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Obama At The UN: The Arrogant Voice Of Imperialism

President Obama delivered an empty and arrogant sermon to the United Nations Wednesday, laced with platitudes about “peace” that were designed to mask Washington’s predatory policies.

The American president received a tepid response from the assembled heads of state, foreign ministers and UN delegates. Not a single line in his speech evoked applause. The novelty of two years ago, when Obama made his first appearance before the body posing as the champion of multilateral-ism in contrast to Bush, has long since worn off. As the world quickly learned, changing the occupant of the White House did little to shift the direction of American foreign policy or curb the spread of American militarism.

The immediate purpose of Obama’s 47-minute address was to supplement a behind-the-scenes campaign of bullying and intimidation aimed at forcing the Palestinian Authority to drop its plan to seek a UN Security Council vote on recognition of Palestine as a sovereign member state.

Washington has vowed to veto any bid for Palestinian statehood if it comes to the Security Council, a move that would only underscore the real character of US imperialist policy in the Middle East and the hypocrisy of its claims to identify with the revolutionary upheavals of the Arab masses.

The speech and Obama’s defense of the veto threat served to accomplish the same purpose, further diminishing the US president’s popularity in the Arab world. According to a recent poll, his favorable rating in the region has fallen from roughly 50 percent when he took office to barely 10 percent, even lower than George W. Bush in his second term.

Obama rushed from the podium at the General Assembly hall to a meeting and joint appearance with Benyamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister praised Obama’s remarks and made it clear that the two are working on a joint strategy to muscle Palestine Authority head Mahmoud Abbas into dropping the statehood bid. It was reported Thursday that there were efforts to get the Palestinian delegation to make an entirely symbolic plea for recognition, while agreeing to postpone any vote until after the resumption of US-brokered negotiations with Israel.

There have been two decades of such talks, which have achieved nothing, while Israel has relentlessly expanded Zionist settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. Since the onset of negotiations in 1991, the number of settlers has more than doubled, while the West Bank has been internally divided by settlements, security roads and checkpoints as well as the apartheid security wall separating it from Israel.

Obama’s remarks in the UN speech represented an even further accommodation to Israel compared to his proposal in May for a resumption of talks, which he then said should be based upon pre-1967 borders with “mutually agreed swaps.” That statement, which implicitly supported Israel’s demand to retain existing settlements, merely reiterated the official policy of the US government since the Clinton administration. Nonetheless, the mere reference to borders provoked a storm of criticism from Netanyahu, the Israeli right, and the Republican Party.

In his speech to the UN, Obama mentioned neither the 1967 borders nor any proposal to halt the expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Instead, he presented the basis for proposed negotiations as: “Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their state.” As the rest of the US president’s remarks made clear, both those conditions are to be dictated by Israel.

While behind the scenes US officials are reportedly threatening the Palestinian Authority with cutting off all US aid if it goes ahead with the request for recognition, in his speech Obama described a turn to the UN as a “short cut” that would accomplish nothing.

Dismissing the role of the institution that he had rhetorically praised at the outset of his remarks, Obama said, “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the UN—if it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now.” Indeed, scores of UN resolutions on the plight of the Palestinians have been repudiated and ignored by both Israel and Washington. The US has used its veto in the Security Council to kill scores more.

Evidently responding to the right-wing criticism of Republican presidential hopefuls, who have denounced him for “throwing Israel under the bus” with his 1967 borders remark last May, Obama went out of his way to dismiss the historical grievances of the Palestinian people, while identifying unconditionally with Israel.

Of the Palestinians, he said only that they deserved a “sovereign state of their own” and they “have seen that vision delayed for too long.”

This was followed by a declaration that “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakable, and our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring.” He continued by describing Israel as a country “surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it,” whose “citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses.” He referred to Israel as a “small country” in a world “where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map.” And he wound up by invoking the Holocaust.

“These facts cannot be denied,” he said. One would never guess from this selection of “facts” that some 4 million Palestinians live under the oppression and constant violence of Israeli occupation, and that another 5 million are refugees, driven from their homeland.

Nor for that matter, would one have any inkling of the constant wars that “little Israel,” with its elastic borders, has waged against its neighbors. Among the more recent are the 2006 war against Lebanon, which left 1,200 civilians dead and much of the country’s infrastructure in ruins, and the 2008 “Operation Cast Lead,” against Gaza, which claimed the lives of nearly 1,500 Palestinians, compared to 13 Israelis.

With a tone of exasperation, Obama acknowledged that “for many in this hall,” the Palestinian question was the issue that “stands as a test” for Washington’s claims to champion human rights and democracy.

In reality, however, the rest of the speech proved just as revealing in terms of the hypocrisy and imperialist interests that pervade Washington’s policies all over the world.

The pretense laid out at the beginning of Obama’s speech was that the US government is engaged in “the pursuit of peace in an imperfect world.” The address included a trite refrain, repeated three times: “peace is hard.”

Fleshing out this theme, Obama pointed to the partial troop withdrawals from the eight-and-a-half-year-old war and occupation in Iraq and the decade-old war in Afghanistan. He bragged that by the end of the year, only 90,000 US troops will be deployed in these wars.

Washington’s aim, he said, was to forge an “equal partnership” with Iraq “strengthened by our support for Iraq—for its government and its security forces,” and an “enduring partnership” with “the people of Afghanistan.” He claimed that these changes proved that “the tide of war is receding.”

The rhetoric about “partnership”, however, refers to the plans being pursued by the White House and the Pentagon to keep US troops, CIA operatives and American bases in both countries, long past the dates set for US withdrawal. US imperialism is determined to continue pursuing the goals that underlay the wars from the outset: hegemonic control over the strategic energy reserves of the Caspian Basin and the Persian Gulf.

Obama then preceded to extol the “Arab Spring,” declaring: “One year ago, the hopes of the people of Tunisia were suppressed…One year ago, Egypt had known one president for nearly thirty years.”

Needless to say, the American president made no reference as to whose support had kept the dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak in power for so long, nor to the current attempts by Washington to salvage the regimes they headed and suppress the mass popular movements that forced their ouster.

From there, he proceeded to praise the NATO war in Libya, declaring that, by authorizing this imperialist intervention, “the United Nations lived up to its charter.”

In reality, the war represented a fundamental violation of the tenets of this charter, which proclaimed the “sovereign equality” of all member states, demanded that all disputes be settled peacefully and insisted that member states “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

In the case of Libya, the US and its NATO allies, proclaiming the threat of an imminent massacre in Benghazi, procured a resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. It utilized this resolution as a cover for a war of regime change. The NATO powers carried out thousands of air strikes and sent in special forces troops to organize, train and arm a “rebel” force for a war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Libyans. The aim of this war, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq before it, is domination of strategic energy reserves—as well as inserting Western military power in the midst of a region facing revolutionary turmoil.

“This is how the international community is supposed to work,” Obama declared in relation to the Libyan operation, calling to mind Lenin’s description of the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor, as a “thieves’ kitchen.”

Turning to uncompleted business and potential imperialist interventions yet to come, Obama condemned Iran for failing “to recognize the rights of its own people” and calling for the UN impose new sanctions against Syria. “Will we stand with the Syrian people, or with their oppressors?” he demanded.

Given the bloody events in Yemen, where over 100 civilians have been massacred over the past three days, Obama could not completely ignore the upheavals against US-backed regimes in the region. In Yemen, however, there was no invocation to stand against oppressors, merely a call to “seek a path that allows for a peaceful transition.”

Even more tepid was his reference to Bahrain, the headquarters of the US 5th Fleet. “America is a close friend of Bahrain,” he declared. Here, where thousands have been killed, tortured, imprisoned, beaten and fired from their jobs for demanding democratic rights, he proposed merely a “meaningful dialogue,” while justifying the repression by suggesting that Bahrainis were confronting “sectarian forces that would tear them apart.”

The rest of the speech consisted of a hollow and unconvincing recitation of the usual platitudes. These included the elimination of nuclear weapons—with Washington, sitting on the greatest nuclear arsenal in the world and the only state ever to use such weapons lecturing North Korea and Iran. He inveighed against poverty and disease and insisted on the need “not to put off action that a changing climate demands.” Thrown in were calls for the rights of women as well as gays and lesbians.

On the decisive issue facing millions of working people in the US and across the globe, Obama acknowledged that economic “recovery is fragile”, that “too many people are out of work” and that “too many are struggling to get by.” Referring to the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks, he boasted, “We acted together to avert a depression in 2009” and insisted that “We must take urgent and coordinated action once more.”

But as with all the other issues raised in the speech, the American president had no “coordinated action,” no program, and no policy to propose. In the final analysis, Obama’s empty rhetoric is a direct expression of the profound crisis gripping American capitalism and its ruling financial elite as it confronts economic collapse and the threat of revolutionary upheaval.

By Bill Van Auken

22 September 2011

@ WSWS.org

Tripoli Journal in Which Franklin Lamb Shields a Nigerian from Rebel Racists and Dreams of Chadian Ladies

Tripoli: My roommate left our hotel and hopefully Libya last night for his village near Arlit, Niger thanks to the assistance of one of Tripoli’s Christian Churches. I shall miss him a lot.

It was a recently formed human rights group from the Coptic Orthodox (Egyptian) Church in Tripoli, working to protect blacks from the still lawless Tripoli streets that enabled my roommate to depart this hotel. The Coptic Church, according to their Prelate here, has the largest Christian communion in Libya with normally 60,000 parishioners and has roots in Libya going back hundreds of years before the Arabs spread westward from Egypt.

Mohammad departed none too soon since “security personnel” arrived at the Corinthia Hotel close to 1 p.m. Sunday afternoon, with gunmen and two “Generals” in fine new uniforms complete with epaulets. Their surprise visit was to check the hotel rooms for Gaddafi supporters. They claimed they had received “reports.”

The Copts did a good job in getting Mohammad to safety. Most observers here agree that for the immediate future there will be a whirlwind of wild speculation, accusations and even some serious examination of Moammar Gaddafi’s leadership of Libya these past four decades. One fact however is incontrovertible to this observer and it is that under Gaddafi, Christians, whether Roman Catholic, Anglican Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox or Greek Orthodox — the main Christian sects here — have been well treated and allowed virtually complete freedom to practice their beliefs and to celebrate their traditions with some restrictions placed on campaigns to proselytize Muslims of which they have not been any since the Mormons and the “Way of the Cross” evangelicals left some years back.

Most of the churches here currently have volunteers working to help their Muslim sisters and brothers during this cataclysmic period. My friend Mohammad is one whose life they may have saved.

Mohammad and I have been secretly sharing my room for more than a week since I accidently discovered him hiding and trembling in the hotel’s garden bushes shortly after the rebel entrance into Tripoli. It was easy to calm Mohammad down and I brought him a shirt from my room, as his was filthy.

