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Libyan cultural heritage in danger of going the Iraqi way

Libya’s priceless historical heritage is in danger of being destroyed in the same way Iraq’s cultural riches perished during the United States invasion, a Russian expert on West Asia has warned.

Nikolai Sologubovsky, Orientalist, writer and film-maker, said massive looting and destruction of ancient artefacts was underway in Libya.

Being shipped to Europe

“The al-Jamahiriya National Museum in Tripoli has been looted and antiquities are being shipped out by sea to Europe,” the scholar told Russian television.

The National Museum houses some of Libya’s most treasured archaeological and historical heritage. The collection includes invaluable samples of Neolithic, prehistoric, Berber, Garamantian, Phoenician, Punic, Greek, Roman and Byzantine culture.

Mr. Sologubovsky, who studied Libya’s archeological sites and spent several months in Libya this year as a correspondent for a Moscow tabloid, said cave paintings in the Acacus Mountains that go back 14,000 years were being destroyed by looters.

“They press silk cloth soaked in special chemical solution against rock frescoes and the paint sticks to the cloth and comes off the cave wall,” he said.

NATO bombing

The scholar accused NATO forces of destroying some of Libya’s most spectacular architectural sites.

“NATO aircraft have bombed Leptis Magna and Sabratha under the pretext that Qadhafi forces were hiding weapons there,” said Mr. Sologobovsky, who is deputy head of a Russian committee of solidarity with the people of Libya and Syria set up earlier this year.

Leptis Magna was one of the most beautiful cities of the Roman Empire and Sabratha was a Phoenician trading post. Both are more than 2,500 years old, and are on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. Following their bombing by NATO aircraft on August 16 and 17, Mr. Sologubovsky wrote:

“NATO is acting with complete impunity and is methodically turning defiant Libya into desert.”

Earlier this summer, the government in Tripoli asked Egypt and other neighbouring countries to block the smuggling of artefacts from Libya, but the looting continued unabated. Egypt’s own cultural treasures were plundered when looters ransacked archaeological sites, carrying away over 1,000 artefacts, and stole a statue of King Tutankhamun and dozens of other precious objects from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo during the “Arab Spring” revolution.

Last week, the United Nation’s cultural body called for protection of Libya’s “invaluable cultural heritage” and warned international art dealers and museums to look out for artefacts that may have been looted from Libya.

UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said in a statement that dealers should be “particularly wary of objects from Libya in the present circumstances.”

“Experience shows that there is a serious danger of destruction during times of social upheaval,” the UNESCO chief said, “It has taught us to look out for looting by unscrupulous individuals, that often damages the integrity of artefacts and of archaeological sites.”

Mr. Sologubovsky said the UNESCO appeal came too late, too little.

“Plunder of Libya’s cultural heritage has been going on since February. I’m afraid it faces the same tragic fate as Iraq’s antiquities, which were plundered by the victorious U.S. military,” said the Russian scholar.

By Vladimir Radyuhin

31 August 2011

@ The Hindu

Libya, Oil, And The New Scramble For Africa

Is current U.S. foreign policy in Africa following a blueprint drawn up almost eight years ago by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, one of the most conservative think tanks in the world? Although it seems odd that a Democratic administration would have anything in common with the extremists at Heritage, the convergence in policy and practice between the two is disturbing.

Heritage, with help from Joseph Coors and the Scaife Foundations, was founded in 1973 by the late Paul Weyrich, one of the most conservative thinkers in the United States and a co-founder of the Moral Majority.

In October 2003, James Carafano and Nile Gardiner, two Heritage Foundation heavyweights, proposed a major shift in U.S. military policy vis-à-vis the African continent.

In a “Backgrounder” article entitled “U.S. Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution,” the two called for the creation of a military command for the continent, a focus on fighting “terrorism,” and direct military intervention using air power and naval forces if “vital U.S. interests are at stake.” Such interventions, they wrote, should include allies and avoid using ground troops.

Almost every element of that proposal has come together over the past year, though some pieces, like the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative, were in place before the Obama administration took office.

Libya and Oil

The Libya war seems almost straight off Heritage’s drawing board. Although the United States appeared to take a back seat to its allies, NATO would not have been able to carry out the war without massive amounts of U.S. military help. U.S. Special Forces and CIA teams, along with special units from Britain, France, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, organized the rebels, coordinated air strikes, and eventually pulled off an amphibious operation that sealed Tripoli’s fate.

The Heritage scholars were also clear what they meant by vital U.S. interests: “With its vast natural and mineral resources, Africa remains strategically important to the West, as it has been for hundreds of years, and its geostrategic significance is likely to rise in the 21st century. According to the National Intelligence Council, the United States is likely to draw 25 percent of its oil from West Africa by 2015, surpassing the volume imported from the Persian Gulf.”

It was a sentiment shared by the Bush Administration. “West Africa’s oil has become a national strategic interest,” said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Walter Kansteiner in 2002.

The UN tasked NATO with protecting civilians in Libya, but France, Britain, the United States, and their Gulf allies focused on regime change. Indeed, when leaders of the African Union (AU) pushed for negotiations aimed at a political settlement, NATO and the rebels brusquely dismissed them.

