libya. An editorial in the 3 March issue of Workers World (published February 23) declared, “Of all the struggles going on in North Africa and the Middle East right now, the most difficult to unravel is the one in Libya.” On the one hand, it stated:
“Getting concessions out of Gadhafi is not enough for the imperialist oil barons. They want a government that they can own outright, lock, stock and barrel. They have never forgiven Gadhafi for overthrowing the monarchy and nationalizing the oil.”
On the other hand:
“Progressive people are in sympathy with what they see as a popular movement in Libya. We can help such a movement most by supporting its just demands while rejecting imperialist intervention, in whatever form it may take.”
Conclusion: “It is the people of Libya who must decide their future.” I.e., don’t ask the WWP.
Opportunist leftists push fiction of a “Libyan Revolu¬tion” that is opposed to imperialist intervention. Yet Libyan rebels have pleaded for U.S./French/British/NATO/U.N. forces to strike Qaddafi forces. Here rebel fighters atop bombed tank. (Photo: Patrick Baz/AFP)
A 2004 split-off from the WWP, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), continued the Marcyite tradition of political support to Stalinist and bourgeois nationalists and domestic reformism. In fact, their overall politics are still virtually identical to those of the WWP, although the PSL tries to give it a more hip radical veneer with portraits of Che Guevara while pursuing crass electoralism. But the PSL, too, has been having stomach pains over Libya. An article titled “Libya and the Arab revolt in perspective” (Liberation, 24 February) stated: “At present, the revolt has not produced any organizational form or leader that would make it possible to characterize it politically.” It also opined that “Gaddafi is not a puppet of imperialism like Mubarak was,” but “developments in the last decade have greatly and understandably diminished his credibility among progressive and anti-imperialist forces in the region, almost all of which have declared their solidarity with the Libyan revolt.” As in the case of the WWP, the conclusion is: “it is the people of Libya and the Arab world who will determine their future.” This is a “perspective”?!
The Marcyites continue to hail Qaddafi’s supposed “strong anti-imperialist positions” in the past, ignoring the evidence of his collaboration with Washington in the 1970s (see “Qaddafi and the Imperialists: On and Off”). But since the U.S. invasion of Iraq (according to the WWP), or “in recent years” (so says the PSL), Libya “finally succumbed to U.S. demands” (WWP) and “has made many concessions to imperialism” (PSL). A subsequent article in Workers World (10 March) details how Libya slashed billions of dollars of subsidies for basic necessities and sold off hundreds of state firms. But they seem to have discovered this fact only after February 17, for at the time of Qaddafi’s visit to the U.N., Workers World (24 September 2009) published an article gushing over Libya’s “40 years of revolution.” What changed was not Libya, which has avidly sought imperialist favor since the mid-1990s. Rather, the Marcyites’ recent mealy-mouthed positions reflect the fact that two different forces they tail after (liberal imperialists and semi-colonial bourgeois nationalists) have come into conflict. That’s why WWP and PSL now talk with marbles in their mouths.
If the Stalinoids are feeling conflicted over their one-time putative “anti-imperialist” hero Qaddafi, the social democrats are solidly for the pro-imperialist rebels. First and foremost is the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which seized on the WWP and PSL’s embarrassment to tweak their reformist rivals with whom they organizationally compete in the antiwar, student and other “movements.” An article by the ISO, “Taking Sides About Libya” (Socialist Worker website, 28 February), takes the Marcyites to task for not endorsing pro-rebel demonstrations in San Francisco and elsewhere, declaring that WWP/PSL “allegiance to police states” has “no place in the fight for social justice.” No place? Hmm. This was the line of openly pro-Democratic Party groups like the moribund United for Peace and Justice who insisted on no cooperation with the WWP (via the International Action Center) and PSL (via International ANSWER). But the ISO hastens to add, “Of course, socialists and radicals of all stripes must continue to work together to oppose U.S. military intervention” despite disagreements.
Covering its left flank with this fig-leaf (the ISO claims to oppose U.S. intervention while supporting a “movement” which is crying for it), the polemic also serves to ward off any internal dissent over its support to the Benghazi “democrats,” portraying any opposition as “siding with the tanks.” Earlier (February 22), the ISO ran an incredible string of outright falsehoods taken from Andrew Solomon in the New Yorker portraying Qaddafi’s Libya as identical to the usual U.S.-backed African dictatorship (it “does not take care of even the most basic government obligations,” makes “no effort to provide adequate public accommodation,” does nothing to “raise the standard of living for the population as a whole,” etc.). While of late, the regime has presided over mounting unemployment, increasing concentration of wealth, falling real income and other consequences of the U.S./IMF “free market” economic policies it has adopted, unless one understands that Libya has far and away the highest standard of living in Africa, one can’t understand why Qaddafi continues to have substantial support in much of the country.
Check out those wheels: this isn’t the wretched of the earth. Rebels flee from Ras Lanuf on March 30.
(Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP)
Proof? There are the reports of residents joining loyalist troops and militias to fight the rebels, even in Benghazi. As for the standard of living, there is the fact that there are (or were) more than 1.5 foreign-born workers in Libya, mostly from Egypt and Tunisia. Or just take a gander at the photos of the cars the rebels are driving to battle: those are some pretty hot wheels. In most of Africa and the Near East, virtually nobody among the impoverished masses has a car, new or old, much less late model Toyotas, Nissans, 4x4 Land Rovers and Land Cruisers, etc. The “pro-democracy” rebels are hardly the downtrodden wretched of the earth but a well-to-do layer of businessmen, engineers, bankers, imams and managerial employees of “multi-national” corporations, plus some of their counterparts from the Qaddafi regime. In fact, a good part of Qaddafi’s travails are due to the fact that his regime didn’t carry out a social revolution and left the eastern bourgeoisie in place. Meanwhile, his economic policies created a substantial middle class which considers Qaddafi and his cohorts to be uncouth country bumpkins, wants to live like Europeans, and has been hard-hit by the regime’s new Western-inspired economic policies.
The ISO printed a piece by Richard Seymour (author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb and a supporter of the British Socialist Workers Party), “The West’s Fear of Qaddafi’s Fall” (Socialist Worker website, 24 February). Seymour insisted that “the trouble for the U.S. and UK governments in this revolt is that they really, really don't want Qadaffi to fall.” The trouble for the ISO is that the U.S. and U.K. governments really, really do want Qaddafi to fall. Barack Obama said so, Hillary Clinton said so, David Cameron said so, and now they’re trying to do so, while piously pretending to protect the civilian population. More fundamentally, the ISO’s “trouble” is that their “third camp” politics – taken from their mentor, the late Tony Cliff, who called the USSR “state capitalist” and during the anti-Soviet Cold War summed up his position as “neither Washington nor Moscow” – inexorably place them in the “first camp,” that of imperialism. As they focus on “democracy” while blithely crossing the class line, these “State Department socialists” end up with State Department-sponsored “youth movements,” and mercenary mujahedin (holy warriors) who want back on the CIA payroll like they were in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan (and the Cliffites praised them as “freedom fighters”).
Cliff’s SWP in Britain (with which the ISO was initially allied in the International Socialist Tendency, until they parted ways in 2001 accusing each other of being insufficiently opportunist) has been at the forefront of those who – while peddling imperialist war propaganda against the Qaddafi regime and hallucinatory tales of “new forms of democracy” in Benghazi – claimed that “Libyan revolutionaries” are opposing Western interference. It quoted Abdel Hafidh Ghoga, the spokesman for the rebels’ Transitional National Council, saying, “We are against any foreign intervention or military intervention in our internal affairs” (Socialist Worker [UK], 5 March 2011). That was when the rebels thought that the Qaddafi regime would simply collapse, but a few days later, this same Ghoga was singing a different tune: “The Libyan people are facing genocide…. We demand a bombardment of the camps where he (Qaddafi) keeps his mercenaries and the roads he uses to transport them and his security forces” (Reuters, 10 March). So much for the myth of an anti-intervention sector of the Libyan rebels.
Libyan rebels threaten black African workers. Opportunist leftists alibi lynchings, claiming racism was due to Qaddafi. (Photo: AP)
While the ISO and SWP/UK are the largest and most outspoken left groups in championing the cause of the monarchist, Islamist, ex-Qaddafi and pro-imperialist Libyan rebels, they are joined by the whole of the social-democratic milieu in portraying these reactionaries as fighters for “democracy.” Socialist Action (March 2011) calls for “Victory to the Workers' and Peasants' Uprising Against Qaddafi!” while adding a ritual call, “US Hands Off Libya!” It says it must give its “political support” to the workers, peasants and youth who are supposedly separate from the “middle-class professionals—doctors, lawyers, academics, etc.” and defecting military officers who “would turn over Libya to imperialist intervention.” SA’s claim that it is only the latter who are pleading for aid from the U.S. and Europe is a fairy tale. Despite the single banner against foreign military intervention and a few quotes from youth interviewed by liberal media, there is no indication of any significant sector of the rebels opposed to the U.S./UK/U.N./NATO “no-fly” zone or to calls on the imperialists to use their bombs to get rid of Qaddafi and his regime.
Another social-democratic group, Socialist Alternative (SAlt), likewise calls, in a March 19 statement, for “Victory to the Libyan Revolution!” while adding “No to Western Military Intervention!” An earlier article by SAlt’s mentor and leader of the Committee for a Workers International, Peter Taaffe, hailed “Herculean efforts to remove Gaddafi dictatorship in Libya” (CWI web site, 8 March). SAlt and the CWI are less hot on promoting an imaginary anti-intervention, worker-peasant sector of the “revolution” and admits that “people’s committees” in the east are “not fully based upon the real involvement of working class people.” But while professing opposition to Western military intervention, SAlt/CWI calls for workers in the West to implement economic sanctions against the Qaddafi regime: “trade unions should block the export of Libyan oil and gas” and “bank workers should organise the freezing of all the Gaddafi regime’s financial assets.” Whether trade-unions or governments carry out such measures to strangle Libya economically, the Taaffeites are calling for imperialist sanctions which proletarian revolutionaries and class-conscious workers resolutely oppose.
Still another denizen of the social-democratic swamp, the Workers International League (WIL), a satellite of the Allan Woods’ Socialist Appeal group inside the British Labour Party and his International Marxist Tendency (IMT), is even more open about the fact that “reactionary bourgeois agents” are running things in Benghazi, and that the rebels are led by “direct representatives of imperialist interests” (“Libyan Interim Government – agents of imperialism,” In Defense of Marxism web site, 1 April). At the beginning, however, Woods was ecstatic: “Uprising in Libya: Tremble, tyrants!” (IDoM, 23 February). “The revolution has already spread to the west,” and “the fall of Gaddafi is now only a matter of time,” proclaimed Woods, who is forever announcing revolutions here, there and everywhere, from Venezuela to Argentina, Bolivia, Iran and now Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. While saying sotto voce (in a stage whisper) that “we must oppose imperialist aggression,” whether bombing or in other forms, the IMT is strangely low-key about this. As over Iran, which led to a split in Woods’ international, their big problem is that their hero Hugo Chávez is a big pal of Qaddafi’s.
In claiming to support the “Libyan Revolution” while simultaneously opposing imperialist military intervention, it should have occurred to the various social democrats that the very people they’re seeking to tail after in Libya won’t appreciate this pro-forma opposition to Western bombardment of Qaddafi, which the rebels see as their only hope of survival, much less victory. In fact, along with the “cruise missile liberals” and Labour Party leaders, a few Western leftists, of sorts, have come out for the imperialist bombing campaign – or at least against denouncing it. Like a number of left apostates did over the bombing of Yugoslavia by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in 1999, they want to “give war a chance.”
Chief among them is the British Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) of Sean Matgamna, who developed a passion for the anti-Trotskyist renegade Max Shachtman, who refused to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism in World War II and went on to become a propagandist for the U.S. government in the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the Vietnam War. Matgamna recently wrote an essay, “Why we should not denounce intervention in Libya” (Solidarity, 23 March). He takes his stand on the basis of “any humanitarian, socialist or even decent liberal point of view.” Of course, the imperialists “humanitarian” concern “is not unconnected with their concern for Libyan oil. Of course they are hypocrites.” Of course, the humanitarian “decent liberal” Matgamna would “not give positive political support to the governments and the ruling capitalists” while supporting their war. But of course. (He also backed the imperialist-backed Kosovo Liberation Army in ’99, and notoriously supports Israel in its war against the Palestinians.) Going a step beyond the reformists of the antiwar movement, the AWL are outright apologists for imperialist war.
Another of this ilk is the Lebanese academic Gilbert Achcar, a long-time spokesman for the USec and a fellow at the International Institute for Research and Education founded by USec leaders Ernest Mandel and Livio Maitan. In an interview which Achcar “gave to my good friend Steve Shalom” of Z Magazine and was reposted on the web site of the USec’s International Viewpoint (March 2011), Achcar claims that “given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would have inevitably resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it” [U.N. Resolution 1973, calling for military action against the Libyan regime in the name of protecting civilians]. This set off a flurry of responses, including from the SWP/U.K. leader Alex Callinicos, who in reply agrees with “my old friend Gilbert Achcar” that sometimes asking for help from the imperialists is okay, just not in this particular case. That such an oh-so-collegial “debate” between a coterie of “left” academics could even take place is proof positive that none of them have the remotest connection with revolution or Marxism.[4]
For revolutionary Trotskyists such a “discussion” is an abomination: it is not only necessary to fight against imperialist intervention tooth and nail, it is an obligation to defend a semi-colonial country under attack, whatever the pretext or its internal regime, and to seek the defeat of the imperialist attackers, no matter how “democratic” or “humanitarian” they claim their mission to be. Leon Trotsky defended Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) under the feudalist and slave owner Haile Selassie against imperialist Italy in the mid-late 1930s. French Communists stood on the side of the Rif rebellion in the early 1920s, and Communist-led dock workers refused to ship munitions to the French troops defending the colony of Morocco. Was Berber tribal leader Muhammad Abd al-Krim a progressive? Hardly. V.I. Lenin defended the “Boxer Rebellion” in China in 1900 which sought to restore the Manchu Qing dynasty. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defended the Sepoy Rebellion in India in the late 1850s, even while noting that it was sparked by a mutiny of mercenary soldiers who carried out no small number of atrocities and was led by feudalist Muslim forces.[5] In all these cases, the fundamental issue was the fight against imperialism. As Lenin wrote in his pamphlet, Socialism and War (1915):
“If tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, those would be ‘just’ and ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who attacked first; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘great’ powers.”