Mohammad is a black African, devout Muslim, and one fine man. When I saw him looking up at me and trembling my thoughts instantly turned to a 21-year-old black Mississippian, James Chaney, and the date could have been June 21, 1964. That was when Neshoba County’s law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan hunted blacks to kill and did kill James and his white companions Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

The reason Mohammad was hiding outside the Corinthia hotel is that he feared for his life as so many, if not most, black Africans and black Libyans (roughly one third of Libya’s population) do these days. Bands of young rebel “freedom fighters” are still roaming some of Tripoli’s streets, itching it seems, to kill some “African mercenaries”, meaning, it appears, any black man they can find. Although the apparently politically contrived rumors of African mercenaries raping Libyan women which helped NATO get the UN Security Council to green light its bombing and regime change campaign, have been debunked as fake by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and a UN fact finding group, some of the macho young rebels in Libya still insist the smear campaign is true.

Mohammad explained to me that he was never a fighter for anyone in Libya but rather that his employment background, like his father, uncles and brothers, was in Niger’s uranium mines which only the past few years have begun to recover from the late 1980’s collapse. Mohammad’s brother Said was killed in the Tuareg Rebellion of the 1990’s and his father sent Mohammad to Libya to work in construction.

I agreed with Mohammad that he could stay secretly with me until we could get him into safe hands. The hotel has never been the wiser to my knowledge although my friend Ismail, who works behind the front desk when he is not doing a dozen other jobs during his frequent 16 hour shifts, probably suspected something was going on because he would give me knowing glances as I disappeared toward the elevator with a table cloth covering a big plate of food and contrary to hotel rules of no hotel kitchen food in the rooms. Luckily Ismail is a black Libyan and, if he knew, he did not rat us out.

With no security at our hotel until the day before yesterday and now packed with journalists, Mohammad took extra precautions and never left room # 1185 except for one night when someone from the Coptic Church came to meet with him in another room and I gave his floor spot to a French activist from Beirut whose boat to Alexandria was delayed again.

Housekeeping, no longer exists at this hotel, and so no one has entered my room for almost two weeks since the staff fled. In any case Mohammad and I had a good cover story ready in case events demanded one. Mohammad, we would explain if caught, was a driver for the Italian Embassy before the Italians temporarily pulled up stakes back in March.

I got pretty good at fixing plates of food for Mohammad from the nightly “Iftar buffet.” Because we are both fasting for Ramadan, smuggling Mohammad food only once a day was easy enough, especially as some of the new hotel guests, being journalists from the Rixos Hotel or rushing here to cover the “Fall of Tripoli”, are now in the habit of fixing their dinner plates and sitting around the abandoned hotel restaurants. This way they have more space and privacy from the cramped conditions in the rapidly deteriorating “dining room” or their working area.

Personally, this Ramadan, the Iftar feast no longer has appeal for me because we have the very same food every Iftar which now comes almost entirely from cans. At noon today, the Hotel Front Desk posted the most recent Dear Guest Notice. It reads: “Dear Guests: Please be advised that there will be no lunch today due to absence of water supply in the Hotel. We hope for a water delivery this afternoon and hope to serve dinner tonight at 18:30. Thank you. The Corinthia Hotel Management.” No water arrived and when I and an American lady who works for the Sunday Times returned from driving thru Tripoli’s center, at 7:50 p.m. just in time for Iftar, mine consisted of walking through the dining area picking leftover food bits from plates where diners had eaten and left.

Before Mohammad left, he helped me with my infected leg and told me about a nearby Dr. which made me happy since no others have been available this past week. But as dear readers may come to understand, I soon became reluctant to seek treatment from the doctor who Mohammad recommended although by very great coincidence I have known her wonderful granddaughter, an Arabic-English language interpreter named Aya, for several weeks.

My most recent best bet for immediate medical assistance was my new friend Dr. XX, “Consultant Urological Surgeon” from the British Medical Center here in Tripoli (formerly the Swiss Medical Center until Hannibal Gaddafi had that unfortunate problem with Swiss authorities last winter and his Dad wanted to abolish Switzerland and all things Swiss), hence the fast name change on the Clinic building. Dr. XX is from New Delhi but studied in England and now normally resides in Sheffield, England. He spent the past year working here in Libya, loves the people and the country and was most willing to help me. The problem was that he had to rush to catch the boat out of here for Malta yesterday. Anyhow, he said I had a couple of days left before I would possibly have major leg problems and he gave me the phone numbers of two of his colleagues, one an Indian dentist. So far the phones still don’t work well in Tripoli.

Just a word of background about Dr. Fatima, recommended by Mohammad now that I am resigned to get treatment late today, come what may, following my brief meeting with the good Dr. this morning.

Dr. Fatima is very thin, quite tall, has an unusually large head and a red scarf covers part of her face which is stained blue. Aya explained that while Dr. Fatima is by background Muslim, her Saharan tribe retains some pre-Islamic rites and customs and is genealogically connected with the Delvar Nar. Yet Aya also told me that Fatma’s tribe claims that they are linked with the Angels mentioned in Luke 24:4 where Christ’s apostle describes the scene at Jesus’s tomb when two angels appeared to Mary. Anyhow….

Aya says Dr. Fatima is capable of teleportation, telekinesis and ESP and while I don’t need any of that stuff just now, but could later, Dr. Fatima fortunately is also expert in Saharan medicine including leg infections. So the good news is that I am very soon to be in experienced medical hands. I have no doubt about that and I shall always be grateful to my friend Mohammad for the referral.

The down side may be what Aya told me about what her grandmother must do to make me well. This may be the tough part for someone who nearly collapses if some nurse even hints that she wants to stick a needle in me. Aspirin is about the only medicine I have ever taken because my half German sainted Mother did not believe in her large brood getting sick and we all minded her over the years.

Dr. Fatima’s “clinic” is in the Medina not far from my Hotel and the area is coming back to life as some citizens are beginning to peek out and emerge from their homes. Hundreds of shops and outdoor tables with all kinds of new and used goods have been closed for more than a week. Even the lovely Chadian hospitality ladies who I have good reason to believe rent themselves from dirt floor rooms off the ancient streets of the medina for ten Libyan dinars an hour (about $8) or 16 dinar ($ 12.80) for two hostesses, (three additional dinars per hour for air conditioning in the room ) have vanished. This fact alone, according to one of the guys from the UN delegation that ten days ago got permission from NATO to fly from Tripoli airport to Tunis for R & R and to assess their “findings,” is reason enough for the UNSC to immediately end NATO’s carnage in Libya.

I admit to being a little apprehensive because Aya told me one of the Chadian ladies, who recently returned and works as a nurse for Dr. Fatima, must first slice my wound in narrow lines and then rub and wash it thoroughly with Saharan sand and some nasty looking green paste of Sarahan vegetation and insect fluids.

While I sat thinking how that is going to feel, Aya seems to have read my expression and assures me that everything will be ok because her granny also makes a strong alcoholic drink out of Saharan cactus and I will drink some and feel fine.

“Well, why not we just use that drink rather than sand to cleanse the wound”? I ask. Aya gave me one of her, “You stupid American!” glances that communicates, “Please don’t bother to question we who know what’s best for you!”

Aya also promises me that after my “treatment” the now returning Chadian ladies will take care of me for the expected three-day recovery period. I immediately feel better.

If fate rules that these next few days in fact comprise my last chapter, and never having had much interest in being with virgins, the company of these angels will certainly be as close to Heaven as this hayseed from rural Oregon will likely get

By Franklin Lamb

30 August, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Franklin Lamb is in Libya.

Negotiations: A  Disaster For Palestinians

The issue of a Palestinian state is back on the radar due to Palestinians taking their cause to the UN next week. Israel and the U.S. strongly oppose the Palestinian effort. In fact, on September 8 th , the U.S. confirmed it would veto the Palestinian effort in the UN Security Council. Israel claims that the Palestinians can achieve statehood only through negotiations, not through the UN. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. dutifully supports Israel.

Perhaps Palestinians finally concluded that they could not achieve a just settlement with the Israelis through a U.S. brokered peace process, hence the move to the UN. Support for this belief about the futility of negotiations is found in the Palestinian papers that were released this January by al-Jazeera and the British Guardian newspaper. The Palestinian papers, obtained by al-Jazeera, contained over 1600 documents about the peace process from September 1999 through late 2010. According to the Guardian : ” But as became clear even under the earlier, less hardline Israeli government of Ehud Olmert, the scale of concessions offered by Erekat and other Palestinian Authority negotiators — far beyond what the majority of the Palestinian public would be likely to accept — was insufficient for Israeli leaders. “

Negotiations before 1999 showed Israel often used delaying tactics to avoid reaching a resolution. For example, re the 1991 Madrid negotiations, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said: “I would have conducted negotiations on autonomy for 10 years and in the meantime we would have reached half a million people” in the West Bank. Successive Israeli governments have essentially carried out Shamir ‘ s policy.

The 1993 Oslo Accords led to a huge increase in Israeli settlers. In 2001 then former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu claimed he stopped the accords . He recalled how he conditioned his signing of the 1997 Hebron agreement on American consent that there be no withdrawals from “specified military locations,” and insisted he choose those same locations, such as the whole of the Jordan Valley, for example.

Casting doubt on the U.S.’s role as an honest broker , Aaron David Miller, one of the U.S. team at the 2000 Camp David debacle, wrote about negotiations: “The “no surprises” policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking.” Re the negotiations themselves, Shlomo Ben-Ami, then Israeli Foreign Minister and one of the Israeli negotiators added : “that Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.”

It was not only the Netanyahu government that put up barriers to a Palestinian state. For example, according to the Guardian, the Palestinian papers covered a November 2007 meeting that included Tzipi Livni, then Israeli Foreign Minister and Ahmed Qureia, a Palestinian negotiator. Livni told Qureia that she believed Palestinians saw settlement building as meaning “Israel takes more land [so] that the Palestinian state will be impossible “; that “the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we’ll say that is impossible, we already have the land and we cannot create the state”. She conceded that it had been “the policy of the government for a really long time”.

Netanyahu is again the Israeli Prime Minister. He now rejects another short-term freeze on Israel’s illegal building of settlements. Since the Palestinians require a freeze before continuing negotiations, Netanyahu is content with the current impasse. He doesn’t even have to raise Hamas as a reason for avoiding negotiations. Stalling continues unimpeded.

Considering Hamas, according to a 2007 article in Forward , hawkish Israelis such as retired Major General Shlomo Gazit, a former chief of military intelligence, and Ephraim Halevy, a former Mossad chief, support negotiating with Hamas. Gazit called the three conditions laid down by Israel and its Western allies for negotiating with Hamas “ridiculous, or an excuse not to negotiate.” Halevy believes Israel should take up Hamas’s offer of a long-term truce and try negotiating, because the Islamic movement is respected by Palestinians and generally keeps its word.

Palestinian civil society has seen the continuation of the brutal Israeli occupation and Israel’s construction of more illegal settlements despite, or maybe as a result of, the negotiations. Palestinians also see the hypocrisy of the international community that has failed in its responsibility to support human rights and international law. Therefore Palestinian society has moved on from a flawed U.S. brokered negotiating process and turned to a nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign that is already having an impact.