The NATO bombing “really undermined the AU’s initiatives and effort to deal with the matter in Libya,” complained South African President Jacob Zuma. More than 200 prominent Africans released a letter on August 24 condemning the “misuse of the United Nations Security Council to engage in militarized diplomacy to effect regime change in Libya,” as well as the “marginalization of the African Union.”

The suspicion that the Libya war had more to do with oil and gas than protecting civilians is why the AU has balked at recognizing the rebel Transitional National Council, and there is a growing unease at the West’s “militarized diplomacy.”

Protecting Energy Supplies

Through the Defense Department’s African Contingency Operation Training and Assistance Program, the United States is actively engaged in training the militaries of Mali, Chad, Niger, Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Gabon, Zambia, Uganda, Senegal, Mozambique, Ghana, Malawi, and Mauritania.

In June 2006, NATO troops stormed ashore on Sao Vicente island in the Cape Verde archipelago, an exercise aimed at “protecting energy supplies” in the Niger Delta and Gulf of Guinea.

Major oil producers in the region include Angola, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, and Mauritania.

Protecting energy supplies from whom?

In the case of the Niger Delta, it means protecting oil companies and the Nigerian government from local people fed up with the pollution that is killing them and the corruption that denies them any benefits from their resources. Under the umbrella of the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), locals are waging a low-key guerilla war that at one point reduced oil supplies by 20 percent.

MEND is certainly suspicious of American motives in the region. “Of course, it is evident that oil is the key concern of the United States in establishing its Africa Command,” says the organization’s spokesman, Jomo Gbomo.

The Nigerian government labels a number of restive groups in Nigeria as “terrorist” and links them to al-Qaeda, including Boko Haram in the country’s north. But labeling opponents “terrorists” or raising the al-Qaeda specter is an easy way to dismiss what may be real local grievances. For instance, Boko Haram’s growing penchant for violence is more likely a response to the heavy-handedness of the Nigerian army than an al-Qaeda-inspired campaign.

Corporate Interests

The protection of civilians may be the public rationale for intervention, but the bottom line looks suspiciously like business. Before the guns have even gone silent in Libya, one British business leader has complained to The Independent that Britain is behind the curve on securing opportunities. “It‘s all politics, no commercial stuff. I think that is a mistake. We need to be getting down there as soon as possible,”

The Spanish oil company Repsol and the Italian company Eni are already gearing up for production. “Eni will play a No.1 role in the future,” says Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini. Almost 70 percent of Libya’s oil goes to four countries: Spain, Germany, France, and Italy. Qatar, which is already handing oil sales in Eastern Libya, will also be on the ground floor as production ramps up.

A major loser in the war—and some would argue, not by accident—is China. Beijing, which accounted for about 11 percent of Libya’s pre-war exports, had some 75 companies working in Libya and 36,000 personnel. But because China complained that NATO had unilaterally changed the UN resolution from protecting civilians to regime change, Beijing is likely to suffer. Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager of the rebel oil firm AGOCO told Reuters that China, Brazil, and Russia would be frozen out of contracts.

Brazil and Russia also supported negotiations and complained about NATO’s interpretation of the UN resolution on Libya.

For Heritage, keeping China out of Africa is what it is all about. Peter Brookes, the former principal Republican advisor for East Asia on the House Committee on International Relations, warned that China was hell-bent on challenging the United States and becoming a global power, and key to that is expanding its interests in Africa. “In a throwback to the Maoist revolutionary days of the 1960s and 1970s and the Cold War, Beijing has once again identified the African continent as an area of strategic interest,” he told a Heritage Foundation audience in a talk entitled “Into Africa: China’s Grab for Influence and Oil.”

Beijing gets about one third of its oil from Africa—Angola and Sudan are its major suppliers—plus important materials like platinum, copper, timber, and iron ore.

Africa is rife with problems, but terrorism is not high on that list. A severe drought has blistered much of East Africa, and with food prices rising, malnutrition is spreading continent-wide. The “war on terrorism” has generated 800,000 refugees from Somalia. African civilians do indeed need help, but not the kind you get from fighter-bombers, drone strikes, or Tomahawk cruise missiles dispatched at the urging of right-wing think tanks or international energy companies.

By Conn Hallinan

14 September, 2011

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist. Hallinan is also a columnist for the Berkeley Daily Planet, and an occasional free lance medical policy writer. He is a recipient of a Project Censored “Real News Award.” He formally ran the journalism program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he was also a college provost. He can be reached at: ringoanne@sbcglobal.net

© 2011 Foreign Policy in Focus

Libya’s Next Fight: Overcoming Western Designs

At a press conference in Tripoli on Aug. 26, a statement read aloud by top Libyan rebel commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj was reassuring. Just a few months ago, disorganized and leaderless rebel fighters seemed to have little chance at ousting Libyan dictator Moammar Ghaddafi and his unruly sons.

But despite vague references to “pockets of resistance” throughout Tripoli, and stiffer battles elsewhere, Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) is moving forward to extend its rule as the caretaker of Libyan affairs. In his conference, Belhadj declared full control over Tripoli, and the unification of all rebel fighter groups under the command of the military council.