Today the overriding issue in Libya is the struggle against imperialism. For decades the dictatorships of this strategically vital region, as well as the Zionist oppressor state in Israel, have rested on the support of imperialism. The uprising in Libya was fueled precisely by Qaddafi’s adoption of the dominant capitalist economic policies as a part of his alliance with imperialism. To call on the imperialists to intervene, militarily or through punishing economic sanctions, is to guarantee that at this moment of great and potentially revolutionary upheaval, the dominant imperial powers, first of all the United States, will continue to be the arbiters, exploiters and oppressors of the Arab masses. It is necessary to organize a struggle for workers revolution throughout the region not only against the strongmen such as Qaddafi but also against imperialism and the “democrats,” monarchists and Islamists who would serve as its front men.
Those leftists who openly call for Western military action, such as the AWL and Achcar, are what Lenin called social imperialists, like the German Social Democrats who voted for war credits in 1914 in the name of fighting tsarist reaction. Once the Maoists might have called them “running dogs” of imperialism, although in this case “lap dogs” would be more to the point. On the other hand, by drumming up political support for the pro-imperialist Libyan rebels whose rebellion is dependent on and who call for U.S./UK/U.N./NATO intervention, the social-democratic and other “social pacifists” in the “antiwar” movement are serving as cat’s paws, that is to say dupes or stooges, who have paved the way for imperialist attack. Today as in the past, a real struggle against imperialist war and domination requires fighting to smash the imperialist system by socialist revolution throughout the region and the world. ■
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[1] The American SWP was fraternally tied to the United Secretariat of the Fourth Internation (USec). Today, the Socialist Action group, which is similarly linked to the USec, writes that “much of the left fell for his [Qaddafi’s] rhetoric, as they had—and still do—for other bourgeois populists in neocolonial countries” (Socialist Action, March 2011). They neglect to mention that the cheerleaders for the Libyan leader included the SWP, to which most of the Socialist Action leadership belonged at the time.
[2] See “Where Were You, David North?” The Internationalist No. 29, Summer 2009; “Socialists in Bourgeois Electionland,” The Internationalist No. 28, March-April 2009; and “SEP/WSWS: Scab ‘ Socialists’” (December 2007) available on our web site, www.internationalist.org.
[3] This sordid history is documented in several articles published by Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the Spartacist League, when it was the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism, which can be found on the web site Anti-SEP-tic. These include: “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” WV No. 158 (20 May 1977); “More from Healy, Messenger of Qaddafi,” WV No. 174 (23 September 1977); “Healyites Got Blood Money,” WV No. 517 (4 January 1991); “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523 (29 March 1991); “Northite Fool's Gold ,” WV No. 533 (22 November 1991).
[4] Achcar is at least consistent in his support for imperialism: in 1980 he – along with Tariq Ali – put forward a resolution in the USec calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the face of the CIA-sponsored Islamist onslaught (see Gilbert Achcar, Eastern Cauldron [Monthly Review Press, 2004]). And in 2006 he supported the pseudo-elections being held under the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
[5] See “Lenin on the ‘Boxer Rebellion’” and “Marx on the Sepoy Revolt” in The Internationalist No. 21, Summer 2005.
From The SteveLendman Blog-Mission Creep In Libya
Markin comment:
Defense Libya (hold your nose if you like, but do it) against the imperialist (and its agents, internal and external) mission creep!
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Mission Creep in Libya
Mission Creep in Libya - by Stephen Lendman
Escalated intervention keeps incrementally building toward sending combat troops against Gaddafi, French and UK leaders signaling what may, in fact, have been planned all along, perhaps including US marines. More on that below.
On April 16, New York Times writer Rod Nordland admitted what's already known headlining, "Libyan Rebels Say They're Being Sent Weapons," saying:
Interviewed by Al Arabiya on Saturday, rebel military leader General Abdel Gattah Younas said "his forces had received weapons supplies from unidentified nations that supported their uprising." National Transitional Council spokesman Mustafa Gheriani confirmed it without naming sources thought to be Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and NATO members directly.
Gheriani also said that rebels had "professional training centers," adding:
"We have a lot of people being trained, real professional training, that we don't talk to the world about."
On April 19, RTT News Global Financial Newswires headlined, "French Lawmaker Calls for Deployment of Ground Troops in Libya," saying:
Axel Poniatowski, French Parliament foreign affairs committee chairman, recommended "deploy(ing) ground troops in Libya to guide the ongoing airstrikes being carried out." Warning that operations could get bogged down, he said:
"The exclusive use of air power, as imposed on us by UN Security Council Resolution 1973, has proved its limitations in the face of targets that are mobile and hard to track. Without information from the ground, coalition planes are flying blind and increasing the risk of friendly fire incidents."
On April 19, the London Independent headlined, "Army experts to mention Libya rebels," saying:
"British Army officers are being sent to Libya to advise rebels fighting (Gaddafi's) forces. The UK group will be deployed to the opposition stronghold of Benghazi (in) a mentoring role to help leaders co-ordinating attacks on (his) army."
Foreign Secretary William Hague called those sent "legitimate political interlocutors," saying, "Our officers will not be involved in training or arming the opposition's fighting forces. Nor will they be involved in the planning or execution of the NTC's military operations or in the provision of any other form of operational military advice."
Ruling out a ground invasion, he admitted that additional SAS raids were possible, complementing others along with CIA and MI 6 intelligence operatives in Libya perhaps for months ahead of planned intervention, arming, funding and training rebel insurgents.
Usually described as experts, consultants and advisors, mission creep has been evident for weeks, a process begun in fall 2010 or earlier. Moreover, on March 25, London Daily Mail writers David Williams and Tim Shipman said before bombing began "it was revealed that hundreds of British special forces troops have been deployed deep inside Libya targeting (Gaddafi's) forces - and more are on standby."
On April 20, New York Times writers Alan Cowell and Ravi Somaiya headlined, "France and Italy Will Also Send Advisors to Libya Rebels," saying:
Both governments confirmed "they would join Britain in sending a small number of military liaison officers to support" Libyan insurgents, without Security Council authorization.
On April 18, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's permanent NATO envoy, warned about serious Resolution 1973 violations, saying:
"We have information that certain European states are acting more and more on the side of the Libyan rebels. We request a halt to the violation of the UN Security Council resolution, especially its clause imposing an embargo on arms supplies to the conflict zones....No one has ever succeeded in extinguishing a fire with kerosene."
On April 19, RT.com headlined "Libyan relief effort feared guise for ground invasion," saying:
EU nations "plan to send up to 1,000 troops to Libya to convoy humanitarian aid," despite Russia warning about an invasion disguised as relief. Planned earlier in April, EUFOR Libya won't engage in direct combat unless attacked, said Michael Mann, spokesman EU High Representative Catherine Aston, yet expect them to have a very fluid mandate, escalating mission creep on any pretext or none at all.
In addition, US-led NATO forces may intervene to aid insurgents or engage directly in combat, according to AFRICOM General Carter Ham in early April testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying:
Air attacks produced stalemate, not resolution, and insurgents stand little chance of defeating Gaddafi on their own. As a result, he admitted consideration being given to direct engagement, saying his "personal view at this point would be that (it's) probably not the ideal circumstance" because of the regional reaction to another American-led land war. But he's not ruling it out, suggesting a pretext will be contrived to justify it.
According to former UK Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell, PM Cameron's "words need careful interpretation." Saying '(w)e're not occupying, we're not invading,' only "implies large numbers of troops being in Libya for a substantial period of time. (Cameron's) answer could imply military assistance or support at a much lower level, designed to stiffen the resolve and improve the quality of the rebel effort."
Or it may be planned escalation toward NATO assuming full operational control, including directly engaging Gaddafi's forces.
It's well known, though unreported in America, that US and UK elements have been active on the ground for weeks, perhaps months. Ahead look for fabricated reasons to send larger numbers openly for combat, not humanitarian or other reasons, despite disclaimers to the contrary. Once there, they'll fight to replace Gaddafi with a puppet leader serving Western interests, not Libyans. As a result, Libya's Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim said:
"If there is any deployment of any armed personnel on Libyan ground, there will be fighting. The Libyan government will not take it as a humanitarian mission. It will be taken as a military mission."
RT and the Boston Globe also said Obama exaggerated the humanitarian threat to justify Libya intervention, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) data on Misurata, saying Gaddafi isn't massacring civilians. He's targeting insurgents attacking his forces.
University of Texas Professor Alan Kuperman agreed, saying there's no evidence he's targeting civilians. However, they're "caught in the middle. We didn't stop a bloodbath but we are prolonging and perpetuating the suffering of civilians in Libya." Other analysts agree, including former State Department official and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass saying earlier in April:
"There (have) been no reports of large-scale massacres in Libya (so far), and Libyan society is not divided along a single or defining fault line. Gaddafi (sees) rebels as enemies for political reasons, not for their ethnic or tribal associations....(T)here is no evidence of which I am aware that civilians (have been) targeted on a large scale."
Obama lied saying:
"We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
In fact, no humanitarian crisis existed until Washington's led NATO campaign began. According to Kuperman, "If Gaddafi were trying to massacre civilians there would be thousands killed, not a couple of hundred." Moreover, he only railed against insurgents, saying he'd show them no mercy unless they disengaged from fighting.
On April 19, London Guardian writer Harriet Sherwood headlined, "Gaddafi violence against Libya civilians exaggerated, says British group," explaining they found "no evidence of dissent and accuse(d) western media of bias toward NATO military action."
Comprised of academics, human rights activists, lawyers, one doctor, and independent journalists, their group, called British Civilians for Peace in Libya, expressed outrage over another imperial war by "the biggest military force in the world," Washington's-led NATO.
Moreover, they "witnessed substantial support for (Gaddafi's) government by broad sections of society." They also expressed outrage over distorted Western reporting, especially from Britain, calling it one-sided and manipulative for "failing in their duty to report the conflict truthfully." In fact, "(s)ome of the reports from Benghazi and Misurata are totally one-sided," they said.
Anyone following America's media, especially on television, can verify what Project Censored calls a "truth emergency," whether on Libya or any other important world or national issue.
Questionable Reports of Cluster Bombs Used
Reports in The New York Times, the London Guardian, other Western broadsheets, and Al Jazeera, among others, claim Gaddafi is using munitions banned by over 100 countries, but not America or Israel freely using them in combat to cause mass casualties, even after cessation of hostilities.
Moreover, throughout the Libyan conflict, Al Jazeera has shown disturbing pro-insurgent, anti-Gaddafi bias instead of accurately reporting verifiable facts on the ground only, not speculation or willful propaganda so common in Western media.
Besides questionable accounts of cluster bombs (what Gaddafi's military categorically denies saying they have none), its April 19 report headlined, "Libya death toll 'reaches 10,000' " based solely on what insurgent leaders claim.
In fact, Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna in Benghazi said:
"Given the intensity of the conflict, it doesn't come as surprise. We have focused on areas like Misurata, where the humanitarian crisis is well documented. However, it is happening throughout Libya, the full extent of the crisis is not known and there is no real idea of" total casualties, omitting any responsibility for intense, daily US-led NATO bombing with depleted uranium munitions irradiating northern parts of the country, assuring future epidemic-level health problems everywhere these weapons are used.
Moreover, five weeks of heavy NATO bombing, exceeding 100 daily sorties, including against non-military targets, caused most civilian casualties - what neither Western media or Al Jazeera report, nor hazardous DU radiation dangers.
Overall, Al Jazeera's Libya misreporting has been deceitful, functioning more as a propaganda arm for Washington, NATO and insurgents, indistinguishable from US and other western media, representing planned imperial destruction, pillaging, and colonization of another non-belligerent country.
In late March, moreover, Front Page writer Mohammed al-Kibsi accused Al Jazeera of other misreporting for airing old Iraqi prisoner abuse video, broadcast by Al-Arabiya in 2007, in fabricating news about Yemen.
Yet it was aired repeatedly, claiming it showed Yemeni Central Security forces torturing protesters. Later admitting its mistake, Al Jazeera blamed a technical error and apologized, too late to undue the damage to those blamed and its own reputation, badly tarnished by frequent misreporting on the region, despite other worthy efforts that built it as a reliable broadcaster. That now is very much in question.
A Final Comment
In a personal email, independent Eritrea-based journalist Thomas Mountain explained human trafficking in Benghazi, saying:
It's "back in business....Benghazi to Malta was the route the human trafficking racket (took) between North Africa and Europe," exploiting millions of refugees in countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya and others.
It was longstanding for years until "Gaddafi and (Italy's) Berlusconi sat down together and (largely shut down) the Benghazi based human trafficking mob."
So how was it reinvigorated? "(Y)ou can thank NATO," operating like in Kosovo and other Balkan countries "selling body parts" in the late 1990s.
"It is hard to imagine" that Gaddafi can now defeat co-belligerents America, UK and France. "Yet....some believe" doing so is the only way to stop human trafficking once and for all.
Mountain is the only Horn of Africa-based Western journalist. In 1987, he was also a member of the 1st US Peace Delegation to Libya.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:23 AM
Defense Libya (hold your nose if you like, but do it) against the imperialist (and its agents, internal and external) mission creep!
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Mission Creep in Libya
Mission Creep in Libya - by Stephen Lendman
Escalated intervention keeps incrementally building toward sending combat troops against Gaddafi, French and UK leaders signaling what may, in fact, have been planned all along, perhaps including US marines. More on that below.
On April 16, New York Times writer Rod Nordland admitted what's already known headlining, "Libyan Rebels Say They're Being Sent Weapons," saying:
Interviewed by Al Arabiya on Saturday, rebel military leader General Abdel Gattah Younas said "his forces had received weapons supplies from unidentified nations that supported their uprising." National Transitional Council spokesman Mustafa Gheriani confirmed it without naming sources thought to be Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and NATO members directly.
Gheriani also said that rebels had "professional training centers," adding:
"We have a lot of people being trained, real professional training, that we don't talk to the world about."
On April 19, RTT News Global Financial Newswires headlined, "French Lawmaker Calls for Deployment of Ground Troops in Libya," saying:
Axel Poniatowski, French Parliament foreign affairs committee chairman, recommended "deploy(ing) ground troops in Libya to guide the ongoing airstrikes being carried out." Warning that operations could get bogged down, he said:
"The exclusive use of air power, as imposed on us by UN Security Council Resolution 1973, has proved its limitations in the face of targets that are mobile and hard to track. Without information from the ground, coalition planes are flying blind and increasing the risk of friendly fire incidents."