By Ron Forthofer

14 September 2011

Countercurrents.org

Ron Forthofer, Ph.D.is a retired professor and activist for peace and social justice

NATO’s War Crimes In Libya: Who Grieves For The Fallen Heroes?

The conquest and occupation of Libya is first and foremost a military victory for NATO. Every aspect of the military offensive was spearheaded and directed by NATO air, sea and ground forces. The NATO invasion of Libya was basically a response to the “Arab spring” : the popular uprisings which spread from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. The NATO assault formed part of a general counter-attack designed to contain and reverse the popular democratic and anti-imperialist movements which had ousted or were on the verge of overthrowing US-client dictators.

Political and military considerations were foremost in motivating the NATO invasion: As late as May 2009, the U.S. and European regimes were developing close bilateral military, economic and security agreements with the Gaddafi regime. According the British daily, the Independent (9/4/2011), official Libyan documents found in its Foreign Office described how on December 16, 2003, the US CIA and British MI6 established close collaboration with the Gaddafi government. The MI6 provided Gaddafi with details on Libyan opposition leaders exiled in England and even drafted a speech for him as he sought rapprochement with the outside world.

U.S. Secretary of State Clinton presented Mutassin Gaddafi to the Washington press during a visit in 2009 stating, “I am very pleased to welcome Minister Gaddafi to the State Department. We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya. We have many opportunities to deepen and broaden our co-operation and I am very much looking forward to building on this relationship.”(examiner.com 2/26/2011).

Between 2004-2010 the largest oil and petroleum service multinational corporations, including British Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Chevron, Conoco and Marathon Oil joined with military-industrial giants like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, Dow Chemical and Fluor and signed enormous investments and sales deals with Libya (examiner.com op cit).

In 2009, the U.S. State Department awarded a $1.5 million dollar grant to train Libyan civilian and government security forces. The White House budget for 2012 included a grant for training Libyan security forces. General Dynamics signed a $165 million dollar deal in 2008 to equip Libya’s elite mechanized brigade (examiner.com ibi).

On August 24, 2011 Wikileaks released US embassy cables from Tripoli, which described the positive assessment a group of leading Republican senators had made of US-Libyan relations in during their visit in late 2009. These cables highlighted ongoing security training programs involving Gaddafi’s police and military, as well as the US’ strong support for the regime’s repression of radical Islamists, many of whom are now leading the NATO-backed ‘rebel forces’ now occupying Tripoli.

What caused the NATO countries to shift abruptly from a policy of embracing Gaddafi to launching a brutal scorched-earth invasion of Libya in a matter of months? The key is the popular uprisings, which threatened Euro-US domination. The near total destruction of Libya, a secular regime with the highest standard of living in Africa, was meant to be a lesson, a message from the imperialists to the newly aroused masses of North Africa, Asia and Latin America: The fate of Libya awaits any regime which aspires to greater independence and questions the ascendancy of Euro-American power.

NATO’s savage six-month blitz – over 30,000 air and missile assaults on Libyan civil and military institutions – was a response to those who claimed that the US and the EU were on the “decline” and that the “empire was in decay”. The radical Islamist and monarchist-led “uprising” in Benghazi during March 2011 was backed by and served as a pretext for the NATO imperial powers to extend their counter-offensive on the road to neo-colonial restoration.

NATO’s War and the Phony “Rebel Uprising”

Nothing is more obvious than the fact that the entire war against Libya was in every strategic and material fashion NATO’s war. The casting of the rag-tag collection of monarchists, Islamist fundamentalists, London and Washington-based ex-pats and disaffected Gaddafi officials as “rebels” is a pure case of mass media propaganda. From the beginning the ‘rebels’ depended completely on the military, political, diplomatic and media power of NATO, without which the de facto mercenaries would not have lasted a month, holed up in Benghazi.

A detailed analysis of the main features of the conquest of Libya confirms this assault as a NATO war.

NATO launched brutal air and sea attacks destroying the Libyan air force, ships, energy depots, tanks, artillery and armories and killed and wounded thousands of soldiers, police and civilian militia fighters. Until NATO’s invasion the mercenary ‘rebel’ ground forces had not advanced beyond Benghazi and could barely ‘hold’ territory afterwards. The ‘rebel’ mercenaries ‘advanced’ only behind the withering round-the-clock air attacks of the NATO offensive.

NATO air strikes were responsible for the massive destruction of Libyan civilian and defensive military infrastructure, bombing ports, highways, warehouses, airports, hospitals, electrical and water plants and neighborhood housing, in a war of ‘terror’ designed to ‘turn’ the loyalist mass base against the Gaddafi government. The mercenaries did not have popular backing among Libyan civilians, but NATO brutality weakened active opposition against the ‘rebel’ mercenaries.

NATO won key diplomatic support for the invasion by securing UN resolutions, mobilizing their client rulers in the Arab League, procuring US mercenary trained ‘legionnaires’ from Qatar and the financial backing of the rich rabble in the Gulf. NATO forced ‘cohesion’ among the feuding clans of self-appointed ‘rebel’ mercenary leaders via its (“freezing”) seizure of overseas Libyan government assets amounting to billions of dollars. Thus the financing, arming, training and advising by “Special Forces” were all under NATO control.

NATO imposed economic sanctions, cutting off Libya’s income from oil sales.. NATO ran an intensive propaganda campaign parading the imperial offensive as a “rebel uprising”; disguising the blistering bombardment of a defenseless anti-colonial army as ‘humanitarian intervention’ in defense of ‘pro-democracy civilians’. The centrally choreographed mass media blitz extended far beyond the usual liberal circles, to convince ‘progressive’ journalists and their newspapers, as well as intellectuals to paint the imperial mercenaries as ‘rebels’ and to condemn the heroic 6-month resistance of the Libyan army and people against foreign aggression. The pathologically racist Euro-US propaganda published lurid images of Libyan government troops (often portrayed as ‘black mercenaries’) receiving massive quantities of ‘Viagra’ from Gadhafi while their own families and homes were, in fact, under aerial assault and blockade by NATO.

The main contribution of the mercenary ‘conquerors’ in this grand production was to provide photo opportunities of rag-tag ‘rebels’ waving rifles in Pentagon-style Che Guevara poses riding around in pickup trucks arresting and brutalizing African migrant workers and black Libyans. The mercenary ‘liberators’ triumphantly entered Libyan cities and towns, which were already scorched and devastated by the NATO colonial air force. Needless to say the mass media ‘adored’ them.

In the aftermath of NATO’s destruction, the ‘rebel’ mercenaries showed their true talents as death squads: They organized the systematic execution of “suspected Gadfafi supporters” and the pillage of homes, stores, banks and public institutions related to the defeated regime. To “secure” Tripoli and snuff out any expression of anti-colonial resistance, the ‘rebel’ mercenaries carry out summary executions – especially of black Libyans and sub-Saharan African workers and their families. The “chaos” in Tripoli described by the mass media is due to the ‘self-styled liberation’ forces running amok. The only quasi–organized forces in Tripoli appear to be the Al Qaeda-linked militants, NATO’s erstwhile allies.

Consequences of the NATO Conquest of Libya

According to ‘rebel’ mercenary technocrats, NATO’s policy of systematic destruction will cost Libya at least a ‘lost decade’. This is an optimistic assessment of how long ‘reconstruction’ will take for Libya to regain the economic levels of February 2011. The major petroleum companies have already lost hundreds of millions in profits and over the decade are expected to lose billions more due to the flight, assassination and jailing of thousands of experienced Libyan and foreign experts, skilled immigrant workers and technical specialists in all fields, especially in view of the destruction of Libyan infrastructure and telecommunication systems.

Sub-Sahara Africa will suffer a huge set-back with the cancellation of the proposed ‘Bank of Africa’, which Gaddafi was developing as an alternative source of investment finance and the destruction of his alternative communication system for Africa. The process of re-colonization involving imperial rule via NATO and UN mercenary ‘peace keepers’ will be chaotic given the inevitable strife among hostile armed Islamist fundamentalists, monarchists, neo-colonial technocrats, tribal warlords and clans as they carve up their private fiefdoms. Intra-imperial rivalries and local political claimants to the oil wealth will further enhance the ‘chaos’ and degrade civilian life, in a nation which had once boasted the highest per capita income and standard of living in Africa. Complex irrigation and petroleum networks, developed under Gaddafi and destroyed by NATO, will remain in shambles. As the example of Iraq has vividly proven, NATO is better at destroying than constructing a modern secular state rooted in a modern civil bureaucracy, universal free public education, secular judicial system and modern health services. The US policy of rule and ruin reigns supreme in NATO’s juggernaut.

Motivation for the Invasion

What motivated NATO to initiate a massive, six-month long aerial bombardment of Libya, followed by invasion and crimes against humanity? Civilian deaths and the widespread destruction of Libyan civil society by NATO flies in the face of its claims that the air assaults were meant to “protect civilians” from imminent Gaddafi-led genocide, ‘rebel’ claims which were never substantiated. Bombing Libya’s critical economic infrastructure allows us to categorically conclude that the NATO assault has little to do with ‘economic rationality’ or any such consideration. The primary motivation for NATO’s actions can be found in earlier policies related to a spring counter-offensive against the mass popular movements that overthrew US-EU puppets in Egypt and Tunisia and were threatening client regimes in Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere.

Despite the fact that the US-NATO were already engaged in several colonial wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia) and Western public opinion had been demanding withdrawal in light of the costs, Western imperial leaders felt too much was at stake and calculated that losses could be minimized. NATO’s overwhelming mastery of the air and sea made short work of Libya’s puny military defense capability, allowing them to bomb the cities, ports and vital infrastructure with impunity and enforce a total economic blockade. They calculated that massive bombing would terrorize the Libyan people into submission and bring about a quick colonial victory without any NATO military losses, the prime concern of Western public opinion, and permit a triumphant ‘rebel’ mercenary army to march into Tripoli.

The Arab popular rebellions were the central concern and the motor force behind NATO’s destruction of Libya. These mass popular uprisings had toppled the long-standing pillars of US-Israel-EU dominance in the Middle East. The fall of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and his Tunisian counterpart Ben Ali sent tremors through the imperial foreign offices. These successful uprisings had the immediate ripple effect of inspiring similar movements throughout the region. Bahrain, housing the key naval base for the US navy in the Middle East and neighboring Saudi Arabia (the US key strategic ally in the Arab world), witnessed a prolonged massive uprising of civil society, while Yemen ruled by the US- puppet Ali Saleh, faced mass popular movements and militant resistance. Morocco and Algeria were experiencing popular demands for democracy. The common thread in the Arab peoples’ movements was their demands to end EU, US and Israeli domination of the region, an end to massive corruption and nepotism, free elections and a solution to wide-spread unemployment via large-scale job programs. As anti-colonial movements grew in breadth and intensity their demands radicalized from political to social democracy, from a democratic to an anti-imperialist foreign policy. Workers’ demands were enforced by strikes and calls for the prosecution of repressive police and internal security and military officials guilty of crimes against their citizens.