Listening to upbeat statements by rebel military commanders, and optimistic assessments of NTC members, one gets the impression that the future of Libya is being entirely formulated by the new Libyan leadership. Arab media, lead by Al Jazeera, seemed at times to entirely neglect that there was a third and most powerful party involved in the battle between freedom-seeking Libyans and the obstinate dictator. It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose decisive and financially costly military intervention was not charitable, nor was it a moral act. It was a politically and strategically calculated endeavor, with multifaceted objectives that simply cannot be scrutinized in one article.

However, one needs to follow the intense discussion under way in Western media to realize the nature of NATO’s true intentions, their expectations and the bleak possibilities awaiting Libya if the new leadership doesn’t quickly remove itself from this dangerous NATO alliance.

While Libyans fought against brutality, guided by a once distant hope of freedom, democracy and liberation from the grip of a clownish and delusional dictator, NATO calculations had nothing but a self-serving agenda in mind.

In his brilliant and newly released book, “Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Game,” Eric Walberg astutely charts NATO’s role following the end of the Cold War. NATO “has become the centerpiece of the (U.S.) empire’s military presence around the world, moving quickly to respond to U.S. needs to intervene where the U.N. won’t as in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya.”

The massive NATO expansion in the last two decades, to include new members, to enter into new “Partnerships for Peace,” and to carry out various “Dialogue” with entities outside its immediate geographic sphere required the constant reinvention of NATO and the redefinition of its role around the globe. “NATO’s victory” in Libya — a “regime change from the air” as described by some — is certain to ignite the imagination of the relatively dormant neoconservative ideas of regime change at any cost.

Indeed, it might not be long before NATO’s intervention in Libya becomes a political-military doctrine in its own right. U.S. President Barack Obama, and other Western leaders are already offering clues regarding the nature of that doctrine. In a statement issued Aug. 22 from Martha’s Vineyard, where Obama was vacationing, the U.S. president said: “NATO has once more proven that it is the most capable alliance in the world and that its strength comes from both its firepower and the power of our democratic ideals.” It’s difficult to underline with any certainty how this gung-ho mentality coupled with democracy rhetoric is any different from President George W. Bush’s justification of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many commentators in the U.S. and other NATO countries are already treating Libya as another military conquest, similar to that of Afghanistan and Iraq, a claim that Libyans would find most objectionable. Such ideas are not forged haphazardly, however, since the language used by NATO leaders and their treatment of post-Ghaddafi Libya seem largely consistent with their attitude toward other invaded Muslim countries.

In a written statement cited widely in the media, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began laying down the rules, by which the “new Libya” will be judged before the international community (meaning the U.S., NATO and their allies.)

“We will look to them to ensure that Libya fulfills its treaty responsibilities, that it ensures that its weapons stockpiles do not threaten its neighbors or fall into the wrong hands, and that it takes a firm stand against violent extremism.”

Worse, the al-Qaida card had already been placed into NATO’s new game. The centrality of that card will be determined based on the political attitude of the new Libyan leadership.

The insinuation of al-Qaida’s involvement in the Libyan uprising is not new, of course; it dates back to March when “top NATO commander and U.S. Adm. James Stavridis said he had seen ‘flickers’ of an al-Qaida presence among the rebels,” reported the British Telegraph (Aug. 26).

Now, Algeria, a U.S.-ally in the so-called war on terror is waving that very card to justify its refusal to recognize the NTC.

Injection of “fighting extremism” as a condition for further U.S. and NATO support, and the refusal of access to tens of billions of dollars in Western bank accounts, could prove the biggest challenge to the new Libyan leadership, one that is greater than Ghaddafi’s audio rants or any other.

NATO understands well that a “failure” in its new Libya project could spoil a whole array of interests in the Arab region, and could hinder future use of Obama’s blend of firepower and democracy ideals. Mainstream intellectuals are busy drawing parallels between Libya and other NATO adventures.

John F. Burns, writing in the New York Times (Aug. 22), discussed some of the seemingly eerie similarities between post-Ghaddafi Libya and post-Saddam Iraq. In an article titled: “Parallels Between Qaddafi and Hussein Raise Anxiety for Western Leaders,” Burns wrote: “The list (of parallels between both experiences) sounded like a rule book built on the mistakes critics have identified as central to the American experience in Iraq.” Burn’s line of logic is consistent with a whole new media discourse that is building momentum by the day.

Tuning back to Arabic media however, one is confronted with almost an entirely different discourse, one that refers to NATO as “friends,” to whom the Libyan people are “grateful” and “indebted.” Some pan-Arab TV channels have been more instrumental than others in introducing that faulty line of logic, which could ultimately bode terrible consequences for Syria, and eventually turn the Arab Spring into an infinite winter.

The Libya that inspired the world is capable of overcoming NATO’s stratagems, if it becomes aware of NATO’s true intentions in Libya and the desperate attempt to thwart or hijack Arab revolts.

By Ramzy Baroud

01 September 2011

Countercurrents.org

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), available on Amazon.com.

Libya And The World We Live In

“Why are you attacking us? Why are you killing our children? Why are you destroying our infrastructure?”

– Television address by Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi, April 30, 2011

A few hours later NATO hit a target in Tripoli, killing Gaddafi’s 29-year-old son Saif al-Arab, three of Gaddafi’s grandchildren, all under twelve years of age, and several friends and neighbors.