On April 19, the London Independent headlined, "Army experts to mention Libya rebels," saying:
"British Army officers are being sent to Libya to advise rebels fighting (Gaddafi's) forces. The UK group will be deployed to the opposition stronghold of Benghazi (in) a mentoring role to help leaders co-ordinating attacks on (his) army."
Foreign Secretary William Hague called those sent "legitimate political interlocutors," saying, "Our officers will not be involved in training or arming the opposition's fighting forces. Nor will they be involved in the planning or execution of the NTC's military operations or in the provision of any other form of operational military advice."
Ruling out a ground invasion, he admitted that additional SAS raids were possible, complementing others along with CIA and MI 6 intelligence operatives in Libya perhaps for months ahead of planned intervention, arming, funding and training rebel insurgents.
Usually described as experts, consultants and advisors, mission creep has been evident for weeks, a process begun in fall 2010 or earlier. Moreover, on March 25, London Daily Mail writers David Williams and Tim Shipman said before bombing began "it was revealed that hundreds of British special forces troops have been deployed deep inside Libya targeting (Gaddafi's) forces - and more are on standby."
On April 20, New York Times writers Alan Cowell and Ravi Somaiya headlined, "France and Italy Will Also Send Advisors to Libya Rebels," saying:
Both governments confirmed "they would join Britain in sending a small number of military liaison officers to support" Libyan insurgents, without Security Council authorization.
On April 18, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's permanent NATO envoy, warned about serious Resolution 1973 violations, saying:
"We have information that certain European states are acting more and more on the side of the Libyan rebels. We request a halt to the violation of the UN Security Council resolution, especially its clause imposing an embargo on arms supplies to the conflict zones....No one has ever succeeded in extinguishing a fire with kerosene."
On April 19, RT.com headlined "Libyan relief effort feared guise for ground invasion," saying:
EU nations "plan to send up to 1,000 troops to Libya to convoy humanitarian aid," despite Russia warning about an invasion disguised as relief. Planned earlier in April, EUFOR Libya won't engage in direct combat unless attacked, said Michael Mann, spokesman EU High Representative Catherine Aston, yet expect them to have a very fluid mandate, escalating mission creep on any pretext or none at all.
In addition, US-led NATO forces may intervene to aid insurgents or engage directly in combat, according to AFRICOM General Carter Ham in early April testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying:
Air attacks produced stalemate, not resolution, and insurgents stand little chance of defeating Gaddafi on their own. As a result, he admitted consideration being given to direct engagement, saying his "personal view at this point would be that (it's) probably not the ideal circumstance" because of the regional reaction to another American-led land war. But he's not ruling it out, suggesting a pretext will be contrived to justify it.
According to former UK Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell, PM Cameron's "words need careful interpretation." Saying '(w)e're not occupying, we're not invading,' only "implies large numbers of troops being in Libya for a substantial period of time. (Cameron's) answer could imply military assistance or support at a much lower level, designed to stiffen the resolve and improve the quality of the rebel effort."
Or it may be planned escalation toward NATO assuming full operational control, including directly engaging Gaddafi's forces.
It's well known, though unreported in America, that US and UK elements have been active on the ground for weeks, perhaps months. Ahead look for fabricated reasons to send larger numbers openly for combat, not humanitarian or other reasons, despite disclaimers to the contrary. Once there, they'll fight to replace Gaddafi with a puppet leader serving Western interests, not Libyans. As a result, Libya's Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim said:
"If there is any deployment of any armed personnel on Libyan ground, there will be fighting. The Libyan government will not take it as a humanitarian mission. It will be taken as a military mission."
RT and the Boston Globe also said Obama exaggerated the humanitarian threat to justify Libya intervention, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) data on Misurata, saying Gaddafi isn't massacring civilians. He's targeting insurgents attacking his forces.
University of Texas Professor Alan Kuperman agreed, saying there's no evidence he's targeting civilians. However, they're "caught in the middle. We didn't stop a bloodbath but we are prolonging and perpetuating the suffering of civilians in Libya." Other analysts agree, including former State Department official and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass saying earlier in April:
"There (have) been no reports of large-scale massacres in Libya (so far), and Libyan society is not divided along a single or defining fault line. Gaddafi (sees) rebels as enemies for political reasons, not for their ethnic or tribal associations....(T)here is no evidence of which I am aware that civilians (have been) targeted on a large scale."
Obama lied saying:
"We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
In fact, no humanitarian crisis existed until Washington's led NATO campaign began. According to Kuperman, "If Gaddafi were trying to massacre civilians there would be thousands killed, not a couple of hundred." Moreover, he only railed against insurgents, saying he'd show them no mercy unless they disengaged from fighting.
On April 19, London Guardian writer Harriet Sherwood headlined, "Gaddafi violence against Libya civilians exaggerated, says British group," explaining they found "no evidence of dissent and accuse(d) western media of bias toward NATO military action."
Comprised of academics, human rights activists, lawyers, one doctor, and independent journalists, their group, called British Civilians for Peace in Libya, expressed outrage over another imperial war by "the biggest military force in the world," Washington's-led NATO.
Moreover, they "witnessed substantial support for (Gaddafi's) government by broad sections of society." They also expressed outrage over distorted Western reporting, especially from Britain, calling it one-sided and manipulative for "failing in their duty to report the conflict truthfully." In fact, "(s)ome of the reports from Benghazi and Misurata are totally one-sided," they said.
Anyone following America's media, especially on television, can verify what Project Censored calls a "truth emergency," whether on Libya or any other important world or national issue.
Questionable Reports of Cluster Bombs Used
Reports in The New York Times, the London Guardian, other Western broadsheets, and Al Jazeera, among others, claim Gaddafi is using munitions banned by over 100 countries, but not America or Israel freely using them in combat to cause mass casualties, even after cessation of hostilities.
Moreover, throughout the Libyan conflict, Al Jazeera has shown disturbing pro-insurgent, anti-Gaddafi bias instead of accurately reporting verifiable facts on the ground only, not speculation or willful propaganda so common in Western media.
Besides questionable accounts of cluster bombs (what Gaddafi's military categorically denies saying they have none), its April 19 report headlined, "Libya death toll 'reaches 10,000' " based solely on what insurgent leaders claim.
In fact, Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna in Benghazi said:
"Given the intensity of the conflict, it doesn't come as surprise. We have focused on areas like Misurata, where the humanitarian crisis is well documented. However, it is happening throughout Libya, the full extent of the crisis is not known and there is no real idea of" total casualties, omitting any responsibility for intense, daily US-led NATO bombing with depleted uranium munitions irradiating northern parts of the country, assuring future epidemic-level health problems everywhere these weapons are used.
Moreover, five weeks of heavy NATO bombing, exceeding 100 daily sorties, including against non-military targets, caused most civilian casualties - what neither Western media or Al Jazeera report, nor hazardous DU radiation dangers.
Overall, Al Jazeera's Libya misreporting has been deceitful, functioning more as a propaganda arm for Washington, NATO and insurgents, indistinguishable from US and other western media, representing planned imperial destruction, pillaging, and colonization of another non-belligerent country.
In late March, moreover, Front Page writer Mohammed al-Kibsi accused Al Jazeera of other misreporting for airing old Iraqi prisoner abuse video, broadcast by Al-Arabiya in 2007, in fabricating news about Yemen.
Yet it was aired repeatedly, claiming it showed Yemeni Central Security forces torturing protesters. Later admitting its mistake, Al Jazeera blamed a technical error and apologized, too late to undue the damage to those blamed and its own reputation, badly tarnished by frequent misreporting on the region, despite other worthy efforts that built it as a reliable broadcaster. That now is very much in question.
A Final Comment
In a personal email, independent Eritrea-based journalist Thomas Mountain explained human trafficking in Benghazi, saying:
It's "back in business....Benghazi to Malta was the route the human trafficking racket (took) between North Africa and Europe," exploiting millions of refugees in countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya and others.
It was longstanding for years until "Gaddafi and (Italy's) Berlusconi sat down together and (largely shut down) the Benghazi based human trafficking mob."
So how was it reinvigorated? "(Y)ou can thank NATO," operating like in Kosovo and other Balkan countries "selling body parts" in the late 1990s.
"It is hard to imagine" that Gaddafi can now defeat co-belligerents America, UK and France. "Yet....some believe" doing so is the only way to stop human trafficking once and for all.
Mountain is the only Horn of Africa-based Western journalist. In 1987, he was also a member of the 1st US Peace Delegation to Libya.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:23 AM
Friday, April 08, 2011
The Anti-War Protest Season Continues-New York City Anti-War Rally April 9
Markin comment:
During this February and March I have called for and placed a number posts in this space in support of a March 19th Veterans For Peace-led march and action in Washington, D.C. I also gave my reasons for such support in commentary in those posts. Mainly from a sense of solidarity with my fellow veterans and because they were ramping up their opposition to Obama's wars beylond yet another march. This march in New York on April 9th, while necessary as an action to oppose Obama's wars, is a more traditional one and while we will attend it does not have the dramatic impact and bonds of solidarity attached to it of the Veterans' march.
March and Rally: Bring the Troops Home Now!
When: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 12:00 pm
Where: Union Square • New York, NY
Start: 2011 Apr 9 - 12:00pm
Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Bring the Troops Home Now!
March and Rally
April 9th, 2011
New York City and San Francisco
(Union Sq. at noon) (Time and place to be announced)
Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!
Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads
During this February and March I have called for and placed a number posts in this space in support of a March 19th Veterans For Peace-led march and action in Washington, D.C. I also gave my reasons for such support in commentary in those posts. Mainly from a sense of solidarity with my fellow veterans and because they were ramping up their opposition to Obama's wars beylond yet another march. This march in New York on April 9th, while necessary as an action to oppose Obama's wars, is a more traditional one and while we will attend it does not have the dramatic impact and bonds of solidarity attached to it of the Veterans' march.
March and Rally: Bring the Troops Home Now!
When: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 12:00 pm
Where: Union Square • New York, NY
Start: 2011 Apr 9 - 12:00pm
Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Bring the Troops Home Now!
March and Rally
April 9th, 2011
New York City and San Francisco
(Union Sq. at noon) (Time and place to be announced)
Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!
Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads
Thursday, April 07, 2011
From The Renegade Eye Blog-The nature of the Gaddafi regime – historical background notes
The nature of the Gaddafi regime – historical background notes
Written by Fred Weston
Wednesday, 06 April 2011
We provide a brief historical outline of the development of the Gaddafi regime from the bourgeois Arab nationalism of the early days, to the period of so-called Islamic socialism, to the recent period of opening up to foreign investment, with major concessions to multinational corporations and the beginnings of widespread privatisations.
Gaddafi came to power in a young officers ´coup in 1969, which was clearly influenced by the panarabism of Nasser’s Egypt. Under the previous rule of King Idris, Libya had been totally under the thumb of imperialism. He became associated with the Free Officers' movement, a group of junior officers in the Libyan Army who had a deep sense of anger and shame at seeing the Arab armies defeated in the 1967 war with Israel. Gaddafi's aim was to modernise Libya and develop the economy. However, as he attempted to do this on a capitalist basis he came into conflict with the interests of the imperialists, for example taking over the property of former Italian colonisers or, as in 1971, nationalising the assets of British Petroleum. In the process he also expelled US bases from Libya.
Retaliatory measures by the British government contributed to pushing Gaddafi to seek economic help from the Soviet Union. This came in 1972 when the Soviet Union signed a deal with Libya to help develop its oil industry.
During the same period, however, Gaddafi was very clear in expressing his anti-Communism. In 1971, he sent a plane full of Sudanese Communists back to Sudan where they were executed by Nimeiry. In 1973 the regime published an official document to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Gaddafi’s rise to power, under the title “Holy War Against Communism” in which we read that, “the biggest threat facing man nowadays is the communist theory.”
The Nixon administration, in spite of Gaddafi having expelled US bases, saw him as a beneficial influence in the Arab world, precisely because of his anti-communism. This was expressed also on the international arena. Initially Gaddafi was not pleased at Egypt’s close relationship with the Soviet Union. In the Yemen he was for unification of the North and South, but on the basis that the South should abandon its pro-Moscow stance. He supported Pakistan against India in the 1971 war on the basis that India was aligned with the Soviet Union.
What produced a radical change in Gaddafi’s stance was the worldwide recession of 1974. This had deep repercussions within Libya, leading to growing social unrest. This in turn produced divisions within the regime, with some sections reflecting the interests of the weak capitalist elements within Libyan society, while Gaddafi himself proceeded to move against these elements.
The inability of the nascent Libyan bourgeois to develop the economy, led Gaddafi to shift from his earlier policy of attempting to develop indigenous Libyan capitalism to what was to become an economy dominated by state owned enterprises.
Some of the army officers involved in the initial 1969 coup against the monarchy that brought Gaddafi to power broke with him on this specific question and organised an attempted coup in 1975 to try and stop his programme of nationalisations.
Some of these are now playing a role in trying to overthrow Gaddafi today, such as Omar Mokhtar El-Hariri the newly appointed Minister of Military Affairs in the present Interim Government of the opposition.
Gaddafi successfully crushed the 1975 coup and proceeded subsequently with his programme. He ended up by taking over most of the economy and leaning towards the Soviet Union. By 1979 the private sector had been almost completely eliminated.
Gaddafi's Green BookTo provide some kind of ideological backing to what he was doing, he wrote the first part of his famous Green Book in 1975 and in 1977 he changed the official name of the country to the “Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, Jamahiriya meaning the “state of the masses”. In his book he presents his version of “socialism”, an Islamic version that rather than viewing the class struggle as the key to moving society forward, sees the class struggle as a dangerous deviation. In effect his book was simply a cover for a regime that allowed no freedom of organisation or strike for the workers, but claimed to be building some kind of socialism, which of course it was not.
It was in this period that some groups on the left became open cheer-leaders for Gaddafi, uncritically supporting his regime. This ignored some not unimportant details. For example, in 1969 Gaddafi had banned independent trade unions and strikes were completely banned a few years later. Once real labour organisations had been banned, state-controlled “unions” were set up. What was thus created was a totalitarian regime, under the tight control of Gaddafi himself.
In spite of this brutal dictatorship, a combination of large oil reserves, and thus income, and a large public sector, allowed for the development of an extensive welfare state. In this we have to understand that Gaddafi was able to build a significant base of support for himself among the population. Some of that support has survived to this day as we can see in Tripoli and other areas of the country.
A layer of the population, particularly among the older generation, will remember what it was like under King Idris and will also recall how Libya developed subsequently under Gaddafi.