The U.S., E.U. and Israel were caught by surprise – their intelligence agencies so deeply embedded in the smelly crevices of their clients’ secret police institutions failed to detect the popular explosions. The popular uprisings came at a critical and inopportune moment, especially for the US where domestic support for NATO wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had declined sharply given the economic crises and major social cutbacks to pay for these wars. Moreover, in Iraq and Afghanistan the US-NATO troops were losing ground: The Taliban was, in effect, the real ‘shadow government’. Pakistan, despite its puppet regime and compliant generals, faced overwhelming popular opposition to the air war against its citizens in frontier villages and towns. The US drone strikes killing militants and civilians were answered with the sabotage of vital transport supplying the occupation forces in Afghanistan. Faced with the deteriorating global situation, the NATO powers, decided that they needed to counter-attack in the most decisive and visible manner by destroying an independent, secular regime like Libya and thereby re-affirming their global supremacy, countering the image of defeat and retreat and, above all, re-energizing the “declining imperial power”.

The Imperial Counter-Attack

The US led the way in its counter-offensive in Egypt, by backing the power grab by the military junta led by Mubarak loyalists, who then proceeded to disperse and repress the pro-democracy and workers movements and to end all talk of restructuring the economy. A pro-NATO collective dictatorship of generals replaced the personal autocratic rule of Hosni Mubarak. The NATO powers provided “emergency” billions to float the new regime and ‘derail’ the Egyptian people’s march to democracy. In Tunisia a similar process took hold: The EU, especially France and the US, backed a reshuffling of the ousted regime bringing to the fore a new/old cast of neo-colonial politicians. They plied them with funds, insuring that the military-police apparatus remained intact despite continued mass discontent with the conformist policies of the ‘new/old regime.

In Bahrain and Yemen, the NATO powers followed a dual track, unsure of the outcome between the massive pro-democracy movements and the pro-imperial autocrats. In Bahrain, the West called for ‘reform’ and ‘dialogue’ with the majority Shia population and a peaceful resolution, while continuing to arm and protect the Bahraini royalty – all the while looking for a pliant alternative if the incumbent puppet was overthrown. The NATO-backed Saudi invasion of Bahrain in support of the dictatorship and the subsequent wave of terror effectively showed West’s true intentions. In Yemen the NATO powers continued to support the brutal Ali Saleh regime.

Meanwhile the NATO powers were exploiting internal discontent in Syria by arming and providing diplomatic support to the Islamic fundamentalists and their minority neo-liberal allies in an effort to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime. Thousands of Syrian civilians, police and soldiers have been killed in this simmering civil war, which NATO propaganda presents as a case of state terror against ‘peaceful civilians’, ignoring the killing of soldiers and civilians by armed Islamists and the very real threat to Syria’s secular population and religious minorities.

The Counter-Offensive and NATO’s Invasion of Libya

The destruction and invasion of Libya reversed seven years of accommodation and co-operation with Gaddifi. There were no ‘incidents’ in Libya or elsewhere that had threatened the NATO countries’ economic and military interests. Libya was still an independent country, pursuing a pro-African agenda which had spearheaded and funded the establishment of an independent regional bank and communications system designed to bypass IMF and World Bank control. Libya’s close ties to all the major NATO oil companies and to Wall Street investment banks as well as its ongoing bilateral military programs with the US did not shield it from the NATO’s attack. Libya was deliberately destroyed by a 6-month campaign of relentless bombing by NATO air and naval forces to serve as an example to the Arab popular movements: NATO’s message to the Arab pro-democracy movements was that it was prepared to launch new offensive wars with the same devastating consequences as the Libyan people just endured; the imperial powers were not in decline and any independent anti-colonial regime would suffer the same fate. NATO’s message to the African Union was clear: There will be no independent regional bank organized by Gaddafi or anyone else. There is no alternative to imperial banks, the IMF or the World Bank.

Through the devastation of Libya, the West was telling the Third World that, contrary to the pundits who chattered about ‘the decline of the US empire’, NATO was willing to use overwhelming and genocidal military power to establish puppet regimes, no matter how backward, vicious and regressive the puppets, because they will ultimately obey NATO and answer to the White House.

NATO’s invasion and destruction of a secular modern republic, like Libya, which had used its oil wealth to develop Libyan society, was a stern message to democratic popular movements. Any independent Third World regime can be rolled back; colonial puppet regimes can be foisted onto a devastated people; the end of colonialism is not inevitable, imperial rule is back.

NATO’s invasion of Libya sends a message to freedom fighters everywhere: There is a high cost to independence; acting outside of imperial channels, even if only to a limited degree, can bring swift destruction. Moreover, the NATO war on Libya demonstrates to all nationalist regimes that making concessions to Western economic, political and military interests– as Gaddafi’s sons and their neo-liberal entourage had pursued full accommodation—does not offer security. In fact concessions may have encouraged imperial penetration. The West’s burgeoning ties with Libyan officials facilitated their defections and promised an easy victory over Tripoli. The NATO powers believed that with a regional uprising in Benghazi, a handful of defectors from the Gaddafi regime and their military control of the air and sea, Libya would be an easy victory on the way to a widespread rollback of the Arab Spring.

The “cover” of an orchestrated regional military-civilian “uprising” and the imperial mass media propaganda blitz against the Libyan government was sufficient to convince the majority of western leftist intellectuals to take up the cudgels for the mercenary ‘rebels”: Samir Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Lowy, Juan Cole and many others backed the mercenary “rebels” … demonstrating the irrelevance and bankruptcy of the remnants of the old left.

The Long Term, Large Scale Consequences of NATOs War

The invasion and conquest of Libya marks a new phase in Western imperialism’s drive to reassert its primacy in the Arab-Islamic world. The ongoing offensive is clearly evident in the mounting pressures, sanctions, and arming of the Syrian opposition to Bashar al-Assad, the ongoing consolidation of the Egyptian military junta and the demobilization of the pro-democracy movement in Tunisia. How far “backwards” the process can be pushed depends on the revitalization and regrouping of the pro-democracy movements, currently in ebb.

Unfortunately, NATO’s victory over Libya will strengthen the arguments of the militarist wings of the US and EU ruling class who claim that the ‘military option’ brings results, that the only policy that “the anti-colonial Arabs” understand is force. The Libyan outcome will strengthen the hand of policymakers who favor a continued long-term US-NATO presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and promote a military offensive against Iran and Syria. Israel has already capitalized on NATO’s victory against Gaddafi via its expansion of huge colonial settlements in the West Bank, increasing bombing and missile raids on Gaza, a major naval and army build-up in the Red Sea region adjoining Egypt and confrontational posturing toward Turkey.

As of early September, members of the African Union, especially South Africa, have yet to recognize the mercenary “transition” regime imposed by NATO on Libya. Aside from the Libyan people, Sub-Saharan Africa will be the biggest immediate loser in the overthrow of Gaddafi. Libya’s generous aid, grants and loans, bought the African states a degree of independence from the harsh conditions of the IMF, World Bank and Western bankers. Gaddafi was a major sponsor and backer of regional integration – including the African Union. His large scale development programs, especially oil and water infrastructure and construction projects, employed hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan African immigrant workers and specialists who remitted billions to their home countries, helping the balance of payments and reducing deficits and poverty at home. In place of Gaddafi’s positive economic contribution, Africa now faces Tripoli transformed into a colonial outpost, fortifying US military command in Africa and a new push to strengthen military ties with the empire.

However, beyond the present-day celebrations of their imperial military success in Libya, the war only exacerbates the weakening of Western economies by diverting scarce domestic resources to wage prolonged wars with no decisive victories. Ongoing social cuts and harsh austerity programs have undercut any ruling class efforts to whip up phony mass chauvinist celebrations for “democratic victories over tyrants”. The naked aggression against Libya has heightened Russian, Chinese and Venezuelan security concerns. Russia and China will veto any UN Security Council sanctions on Syria. Venezuela and Russia are signing new multi-billion dollar military co-operation agreements, strengthening Caracas’s military defense in the wake of the Libyan invasion.

For all the ruling class and mass media euphoria, the ‘win’ over Libya, grotesque and criminal in the destruction of Libyan secular society and the ongoing brutalization of black Libyans, does not solve the profound economic crises in the EU-US. It does not affect China’s growing competitive advantages over its western competitors. It does not end US-Israeli isolation faced with an imminent world-wide recognition of Palestine as an independent state. The absence of left-wing western intellectual solidarity for independent Third World nations, evident in their support for the imperial-based mercenary “rebels” is more than compensated by the emergence of a radical new generation of left-wing activists in South Africa, Chile, Greece, Spain, Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere. These are youth, whose solidarity with anti-colonial regimes is based on their own experience with exploitation, “marginalization” (unemployment) and repression at home.

Is it too much to hope that a War Crimes Tribunal could be organized to prosecute NATO leaders for crimes against humanity, for genocide against the people of Libya? Can the brutal link between costly imperial wars abroad and increasing austerity and domestic decay lead to the revival of an anti-imperialist peace movement based on withdrawal of imperial troops abroad and public domestic investments for jobs, health and education for the working and middle class?

If the destruction and occupation of Libya marks a time of infamy for the NATO powers, it also establishes a new awareness that a people can struggle and resist 6 months of intense, massive bombings from all the NATO powers. Perhaps when their heroic example becomes clear and the fog of media propaganda is lifted, a new emerging generation of fighters can vindicate the battle of Libya, as a continuation of the struggle for the definitive emancipation of the Afro-Arab and Islamic peoples from the yoke of Western imperialism.

By James Petras

10 September 2011

Countercurrents.org

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals.

NATO Conquers Libya

On the day its planes and drones attacked North African ground, NATO decided the outcome of the Libyan rebellion. Scratch out all rebel fighters and the Gadhafi led government remained doomed. A relatively strong Yugoslavian army could not repel NATO aerial attacks and eventually surrendered. How could a deficient Libyan military expect to prevail? A powerful world body took advantage of a major dispute between elements of a nation in order to impose its authority and satisfy its wants. NATO certainly wasn’t going to permit itself to lose or be involved in a stalemate.

Those who regarded the war as a simple rebellion of oppressed masses against an illegitimate and brutal dictator are as naive as those who believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and had to be immediately defeated. Subscribing to Moammar Gadhafi’s removal for imposing his dubious Green philosophy on the nation and for his harsh and autocratic tactics might have been correct. Those are issues, but not the issues. Revelations from the Libyan civil war expose the issues, which are significantly disturbing and demand careful attention:

• The internationalization of only this local conflict, which was not different and less compelling than similar conflicts throughout he word, notably in Syria, Bahrain, Nigeria, and other places.
• Use of an unverified story to justify immediate NATO intervention – prevention of Gadhafi forces from taking violent retribution against the citizens of Benghazi .
• Media failure to accurately report the conflict, and replaced by an unusual and intensive propaganda that favored the rebels.
• Rejection of compromises to resolve the conflict while the nation was being destroyed and many were being killed, a contradiction to NATO’s reasons for entering the conflict.
• NATO impolitely going beyond the original Security Council Resolution to only provide a “no-fly” zone and instead leading the rebel offensive by a cowardly method – bombing a defenseless nation that had had no military means to counter the attacks.
• The constant and one-sided demonizing of leader Gadhafi, while not knowing if antagonists were any better.
• Neglect of examining Libya ‘s real problems of being a rentier nation that supports its population from principally oil exports, whose supply is limited and whose derived wealth needs careful distribution.