In his TV address, Gaddafi had appealed to the NATO nations for a cease-fire and negotiations after six weeks of bombings and cruise missile attacks against his country.

Well, let’s see if we can derive some understanding of the complex Libyan turmoil.

The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO and the European Union — recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, to whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, and call it whatever it wants, like “humanitarian”.

If The Holy Triumvirate decides that it doesn’t want to overthrow the government in Syria or in Egypt or Tunisia or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Jordan, no matter how cruel, oppressive, or religiously intolerant those governments are with their people, no matter how much they impoverish and torture their people, no matter how many protesters they shoot dead in their Freedom Square, the Triumvirate will simply not overthrow them.

If the Triumvirate decides that it wants to overthrow the government of Libya, though that government is secular and has used its oil wealth for the benefit of the people of Libya and Africa perhaps more than any government in all of Africa and the Middle East, but keeps insisting over the years on challenging the Triumvirate’s imperial ambitions in Africa and raising its demands on the Triumvirate’s oil companies, then the Triumvirate will simply overthrow the government of Libya.

If the Triumvirate wants to punish Gaddafi and his sons it will arrange with the Triumvirate’s friends at the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for them.

If the Triumvirate doesn’t want to punish the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan it will simply not ask the ICC to issue arrest warrants for them. Ever since the Court first formed in 1998, the United States has refused to ratify it and has done its best to denigrate it and throw barriers in its way because Washington is concerned that American officials might one day be indicted for their many war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bill Richardson, as US ambassador to the UN, said to the world in 1998 that the United States should be exempt from the court’s prosecution because it has “special global responsibilities”. But this doesn’t stop the United States from using the Court when it suits the purposes of American foreign policy.

If the Triumvirate wants to support a rebel military force to overthrow the government of Libya then it does not matter how fanatically religious, al-Qaeda-related,1 executing-beheading-torturing, monarchist, or factionally split various groups of that rebel force are at times, the Triumvirate will support it, as it did certain forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hope that after victory the Libyan force will not turn out as jihadist as it did in Afghanistan, or as fratricidal as in Iraq. One potential source of conflict within the rebels, and within the country if ruled by them, is that a constitutional declaration made by the rebel council states that, while guaranteeing democracy and the rights of non-Muslims, “Islam is the religion of the state and the principle source of legislation in Islamic Jurisprudence.”2

Adding to the list of the rebels’ charming qualities we have the Amnesty International report that the rebels have been conducting mass arrests of black people across the nation, terming all of them “foreign mercenaries” but with growing evidence that a large number were simply migrant workers. Reported Reuters (August 29): “On Saturday, reporters saw the putrefying bodies of 22 men of African origin on a Tripoli beach. Volunteers who had come to bury them said they were mercenaries whom rebels had shot dead.” To complete this portrait of the West’s newest darlings we have this report from The Independent of London (August 27): “The killings were pitiless. They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came.”

If the Triumvirate’s propaganda is clever enough and deceptive enough and paints a graphic picture of Gaddafi-initiated high tragedy in Libya, many American and European progressives will insist that though they never, ever support imperialism they’re making an exception this time because …

>> The Libyan people are being saved from a “massacre”, both actual and potential. This massacre, however, seems to have been grossly exaggerated by the Triumvirate, al Jazeera TV, and that station’s owner, the government of Qatar; and nothing approaching reputable evidence of a massacre has been offered, neither a mass grave or anything else; the massacre stories appear to be on a par with the Viagra-rape stories spread by al Jazeera (the Fox News of the Libyan uprising). Qatar, it should be noted, has played an active military role in the civil war on the side of NATO. It should be further noted that the main massacre in Libya has been six months of daily Triumvirate bombing, killing an unknown number of people and ruining much of the infrastructure. Michigan U. Prof. Juan Cole, the quintessential true-believer in the good intentions of American foreign policy who nevertheless manages to have a regular voice in progressive media, recently wrote that “Qaddafi was not a man to compromise … his military machine would mow down the revolutionaries if it were allowed to.” Is that clear, class? We all know of course that Sarkozy, Obama, and Cameron made compromises without end in their devastation of Libya; they didn’t, for example, use any nuclear weapons.

>> The United Nations gave its approval for military intervention; i.e., the leading members of the Triumvirate gave their approval, after Russia and China cowardly abstained instead of exercising their veto power; (perhaps hoping to receive the same courtesy from the US, UK and France when Russia or China is the aggressor nation).

>> The people of Libya are being “liberated”, whatever in the world that means, now or in the future. Gaddafi is a “dictator” they insist. That may indeed be the proper term to use for the man, but it must still be asked: Is he a relatively benevolent dictator or is he the other kind so favored by Washington? It must also be asked: Since the United States has habitually supported dictators for the entire past century, why not this one?