F-14 preparing for mission in 1986. Photo: PHAN David Casper, USNSince then, however, many important changes have taken place on a world scale that deeply affected Libya. A key element was the fall of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites that ushered in the return to capitalism in all these countries. These events had a major impact on the direction taken by China towards capitalism. How could a small country like Libya escape such a process?
It is in fact in 1993 that we see the first tentative steps of the regime to begin a process of “economic liberalisation” or “infitah” as it was known. Decree No.491 in 1993 allowed for the liberalization of the wholesale trade. This was followed later that year and in 1994 with legal guarantees to cover foreign capital investment as well as the convertibility of the Libyan Dinar.
However, it is also true to say that although the intention was there, in practice this led to very little movement in the direction of full-fledged privatisation. The main beneficiaries of the nationalised economy, the middle and senior managers, the officer caste, the technocrats who ran the oil industry as well as the state bureaucrats, had little interest in changing the status quo.
The relative independence that Libya enjoyed while the Soviet Union existed determined the conflict with imperialism that put Libya in the position of being classed as a “rogue state” together with other regimes such as that of the Ayatollahs in Iran or of Serbia under Milosevic. In 1986, Reagan ordered a bombing raid against Libya with the declared aim of killing Gaddafi. He survived, but the raid caused some 60 victims. The 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland also helped to provide the excuse for the sanctions that were imposed on the country. This, together with falling oil prices in the nineties and into the early 2000s, caused significant economic pain to the country. The 2003 invasion of Iraq by imperialism, leading to the death of Saddam Hussein and the overthrow of his regime served also as strong pressure towards abandoning any pretence of an anti-imperialist stance. The excuse for the invasion of Iraq had been the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction, something imperialist powers were also accusing Libya of. The combination of all these factors is what determined a radical shift in policy.
In June 2003 Shukri Ghanem, considered a “reformist”, i.e. a free marketer in favour of privatisations, was appointed as Prime Minister. In the same year Decision No.31 put forward the proposal for 360 state owned enterprises to be privatised over a period from January 2004 to December 2008. By the end of 2004, 41 enterprises had already been privatised. This was slower than expected, but the process had clearly begun. As part of this process in January 2007 the Libyan government announced plans to lay off 400,000 public sector workers, more than one-third of the overall government workforce.
In December 2003, Libya renounced its programme to develop “weapons of mass destruction”. This was just after the US had invaded Iraq. Gaddafi’s shift allowed Bush to present his policy in Iraq as one that was paying off, as a former “rogue regime” such as the Libyan was now being brought back into the fold. UN sanctions were thus lifted in 2003 and a year later the US lifted most of its sanctions also. Diplomatic relations were re-established in 2006.
As a result of all this Libya started attracting a lot of foreign direct investment, mainly in the energy sector, but also in civil engineering. Many contracts were signed giving concessions to western oil and gas companies, such as Italy’s AGIP, British Petroleum, Shell, Spain’s Repsol, France’s Total and GFD Suez, as well as US companies such as Conoco Phillips, Hess, and Occidental, Exxon and Chevron, as well as Canadian, Norwegian and other companies.
In this period the Gaddafi regime moved closer and closer to the imperialists. The press of recent years is full of stories about western businesspeople and politicians visiting Libya and making lucrative deals. An example is an article, “The Opening Of Libya”, that appeared in Business Week on March 12, 2007:
“Much of the progress [in opening up the Libyan economy] is due to an unusual partnership with Harvard Business School professor and competitiveness guru Michael E. Porter, who is advising the Libyans through Boston consultancy Monitor Group. For the past two years, more than a dozen Monitor consultants have been working in Libya, studying the economy and running a three-month leadership program intended to create a new pro-business elite (..)
“Porter was persuaded to take the job by Qaddafi's son, Saif al Islam. The former London School of Economics graduate student is a lean man who favors expensive European suits and Western-style economic reform. Since first meeting Saif at several dinners in London, Porter has traveled to Libya three times and met top government officials, including the elder Qaddafi.”
Saif al Islam, one of Gaddafi’s sons, is renowned for being in favour of “liberalising” the economy, and has been pushing for more and more “liberal” economic policies, i.e. greater privatisation! But as Business Week quoted, Saif explained that, "We need to change from a state economy to an open economy, but without it being out of control."
What Saif meant with these words was an opening up of Libya’s economy, with privatisation of state owned enterprises, but making sure that the Gaddafi family and its entourage gets the lion’s share of these enterprises in collaboration with western multinational corporations... and without renouncing the dictatorial powers of the regime itself.
Since Libya was taken off the list of “rogue states”, a whole swathe of western politicians have been to Libya, shaking hands and embracing Gaddafi... and signing excellent deals for their respective national companies.
In 2008 Berlusconi signed a deal to pay Libya US$5 billion in compensation for Italy’s colonisation of Libya in the past. Part of the deal also involved Libya policing the Mediterranean coast to stop African immigrants getting to Italy. The fact that Gaddafi used brutal means to achieve this seemed to be of no concern to western governments at the time.
This was followed by an official visit from the then US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice the same year, the first such visit since 1953. But it was Tony Blair who started the process when he visited Gaddafi back in 2004, establishing a “new relationship”... and bringing home some very lucrative oil contracts for Shell!
Thus we see how the aura of “anti-imperialism” that Gaddafi may have had in the past evaporated in the past decade. He has been collaborating fully with imperialism, de facto returning to the Gaddafi of the early 1970s. His regime has been based on making deals with imperialism and even helping them directly as the case of Italy demonstrates.
He was also helping them in their so-called “war on terror”, passing information to both the CIA and MI6 on suspected Islamic fundamentalists from Libya. A leaked cable from the US embassy in Tripoli from August 2009, described how “Libya has acted as a critical ally in US counter-terrorism efforts, and is considered one of our primary partners in combating the flow of foreign fighters”. The cable emphasised that the US-Libya “strategic partnership in this field has been highly... beneficial to both nations”. It is therefore clear that Gaddafi is not an anti-imperialist. He had become a useful collaborator of the imperialists in the recent period.
All this also explains his surprise at being attacked by NATO forces in the recent period. He felt he had done everything that he needed to do to avoid ending up like Saddam Hussein. However, because of his past, Gaddafi was never fully trusted; he was a bit of a wild card. He was collaborating yes, fully and willingly, but when the imperialist powers saw a chance of replacing him with someone even more subservient they did not hesitate in seizing the opportunity.
Written by Fred Weston
Wednesday, 06 April 2011
We provide a brief historical outline of the development of the Gaddafi regime from the bourgeois Arab nationalism of the early days, to the period of so-called Islamic socialism, to the recent period of opening up to foreign investment, with major concessions to multinational corporations and the beginnings of widespread privatisations.
Gaddafi came to power in a young officers ´coup in 1969, which was clearly influenced by the panarabism of Nasser’s Egypt. Under the previous rule of King Idris, Libya had been totally under the thumb of imperialism. He became associated with the Free Officers' movement, a group of junior officers in the Libyan Army who had a deep sense of anger and shame at seeing the Arab armies defeated in the 1967 war with Israel. Gaddafi's aim was to modernise Libya and develop the economy. However, as he attempted to do this on a capitalist basis he came into conflict with the interests of the imperialists, for example taking over the property of former Italian colonisers or, as in 1971, nationalising the assets of British Petroleum. In the process he also expelled US bases from Libya.
Retaliatory measures by the British government contributed to pushing Gaddafi to seek economic help from the Soviet Union. This came in 1972 when the Soviet Union signed a deal with Libya to help develop its oil industry.
During the same period, however, Gaddafi was very clear in expressing his anti-Communism. In 1971, he sent a plane full of Sudanese Communists back to Sudan where they were executed by Nimeiry. In 1973 the regime published an official document to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Gaddafi’s rise to power, under the title “Holy War Against Communism” in which we read that, “the biggest threat facing man nowadays is the communist theory.”
The Nixon administration, in spite of Gaddafi having expelled US bases, saw him as a beneficial influence in the Arab world, precisely because of his anti-communism. This was expressed also on the international arena. Initially Gaddafi was not pleased at Egypt’s close relationship with the Soviet Union. In the Yemen he was for unification of the North and South, but on the basis that the South should abandon its pro-Moscow stance. He supported Pakistan against India in the 1971 war on the basis that India was aligned with the Soviet Union.
What produced a radical change in Gaddafi’s stance was the worldwide recession of 1974. This had deep repercussions within Libya, leading to growing social unrest. This in turn produced divisions within the regime, with some sections reflecting the interests of the weak capitalist elements within Libyan society, while Gaddafi himself proceeded to move against these elements.
The inability of the nascent Libyan bourgeois to develop the economy, led Gaddafi to shift from his earlier policy of attempting to develop indigenous Libyan capitalism to what was to become an economy dominated by state owned enterprises.
Some of the army officers involved in the initial 1969 coup against the monarchy that brought Gaddafi to power broke with him on this specific question and organised an attempted coup in 1975 to try and stop his programme of nationalisations.
Some of these are now playing a role in trying to overthrow Gaddafi today, such as Omar Mokhtar El-Hariri the newly appointed Minister of Military Affairs in the present Interim Government of the opposition.
Gaddafi successfully crushed the 1975 coup and proceeded subsequently with his programme. He ended up by taking over most of the economy and leaning towards the Soviet Union. By 1979 the private sector had been almost completely eliminated.
Gaddafi's Green BookTo provide some kind of ideological backing to what he was doing, he wrote the first part of his famous Green Book in 1975 and in 1977 he changed the official name of the country to the “Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, Jamahiriya meaning the “state of the masses”. In his book he presents his version of “socialism”, an Islamic version that rather than viewing the class struggle as the key to moving society forward, sees the class struggle as a dangerous deviation. In effect his book was simply a cover for a regime that allowed no freedom of organisation or strike for the workers, but claimed to be building some kind of socialism, which of course it was not.
It was in this period that some groups on the left became open cheer-leaders for Gaddafi, uncritically supporting his regime. This ignored some not unimportant details. For example, in 1969 Gaddafi had banned independent trade unions and strikes were completely banned a few years later. Once real labour organisations had been banned, state-controlled “unions” were set up. What was thus created was a totalitarian regime, under the tight control of Gaddafi himself.
In spite of this brutal dictatorship, a combination of large oil reserves, and thus income, and a large public sector, allowed for the development of an extensive welfare state. In this we have to understand that Gaddafi was able to build a significant base of support for himself among the population. Some of that support has survived to this day as we can see in Tripoli and other areas of the country.
A layer of the population, particularly among the older generation, will remember what it was like under King Idris and will also recall how Libya developed subsequently under Gaddafi.
F-14 preparing for mission in 1986. Photo: PHAN David Casper, USNSince then, however, many important changes have taken place on a world scale that deeply affected Libya. A key element was the fall of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites that ushered in the return to capitalism in all these countries. These events had a major impact on the direction taken by China towards capitalism. How could a small country like Libya escape such a process?
It is in fact in 1993 that we see the first tentative steps of the regime to begin a process of “economic liberalisation” or “infitah” as it was known. Decree No.491 in 1993 allowed for the liberalization of the wholesale trade. This was followed later that year and in 1994 with legal guarantees to cover foreign capital investment as well as the convertibility of the Libyan Dinar.
However, it is also true to say that although the intention was there, in practice this led to very little movement in the direction of full-fledged privatisation. The main beneficiaries of the nationalised economy, the middle and senior managers, the officer caste, the technocrats who ran the oil industry as well as the state bureaucrats, had little interest in changing the status quo.
The relative independence that Libya enjoyed while the Soviet Union existed determined the conflict with imperialism that put Libya in the position of being classed as a “rogue state” together with other regimes such as that of the Ayatollahs in Iran or of Serbia under Milosevic. In 1986, Reagan ordered a bombing raid against Libya with the declared aim of killing Gaddafi. He survived, but the raid caused some 60 victims. The 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland also helped to provide the excuse for the sanctions that were imposed on the country. This, together with falling oil prices in the nineties and into the early 2000s, caused significant economic pain to the country. The 2003 invasion of Iraq by imperialism, leading to the death of Saddam Hussein and the overthrow of his regime served also as strong pressure towards abandoning any pretence of an anti-imperialist stance. The excuse for the invasion of Iraq had been the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction, something imperialist powers were also accusing Libya of. The combination of all these factors is what determined a radical shift in policy.
In June 2003 Shukri Ghanem, considered a “reformist”, i.e. a free marketer in favour of privatisations, was appointed as Prime Minister. In the same year Decision No.31 put forward the proposal for 360 state owned enterprises to be privatised over a period from January 2004 to December 2008. By the end of 2004, 41 enterprises had already been privatised. This was slower than expected, but the process had clearly begun. As part of this process in January 2007 the Libyan government announced plans to lay off 400,000 public sector workers, more than one-third of the overall government workforce.
In December 2003, Libya renounced its programme to develop “weapons of mass destruction”. This was just after the US had invaded Iraq. Gaddafi’s shift allowed Bush to present his policy in Iraq as one that was paying off, as a former “rogue regime” such as the Libyan was now being brought back into the fold. UN sanctions were thus lifted in 2003 and a year later the US lifted most of its sanctions also. Diplomatic relations were re-established in 2006.
As a result of all this Libya started attracting a lot of foreign direct investment, mainly in the energy sector, but also in civil engineering. Many contracts were signed giving concessions to western oil and gas companies, such as Italy’s AGIP, British Petroleum, Shell, Spain’s Repsol, France’s Total and GFD Suez, as well as US companies such as Conoco Phillips, Hess, and Occidental, Exxon and Chevron, as well as Canadian, Norwegian and other companies.
In this period the Gaddafi regime moved closer and closer to the imperialists. The press of recent years is full of stories about western businesspeople and politicians visiting Libya and making lucrative deals. An example is an article, “The Opening Of Libya”, that appeared in Business Week on March 12, 2007:
“Much of the progress [in opening up the Libyan economy] is due to an unusual partnership with Harvard Business School professor and competitiveness guru Michael E. Porter, who is advising the Libyans through Boston consultancy Monitor Group. For the past two years, more than a dozen Monitor consultants have been working in Libya, studying the economy and running a three-month leadership program intended to create a new pro-business elite (..)
“Porter was persuaded to take the job by Qaddafi's son, Saif al Islam. The former London School of Economics graduate student is a lean man who favors expensive European suits and Western-style economic reform. Since first meeting Saif at several dinners in London, Porter has traveled to Libya three times and met top government officials, including the elder Qaddafi.”