Internationalization of the conflict

Still no satisfactory explanation of how or why NATO, constituted for defense against a Soviet attack on West Europe, and which evolved into an organization that endorses offense before defense against its self-proclaimed enemies, had been threatened by Libya, nor why the voices from Africa’s nations, all of whose nations had major reasons to be concerned with the Libyan conflagration, went unheard. At a meeting between the UN Security Council and the African Union (AU) High Level Ad hoc Committee on Libya on June 15, Dr Ruhakana Rugunda, Uganda’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations summarized the African Union position on NATO’s invasion of Libya: “The NATO attacks, noted the Addis meeting, had gone beyond the scope of the United Nation Security Council resolution 1970 and 1973….Whatever the genesis of the intervention by NATO in Libya, the AU called for dialogue before the UN resolutions 1970 and 1973 and after those Resolutions. Ignoring the AU for three months and going on with the bombings of the sacred land of Africa has been high-handed, arrogant and provocative. This is something that should not be sustained.”

Those whom the conflict affected (Africans) are not consulted. Those whom the confect did not affect (Europeans) make a unilateral decision.

No need to discuss the obvious; other rebellions, such as in Syria and Bahrain , which had more urgency than that of Libya , have been brutally suppressed. Bahrain ‘s self-proclaimed King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, with approval from the world’s guardians of oppressed peoples, invited Saudi Arabia to behave opposite to the NATO action by rough necking the insurgency and militarily assisting the oppressor government. In unison and patently contrived, the made for consumption public relations machines of the world’s savior nations proclaimed: “We can’t do anything, but we must do something.” Assistance is selective and random. If you are lucky you get attacked.

” France has taken a leading military role in the NATO force backing the rebels. Britain ‘s defense minister said on Thursday that NATO was helping with intelligence and reconnaissance in the hunt for Gaddafi and his sons. Many analysts believe France , Britain and Arab allies, notably Qatar , may have some special forces on the ground in Tripoli working with Libyan commandos.”

One year ago, Muommar Gadhafi came to France and met with Sarkozy. Both leaders were all smiles to one another. What changed?

Conjecture – Revenge for Gadhafi’s previous attacks on French civilians and interests, personal animosity to Moammar Gadhafi due to his egotistic nature and deadly tactics, desire to increase French presence and prestige on the world stage, consolidate its position in Africa, and expect economic benefits from a new Libya.

Nations that didn’t support the early military actions, such as Turkey and Russia , subsequently joined the rebel cause. Their evolved positions seemed to validate NATO’s efforts. Consider that after NATO determined the outcome, these nations sensed it was more beneficial to end the war quickly by supporting the National Transition Council.

An unverified story to justify immediate NATO intervention

The principal excuse for the NATO intervention suggested that leader Gadhafi, after retaking Benghazi , intended to liquidate at least 100,000 of his opponents, a slight exaggeration and an obvious impossibility. According to President Barack Obama, “Gaddafi declared that he would show no mercy to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.”

“Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them. In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear. He also told his troops not to pursue any rebels who drop their guns and flee when government forces reach the city.”

Logic tells us that few Benghazi residents could even have guns to hide, and Gadhafi’s forces were too limited to carry out any large scale purge, Gadhafi’s comment (much different than Obama’s presentation) was directed only to fighters and meant to create fear. Would any leader tell his people he intended to kill masses of them? If so, they had nothing to lose by fighting. Why encourage them?

Media failure to accurately report the conflict

Although battles raged throughout The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, destruction occurred, and combatants and civilians were killed and wounded, the news reports never seemed definite. Who controlled what wavered with each morning cup of coffee. How many rebel fighters, how large was the Libyan government’s military, who was most responsible for civilian damage – Libyan government forces, rebel fighters or NATO? Substantiated facts, wide view images, interviews, and on spot reporting were either suspect of being selective, lacking in depth, or contradictory.

Fact could not be separated from fiction, bias or propaganda. Was this a revolution or a civil war between a huge discontented portion of the society and its entrenched beneficiaries? The mass of citizens didn’t seem to care and went about trying to do their daily chores. Huge demonstrations for the rebels were not reported, and the gathering of new recruits and local assistance after victories were not apparent. Even after the liberation of Tripoli , the city of one million didn’t exhibit a massive celebratory environment. Widely dispersed and relatively moderate numbers of dedicated combatants characterized the rebel effort. A token number of willing fighters backed by missiles and sparse civilian support characterized the government effort.

The war’s final stage demonstrated the inaccuracy of the reporting. While media spoke of the impossibility of the rebel forces to enter Tripoli for weeks and insisted they would be encountering about 45,000 loyal and well equipped government troops, the rebel forces, who wisely didn’t listen to the media, just walked in, encountered moderate resistance and, within a few days, controlled most of the capital city. An intense NATO bombing of Tripoli , which preceded the rebel strike, indicated close coordination between European and rebel forces.

CNN broadcast intense and dramatic situations of foreign correspondents being held hostage by ‘gunmen’ at the Rixos hotel.

Matthew Chance, CNN’s Tripoli reporter, insisted:

CNN’s Arwa Damon, who previously reported from Syria , toured what she described as a luxurious Recreational Vehicle (RV), equipped with two golf carts on Moammar Gadhafi’s farm, and presumably owned by him. “The Libyan people wished they had this,” she said. Ms. Damon was also told (by whom?) that the Libyans did not realize the luxurious life that Gadhafi lived. Joe Johns, CNN correspondent, who undoubtedly recognized the standard RV as an ordinary U.S. vehicle, gulped as he exclaimed, “Yes, a RV with two golf carts, what luxury.”

Rejection of compromises to resolve the conflict

NATO declared its principal objective to be the protection of civilians and refused every opportunity to achieve that objective. Although the most direct means to limit casualties was to negotiate an end to the conflict, the European powers did nothing to convince the NTC to enter into negotiations. Maybe, negotiations would not resolve the situation, and maybe they would lead to compromises not fully acceptable to the NTC, but, if successful, lives would have been saved, and a humanitarian crisis would have been averted. European powers were determined to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi and replace his government, regardless of suffering of the Libyan people.

NATO impolitely going beyond the original Security Council Resolution

The main details of UN Resolution 1973 authorizing action to protect Libyan civilians:  

• A no-fly zone is an important element for the protection of civilians as well as the safety of the delivery of humanitarian assistance and a decisive step for the cessation of hostilities.
• I t authorises UN member states to take all necessary measures [notwithstanding the previous arms embargo] to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
• It decides to establish a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in order to help protect civilians.
• It calls on member states to intercept boats and aircraft it believes may be taking arms and other items to Libya .
• Member states should ensure domestic businesses exercise vigilance when doing business with entities incorporated in Libya if the states have information that provides reasonable grounds to believe that such business could contribute to violence and use of force against civilians.
• I t requests that the UN secretary general create a group of up to eight experts to oversee the implementation of the resolution.

With no UN authority to proceed with offensive actions, and no eight experts to oversee the implementation of the resolution, NATO aircraft conducted more than 20,000 sorties including 7,635 strikes. In effect, NATO served as the air force arm of the rebel military, or the other way around, the rebels served as the ground troops for NATO.

After the fall of Tripoli , “The alliance said its planes struck a command bunker and a convoy of 29 military vehicles in Sirte, where Gadhafi’s tribe, the Qaddafa, remain fiercely loyal to the ousted dictator. The rebel leadership had hoped the city would surrender peacefully, but tribal leaders have rejected all entreaties,” The Associated Press reported.

Does bombing a convoy of hopeless and helpless military vehicles protect civilians in a city that does not welcome NATO’s presence?

The constant and one-sided demonizing of leader Gadhafi

Moammar Gadhafi has been a tyrant who acted mercilessly against his opponents. However, all of that was in the past. Since the year 2003, after Libya no longer engaged the world, had halted developments into weapons of mass destruction, and began to recover from economic sanctions, the nation has been considered trustworthy. During 2008-2010, Gadhafi negotiated deals with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and released several hundred of its followers in return for promises to renounce violence and a radical brand of Islam.

So, why when Libya was on a path to prosperity and becoming a respectable nation among other nations, was it suddenly mandatory that Gadhafi and his government be forcibly displaced?

Only one perspective of Moammar Gadhafi and his leadership has been provided; that of a mad, fumbling, bumbling tyrant who led his nation into mismanagement and catastrophe. Gadhafi did not lack vision in a world of self-seeking and self-promoting Arab leaders who have used terror to control their citizens and their nation’s oil wealth and acquire immense riches for themselves. His self-written Green Book claimed that in western parliamentary democracies, special interests compete for and gain power without representing the people. The book suggests a grassroots government that features “Popular Conferences and People’s Committees.” It could be true that the desired governance has created anarchy and forced a few to make the difficult decisions. Not much different from the US , where major problems are only contained and never resolved.

“[There’s] now on the economic side a pretty unstoppable momentum…. It’s the place to be,” says Dalton , now an analyst at Chatham House in London .

Libya ‘s nominal gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 16.7 billion dinars ($12.8 billion) in 1999 to 114 billion in 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The year after the US lifted sanctions, the country’s economy surged 10.3 percent in 2005. Foreign direct investment increased more than 50 percent from $1.5 billion in 2000 to $2.3 billion in 2007, according to the World Bank.

“In Tripoli , the capital, cement skeletons along the city’s airport road will soon be sleek luxury high-rises as Libya tackles a 500,000 unit housing shortage. Known as the Bab Tripoli complex, the government-funded plush Turkish development is valued at some $1.3 billion and is set to be completed in November 2011. It boasts 115 buildings with 2,018 apartments as well as office spaces, and a giant mall complete with a 22-lane bowling alley, a movie theater, a five-star hotel. The changes aren’t just limited to Tripoli . In Benghazi , Libya ‘s second-largest city, two government-funded housing projects consisting of 20,000 units, costing approximately $4.8 billion, are half way to completion. To combat income disparity and alleviate the growing pains of privatization, the Libyan government has set up social fund to provide 222,000 families approximately $377 dollars per month from investment funds financed by oil profits.”