The Triumvirate, and its fawning media, would have the world believe that what’s happened in Libya is just another example of the Arab Spring, a popular uprising by non-violent protestors against a dictator for the proverbial freedom and democracy, spreading spontaneously from Tunisia and Egypt, which sandwich Libya. But there are several reasons to question this analysis in favor of seeing the Libyan rebels’ uprising as a planned and violent attempt to take power in behalf of their own political movement, however heterogeneous that movement might appear to be in its early stage. For example:

1. They soon began flying the flag of the monarchy that Gaddafi had overthrown

2. They were an armed and violent rebellion almost from the beginning; within a few days, we could read of “citizens armed with weapons seized from army bases”3 and of “the policemen who had participated in the clash were caught and hanged by protesters”4

3. Their revolt took place not in the capital but in the heart of the country’s oil region; they then began oil production and declared that foreign countries would be rewarded oil-wise in relation to how much each country aided their cause

4. They soon set up a Central Bank, a rather bizarre thing for a protest movement

5. International support came quickly, even beforehand, from Qatar and al Jazeera to the CIA and French intelligence

The notion that a leader does not have the right to put down an armed rebellion against the state is too absurd to discuss.

Not very long ago, Iraq and Libya were the two most modern and secular states in the Mideast/North Africa world with perhaps the highest standards of living in the region. Then the United States of America came along and saw fit to make a basket case of each one. The desire to get rid of Gaddafi had been building for years; the Libyan leader had never been a reliable pawn; then the Arab Spring provided the excellent opportunity and cover. As to Why? Take your pick of the following:

>> Gaddafi’s plans to conduct Libya’s trading in Africa in raw materials and oil in a new currency — the gold African dinar, a change that could have delivered a serious blow to the US’s dominant position in the world economy. (In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars; sanctions and an invasion followed.) For further discussion see here.

>> A host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: “We’ve got a big image problem down there. … Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don’t trust the US.”5

>> An American military base to replace the one closed down by Gaddafi after he took power in 1969. There’s only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It’ll perhaps be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.

>> Another example of NATO desperate to find a raison d’être for its existence since the end of the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact.

>> Gaddafi’s role in creating the African Union. The corporate bosses never like it when their wage slaves set up a union. The Libyan leader has also supported a United States of Africa for he knows that an Africa of 54 independent states will continue to be picked off one by one and abused and exploited by the members of the Triumvirate. Gaddafi has moreover demanded greater power for smaller countries in the United Nations.

>> The claim by Gaddafi’s son, Saif el Islam, that Libya had helped to fund Nicolas Sarkozy’s election campaign6 could have humiliated the French president and explain his obsessiveness and haste in wanting to be seen as playing the major role in implementing the “no fly zone” and other measures against Gaddafi. A contributing factor may have been the fact that France has been weakened in its former colonies and neo-colonies in Africa and the Middle East, due in part to Gaddafi’s influence.

>> Gaddafi has been an outstanding supporter of the Palestinian cause and critic of Israeli policies; and on occasion has taken other African and Arab countries, as well as the West, to task for their not matching his policies or rhetoric; one more reason for his lack of popularity amongst world leaders of all stripes.

>> In January, 2009, Gaddafi made known that he was considering nationalizing the foreign oil companies in Libya.7 He also has another bargaining chip: the prospect of utilizing Russian, Chinese and Indian oil companies. During the current period of hostilities, he invited these countries to make up for lost production. But such scenarios will now not take place. The Triumvirate will instead seek to privatize the National Oil Corporation, transferring Libya’s oil wealth into foreign hands.

>> The American Empire is troubled by any threat to its hegemony. In the present historical period the empire is concerned mainly with Russia and China. China has extensive energy investments and construction investments in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The average American neither knows nor cares about this. The average American imperialist cares greatly, if for no other reason than in this time of rising demands for cuts to the military budget it’s vital that powerful “enemies” be named and maintained.

>> For yet more reasons, see the article “Why Regime Change in Libya?” by Ismael Hossein-zadeh, and the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks — Wikileaks reference 07TRIPOLI967 11-15-07 (includes a complaint about Libyan “resource nationalism”)

A word from the man the world’s mightiest military powers have been trying to kill

“Recollections of My Life”, written by Col. Muammar Gaddafi, April 8, 2011, excerpts:

Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called “capitalism,” but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer, so, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following his path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us … I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it. … In the West, some have called me “mad”, “crazy”. They know the truth but continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip.

The state of our beloved capitalist system, early 21st century

I pay attention to the fat content of my food, so I was pleased to find a can of Pam canola oil cooking spray that had 0 grams fat per serving. Great, can’t do better than zero fat, can you? I used it often for a few months … until one day I took a closer look at the “Nutrition Facts” … Yes, it said 0 grams fat per serving. A serving. How big was that? Let’s see … “Serving Size about 1/4 second spray” … Hmmm, how does one press down on a button for 1/4 second? Is it humanly possible? Even the manufacturer had to say “about”. I had been taken. My hat is off to you Capitalist Robber Barons — You’re good!

The Dow Jones industrial average of blue-chip stocks fell 635 points on Monday August 8.

On Tuesday it rose by 430 points.

Wednesday, the market, in its infinite wisdom, decided to fall again; this time by 520 points.

And on Thursday … yes, it rose once again, by 423 points.

The Dow changed directions for eight consecutive trading sessions.

Upon such marvels of mankind countless people build careers, others wager their life savings, philanthropic foundations and universities risk much of their endowments, and conservative sages deliver sermons to the world on the wisdom and sacredness of the free market.