Saif al Islam, one of Gaddafi’s sons, is renowned for being in favour of “liberalising” the economy, and has been pushing for more and more “liberal” economic policies, i.e. greater privatisation! But as Business Week quoted, Saif explained that, "We need to change from a state economy to an open economy, but without it being out of control."
What Saif meant with these words was an opening up of Libya’s economy, with privatisation of state owned enterprises, but making sure that the Gaddafi family and its entourage gets the lion’s share of these enterprises in collaboration with western multinational corporations... and without renouncing the dictatorial powers of the regime itself.
Since Libya was taken off the list of “rogue states”, a whole swathe of western politicians have been to Libya, shaking hands and embracing Gaddafi... and signing excellent deals for their respective national companies.
In 2008 Berlusconi signed a deal to pay Libya US$5 billion in compensation for Italy’s colonisation of Libya in the past. Part of the deal also involved Libya policing the Mediterranean coast to stop African immigrants getting to Italy. The fact that Gaddafi used brutal means to achieve this seemed to be of no concern to western governments at the time.
This was followed by an official visit from the then US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice the same year, the first such visit since 1953. But it was Tony Blair who started the process when he visited Gaddafi back in 2004, establishing a “new relationship”... and bringing home some very lucrative oil contracts for Shell!
Thus we see how the aura of “anti-imperialism” that Gaddafi may have had in the past evaporated in the past decade. He has been collaborating fully with imperialism, de facto returning to the Gaddafi of the early 1970s. His regime has been based on making deals with imperialism and even helping them directly as the case of Italy demonstrates.
He was also helping them in their so-called “war on terror”, passing information to both the CIA and MI6 on suspected Islamic fundamentalists from Libya. A leaked cable from the US embassy in Tripoli from August 2009, described how “Libya has acted as a critical ally in US counter-terrorism efforts, and is considered one of our primary partners in combating the flow of foreign fighters”. The cable emphasised that the US-Libya “strategic partnership in this field has been highly... beneficial to both nations”. It is therefore clear that Gaddafi is not an anti-imperialist. He had become a useful collaborator of the imperialists in the recent period.
All this also explains his surprise at being attacked by NATO forces in the recent period. He felt he had done everything that he needed to do to avoid ending up like Saddam Hussein. However, because of his past, Gaddafi was never fully trusted; he was a bit of a wild card. He was collaborating yes, fully and willingly, but when the imperialist powers saw a chance of replacing him with someone even more subservient they did not hesitate in seizing the opportunity.
Libya and the dilemma of humanitarian military interventions-By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2011
Libya and the dilemma of
humanitarian military interventions
By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2011
The debate over U.S. efforts to work with NATO in what has been described as an essentially humanitarian effort to prevent Moammar Gadhafi from killing more Libyans underscores problems with U.S. foreign policy. It’s true, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has pointed out, that “we don’t have an exit plan, that (Obama) hasn’t articulated a grand strategy, that our objectives are fuzzy, that Islamists could gain strength.”
Some will argue that we don’t have a consistent foreign policy. After all, we refused to intervene in the slaughter in Darfur, the Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. We did intervene in Kosovo 12 years ago and the outcome seemed to serve humanitarian goals, though our involvement was slow in coming. Ronald Reagan sent troops to Grenada on a mostly foolish humanitarian mission (with ridiculous cold war aspects), and George H. W. Bush prevented Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait a few years later.
What distinguished these interventions from those we passed on is that they were of limited scope and duration. Militarily, their goals and objectives were possible, and relatively easy to obtain. Sending American troops to Rwanda or the Ivory Coast would bog us down in a military situation that would likely result in as great a loss of life as we would have sought to prevent. Worse still, the involvement would likely not end for decades, as has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So Obama’s calculation seems to be that we will intervene if we have lots of help from other countries and alliances, if the possibility of a short-duration intervention is realistic, and if the chances of success appear great. No matter how compelling the suffering in other locales, we will not commit military might if these criteria are not met.
I don’t like the policy and I don’t like the alternatives. But the world is not an orderly place, where all problems are solvable. Sometimes there are nonmilitary steps that can be taken in various trouble spots around the globe if we have the will, which we do not have, for instance, in the case of preventing Israel from taking more land from Palestinians, which continues unabated by humanitarian concerns.
University of Colorado-Boulder law professor Paul Campos offered this analysis of the Libyan military campaign:
Perhaps it's desirable, or even morally imperative, for Western nations in general, and America in particular, to enter another civil war in the Middle East. But the framers of the Constitution had very good reasons for making it difficult for America to go to war. They knew that even wars that begin with the best of intentions often end up being driven by the worst ones.
They also knew that while war is almost never in the interest of a nation's people, it is often in the interest of a nation's rulers, who reap the political and economic benefits of war while bearing little or none of its costs. That's why they designed a system of barriers to action -- which is, after all, what the rule of law is supposed to be -- before politicians could send others off to kill and be killed in the name of the noble national goal of the moment.
While I take the constitutional requirements discussed by Professor Campos seriously and believe that the Congress should have a vigorous debate before the U.S. ever embarks on making war for whatever reasons, no matter how good those reasons seem to the executive or to me, I realize that the Congress has abdicated its constitutional authority with respect to war-making.
Since World War II, the Congress has not ever declared war, yet the U.S. has embarked on military campaigns in over 70 countries by executive fiat. Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution provides that Congress has the sole power "to declare war [and] grant letters of marque and reprisal." And Article II, Section 2, provides that "The president shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States."
While it seems clear, from the history of the Constitutional Convention and the views of most of the drafters of the Constitution, that they intended for Congress alone to declare war, presidents nevertheless often act unilaterally, or after some minimal consultations or discussions with members of Congress.
These arguably competing provisions in Article I and Article II have created a constitutional conundrum that will always be used by presidents to engage in war unless we find a way to reconcile the two positions.
After tiring of war by Executive fiat, in 1973 Congress passed the War Powers Act in response to the prosecution of the Vietnam War by both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, a war that had proceeded without a congressional declaration for at least eight years with devastating consequences for both American soldiers and Vietnam fighters and civilians.
Under the War Powers Act, the president is supposed to obtain congressional approval of military action within 90 days after introducing troops into hostilities. Presidents have generally ignored the War Powers Act, using Article II, Section 2 as their constitutionally-mandated authority to send troops into combat. While a few Congressional voices have been raised periodically against such Constitutional abuses by the Executive, Congress as a whole has failed to resolve this Constitutional dilemma.
But candidate Barack Obama, as a U.S. senator in 2007, said, “the president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” Apparently, he has changed his mind.
The author William Blum identifies the following purposes used by presidents to take military actions. They do not include humanitarian concerns:
making the world safe for American corporations to do business;
enhancing the financial status of U.S. defense contractors who have contributed generously to members of congress;
preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the American capitalist model;
extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a "great power" -- a sort of exceptionalist argument that gives the U.S. license to do as it pleases.
While I believe that there is a humanitarian impulse that guides some U.S. foreign policy, I always look for other reasons, as well. Usually, I find another rationale from Blum’s list that is in play when we use our military might anywhere in the world.
In the case of Libya, Sen. Bernie Sanders has revealed in the last few days that Gadhafi’s Central Bank of Libya owns a 59% stake in the Arab Banking Corporation (ABC), which is based in Bahrain and has two branches in New York City. The ABC received at least 45 emergency, low-interest loans (0.25%) from the Federal Reserve between December, 2007 and March, 2010.
The U.S. Treasury Department has exempted the ABC from economic sanctions that have been applied to Gadhafi’s regime. Such contradictory relations with Libya make Obama’s military actions even more perplexing and suggest that Blum’s fourth reason for war may be in play.
The more we understand about our relations with Libya and other countries, the more difficult it is to accept Obama’s humanitarian rationale. As syndicated columnist David Sirota has pointed out, U.S. foreign policy had mostly ignored the humanitarian crises in Egypt before the recent fall of Mubarak, a dictator that we warmly supported financially and militarily for over 30 years.
We consider the totalitarian Saudi royal family a friend and ally, and our government continues to praise Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, as a reformer even as he slaughters his own people. Sirota sees the Libya war-making as related to oil, defense contracts, and the “Pentagon’s brand-new Africa Command establishing its first foothold on the resource-rich continent, ... but it is not primarily about saving lives.”
Given these contradictions and the seemingly unassailable facts of U.S. interventions for nearly 65 years and the inability of the Congress to assert itself to limit the Executive’s war-making powers, the most palatable policy to me is one that involves cooperative international efforts to protect the helpless from slaughter or death.
Building and strengthening these international cooperative humanitarian efforts needs more attention and, if done properly, at least will not subject the U.S. to hatred and retribution for imposing our will in the pursuit of our own geopolitical objectives.
While I am not sanguine about what we are doing in Libya, it is a far less destructive policy than were the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is faint praise, but until Congress begins to care more about foreign affairs than it does about its domestic agenda, we cannot expect fealty to Constitutional principles.
[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins.]
humanitarian military interventions
By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2011
The debate over U.S. efforts to work with NATO in what has been described as an essentially humanitarian effort to prevent Moammar Gadhafi from killing more Libyans underscores problems with U.S. foreign policy. It’s true, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has pointed out, that “we don’t have an exit plan, that (Obama) hasn’t articulated a grand strategy, that our objectives are fuzzy, that Islamists could gain strength.”
Some will argue that we don’t have a consistent foreign policy. After all, we refused to intervene in the slaughter in Darfur, the Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. We did intervene in Kosovo 12 years ago and the outcome seemed to serve humanitarian goals, though our involvement was slow in coming. Ronald Reagan sent troops to Grenada on a mostly foolish humanitarian mission (with ridiculous cold war aspects), and George H. W. Bush prevented Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait a few years later.
What distinguished these interventions from those we passed on is that they were of limited scope and duration. Militarily, their goals and objectives were possible, and relatively easy to obtain. Sending American troops to Rwanda or the Ivory Coast would bog us down in a military situation that would likely result in as great a loss of life as we would have sought to prevent. Worse still, the involvement would likely not end for decades, as has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So Obama’s calculation seems to be that we will intervene if we have lots of help from other countries and alliances, if the possibility of a short-duration intervention is realistic, and if the chances of success appear great. No matter how compelling the suffering in other locales, we will not commit military might if these criteria are not met.
I don’t like the policy and I don’t like the alternatives. But the world is not an orderly place, where all problems are solvable. Sometimes there are nonmilitary steps that can be taken in various trouble spots around the globe if we have the will, which we do not have, for instance, in the case of preventing Israel from taking more land from Palestinians, which continues unabated by humanitarian concerns.
University of Colorado-Boulder law professor Paul Campos offered this analysis of the Libyan military campaign:
Perhaps it's desirable, or even morally imperative, for Western nations in general, and America in particular, to enter another civil war in the Middle East. But the framers of the Constitution had very good reasons for making it difficult for America to go to war. They knew that even wars that begin with the best of intentions often end up being driven by the worst ones.
They also knew that while war is almost never in the interest of a nation's people, it is often in the interest of a nation's rulers, who reap the political and economic benefits of war while bearing little or none of its costs. That's why they designed a system of barriers to action -- which is, after all, what the rule of law is supposed to be -- before politicians could send others off to kill and be killed in the name of the noble national goal of the moment.
While I take the constitutional requirements discussed by Professor Campos seriously and believe that the Congress should have a vigorous debate before the U.S. ever embarks on making war for whatever reasons, no matter how good those reasons seem to the executive or to me, I realize that the Congress has abdicated its constitutional authority with respect to war-making.
Since World War II, the Congress has not ever declared war, yet the U.S. has embarked on military campaigns in over 70 countries by executive fiat. Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution provides that Congress has the sole power "to declare war [and] grant letters of marque and reprisal." And Article II, Section 2, provides that "The president shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States."
While it seems clear, from the history of the Constitutional Convention and the views of most of the drafters of the Constitution, that they intended for Congress alone to declare war, presidents nevertheless often act unilaterally, or after some minimal consultations or discussions with members of Congress.
These arguably competing provisions in Article I and Article II have created a constitutional conundrum that will always be used by presidents to engage in war unless we find a way to reconcile the two positions.
After tiring of war by Executive fiat, in 1973 Congress passed the War Powers Act in response to the prosecution of the Vietnam War by both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, a war that had proceeded without a congressional declaration for at least eight years with devastating consequences for both American soldiers and Vietnam fighters and civilians.
Under the War Powers Act, the president is supposed to obtain congressional approval of military action within 90 days after introducing troops into hostilities. Presidents have generally ignored the War Powers Act, using Article II, Section 2 as their constitutionally-mandated authority to send troops into combat. While a few Congressional voices have been raised periodically against such Constitutional abuses by the Executive, Congress as a whole has failed to resolve this Constitutional dilemma.
But candidate Barack Obama, as a U.S. senator in 2007, said, “the president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” Apparently, he has changed his mind.
The author William Blum identifies the following purposes used by presidents to take military actions. They do not include humanitarian concerns:
making the world safe for American corporations to do business;
enhancing the financial status of U.S. defense contractors who have contributed generously to members of congress;
preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the American capitalist model;
extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a "great power" -- a sort of exceptionalist argument that gives the U.S. license to do as it pleases.
While I believe that there is a humanitarian impulse that guides some U.S. foreign policy, I always look for other reasons, as well. Usually, I find another rationale from Blum’s list that is in play when we use our military might anywhere in the world.
In the case of Libya, Sen. Bernie Sanders has revealed in the last few days that Gadhafi’s Central Bank of Libya owns a 59% stake in the Arab Banking Corporation (ABC), which is based in Bahrain and has two branches in New York City. The ABC received at least 45 emergency, low-interest loans (0.25%) from the Federal Reserve between December, 2007 and March, 2010.
The U.S. Treasury Department has exempted the ABC from economic sanctions that have been applied to Gadhafi’s regime. Such contradictory relations with Libya make Obama’s military actions even more perplexing and suggest that Blum’s fourth reason for war may be in play.
The more we understand about our relations with Libya and other countries, the more difficult it is to accept Obama’s humanitarian rationale. As syndicated columnist David Sirota has pointed out, U.S. foreign policy had mostly ignored the humanitarian crises in Egypt before the recent fall of Mubarak, a dictator that we warmly supported financially and militarily for over 30 years.
We consider the totalitarian Saudi royal family a friend and ally, and our government continues to praise Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, as a reformer even as he slaughters his own people. Sirota sees the Libya war-making as related to oil, defense contracts, and the “Pentagon’s brand-new Africa Command establishing its first foothold on the resource-rich continent, ... but it is not primarily about saving lives.”