The European powers neglected to observe the lessons from the U.S. invasion of Iraq . In that conflict, U.S. intelligence failed to vet the Iraqi dissidents, principally Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi, who urged the charge into Mesopotamia and managed to deliver Iraq into friendly relations with Iran . The occupying administration allowed Saudi Arabia ‘s rejected Salafists and Afghanistan ‘s displaced Al-Qaeda to pour into Iraq and establish a strong presence. Could Mahmoud Jibri, NTC chairperson, be another Chalabi? Will the already well established Libyan Islamic Fighting Group take advantage of the expected disorder in the new Libya ? Will NATO send a temporary clone of L. Paul Bremer, former head of the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority, to perform similar duties in Libya ? If western policies follow form, expect positive responses to all the above.

The first two propostions are particularly intriguing. Gadhafi, for all his faults, was in the front line in the battle against Al-Qaeda and did not have good relations with Iran . Already, the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has congratulated NTC head Mustafa Abdel Jalil on the the NTC victory and invited him to visit Iran . In many ways Gadhafi benefited the west by remaining in power. In the war against Radical Islamic terrorism, Libya ‘s role in that battle is now less known.

None of the mayhem created by Gadhafi can be pardoned. However, compare Gadhafi’s brutality to Western nations’ punishing actions, and the intense focus on Gadhafi becomes suspect. Count in hundreds the deaths and maimed due to Gadhafi’s actions (none of which can be excused) and count in millions the deaths and maimed caused by western nations in several aggressive wars and assistance to homicidal tyrants since World War II.

Neglect of examining Libya ‘s real problems.

Colonel Gadhafi outlived his usefulness to the Libyan people and had to leave. A consensus of world leaders seemed to approve these propositions. However, is Gadhafi the problem, or is it the condition of Libya , a mildly prosperous nation ($14,000 per capita GDP) that must balance the spending of today with assuring survival after the oil runs out? Finding other than low service employment in a nation that has few large businesses outside of oil extraction and refinement is not a defect due to poor organization or negligence; it’s a difficult task in all single resource nations.

A 2008 article in Libyan newspaper The Tripoli Post describes a meeting at which Moammar Gadhafi discussed the issue.

Opinion: On the Distribution of Wealth in Libya by Sami Zaptia, 22/11/2008 15:54:00

“On Wednesday October 12, the Leader of the Revolution Muammar Al-Qathafi met with the Secretariat of the General People’s Congress and the Secretariat of the General People’s Committee and discussed the issue of the distribution of Libya ‘s wealth and its consequences. In the lively debate that followed, which was broadcast live on Libyan TV, different views on this issue were freely discussed.

“Those who have reservations on the re-distribution of wealth, and specifically the abolition of some bureaucracies or General People’s Committees (ministries) was based on: the fear of short term economic chaos, hyper inflation, loss of the dinar value, uncontrolled consumption and frittering away of the oil income on consumer products, a balance of payments deficit and a real fall in the incomes of people. They stressed that the oil money ought to be centrally invested in long term projects and investment portfolios on behalf of the Libyan people to increase production, long term growth and development. However, history and the track record of centralized bureaucracy and administrators are not good. The General People’s Committees and administrators have had much time and even much more money to try and fix things – and they seem to have failed.

“There has been increased oil production, increased oil income and Libya ‘s general non-oil income has increased. There are new and increased income flows from investments and portfolios. Moreover, Libyans’ expectations have risen, are rising and continue to rise. They see all these signboards going up and construction projects going on all over Libya . They note these new towers, hotels, offices, marinas, railways, metros, and leisure complexes being constructed. They say to themselves there must be a lot of money about and ask when is it going to trickle down to them. And they are right. There is much money about. There are huge and increasing annual budgets. Libya ‘s GDP for 2006 was about US$68 billion (PPP) and is estimated at US$ 83 billion plus for 2008. That is a per capita income of over $8,000 for 2006 and estimated at over $12,000 for 2008. Libya ‘s real unemployment level is estimated at 30% whilst that of Dubai is only 2.4% Moreover, 33% of Libya ‘s population is under 15 years of age. This young population is full of expectations and needs vital investment in education, health and all the other sectors.”

If NATO felt that the Libyan leader had physically, morally and economically harmed his people, and therefore warranted disposal, then it has set a precedent for interference in any nation of the world; albeit a bit late. During the first eight years of the twenty first century, a U.S. leader led his countrymen into military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan , which cost the lives of several thousand of Americans, brought havoc to the Iraq population, with hundreds of thousands killed and two million displaced. Add to the horrific actions against his own and foreign populations, an economic mismanagement which caused a severe recession and generated mass unemployment.

NATO, where were you when the United States most needed you?

By Dan Lieberman

31 August 2011

Countercurrents.org

Dan Lieberman is the editor of Alternative Insight, a monthly web based newsletter. His website articles have been read in more than 150 nations, while articles written for other websites have either appeared or been linked in online journals throughout the world. Many have served as teaching resources in several universities and several have become Internet classics, each attracting thousands of readers annually.

The two Asian giants are focusing on Africa as never before, write columnists Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang, leading to many misconceptions about the role Chinese and Indian companies are playing there

More countries in Africa are joining the global economy. Over the last decade, the continent’s GDP expanded at an average annual rate of 5.1 percent, low compared with emerging giants like China and India but still well above the global growth rate of 2.9 percent. During this period, Africa also became far more globally integrated and saw its merchandise trade grow at an annual rate of 12.9 percent, vs. a global growth rate of 8.9 percent.

Africa’s economic ties with China and India have grown at a particularly rapid pace. This development—when put in the context of Asia’s ongoing march toward becoming the world’s economic center—has led many to believe that China and India have taken over from the West as the new economic powers in Africa. That conclusion, however, hinges on some common misconceptions about China and India’s engagement with Africa.

Myth No. 1: China and India dominate the race for Africa.

During 2000-2010, Africa’s merchandise trade with China grew at an annual rate of 29 percent (from $9 billion to $119 billion) and with India at an annual rate of 18 percent (from $7 billion to $35 billion). While these growth rates are very robust, they are building on a very low base. So far, Africa’s economic partnership with Europe dominates that with China or India. In 2010, Europe received 36 percent of Africa’s exports, compared with 13 percent for China and 4 percent for India. Over 37 percent of Africa’s total imports came from Europe, vs. 12 percent from China and 3 percent from India. In 2010, even the U.S. was ahead of China in terms of total merchandise trade with Africa.

To date, China and India also have played only a small, albeit growing, role in terms of capital investment in Africa. Each accounts for less than 5 percent of the total inbound foreign direct investment (FDI) stock in Africa, a tiny fraction of that from Europe and the U.S.

In short, as newly active players, China and India are making rapid headway in Africa. However, appearances notwithstanding, they are still far behind the developed economies—especially Europe—in terms of economic engagement with Africa.

Myth No. 2: China and India’s engagement with Africa is all about natural resources.

Many Indian companies are looking at opportunities to sell in African markets. In 2010, Indian mobile operator Bharti Airtel paid $9 billion for the African telecom operations of Kuwait-headquartered Zain.  (TTM)Tata Motors, India’s largest automaker, has opened an assembly operation in South Africa. Mumbai-based Essar Group is investing in the African steel sector and Godrej, another Indian conglomerate from Mumbai, is very active in Africa’s consumer goods market. Karuturi Global, the Bangalore company that is the world’s largest rose producer, has become one of Africa’s largest players in commercial agriculture and leases 1,200 square miles of land in Ethiopia. Indian companies are also very active in Africa’s emerging IT services market.

Chinese companies are also not just focused on Africa’s natural resources. China has taken a growing interest in helping build Africa’s infrastructure such as roads, railways, bridges, ports, and power stations. At the 2009 China-Africa Summit, China pledged to build 100 clean energy projects in Africa covering solar, biogas, and hydropower. It also announced the phasing in of zero import tariffs for 95 percent of products from the least developed African countries.

Both China and India are beginning to see Africa not just as a resource supplier but also as a market and as a target for capital investment in many sectors of the economy.

Myth No. 3: China and India are the new neocolonialists in Africa.

In recent months, British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have warned Africa to be cautious of “new colonialism,” especially from China. On this dimension, however, the West doesn’t have much of a moral leg to stand on. Self-serving rhetoric aside, look at the historical reality. In the colonial days, the West’s relationship with Africa was basically one of taking resources from the continent without giving anything back. When the colonial era ended, the West’s relationship changed from “resources for nothing” to “resources for cash.” Whether this helped African economies remains debatable, since much of the cash ended up in the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt African leaders.

China’s relationship—based on “resources for infrastructure”—has been radically different. While such deals are unlikely to be corruption-free, the scope for corruption is clearly lower. More important, in a continent like Africa, better infrastructure is massively critical for spurring growth in productivity.

India’s relationship, driven largely by the private sector and focused heavily on investing and creating jobs in Africa, has the potential to be even more beneficial for Africa. Aside from the above-noted moves by private-sector companies, the Indian government has launched a Pan-African e-Network project aimed at connecting all 53 nations in Africa by a satellite and fiber-optic network. The government has also launched a $700 million program for the development of educational institutions and training programs in Africa.

In short, China and India’s involvement in Africa is structurally different from that of the U.S. and Europe and is likely to have a bigger long-term impact on the creation of human and institutional capacities in African countries.

Myth No. 4: China’s investment in Africa’s natural resources threatens other resource-dependent economies such as Europe, the U.S., Japan, and India.

Even though Africa is resource-rich, it is not the only resource-rich region on earth. Other extremely resource-rich regions include Russia, Mongolia, the Middle East, Latin America, Australia, Canada, and the U.S. It is impossible for Chinese investments in Africa to give China any type of monopoly position in any commodity. In fact, what Chinese investment does is to boost the world’s supply of various commodities and thus prevent commodity prices from rising even faster than they otherwise would.

Take crude oil as an example. For a country such as India, it does not matter whether a barrel of oil was extracted from a well in Angola, Nigeria, Canada, or Russia. The only thing that matters is the positive impact of China’s investments in Africa’s oil resources on the world’s total supply of oil. Thus, China’s investments in Africa’s natural resources should be treated as a case of “win-win-win”—a win for China, a win for Africa, and a win for other resource-importing countries.

Myth No. 5: India cannot compete with China in Africa.

The only Africa-focused issue where India cannot compete with China is in bidding for concessionary rights to natural resources. China simply has more capital than India. Also, most Chinese investors in Africa are state-owned enterprises with access to extremely low-cost capital from state-owned banks. In contrast, it is the private sector from India that plays the leading role in Africa.

However, the last thing India should fret about is Chinese investments in Africa’s natural resources. In sectors other than natural resources, Indian companies have overwhelming advantages over their Chinese peers. In socioeconomic terms (such as low income levels, vast internal diversity, widespread use of English), Africa is much closer to India than China. Also, Indian private-sector companies are far more experienced at managing globally dispersed operations than Chinese state-owned enterprises.

By Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang

22 September 2011

@ Bloomberg Businessweek

Bharti Airtel is a striking example of India’s strengths over China. Bharti Airtel found it easy to become the second-largest mobile operator in Africa and has successfully transferred its frugal innovation model from India to Africa. Meanwhile, China Mobile has had great difficulty figuring out how it could create any value by acquiring an operator in Africa. The Bharti Airtel story is being repeated in other sectors of Africa’s economy such as autos, steel, agriculture, and education.