Do the economic fundamentals really change dramatically overnight? Or is our economic system as psycho as our foreign policy? The Washington Post’s senior economic columnist, Steven Pearlstein, wrote on August 14th of the four days described above: “I suppose there are some schnooks who actually believe that those wild swings in stock prices last week represented sober and serious concerns by thoughtful, sophisticated investors about the Treasury debt downgrade or European sovereign debt or a slowdown in global growth. But surely such perceptions don’t radically change each afternoon between 2 and 4:30, when the market averages last week were gyrating out of control.”

Last month “Pope Benedict XVI denounced the profit-at-all-cost mentality that he says is behind Europe’seconomic crisis” as he arrived in hard-hit Spain. “The economy doesn’t function with market self-regulation but needs an ethical reason to work for mankind,” he declared. “Man must be at the center of the economy, and the economy cannot be measured only by maximization of profit but rather according to the common good.”8

“I am a Marxist,” said the Dalai Lama last year. Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits.”9

“I don’t believe in anything,” said Barack Obama. “At least not really strongly.” (No, I made that one up.)

Perhaps the worst outcome of the United States “winning the Cold War” is that countless progressive people think there’s no alternative to the capitalist system. Seventy years of anti-communist education and media stamped in people’s minds a lasting association between socialism and what the Soviet Union called communism. Socialism meant a dictatorship, it meant Stalinist repression, a suffocating “command economy”, no freedom of enterprise, no freedom to change jobs, few avenues for personal expression, and other similar truths and untruths. This is a set of beliefs clung to even amongst many Americans opposed to US foreign policy. No matter how bad the economy is, Americans think, the only alternative available is something called “communism”, and they know how awful that is.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party USA has endorsed Barack Obama for re-election.10

Notes

1. For example, see: The Telegraph (London), August 30, 2011: “Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.” There is a plethora of other reports detailing the ties between the rebels and radical Islamist groups. ↩

2. Washington Post, August 31, 2011

3. McClatchy Newspapers, February 20, 2011 ↩

4. Wikipedia, Timeline of the 2011 Libyan civil war, February 19, 2011 ↩

5. The Guardian (London), June 25, 2007 ↩

6. The Guardian (London), March 16, 2011 ↩

7. Reuters, January 21, 2009 ↩

8. Associated Press, August 11, 2011 ↩

9. Agence France Presse, May 21, 2010↩

10. “Yikes! Look who just endorsed Obama for 4 more years”, WorldNetDaily, August 3 2011

By William Blum

1 September 2011

Killinghope.org

Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a quarter more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is double that of the United States. It uses three times as much coal and four times as much steel.

These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume conservatively that China’s economy slows from the 11 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then in 2035 income per person in China will reach the current U.S. level.

If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2035 China’s 1.38 billion people will use four fifths as much paper as is produced worldwide today. There go the world’s forests.

If Chinese grain consumption per person in 2035 were to equal the current U.S. level, China would need 1.5 billion tons of grain, nearly 70 percent of the 2.2 billion tons the world’s farmers now harvest each year.

If we assume that in 2035 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The entire world currently has just over one billion. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area equivalent to more than two thirds the land it currently has in rice.

By 2035 China would need 85 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 86 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world’s oil reserves.

What China is teaching us is that the western economic model—the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy—will not work for the world. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2035 is projected to have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy—one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. But can we muster the political will to translate this potential into reality?

By Lester Brown

16 September 2011

Earth Policy Institute

Lester Brown is an United States environmentalist, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C. BBC Radio commentator Peter Day calls him “one of the great pioneer environmentalists.”

Copyright © 2011 Earth Policy Institute

In Tel Aviv, An Arab Spring That Ignores The Arabs

No one could have ever predicted that a single act of protest — the self-immolation of a desperate Tunisian street vendor — would unleash a tidal wave of collective resistance and rebellion throughout North Africa and the Middle East, threatening to topple regimes that had long been considered permanent political players.

But perhaps the most surprising outcome of this regional groundswell of protest was to be seen in Israel where Jewish protesters held up placards and shouted slogans declaring that the revolutionary spirit of Cairo’s Tahrir Square had come to the streets of Tel Aviv. The Arab Spring, it seems, has turned into the Israeli Summer.

But how do the ongoing protests in Tel Aviv relate to the larger regional turmoil? What do the protests say about the current state of Zionism, and what do they mean for the occupation of Palestine? To answer these questions, one might begin by turning to a rather unexpected source: Israeli pop culture.

Zionism escapes unscathed

In 1984, Israeli rock musician Shalom Hanoch released his bestselling album Waiting for Messiah. Located squarely within the rock tradition of protest, the album was graced by an audacious piece of cover art: an extreme close-up of a filthy ashtray, overflowing with garbage and cigarette butts. It is as appropriate a metaphor as any for the true poverty that resides at the heart of the good life, for the grime undergirding the glamorous.

Further solidifying the album’s protest credentials is its title track which tells the tale of the fabled Jewish Messiah, who at long last arrives on earth. But his appearance in the world does not come as a happy occasion. Upon seeing the sad state of affairs that greets him in modern-day Israel, the intrepid, young Messiah does not fulfill any prophetic dreams. Instead, he throws himself from a rooftop, committing suicide on the pavement of a Tel Aviv street. “The Messiah is not coming,” Hanoch intones, his raspy voice accentuating the guttural sounds of Hebrew. “The Messiah is not even going to phone.”