Given these contradictions and the seemingly unassailable facts of U.S. interventions for nearly 65 years and the inability of the Congress to assert itself to limit the Executive’s war-making powers, the most palatable policy to me is one that involves cooperative international efforts to protect the helpless from slaughter or death.
Building and strengthening these international cooperative humanitarian efforts needs more attention and, if done properly, at least will not subject the U.S. to hatred and retribution for imposing our will in the pursuit of our own geopolitical objectives.
While I am not sanguine about what we are doing in Libya, it is a far less destructive policy than were the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is faint praise, but until Congress begins to care more about foreign affairs than it does about its domestic agenda, we cannot expect fealty to Constitutional principles.
[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins.]
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Leon Trotsky On The Duty Of Socialists To Defend Smaller States Against Imperialist Attack- "Declaration To The Antiwar Congress At Amsterdam (July 1932)"- Today- Defend Libya Against The American-Led Coalition Attacks
Leon Trotsky On The Duty Of Socialists To Defend Smaller States Against Imperialist Attack- "Declaration To The Antiwar Congress At Amsterdam (July 1932)"
On Defense of Dependent Countries Against Imperialism
Introduction from Workers Vanguard, Number 977
As the U.S., France and Britain lead the murderous bombing campaign against semi-colonial Libya in the name of "protecting civilians," social-democratic groups beat the drums for the Libyan "opposition," the imperialists'front men on the ground. Writing on the need for proletarian revolution to rid the world of imperialist war, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky insisted that the working class must militarily defend oppressed nations under imperialist attack and excoriated the League of Nations, predecessor to the United Nations under whose imprimatur the war against Libya was begun.
********
Capitalist brigands always conduct a "defensive" war, even when Japan is marching against Shanghai and France against Syria or Morocco. The revolutionary proletariat distinguishes only between wars of oppression and wars of liberation. The character of a war is defined, not by diplomatic falsifications, but by the class which conducts the war and the objective aims it pursues in that war. The wars of the imperialist states, apart from the pretexts and political rhetoric, are of an oppressive character, reactionary and inimical to the people. Only the wars of the proletariat and of the oppressed nations can be characterized as wars of liberation....
The League of Nations is the citadel of imperialist pacifism. It represents a transitory historical combination of capitalist states in which the stronger command and buy out the weaker, then crawl on their bellies before America or try to resist; in which all equally are enemies of the Soviet Union, but are prepared to cover up each and every crime of the most powerful and rapacious among them. Only the politically blind, only those who are altogether helpless or who deliberately corrupt the conscience of the people, can consider the League of Nations, directly or indirectly, today or tomorrow, an instrument of peace....
Whoever directly or indirectly supports the system of colonization and protectorates, the domination of British capital in India, the domination of Japan in Korea or in Manchuria, of France in Indochina or in Africa, whoever does not fight against colonial enslavement, whoever does not support the uprisings of the oppressed nations and their independence, whoever defends or idealizes Gandhism, that is, the policy of passive resistance on questions which can be solved only by force of arms, is, despite good intentions or bad, a lackey, an apologist, an agent of the imperialists, of the slaveholders, of the militarists, and helps them to prepare new wars in pursuit of their old aims or new.
—Leon Trotsky, "Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam" (July 1932)
On Defense of Dependent Countries Against Imperialism
Introduction from Workers Vanguard, Number 977
As the U.S., France and Britain lead the murderous bombing campaign against semi-colonial Libya in the name of "protecting civilians," social-democratic groups beat the drums for the Libyan "opposition," the imperialists'front men on the ground. Writing on the need for proletarian revolution to rid the world of imperialist war, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky insisted that the working class must militarily defend oppressed nations under imperialist attack and excoriated the League of Nations, predecessor to the United Nations under whose imprimatur the war against Libya was begun.
********
Capitalist brigands always conduct a "defensive" war, even when Japan is marching against Shanghai and France against Syria or Morocco. The revolutionary proletariat distinguishes only between wars of oppression and wars of liberation. The character of a war is defined, not by diplomatic falsifications, but by the class which conducts the war and the objective aims it pursues in that war. The wars of the imperialist states, apart from the pretexts and political rhetoric, are of an oppressive character, reactionary and inimical to the people. Only the wars of the proletariat and of the oppressed nations can be characterized as wars of liberation....
The League of Nations is the citadel of imperialist pacifism. It represents a transitory historical combination of capitalist states in which the stronger command and buy out the weaker, then crawl on their bellies before America or try to resist; in which all equally are enemies of the Soviet Union, but are prepared to cover up each and every crime of the most powerful and rapacious among them. Only the politically blind, only those who are altogether helpless or who deliberately corrupt the conscience of the people, can consider the League of Nations, directly or indirectly, today or tomorrow, an instrument of peace....
Whoever directly or indirectly supports the system of colonization and protectorates, the domination of British capital in India, the domination of Japan in Korea or in Manchuria, of France in Indochina or in Africa, whoever does not fight against colonial enslavement, whoever does not support the uprisings of the oppressed nations and their independence, whoever defends or idealizes Gandhism, that is, the policy of passive resistance on questions which can be solved only by force of arms, is, despite good intentions or bad, a lackey, an apologist, an agent of the imperialists, of the slaveholders, of the militarists, and helps them to prepare new wars in pursuit of their old aims or new.
—Leon Trotsky, "Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam" (July 1932)
Saturday, April 02, 2011
Even New York Times Columnists Get It- Bob Herbert's Column On Libya- Our Call- Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attacks!
Click on the headline to link to a The New York Times Bob Herbert column on the madness of the American imperialist-led Libya attacks.
Markin comment:
I don't usually post things from the key mouthpiece of the American imperium, The New York Times, at least not for anything other than information but this one sets just the right tone.
Markin comment:
I don't usually post things from the key mouthpiece of the American imperium, The New York Times, at least not for anything other than information but this one sets just the right tone.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
From The Socialist Alternative Website-Libya: No to Western Military Intervention — Victory to the Libyan Revolution—Build an Independent Movement of Workers and Youth!
Markin comment:
The question of the hour is the question of the defense of Libya against the international cabal of imperialist military forces arrayed against it. It is no longer about like or dislike Quadaffi (I am using this spelling of his name since I have seen about seven variations in the media). It is no longer like or dislike the rebels. This action is now controlled by the imperialist cabal and we have a side. Against the U.S.-led (formally or not) imperial forces (and their allies). A victory, another victory for world imperialism here just makes our task that much harder. I am placing commentary today as I find it on the Internet from sources that argue along those same lines. The imperialists and their allies have already “spoken” loud and clear.
Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack! Down With The U.S.-Led Imperialist Coalition! Down With The NATO No- Fly Zone!
*******
Libya: No to Western Military Intervention — Victory to the Libyan Revolution—Build an Independent Movement of Workers and Youth!
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Mar 19, 2011
By Robert Bechert
The UN Security Council’s majority decision to enact a militarily-imposed ‘no-fly-zone’ against Libya, while greeted with joy on the streets of Benghazi and Tobruk, is in no way intended to defend the Libyan revolution. Revolutionaries in Libya may think that this decision will help them, but they are mistaken. Naked economic and political calculations lay behind the imperialist powers’ decision. It is not a lifeline that could ‘save’ the revolution, in the real sense of the word, against Gaddafi. Major imperialist powers decided that they wanted now to exploit the revolution and try to replace Gaddafi with a more reliable regime. However the Libyan foreign minster’s announcement of an immediate ceasefire has complicated imperialism’s position.
Faced with a rapid eastwards advance of Gaddafi’s forces, many in eastern Libya seized hold of the idea of a no-fly-zone to help stem this tide, but this is not the way to defend and extend the revolution. Unfortunately, the revolution’s initial drive towards the west, where two-thirds of Libyans live, was not based on a movement, built upon popular, democratic committees that could offer a clear programme to win support from the masses and the rank and file soldiers, while waging a revolutionary war. This gave Gaddafi an opportunity to regroup.
The growing support for a no-fly-zone was a reversal of the sentiment expressed in the English language posters put up in Benghazi, in February, declaring: “No To Foreign Intervention – Libyans Can Do It By Themselves”. This followed the wonderful examples of Tunisia and Egypt, where sustained mass action completely undermined totalitarian regimes. The Libyan masses were confident that their momentum would secure victory. But Gaddafi was able to retain a grip in Tripoli. This, at least, relative stabilisation of the regime and its counter-offensive led to a change in attitude towards foreign intervention that allowed the largely pro-Western leadership of the rebel ’Interim Transitional National Council’ to overcome youth opposition to asking the West for aid.
However, despite the Gaddafi regime’s blood-curdling words, it is not at all certain that its relatively small forces could have launched an all-out assault on Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, with around a million living in its environs. A mass defence of the city would have blunted the attack of Gaddafi’s relatively small forces. Now, if the ceasefire holds and Gaddafi remains in power in Tripoli, a de-facto breakup of the country could occur, returning to something like the separate entities that existed before Italy first created Libya after 1912 and which Britain recreated in the late 1940s.
Fighters in Benghazi
Whatever the immediate effect the ‘no fly zone’, any trust placed in either the UN or the imperialist powers threatens to undermine all the genuine hopes and aspirations of the revolution that began last month. This is because the powers that have imposed threatened military action are no friends of the Libyan masses. Until recently, they were quite happy to deal with, and pander to, the murderous Gaddafi ruling clique, to maintain a ‘partnership’, especially concerning Libya’s oil and gas industries. Indeed, the day after the UN took its decision, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal lamented that “the close partnership between the Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s intelligence service and the CIA has been severed” (18 March, 2011). The Journal reported “according to a senior US official” the previous ‘partnership’ was “especially productive”.
Now, having lost former dictatorial allies Mubarak, in Egypt, and Ben Ali, in Tunisia, imperialism is trying to take advantage of the popular uprising in Libya to both refurbish its “democratic” image and to help install a more “reliable” regime, or at least a part of Libya. As before, North Africa and the Middle East, with its oil and strategic location, are of tremendous importance to the imperialist powers.
This reveals the absolute hypocrisy of the main imperialist powers, which have shamelessly supported repressive dictatorial regimes throughout the Middle East for decades. At the very same time that they were deciding the No Fly Zone, the same powers did absolutely nothing to prevent Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies’ increasingly brutal suppression of the majority of the Bahraini population and their attempt to ferment sectarianism. Within 12 hours of the UN decision, the armed forces another regional ally, Yemeni, ally shot dead at least 39 protesters in the capital city, Sanaa. The UN was only able to take its decision on Libya because the Arab League supported a no fly zone, but of course these mainly reactionary rulers say nothing about repression in Bahrain, Yemen or other Arab countries.
Gaddafi and Sarkozy in the past
Cameron and Sarkozy’s “concern” for Libya is at least partly motivated by domestic unpopularity and the hope that a foreign success will strengthen their standing. Cameron clearly hopes for a boost similar to that which Thatcher enjoyed after her victory in the 1983 Falklands war. But Thatcher achieved a quick military victory - the no fly zone operation will not will produce a similar military win. Sarkozy, after the disaster of his Tunisia policy that led to the resignation of the French Foreign Minister, needs a “success” to lift his low poll ratings as next year’s Presidential election looms closer.
Gaddafi zig-zags
Despite the imperialist powers’ recent rapprochement with Gaddafi, the tyrant always remained an unreliable ally. Throughout his nearly 42 years in power, Gaddafi zig-zagged in policy, sometimes violently. In 1971, he helped the Sudanese dictator, Nimeiry, crush a left coup that took place in reaction to the earlier suppression of the left, including the banning of the one-million member Sudanese communist party. Six years later, Gaddafi proclaimed a "people’s revolution" and changed the country’s official name from the Libyan Arab Republic to the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah. Despite the name change and the formation of so-called “revolutionary committees”, this was not genuine democratic socialism or a move towards it. The Libyan working people and youth were not running their country. Gaddafi remained in control. This was underlined by the increasingly prominent role that many of his children played in the regime.
Nevertheless, since 1969, on the basis of a large oil income and a small population, there was a big improvement in most Libyans’ lives, especially in education and health, which at least partly explains why Gaddafi still has some basis of support amongst the population. Even while there is growing opposition to the Gaddafi clique, especially amongst Libya’s overwhelmingly young and educated population, there is also fear about who might replace him and opposition to anything that smells of foreign rule. The revolutionaries’ widespread use of the old ruling monarchy’s flag was bound to alienate those who do not want to return to the past and was used by Gaddafi to justify his rule. Flying the old flag also risked alienating Libyans in the west of the country because the former king came from the east and had no historic roots in the area around Tripoli.
But these factors are not a complete explanation as to why Gaddafi was able, at least temporally, to stabilise his position. While there was a popular uprising in eastern Libya, Gaddafi was able to maintain his position in the west, where two-thirds of the population live, despite large protests in Tripoli and uprisings in Misrata, Zuwarah and a few other areas.
Role of the working class
Unlike in Egypt and Tunisia, the working class in Libya has not, so far, begun to play an independent role in the revolution. Furthermore, many workers in Libya are migrants who have fled the country in recent weeks.
The absence of a national focal point which, for example, the Tunisian UGTT trade union federation provided (despite its pro-Ben Ali national leadership), complicated the situation in Libya. The huge revolutionary enthusiasm of the population has not, so far, been given an organised expression. The largely self-appointed ‘National Council’ that emerged in Benghazi is a combination of elements from the old regime and more pro-imperialist elements. For example, the Council’s foreign spokesman, Mahmoud Jibril, the former head of Gaddafi’s National Economic Development Board, was described by the US Ambassador, in November 2009, as a “serious interlocutor who ‘gets’ the US perspective”.
It is easy for Gaddafi to present these people as a threat to Libyan living standards and agents of foreign powers. At the same time, this propaganda will have only a limited effect, as population’s living standards worsening and unemployment increased (standing at 10%) since from the end of the 1980s oil boom and the start of privatisation back in 2003.
Gaddafi’s use of the threat of imperialist intervention did gather some support and if the country becomes divided may gain more. How long this can sustain Gaddafi is another question. In addition to anti-imperialist rhetoric, Gaddafi made concessions to maintain support. Each family has been given the equivalent of $450. Some public sector workers have been given 150% wage increases and taxes and customs duties on food have been abolished. But these steps do not answer the demands for freedom or end the growing frustration of Libya’s youthful population, with an average age of 24, over the regime’s corruption and suffocating grip.