Anil K. Gupta is a professor of strategy at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and a visiting professor in strategy at INSEAD. Haiyan Wang is managing partner of the China India Institute. They are the co-authors of Getting China and India Right (Wiley, 2009) and The Quest for Global Dominance (Wiley, 2008).

MORE THAN HALF OF SCOTS WANT LOCKERBIE PROBE

MORE than half of Scots believe a Public Inquiry should be held into the Lockerbie bombing, according to an exclusive poll for the Scottish Sunday Express.

Our figures also reveal that most people do not believe Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi was guilty of Britain’s worst terror attack, despite being convicted by a Scottish court.

For the first time, a majority of Scots also back Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill’s controversial decision to send Megrahi home to Tripoli to die from terminal prostate cancer.

This reverses the findings of most previous polls and comes after new television footage last week showed the Libyan looking frail and close to death.

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was among the 270 victims of the 1988 bombing, said yesterday: “This is hugely encouraging. We have the right to know who really murdered our loved one.”

The poll of 500 people, carried out on Thursday and Friday, also found that 35 per cent do not believe Megrahi was guilty, while 32 per cent believe he was and 33 per cent do not know.

The 59-year-old father of five has always protested his innocence and abandoned a second appeal against his conviction just days before his release on health grounds in August 2009.

He was given leave to appeal after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled in 2007 that he may have been the victim a miscarriage of justice.

In a major boost for the Scottish Government, the poll also reveals that 51 per cent of Scots agreed with the decision to free Megrahi on compassionate grounds, with 49 per cent still opposed.

This is a significant increase on the 42 per cent who agreed with Mr MacAskill in 2009 and the 34 per cent who agreed before the dying Libyan’s latest television appearance.

A Scottish Government spokesman said last night: “Whether people support or oppose the decision, it was made following the due process of Scots Law, we stand by it, and Megrahi is dying of terminal prostate cancer.”

However, it is the widespread backing for a Public Inquiry – the first time that public opinion has ever been tested on this issue – that is likely to have the most political impact.

The Holyrood Justice Committee is due to consider a petition calling for a probe, backed by figures such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former MP Tam Dalyell and Cardinal Keith O’Brien.

Dr Swire, one of the architects of the petition, said: “This is hugely interesting, valuable and encouraging. It is terrific that the message is getting out there.

“The Public Inquiry is not for the relatives of those that died, it is for the people of Scotland. They deserve and badly need to be told what has been going on.

“Namely, that their justice system has been made use of by another country – mostly America, although Westminster was conniving away on Washington’s behalf – for politically desired ends, turning the spotlight away from Iran and Syria ahead of the Gulf War.”

Professor Robert Black, who designed the unique Lockerbie trial under Scots Law at Camp Zeist in Holland and has protested Megrahi’s innocence ever since, said he was “delighted” by the support for an inquiry.

“This is the first such poll that I am aware of,” he said. “It certainly helps our campaign as there must come a point where the disquiet about the conviction becomes so great that they can’t go on stonewalling.”

The Justice For Megrahi campaign secretary Robert Forrester said the poll could help sway the Justice Committee – which is chaired by MSP Christine Grahame, a long-standing supporter of Megrahi’s innocence.

He said: “We are up against the Scottish Government and the Lord Advocate and it takes such a long time to go even a short distance, so it is very refreshing to see the Scottish public is on our side.”

Despite the poll findings, a Scottish Government spokesman said they stood by Megrahi’s conviction and had no intention of setting a Public Inquiry.

He added: “We do not doubt Megrahi’s guilt. Scotland’s justice system has been dealing with the Lockerbie atrocity for nearly 23 years, and in every regard the due process of Scots Law has been followed – in terms of the investigation, prosecution, imprisonment, rejection of the prisoner transfer application and granting of compassionate release.

“Given the international dimensions of the Lockerbie atrocity, we always said any inquiry would be beyond the remit of the Scottish Parliament and Government and would have to be international in nature.”

By Ben Borland

4 September 2011

@express.co.uk

THE  MCP  AND  THE  INDEPENDENCE  MOVEMENT

Dr. Ranjit Singh Malhi (The Sun 14 September) raises some important points about the Malayan Communist Party and left-wing nationalism.

It is true that the MCP’s armed challenge expedited the British plan to grant Independence to our country, though Malaya was in the fifties one of Britain’s most lucrative colonies. It was also one of the reasons why the Malay elite liberalised the terms of citizenship for the recently domiciled immigrant population.

But whatever the MCP’s impact, it should not obscure our understanding of the ethnic character of the movement. The MCP was the only preponderantly non-indigenous communist party in Southeast Asia. It was China oriented both in letter and spirit. The party even mirrored the splits and schisms in the Chinese Communist Party and in Chinese politics as a whole.

This is why when the MCP directed Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) attempted to gain control of a number of towns in Malaya through force at the end of the Japanese Occupation of the country in 1945, it was perceived by the Malays as a Chinese bid to usurp power. It was a perception that became even stronger during the period of the armed communist insurgency from 1948 to 1960. It has had a profound effect upon ethnic relations in Malaysia.

It was this — an ethnic character that was at variance with the cultural ethos of the land— and not its ideology per se or its use of violence which made the MCP unique. After all, radical left parties that chose to resort to arms were part of the freedom struggle of a number of countries in Asia and Africa. Whatever our feelings about their ideology or their political methods, we should not deny them their rightful place in history.

By the same token, the contributions of the Left in our own quest for Independence, as Ranjit rightly argues, should be given due emphasis in our history textbooks. The Left had preceded UMNO and the Alliance not only in its call for Merdeka but also in pioneering an inter-ethnic coalition immediately after the Second World War. In similar vein, Islamic writers and preachers who began articulating their thoughts about colonialism, freedom and justice in different parts of the Malay Peninsula even before the Left should also be readily acknowledged. Equally important, an inclusive approach to our history will also recognise the role of freedom fighters in Sabah and Sarawak.

Chandra Muzaffar

Kuala Lumpur.

15 September 2011.

Looking Back On 9/11 A Decade Later , Was There An Alternative?

We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1st, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” Eric Margolis writes. “‘Bleeding the U.S.,’ in his words.” The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap… Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction… may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States” — particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.

That Washington was bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s fervent wishes was evident at once. As discussed in my book 9-11, written shortly after those attacks occurred, anyone with knowledge of the region could recognize “that a massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and his associates, and would lead the U.S. and its allies into a ‘diabolical trap,’ as the French foreign minister put it.”

The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that “bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world,” and largely succeeded: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.

The First 9/11

Was there an alternative? There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11. The “crime against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered.

In 9-11, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the “horrendous crime” of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty,” an accurate judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists — call them “the Kandahar boys” — who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.

Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment. It happened. The only inaccuracy in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the U.S. succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s brutal regime in office. The goal, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us” to take over their own resources and in other ways to pursue an intolerable policy of independent development. In the background was the conclusion of the National Security Council that, if the US could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.”

The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” as Henry Kissinger assured his boss a few days later.

These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. The first 9/11 was just one act in a drama which began in 1962, when John F. Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” — an anachronistic holdover from World War II — to “internal security,” a concept with a chilling interpretation in U.S.-dominated Latin American circles.

In the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that from that time to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites,” including many religious martyrs and mass slaughter as well, always supported or initiated in Washington. The last major violent act was the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The perpetrators were an elite Salvadorean battalion, which had already left a shocking trail of blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of Special Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the U.S. client state.

The consequences of this hemispheric plague still, of course, reverberate.

From Kidnapping and Torture to Assassination

All of this, and much more like it, is dismissed as of little consequence, and forgotten. Those whose mission is to rule the world enjoy a more comforting picture, articulated well enough in the current issue of the prestigious (and valuable) journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. The lead article discusses “the visionary international order” of the “second half of the twentieth century” marked by “the universalization of an American vision of commercial prosperity.” There is something to that account, but it does not quite convey the perception of those at the wrong end of the guns.

The same is true of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which brings to an end at least a phase in the “war on terror” re-declared by President George W. Bush on the second 9/11. Let us turn to a few thoughts on that event and its significance.

On May 1, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in his virtually unprotected compound by a raiding mission of 79 Navy SEALs, who entered Pakistan by helicopter. After many lurid stories were provided by the government and withdrawn, official reports made it increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law, beginning with the invasion itself.

There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 79 commandos facing no opposition — except, they report, from his wife, also unarmed, whom they shot in self-defense when she “lunged” at them, according to the White House.

A plausible reconstruction of the events is provided by veteran Middle East correspondent Yochi Dreazen and colleagues in the Atlantic. Dreazen, formerly the military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is senior correspondent for the National Journal Group covering military affairs and national security. According to their investigation, White House planning appears not to have considered the option of capturing bin Laden alive: “The administration had made clear to the military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.”

The authors add: “For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency who had spent nearly a decade hunting bin Laden, killing the militant was a necessary and justified act of vengeance.” Furthermore, “capturing bin Laden alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome legal and political challenges.” Better, then, to assassinate him, dumping his body into the sea without the autopsy considered essential after a killing — an act that predictably provoked both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

As the Atlantic inquiry observes, “The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration’s counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.” That is one significant difference between Bush and Obama. The authors quote former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who “told German TV that the U.S. raid was ‘quite clearly a violation of international law’ and that bin Laden should have been detained and put on trial,” contrasting Schmidt with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who “defended the decision to kill bin Laden although he didn’t pose an immediate threat to the Navy SEALs, telling a House panel… that the assault had been ‘lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way.’”

The disposal of the body without autopsy was also criticized by allies. The highly regarded British barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who supported the intervention and opposed the execution largely on pragmatic grounds, nevertheless described Obama’s claim that “justice was done” as an “absurdity” that should have been obvious to a former professor of constitutional law. Pakistan law “requires a colonial inquest on violent death, and international human rights law insists that the ‘right to life’ mandates an inquiry whenever violent death occurs from government or police action. The U.S. is therefore under a duty to hold an inquiry that will satisfy the world as to the true circumstances of this killing.”

Robertson usefully reminds us that “[i]t was not always thus. When the time came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness than Osama bin Laden — the Nazi leadership — the British government wanted them hanged within six hours of capture. President Truman demurred, citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson that summary execution ‘would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride… the only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear.’”

Eric Margolis comments that “Washington has never made public the evidence of its claim that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks,” presumably one reason why “polls show that fully a third of American respondents believe that the U.S. government and/or Israel were behind 9/11,” while in the Muslim world skepticism is much higher. “An open trial in the U.S. or at the Hague would have exposed these claims to the light of day,” he continues, a practical reason why Washington should have followed the law.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In June 2002, FBI head Robert Mueller, in what the Washington Post described as “among his most detailed public comments on the origins of the attacks,” could say only that “investigators believe the idea of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, the actual plotting was done in Germany, and the financing came through the United Arab Emirates from sources in Afghanistan.”