But is the message of Waiting for Messiah really all that radical? Before embracing the song as a musical manifesto of leftist rebellion and revolt, one should delve a bit deeper. The lyrics suggest that the grievances leading to the Messiah’s suicidal plunge are entirely economic. Specifically cited is the mishandling of the Israeli stock market. One may thus surmise that the Messiah too was an unlucky investor.

Absent entirely from this picture are the Palestinians. They are relegated to the shadows — marginalized, obscured and forgotten. Thus, an image of protest is cultivated even if the thing that clearly demands the most protest — the ethnocentric Zionist state and its accompanying occupation of the Palestinian people — is not mentioned at all. It is as though everything can be criticized except for precisely that which matters most. In this fashion, protest — even that of an angry rock anthem — functions to perpetuate the very status quo it purports to be against. At the end of the day, Zionism escapes unscathed.

Revolt against neoliberalism

The recent protests that have erupted in Israel should be understood in the exact same fashion. Stationed in a makeshift tent city on Tel Aviv’s swanky Rothschild Boulevard, the protesters’ demands are strikingly similar to those voiced by their Arab neighbors: affordable housing, cheaper food and gasoline, higher wages and an end to the deterioration of the country’s health and education systems.

According to prominent Middle East labor historian Joel Beinin, “The Arab awakening is in part a rebellion against the neoliberal development model, even if it is rarely named. The housing crisis in Israel is similarly a symptom of neoliberal policies” (“The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Arab Awakening,” Middle East Report Online, 1 August 2011). But while these economic problems have been exacerbated by Israel’s costly military occupation of Palestine and the government subsidization of illegal settler communities in the West Bank, the overwhelming tendency is to ignore these inconvenient facts and instead to treat the occupation as an entirely unrelated subject, as a “security issue” with no bearing on the protests whatsoever.

Thus, even though Hanoch’s album was released in 1984, it could have been recorded yesterday. Had its titular Messiah postponed his arrival on earth by 27 years and appeared in the hot Israeli summer of 2011, he would have still taken that rooftop dive and splattered his body on the streets below. Once again, the problem is the economy, and once again, the Palestinians are left completely out of view.

There are those who claim that addressing the Israeli occupation at this time would serve only to divide the protesters. Uri Avnery, for instance, has argued that even “bringing up the occupation would provide [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu with an easy weapon, split the tent-dwellers and derail the protests.” Avnery, who is a longtime fixture on the Israeli left, concludes that there is “no need to push the protesters” in this direction and that with patience, the protests will eventually turn against the occupation on their own, as if by magic (“How godly are thy tents? Who are these people? Where will they go from here?,” Counterpunch, 5 August 2011).

This view is not uncommon. However, the desire to delink the call for social justice from the occupation and to simply hope for the best is ill-conceived. The view that the unity of the protests must be maintained at all costs overlooks the crucial fact that a protest in Israel that does not also address the occupation is really no protest at all.

On Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, the middle class demonstrators are thus attempting to wage an Arab Spring without any Arabs. While the tent city protest has been unusual in its size and in the wide degree of support it has received throughout the country, the urge behind it does not constitute a real challenge to the Israeli state. The protests represent a reaction against the economic injustices exacerbated by the Israeli government’s neoliberal policies, and as such, the broader framework of Zionism is entirely capable of absorbing the protesters’ demands.

Settlers embraced

Indeed, what is the Rothschild Boulevard rebellion but the latest manifestation of an old, Zionist dream? Like the pioneering Zionist settlers before them, the protesters today envision the creation of a welfare state in the land of milk and honey, where life is affordable, food is plentiful and the country’s rightful inhabitants, the Palestinians, are excluded from the discussion. They simply seem not to exist. The protesters do not want to disavow the Zionist dream; to the contrary, they want to implement it.

But a dream for the early Zionists was a living nightmare for the local Palestinians. When freedom for one people is achieved with the occupation of another, there is nothing to be celebrated. The Rothschild Boulevard rebellion departs in no way from this precedent. Without addressing the occupation, the protesters’ demands, at the very best, aim only to make life better for the occupiers, and the welcomed inclusion of members from the Ariel mega-settlement in the revolt, as reported by Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana, should serve here as a grim warning (“How could the largest social movement in Israel’s history manage to ignore the country’s biggest moral disaster?”, Alternet, 24 August 2011) . It is the occupiers who stand to receive better health care, better education, higher wages, more affordable housing and all around better living conditions, and those living under the occupation receive nothing.

Conservative agenda

Thus, in this case, protest is not at all that radical. Like Hanoch’s earlier rock anthem, the image of radical protest conceals a rather conservative agenda. That is, protest functions within the predetermined parameters of the dominant social order. Rather than posing a threat to the Israeli state, the protests aim only to make life better for its Jewish citizens. They seek to improve the Zionist dream of building a social welfare state in a Palestine without Palestinians. What is really needed is for that dream and its accompanying system of apartheid to be dismantled entirely.