Around the world, millions of people follow, and are inspired by, the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East. These events inspired protests against the effects of the continuing capitalist crisis in many countries. Some of those welcoming the revolutionary events in the region may support the UN’s ‘no fly zone’ but socialists argue that it is primarily made in the interests of the imperialist powers – the same powers that no nothing substantially to restrain the repressive actions of Gulf states against mass protests in their countries.
But what then can be done internationally to genuinely help the Libyan revolution? First of all, trade unions should block the export of Libyan oil and gas. Secondly, bank workers should organise the freezing of all the Gaddafi regime’s financial assets.
The ‘no fly zone’ will not automatically lead to the overthrow of Gaddafi, in fact, like Saddam Hussein, the Libyan leader could entrench his position for a time in those parts of the country he controls. As the experience of Egypt and Tunisia shows, the key to overthrow dictatorships is the movement of the working masses and youth.
A revolutionary programme
Thus the fate of the revolution will be decided inside Libya itself. Its victory requires a programme that can cut across tribal and regional divisions and unite the mass of the population against the Gaddafi clique and for a struggle for a better future.
A programme for the Libyan revolution that would genuinely benefit the mass of the population would be based on winning and defending real democratic rights; an end to corruption and privilege; the safeguarding and further development of the social gains made since the discovery of oil; opposition to any form of re-colonisation and for a democratically-controlled, publicly-owned, economic plan to use the country’s resources for the future benefit of the mass of people.
The creation of an independent movement of Libyan workers, poor and youth that could implement such a real revolutionary transformation of the country, is the only way to thwart the imperialists’ plans, end dictatorship and to transform the lives of the people.
The question of the hour is the question of the defense of Libya against the international cabal of imperialist military forces arrayed against it. It is no longer about like or dislike Quadaffi (I am using this spelling of his name since I have seen about seven variations in the media). It is no longer like or dislike the rebels. This action is now controlled by the imperialist cabal and we have a side. Against the U.S.-led (formally or not) imperial forces (and their allies). A victory, another victory for world imperialism here just makes our task that much harder. I am placing commentary today as I find it on the Internet from sources that argue along those same lines. The imperialists and their allies have already “spoken” loud and clear.
Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack! Down With The U.S.-Led Imperialist Coalition! Down With The NATO No- Fly Zone!
*******
Libya: No to Western Military Intervention — Victory to the Libyan Revolution—Build an Independent Movement of Workers and Youth!
Printer-Friendly
E-Mail This
Mar 19, 2011
By Robert Bechert
The UN Security Council’s majority decision to enact a militarily-imposed ‘no-fly-zone’ against Libya, while greeted with joy on the streets of Benghazi and Tobruk, is in no way intended to defend the Libyan revolution. Revolutionaries in Libya may think that this decision will help them, but they are mistaken. Naked economic and political calculations lay behind the imperialist powers’ decision. It is not a lifeline that could ‘save’ the revolution, in the real sense of the word, against Gaddafi. Major imperialist powers decided that they wanted now to exploit the revolution and try to replace Gaddafi with a more reliable regime. However the Libyan foreign minster’s announcement of an immediate ceasefire has complicated imperialism’s position.
Faced with a rapid eastwards advance of Gaddafi’s forces, many in eastern Libya seized hold of the idea of a no-fly-zone to help stem this tide, but this is not the way to defend and extend the revolution. Unfortunately, the revolution’s initial drive towards the west, where two-thirds of Libyans live, was not based on a movement, built upon popular, democratic committees that could offer a clear programme to win support from the masses and the rank and file soldiers, while waging a revolutionary war. This gave Gaddafi an opportunity to regroup.
The growing support for a no-fly-zone was a reversal of the sentiment expressed in the English language posters put up in Benghazi, in February, declaring: “No To Foreign Intervention – Libyans Can Do It By Themselves”. This followed the wonderful examples of Tunisia and Egypt, where sustained mass action completely undermined totalitarian regimes. The Libyan masses were confident that their momentum would secure victory. But Gaddafi was able to retain a grip in Tripoli. This, at least, relative stabilisation of the regime and its counter-offensive led to a change in attitude towards foreign intervention that allowed the largely pro-Western leadership of the rebel ’Interim Transitional National Council’ to overcome youth opposition to asking the West for aid.
However, despite the Gaddafi regime’s blood-curdling words, it is not at all certain that its relatively small forces could have launched an all-out assault on Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, with around a million living in its environs. A mass defence of the city would have blunted the attack of Gaddafi’s relatively small forces. Now, if the ceasefire holds and Gaddafi remains in power in Tripoli, a de-facto breakup of the country could occur, returning to something like the separate entities that existed before Italy first created Libya after 1912 and which Britain recreated in the late 1940s.
Fighters in Benghazi
Whatever the immediate effect the ‘no fly zone’, any trust placed in either the UN or the imperialist powers threatens to undermine all the genuine hopes and aspirations of the revolution that began last month. This is because the powers that have imposed threatened military action are no friends of the Libyan masses. Until recently, they were quite happy to deal with, and pander to, the murderous Gaddafi ruling clique, to maintain a ‘partnership’, especially concerning Libya’s oil and gas industries. Indeed, the day after the UN took its decision, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal lamented that “the close partnership between the Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s intelligence service and the CIA has been severed” (18 March, 2011). The Journal reported “according to a senior US official” the previous ‘partnership’ was “especially productive”.
Now, having lost former dictatorial allies Mubarak, in Egypt, and Ben Ali, in Tunisia, imperialism is trying to take advantage of the popular uprising in Libya to both refurbish its “democratic” image and to help install a more “reliable” regime, or at least a part of Libya. As before, North Africa and the Middle East, with its oil and strategic location, are of tremendous importance to the imperialist powers.
This reveals the absolute hypocrisy of the main imperialist powers, which have shamelessly supported repressive dictatorial regimes throughout the Middle East for decades. At the very same time that they were deciding the No Fly Zone, the same powers did absolutely nothing to prevent Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies’ increasingly brutal suppression of the majority of the Bahraini population and their attempt to ferment sectarianism. Within 12 hours of the UN decision, the armed forces another regional ally, Yemeni, ally shot dead at least 39 protesters in the capital city, Sanaa. The UN was only able to take its decision on Libya because the Arab League supported a no fly zone, but of course these mainly reactionary rulers say nothing about repression in Bahrain, Yemen or other Arab countries.
Gaddafi and Sarkozy in the past
Cameron and Sarkozy’s “concern” for Libya is at least partly motivated by domestic unpopularity and the hope that a foreign success will strengthen their standing. Cameron clearly hopes for a boost similar to that which Thatcher enjoyed after her victory in the 1983 Falklands war. But Thatcher achieved a quick military victory - the no fly zone operation will not will produce a similar military win. Sarkozy, after the disaster of his Tunisia policy that led to the resignation of the French Foreign Minister, needs a “success” to lift his low poll ratings as next year’s Presidential election looms closer.
Gaddafi zig-zags
Despite the imperialist powers’ recent rapprochement with Gaddafi, the tyrant always remained an unreliable ally. Throughout his nearly 42 years in power, Gaddafi zig-zagged in policy, sometimes violently. In 1971, he helped the Sudanese dictator, Nimeiry, crush a left coup that took place in reaction to the earlier suppression of the left, including the banning of the one-million member Sudanese communist party. Six years later, Gaddafi proclaimed a "people’s revolution" and changed the country’s official name from the Libyan Arab Republic to the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah. Despite the name change and the formation of so-called “revolutionary committees”, this was not genuine democratic socialism or a move towards it. The Libyan working people and youth were not running their country. Gaddafi remained in control. This was underlined by the increasingly prominent role that many of his children played in the regime.
Nevertheless, since 1969, on the basis of a large oil income and a small population, there was a big improvement in most Libyans’ lives, especially in education and health, which at least partly explains why Gaddafi still has some basis of support amongst the population. Even while there is growing opposition to the Gaddafi clique, especially amongst Libya’s overwhelmingly young and educated population, there is also fear about who might replace him and opposition to anything that smells of foreign rule. The revolutionaries’ widespread use of the old ruling monarchy’s flag was bound to alienate those who do not want to return to the past and was used by Gaddafi to justify his rule. Flying the old flag also risked alienating Libyans in the west of the country because the former king came from the east and had no historic roots in the area around Tripoli.
But these factors are not a complete explanation as to why Gaddafi was able, at least temporally, to stabilise his position. While there was a popular uprising in eastern Libya, Gaddafi was able to maintain his position in the west, where two-thirds of the population live, despite large protests in Tripoli and uprisings in Misrata, Zuwarah and a few other areas.
Role of the working class
Unlike in Egypt and Tunisia, the working class in Libya has not, so far, begun to play an independent role in the revolution. Furthermore, many workers in Libya are migrants who have fled the country in recent weeks.
The absence of a national focal point which, for example, the Tunisian UGTT trade union federation provided (despite its pro-Ben Ali national leadership), complicated the situation in Libya. The huge revolutionary enthusiasm of the population has not, so far, been given an organised expression. The largely self-appointed ‘National Council’ that emerged in Benghazi is a combination of elements from the old regime and more pro-imperialist elements. For example, the Council’s foreign spokesman, Mahmoud Jibril, the former head of Gaddafi’s National Economic Development Board, was described by the US Ambassador, in November 2009, as a “serious interlocutor who ‘gets’ the US perspective”.
It is easy for Gaddafi to present these people as a threat to Libyan living standards and agents of foreign powers. At the same time, this propaganda will have only a limited effect, as population’s living standards worsening and unemployment increased (standing at 10%) since from the end of the 1980s oil boom and the start of privatisation back in 2003.
Gaddafi’s use of the threat of imperialist intervention did gather some support and if the country becomes divided may gain more. How long this can sustain Gaddafi is another question. In addition to anti-imperialist rhetoric, Gaddafi made concessions to maintain support. Each family has been given the equivalent of $450. Some public sector workers have been given 150% wage increases and taxes and customs duties on food have been abolished. But these steps do not answer the demands for freedom or end the growing frustration of Libya’s youthful population, with an average age of 24, over the regime’s corruption and suffocating grip.
Around the world, millions of people follow, and are inspired by, the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East. These events inspired protests against the effects of the continuing capitalist crisis in many countries. Some of those welcoming the revolutionary events in the region may support the UN’s ‘no fly zone’ but socialists argue that it is primarily made in the interests of the imperialist powers – the same powers that no nothing substantially to restrain the repressive actions of Gulf states against mass protests in their countries.
But what then can be done internationally to genuinely help the Libyan revolution? First of all, trade unions should block the export of Libyan oil and gas. Secondly, bank workers should organise the freezing of all the Gaddafi regime’s financial assets.
The ‘no fly zone’ will not automatically lead to the overthrow of Gaddafi, in fact, like Saddam Hussein, the Libyan leader could entrench his position for a time in those parts of the country he controls. As the experience of Egypt and Tunisia shows, the key to overthrow dictatorships is the movement of the working masses and youth.
A revolutionary programme
Thus the fate of the revolution will be decided inside Libya itself. Its victory requires a programme that can cut across tribal and regional divisions and unite the mass of the population against the Gaddafi clique and for a struggle for a better future.
A programme for the Libyan revolution that would genuinely benefit the mass of the population would be based on winning and defending real democratic rights; an end to corruption and privilege; the safeguarding and further development of the social gains made since the discovery of oil; opposition to any form of re-colonisation and for a democratically-controlled, publicly-owned, economic plan to use the country’s resources for the future benefit of the mass of people.
The creation of an independent movement of Libyan workers, poor and youth that could implement such a real revolutionary transformation of the country, is the only way to thwart the imperialists’ plans, end dictatorship and to transform the lives of the people.
NATO: America's Imperial Tool - by Stephen Lendman
Markin comment:
The question of the hour is the question of the defense of Libya against the international cabal of imperialist military forces arrayed against it. It is no longer about like or dislike Quadaffi (I am using this spelling of his name since I have seen about seven variations in the media). It is no longer like or dislike the rebels. This action is now controlled by the imperialist cabal and we have a side. Against the U.S.-led (formally or not) imperial forces (and their allies). A victory, another victory for world imperialism here just makes our task that much harder. I am placing commentary today as I find it on the Internet from sources that argue along those same lines. The imperialists and their allies have already “spoken” loud and clear.
Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack! Down With The U.S.-Led Imperialist Coalition! Down With The NATO No- Fly Zone!
*********
NATO: America's Imperial Tool
by Stephen Lendman
Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 26 Mar 2011
naked aggression
NATO: America's Imperial Tool - by Stephen Lendman
In 1999, Nobel laureate Harold Pinter called America's bombing and dismemberment of Yugoslavia "barbaric (and despicable), another blatant and brutal assertion of US power using NATO as its missile (to consolidate) American domination of Europe."
Against Iraq and Afghanistan it's to dominate Eurasia, and against Libya for greater regional hegemony, including resource control, privatization of state industries, new Pentagon bases for future imperial wars, and deterring any democratic spark from emerging.
Obama lied saying:
"United States forces are conducting a limited and well-defined mission in support of international efforts to protect civilians and prevent a humanitarian disaster."
In fact, he caused a humanitarian crisis by killing civilians, the situation worsening daily as deaths and destruction increase.
"We will seek a rapid, but responsible, transition of operations to coalition, regional, or international organizations that are postured to continue activities as may be necessary to realize (stated) objectives," he added.
False.
Giving NATO operational no-fly command is a ruse. NATO is the Pentagon, America's missile to reign death and destruction on targeted nations directly or through proxies. Washington planned, orchestrated and leads naked aggression on Libya. The announced handover changes nothing. European allies are more pawns than partners. They mostly go along to get along.
America remains in charge for what promises to be a protracted, destructive, expensive war to replace one despot with another. Like Iraq and Afghanistan, it'll likely cost billions of dollars at a time homeland needs are neglected to hand America's wealth to Wall Street, other corporate favorites, and militarists for endless wars - lawless naked aggression each time.
Moreover, humanitarian intervention is cover for mass killing and destruction. The more the better to assure corporate crooks huge contracts to rebuild, then on to the next war, and the next one, ad infinitum, America's addiction, the major media its cheerleading chorus.
NATO, An Alliance for War, not Peace
Established in April 1949, NATO calls itself a "political and military alliance for peace and security." In fact, it was more for offense than defense. Cold War hysteria was contrived to incite fear and assure an arms race for corporate enrichment. Napoleon once said, "Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self-interest."