What the FBI believed and thought in June 2002 they didn’t know eight months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know) to permit a trial of bin Laden if they were presented with evidence. Thus, it is not true, as President Obama claimed in his White House statement after bin Laden’s death, that “[w]e quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda.”

There has never been any reason to doubt what the FBI believed in mid-2002, but that leaves us far from the proof of guilt required in civilized societies — and whatever the evidence might be, it does not warrant murdering a suspect who could, it seems, have been easily apprehended and brought to trial. Much the same is true of evidence provided since. Thus, the 9/11 Commission provided extensive circumstantial evidence of bin Laden’s role in 9/11, based primarily on what it had been told about confessions by prisoners in Guantanamo. It is doubtful that much of that would hold up in an independent court, considering the ways confessions were elicited. But in any event, the conclusions of a congressionally authorized investigation, however convincing one finds them, plainly fall short of a sentence by a credible court, which is what shifts the category of the accused from suspect to convicted.

There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that was a boast, not a confession, with as much credibility as my “confession” that I won the Boston marathon. The boast tells us a lot about his character, but nothing about his responsibility for what he regarded as a great achievement, for which he wanted to take credit.

Again, all of this is, transparently, quite independent of one’s judgments about his responsibility, which seemed clear immediately, even before the FBI inquiry, and still does.

Crimes of Aggression

It is worth adding that bin Laden’s responsibility was recognized in much of the Muslim world, and condemned. One significant example is the distinguished Lebanese cleric Sheikh Fadlallah, greatly respected by Hizbollah and Shia groups generally, outside Lebanon as well. He had some experience with assassinations. He had been targeted for assassination: by a truck bomb outside a mosque, in a CIA-organized operation in 1985. He escaped, but 80 others were killed, mostly women and girls as they left the mosque — one of those innumerable crimes that do not enter the annals of terror because of the fallacy of “wrong agency.” Sheikh Fadlallah sharply condemned the 9/11 attacks.

One of the leading specialists on the Jihadi movement, Fawaz Gerges, suggests that the movement might have been split at that time had the U.S. exploited the opportunity instead of mobilizing the movement, particularly by the attack on Iraq, a great boon to bin Laden, which led to a sharp increase in terror, as intelligence agencies had anticipated. At the Chilcot hearings investigating the background to the invasion of Iraq, for example, the former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 testified that both British and U.S. intelligence were aware that Saddam posed no serious threat, that the invasion was likely to increase terror, and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had radicalized parts of a generation of Muslims who saw the military actions as an “attack on Islam.” As is often the case, security was not a high priority for state action.

It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos had landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial rites, of course). Uncontroversially, he was not a “suspect” but the “decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq — that is, to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country and its national heritage, and the murderous sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything attributed to bin Laden.

To say that all of this is uncontroversial, as it is, is not to imply that it is not denied. The existence of flat earthers does not change the fact that, uncontroversially, the earth is not flat. Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for horrendous crimes, though loyalists deny it. All of this should, again, be too obvious for comment, and would be, except in an atmosphere of hysteria so extreme that it blocks rational thought.

Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the “supreme international crime” — the crime of aggression. That crime was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg. An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “[i]nvasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State ….” No one, even the most extreme supporter of the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.

We might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg on the principle of universality: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

It is also clear that announced intentions are irrelevant, even if they are truly believed. Internal records reveal that Japanese fascists apparently did believe that, by ravaging China, they were laboring to turn it into an “earthly paradise.” And although it may be difficult to imagine, it is conceivable that Bush and company believed they were protecting the world from destruction by Saddam’s nuclear weapons. All irrelevant, though ardent loyalists on all sides may try to convince themselves otherwise.

We are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty of the “supreme international crime” including all the evils that follow, or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were a farce and the allies were guilty of judicial murder.

The Imperial Mentality and 9/11

A few days before the bin Laden assassination, Orlando Bosch died peacefully in Florida, where he resided along with his accomplice Luis Posada Carriles and many other associates in international terrorism. After he was accused of dozens of terrorist crimes by the FBI, Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by Bush I over the objections of the Justice Department, which found the conclusion “inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch.” The coincidence of these deaths at once calls to mind the Bush II doctrine — “already… a de facto rule of international relations,” according to the noted Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison — which revokes “the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists.”

Allison refers to the pronouncement of Bush II, directed at the Taliban, that “those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves.” Such states, therefore, have lost their sovereignty and are fit targets for bombing and terror — for example, the state that harbored Bosch and his associate. When Bush issued this new “de facto rule of international relations,” no one seemed to notice that he was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and the murder of its criminal presidents.

None of this is problematic, of course, if we reject Justice Jackson’s principle of universality, and adopt instead the principle that the U.S. is self-immunized against international law and conventions — as, in fact, the government has frequently made very clear.

It is also worth thinking about the name given to the bin Laden operation: Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound that few seem able to perceive that the White House is glorifying bin Laden by calling him “Geronimo” — the Apache Indian chief who led the courageous resistance to the invaders of Apache lands.

The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk… We might react differently if the Luftwaffe had called its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

The examples mentioned would fall under the category of “American exceptionalism,” were it not for the fact that easy suppression of one’s own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are not defeated and forced to acknowledge reality.

Perhaps the assassination was perceived by the administration as an “act of vengeance,” as Robertson concludes. And perhaps the rejection of the legal option of a trial reflects a difference between the moral culture of 1945 and today, as he suggests. Whatever the motive was, it could hardly have been security. As in the case of the “supreme international crime” in Iraq, the bin Laden assassination is another illustration of the important fact that security is often not a high priority for state action, contrary to received doctrine.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous bestselling political works, including 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (Seven Stories Press), an updated version of his classic account, just being published this week with a major new essay — from which this post was adapted — considering the 10 years since the 9/11 attacks.

By Noam Chomsky

06 September 2011

@ aTomDispatch.com

Noam Chomsky’s official left narrative on 9/11.

Libyan Humanitarian Disaster Deepens

The humanitarian crisis in Libya is deepening as NATO-backed forces of the National Transitional Council (NTC) continue their offensive to crush forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, with the assistance of NATO bombing and special forces troops.

Yesterday AFP reported artillery fire as NTC prepared to attack Surt, Gaddafi’s home city in the center of Libya’s Mediterranean coast. Surt was heavily bombed on Sunday, with NATO concentrating most of its 52 airstrikes on Libya that day on the city.

NTC spokesman Abdulrahman Busin said that talks with loyalists in Surt were continuing, after breaking down when Moussa Ibrahim—a top Gaddafi official—demanded that NTC forces disarm before entering the city.

NTC forces were also observing a tenuous, weeklong truce in their offensive against Bani Walid, a city at a strategic crossroads connecting Misrata and Tripoli to the inland areas. NTC fighters said they suspected leading Gaddafi officials might be there. They have cut off water and electricity supplies to the city, and are reportedly using re-establishment of utilities as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

The location of Gaddafi himself, like that of his son Saif al-Islam, is unknown. There were some reports that he might have fled in a large convoy of Libyan military vehicles spotted in the city of Agadez in neighboring Niger, apparently heading for that country’s capital, Niamey. Abdoulaye Harouna, the owner of an Agadez newspaper, reported that Tuareg rebel leader Rissa ag Boula, who had found refuge in Gaddafi’s Libya after mounting a failed bid for independence in Niger, was at the head of the convoy.

Military sources in France, the former colonial power in Niger, told Le Monde that the convoy was part of a plan to transport Gaddafi and Saif al-Islam to political asylum in Burkina Faso, and that France was arranging negotiations between the NTC and Gaddafi officials. Officials in Niger denied that Gaddafi was in the convoy, however, and Burkina Faso claimed to have no information on the arrival of the convoy on its soil.

US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland confirmed the departure of the convoy to Niger, including “some dozen or more senior members of the regime,” but did not confirm that Gaddafi was in the convoy. Officials at NATO headquarters in Brussels and NATO’s Libya war command center in Naples declined to comment. However, given the intense ground surveillance carried out by NATO during its bombing, NATO would be well aware of its location and size.

Conditions in Tripoli—the Libyan capital now tenuously held by NTC forces—are also extremely tense. Water engineers are working to repair the Great Man-Made River project, which brought water to the city’s 1.8 million residents as well as to neighboring cities, until it was cut off by NATO bombings in late July and the rebel offensive in August. Engineers said they hoped their repairs had restored water to 70 percent of Tripoli’s residents.

Of particular concern are reports of mass racist reprisals in Libya against black African immigrants, often accused of being mercenaries of Gaddafi fighting against the NTC.

However, the vast majority are menial laborers who came to work in Libya, whose economy is relatively prosperous due to its massive oil reserves. Human Rights Watch (HRW) official Peter Bouckaert, who told the New York Times that HRW had visited several jails for African migrants, explained: “It is very clear to us that most of those detained were not soldiers and have never held a gun in their life.”

In fact, somewhere between 1 million and 2 million African immigrants found work in Libya. Already in 2000 they were the target of race riots, and they are now at risk of arbitrary detention or worse. These events expose the hypocrisy of pro-imperialist claims that the NATO intervention in Libya aimed to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and promote democracy.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issued a statement declaring: “The ICRC is concerned about the stigmatization of sub-Saharan Africans and certain Libyan communities in Tripoli and elsewhere in the country.”

Despite the Western media’s broad support for the NTC, its accounts make clear the role of the right-wing NTC “rebel” victory in encouraging the abuse of African migrants. The New York Times noted, “With thousands of semi-independent rebel fighters still roaming the streets for any hidden threats, though, controlling the impulse to round up migrants may not be easy.”

Lynchings of African migrants also accompanied the takeover of the eastern city of Benghazi by the NTC this winter.

Press accounts mentioned a group of 1,200 migrant workers, women, and children trapped in the southern desert town of Sabha, long a loyalist stronghold but now threatened by the spread of fighting; another group of 1,000 black Africans who have taken refuge in a military port at Sidi Bilal, west of Tripoli; a group of 240 Sudanese oil workers stranded in the town of Brega; and a group of 700 migrants held by “rebel” authorities in a new prison facility in Tripoli, as part of a prison population of African migrants in that city numbering in the thousands.

A construction worker from Niger, hiding in a rusted ship in the port of Sidi Bilal after being attacked and having his savings and telephone stolen from him, told Le Figaro: “It was already not very fun to live in Libya before the war. We were not treated well. Sometimes our wages were not paid, people threw stones at us in the street, or we were arrested by police for no reason. Now that there is the war, however, it is even worse.”

Nigeria has issued a formal protest to the NTC, Britain, and France over reports of the killing of its citizens. Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs Olugbenga Ashiru called on the NTC to “check these excesses” after noting reports that “revealed killings, rape, and extortion of money from these helpless Africans who have taken refuge in camps as well as those in detention and incarceration.”

By Alex Lantier

7 September 2011

@ WSWS.org