Until the Soviet Union dissolved, communism was the alleged enemy. Today it's terrorism, as bogus now as then. Both, however, were used for hugely profitable imperial wars from Korea to Libya to numerous proxy ones, as well as trillions of dollars for military readiness - in fact, scandalous amounts in America without enemies for justification since WW II.
Strategically intervening under US control, NATO, in fact, threatens world peace and human survival. In November 2010, Robert Griffiths, general secretary of Britain's Communist Party (CPB) said:
Under NATO, "(a) global military and reconnaissance infrastructure is being created to support US, British and western European big business interests, especially energy, financial and armaments monopolies." What began "as a cold war provocation against a non-existent Soviet threat (now) invent(s) or exaggerat(es) threats from so-called failed or rogue states, Islamic fundamentalism and cyber-terrorism."
Petre Ignat, general secretary of the New Communist Party of Romania, called for NATO's disbandment, saying:
"We cannot and will not recognize such a murderous alliance, with such a horrible track record....which includes the murder of thousands of innocent civilians in places like Bosnia, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. We cannot and will not recognize an alliance which, through its aggressive policy of expanding East and setting up new military bases there, through its gross interference in other countries' internal affairs, through its gross violation of international law, can only increase the likelihood of an inter-imperialist war between Western imperialism and emerging capitalist powers, like Russia."
Its original member countries include America, the five (1948) Treaty of Brussels states (Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), Canada, Portugal, Italy, Denmark and Iceland. It's now expanded to 28 states and dozens of partners, threatening world peace and stability.
Membership, however, is a bonanza for Western and Israeli weapons industries as current members and entering states must maintain modern arsenals to state-of-the art readiness, despite no enemies except ones Washington creates to wage wars.
On April 4, 2009, NATO's 60th anniversary, a major international demonstration was held in Strasbourg, France under the slogan, "No to War - No to NATO." Participating organizations included peace groups, global justice movements, trade unions, students, and others against NATO's aggressive military and nuclear policies.
Rather than providing security, NATO has been an obstacle to world peace. In a public statement, the Strasbourg coalition said:
NATO "is a vehicle for US-led use of force with military bases on all continents, bypassing the United Nations and the system of international law, accelerating militarization and escalating arms expenditures."
Its member countries account for up to 80% of all purchases, used for imperial wars called "humanitarian intervention."
"To achieve our vision of a peaceful world, we reject military responses to global and regional crises," real or contrived. "We refuse to live under the terror of nuclear weapons, and reject a new arms race." World security depends on peaceful cooperation and coexistence, impossible to achieve under NATO.
Today, bogus threats are used to justify its existence, including "terrorism," instability, arms trafficking, and proliferation of ballistic missiles, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, mostly in Western and Russian arsenals.
Moreover, new justifications are exploited, NATO citing:
"Key environmental and resource constraints, including health risks, climate change, water scarcity and increasing energy needs (that) further shape the future security environment in areas of concern to (member states) and have the potential to affect significantly (their) planning and operations."
In addition, other areas, including the "ability to prevent, detect, defend against and recover from cyber-attacks (and) assessing the impact of emerging security technologies."
At the same time, NATO pays lip service to "creating the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons" when, in fact, members like America proliferate them. Hypocritically it then states, "As long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, NATO will remain a nuclear power" because Washington, Britain and France won't abandon them.
Rick Rozoff runs the Stop Nato web site:
"an international email news list that examines, from an adversarial position, the expansion of (NATO) and affiliated and allied military blocs into and throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, Central and South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Africa, the so-called Greater Middle East and beyond."
As explained above, he calls NATO "the first attempt in history to establish an aggressive global military formation," comprising one-third of world nations as members or partners on five continents. Stop NATO's purpose is "anti-militarist, international and internationalist." The ultimate aim is survival.
NATO wars, in fact, are America's for greater reach. Against Libya it's to control the only North African Mediterranean state outside its partnership, and only one of five African states not under AFRICOM.
Replacing Gaddafi with a subservient puppet will assure its entry, giving Washington unchallenged Mediterranean Basin dominance, a strategically important waterway bordering three continents. Securing control over Iran, Syria and Lebanon successfully will achieve overall regional hegemony.
NATO's European dominance and eastward expansion especially threatens Russia. Its new Military Doctrine listed "main external threats of war" concerns, including:
-- NATO's global expansion, including to Russia's borders;
-- destabilizing nations and regions;
-- deploying foreign forces on territories and adjacent waters bordering Russia and its allies;
-- deploying offensive strategic missile systems targeting Russia;
-- militarizing space;
-- deploying strategic non-nuclear precision weapons;
-- interfering in the internal affairs of Russia and its allies;
-- proliferating weapons of mass destruction, including missiles, related technology, and nuclear weapons;
-- violating international agreements;
-- not ratifying and implementing others on arms limitations and reductions; and
-- escalating armed conflicts and using military force in areas bordering Russia and its allies.
As a result, at the February 2010 Munich Conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said:
After the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact dissolved, "a real opportunity emerged to make the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) a full-fledged organization providing equal security for all states of the Euro-Atlantic area. However, the opportunity was missed, because the choice was made in favor" of expanding NATO eastward, threatening Russia and its allies.
For example, Yugoslavia's 1999 bombing violated international law and NATO's charter "when a group of OSCE countries....committed aggression against another OSCE country." Again in August 2008 in the Georgian - South Ossetian conflict "in violation of the Helsinki Final Act," prohibiting use of force. US-led NATO, in fact, proliferates it globally, Libya its latest adventure, threatening the entire region and beyond.
A Final Comment
It's no exaggeration calling NATO a global menace, waging war, not peace. It should be abolished, dismantled, not expanded. Today, it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons unilaterally in violation of the 1996 International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling stating:
"....the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable to armed conflict, and in particular the principles of humanitarian law," despite no "comprehensive and universal prohibition."
Operating lawlessly and recklessly as America's "missile," NATO threatens world peace, stability, security and survival. Disbanding it is more important than ever. Besides millions of Iraqi and Afghan victims, how many Libyan deaths are needed to prove it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
The question of the hour is the question of the defense of Libya against the international cabal of imperialist military forces arrayed against it. It is no longer about like or dislike Quadaffi (I am using this spelling of his name since I have seen about seven variations in the media). It is no longer like or dislike the rebels. This action is now controlled by the imperialist cabal and we have a side. Against the U.S.-led (formally or not) imperial forces (and their allies). A victory, another victory for world imperialism here just makes our task that much harder. I am placing commentary today as I find it on the Internet from sources that argue along those same lines. The imperialists and their allies have already “spoken” loud and clear.
Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack! Down With The U.S.-Led Imperialist Coalition! Down With The NATO No- Fly Zone!
*********
NATO: America's Imperial Tool
by Stephen Lendman
Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 26 Mar 2011
naked aggression
NATO: America's Imperial Tool - by Stephen Lendman
In 1999, Nobel laureate Harold Pinter called America's bombing and dismemberment of Yugoslavia "barbaric (and despicable), another blatant and brutal assertion of US power using NATO as its missile (to consolidate) American domination of Europe."
Against Iraq and Afghanistan it's to dominate Eurasia, and against Libya for greater regional hegemony, including resource control, privatization of state industries, new Pentagon bases for future imperial wars, and deterring any democratic spark from emerging.
Obama lied saying:
"United States forces are conducting a limited and well-defined mission in support of international efforts to protect civilians and prevent a humanitarian disaster."
In fact, he caused a humanitarian crisis by killing civilians, the situation worsening daily as deaths and destruction increase.
"We will seek a rapid, but responsible, transition of operations to coalition, regional, or international organizations that are postured to continue activities as may be necessary to realize (stated) objectives," he added.
False.
Giving NATO operational no-fly command is a ruse. NATO is the Pentagon, America's missile to reign death and destruction on targeted nations directly or through proxies. Washington planned, orchestrated and leads naked aggression on Libya. The announced handover changes nothing. European allies are more pawns than partners. They mostly go along to get along.
America remains in charge for what promises to be a protracted, destructive, expensive war to replace one despot with another. Like Iraq and Afghanistan, it'll likely cost billions of dollars at a time homeland needs are neglected to hand America's wealth to Wall Street, other corporate favorites, and militarists for endless wars - lawless naked aggression each time.
Moreover, humanitarian intervention is cover for mass killing and destruction. The more the better to assure corporate crooks huge contracts to rebuild, then on to the next war, and the next one, ad infinitum, America's addiction, the major media its cheerleading chorus.
NATO, An Alliance for War, not Peace
Established in April 1949, NATO calls itself a "political and military alliance for peace and security." In fact, it was more for offense than defense. Cold War hysteria was contrived to incite fear and assure an arms race for corporate enrichment. Napoleon once said, "Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self-interest."
Until the Soviet Union dissolved, communism was the alleged enemy. Today it's terrorism, as bogus now as then. Both, however, were used for hugely profitable imperial wars from Korea to Libya to numerous proxy ones, as well as trillions of dollars for military readiness - in fact, scandalous amounts in America without enemies for justification since WW II.
Strategically intervening under US control, NATO, in fact, threatens world peace and human survival. In November 2010, Robert Griffiths, general secretary of Britain's Communist Party (CPB) said:
Under NATO, "(a) global military and reconnaissance infrastructure is being created to support US, British and western European big business interests, especially energy, financial and armaments monopolies." What began "as a cold war provocation against a non-existent Soviet threat (now) invent(s) or exaggerat(es) threats from so-called failed or rogue states, Islamic fundamentalism and cyber-terrorism."
Petre Ignat, general secretary of the New Communist Party of Romania, called for NATO's disbandment, saying:
"We cannot and will not recognize such a murderous alliance, with such a horrible track record....which includes the murder of thousands of innocent civilians in places like Bosnia, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. We cannot and will not recognize an alliance which, through its aggressive policy of expanding East and setting up new military bases there, through its gross interference in other countries' internal affairs, through its gross violation of international law, can only increase the likelihood of an inter-imperialist war between Western imperialism and emerging capitalist powers, like Russia."
Its original member countries include America, the five (1948) Treaty of Brussels states (Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), Canada, Portugal, Italy, Denmark and Iceland. It's now expanded to 28 states and dozens of partners, threatening world peace and stability.
Membership, however, is a bonanza for Western and Israeli weapons industries as current members and entering states must maintain modern arsenals to state-of-the art readiness, despite no enemies except ones Washington creates to wage wars.
On April 4, 2009, NATO's 60th anniversary, a major international demonstration was held in Strasbourg, France under the slogan, "No to War - No to NATO." Participating organizations included peace groups, global justice movements, trade unions, students, and others against NATO's aggressive military and nuclear policies.
Rather than providing security, NATO has been an obstacle to world peace. In a public statement, the Strasbourg coalition said:
NATO "is a vehicle for US-led use of force with military bases on all continents, bypassing the United Nations and the system of international law, accelerating militarization and escalating arms expenditures."
Its member countries account for up to 80% of all purchases, used for imperial wars called "humanitarian intervention."
"To achieve our vision of a peaceful world, we reject military responses to global and regional crises," real or contrived. "We refuse to live under the terror of nuclear weapons, and reject a new arms race." World security depends on peaceful cooperation and coexistence, impossible to achieve under NATO.
Today, bogus threats are used to justify its existence, including "terrorism," instability, arms trafficking, and proliferation of ballistic missiles, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, mostly in Western and Russian arsenals.
Moreover, new justifications are exploited, NATO citing:
"Key environmental and resource constraints, including health risks, climate change, water scarcity and increasing energy needs (that) further shape the future security environment in areas of concern to (member states) and have the potential to affect significantly (their) planning and operations."
In addition, other areas, including the "ability to prevent, detect, defend against and recover from cyber-attacks (and) assessing the impact of emerging security technologies."
At the same time, NATO pays lip service to "creating the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons" when, in fact, members like America proliferate them. Hypocritically it then states, "As long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, NATO will remain a nuclear power" because Washington, Britain and France won't abandon them.
Rick Rozoff runs the Stop Nato web site:
"an international email news list that examines, from an adversarial position, the expansion of (NATO) and affiliated and allied military blocs into and throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, Central and South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Africa, the so-called Greater Middle East and beyond."
As explained above, he calls NATO "the first attempt in history to establish an aggressive global military formation," comprising one-third of world nations as members or partners on five continents. Stop NATO's purpose is "anti-militarist, international and internationalist." The ultimate aim is survival.
NATO wars, in fact, are America's for greater reach. Against Libya it's to control the only North African Mediterranean state outside its partnership, and only one of five African states not under AFRICOM.
Replacing Gaddafi with a subservient puppet will assure its entry, giving Washington unchallenged Mediterranean Basin dominance, a strategically important waterway bordering three continents. Securing control over Iran, Syria and Lebanon successfully will achieve overall regional hegemony.
NATO's European dominance and eastward expansion especially threatens Russia. Its new Military Doctrine listed "main external threats of war" concerns, including:
-- NATO's global expansion, including to Russia's borders;
-- destabilizing nations and regions;
-- deploying foreign forces on territories and adjacent waters bordering Russia and its allies;
-- deploying offensive strategic missile systems targeting Russia;
-- militarizing space;
-- deploying strategic non-nuclear precision weapons;
-- interfering in the internal affairs of Russia and its allies;
-- proliferating weapons of mass destruction, including missiles, related technology, and nuclear weapons;
-- violating international agreements;
-- not ratifying and implementing others on arms limitations and reductions; and
-- escalating armed conflicts and using military force in areas bordering Russia and its allies.
As a result, at the February 2010 Munich Conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said:
After the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact dissolved, "a real opportunity emerged to make the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) a full-fledged organization providing equal security for all states of the Euro-Atlantic area. However, the opportunity was missed, because the choice was made in favor" of expanding NATO eastward, threatening Russia and its allies.
For example, Yugoslavia's 1999 bombing violated international law and NATO's charter "when a group of OSCE countries....committed aggression against another OSCE country." Again in August 2008 in the Georgian - South Ossetian conflict "in violation of the Helsinki Final Act," prohibiting use of force. US-led NATO, in fact, proliferates it globally, Libya its latest adventure, threatening the entire region and beyond.
A Final Comment
It's no exaggeration calling NATO a global menace, waging war, not peace. It should be abolished, dismantled, not expanded. Today, it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons unilaterally in violation of the 1996 International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling stating:
"....the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable to armed conflict, and in particular the principles of humanitarian law," despite no "comprehensive and universal prohibition."
Operating lawlessly and recklessly as America's "missile," NATO threatens world peace, stability, security and survival. Disbanding it is more important than ever. Besides millions of Iraqi and Afghan victims, how many Libyan deaths are needed to prove it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
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