Thus, the various left-leaning supporters of the Rothschild Boulevard rebellion who defend the exclusion of the Palestinian issue in the name of Israeli unity have it all wrong. Unity does not mean coming together with occupation supporters and land-usurping settlers. Rather, real unity would mean crossing that much tabooed Jewish-Arab, Israeli-Palestinian divide. It would mean that the exclusive, ethnocentric dream of Zionism would have to be replaced by a democratic dream without segregation and apartheid. Economic justice predicated on ethnocentric exclusion is hardly a dream worth fighting for. When those Jewish Israeli citizens consigned to the bottom rungs of their government’s ladder of exploitation are ready to recognize that their true enemy is the same as the one terrorizing the occupied Palestinian people, then and only then will there be a unity in protest worth celebrating.

By Greg Burris

17 September 2011

The Electronic Intifada

Greg Burris is a former instructor at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey and a current graduate student in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In Libya, Former Enemy Is Recast in Role of Ally

TRIPOLI, Libya — Abdel Hakim Belhaj had a wry smile about the oddity of his situation.

Yes, he said, he was detained by Malaysian officials in 2004 on arrival at the Kuala Lumpur airport, where he was subjected to extraordinary rendition on behalf of the United States, and sent to Thailand. His pregnant wife, traveling with him, was taken away, and his child would be 6 before he saw him.

In Bangkok, Mr. Belhaj said, he was tortured for a few days by two people he said were C.I.A. agents, and then, worse, they repatriated him to Libya, where he was thrown into solitary confinement for six years, three of them without a shower, one without a glimpse of the sun.

Now this man is in charge of the military committee responsible for keeping order in Tripoli, and, he says, is a grateful ally of the United States and NATO.

And while Mr. Belhaj concedes that he was the emir of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was deemed by the United States to be a terrorist group allied with Al Qaeda, he says he has no Islamic agenda. He says he will disband the fighters under his command, merging them into the formal military or police, once the Libyan revolution is over.

He says there are no hard feelings over his past treatment by the United States.

“Definitely it was very hard, very difficult,” he said. “Now we are in Libya, and we want to look forward to a peaceful future. I do not want revenge.”

As the United States and other Western powers embrace and help finance the new government taking shape in Libya, they could face a particularly awkward relationship with Islamists like Mr. Belhaj. Once considered enemies in the war on terror, they suddenly have been thrust into positions of authority — with American and NATO blessing.

In Washington, the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on Mr. Belhaj or his new role. A State Department official said the Obama administration was aware of Islamist backgrounds among the rebel fighters in Libya and had expressed concern to the Transitional National Council, the new rebel government, and that it had received assurances.

“The last few months, we’ve had the T.N.C. saying all the right things, and making the right moves,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the matter’s delicacy.

Mr. Belhaj, 45, a short and serious man with a close-cropped beard, burst onto the scene in the mountains west of Tripoli only in the last few weeks before the fall of the capital, as the leader of a brigade of rebel fighters.

“He wasn’t even in the military council in the western mountains,” said Othman Ben Sassi, a member of the Transitional National Council from Zuwarah in the west. “He was nothing, nothing. He arrived at the last moment, organized some people but was not responsible for the military council in the mountains.”

Then came the push on Tripoli, which fell with unexpected speed, and Mr. Belhaj and his fighters focused on the fortified Bab al-Aziziya compound of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, where they distinguished themselves as relatively disciplined fighters.

A veteran of the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets, Mr. Belhaj has what most rebel fighters have lacked — actual military experience. Yet he has still not adopted a military rank (unlike many rebels who quickly became self-appointed colonels and generals), which he said should go only to members of the army.

Dressed in new military fatigues, with a pistol strapped backward to his belt, Mr. Belhaj was interviewed at his offices in the Mitiga Military Airbase in Tripoli, the site of what had been the United States Air Force’s Wheelus Air Base until 1970.

Last weekend, Mr. Belhaj was voted commander of the Tripoli Military Council, a grouping of several brigades of rebels involved in taking the capital, by the other brigades, a move that aroused some criticism among liberal members of the council.

However, his appointment was strongly supported by Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the chairman of the council, who said that as Colonel Qaddafi’s former minister of justice he got to know Mr. Belhaj well during negotiations leading to his release from prison in 2010. Mr. Belhaj and other Islamist radicals made a historic compromise with the Qaddafi government, one that was brokered by Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the Qaddafi son seen then as a moderating influence.

The Islamists agreed to disband the Islamic Fighting Group, replacing it with the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change, and renounced violent struggle. “We kept that promise,” Mr. Belhaj said. “The revolution started peacefully, but the regime’s crackdown forced it to become violent.”

Mr. Belhaj conceded that Islamists had no role in creating the revolution against Colonel Qaddafi’s rule; it was instead a popular uprising. “The February 17th revolution is the Libyan people’s revolution and no one can claim it, neither secularists nor Islamists,” he said. “The Libyan people have different views, and all those views have to be involved and respected.”

Forty-two years of Qaddafi rule in Libya had, he said, taught him an important lesson: “No one can make Libya suffer any more under any one ideology or any one regime.” His pledge to disband fighters under his command once Libya has a new government was repeated to NATO officials at a meeting in Qatar this week.

Some council members said privately that allowing Mr. Belhaj to become chairman of the military council in Tripoli was done partly to take advantage of his military expertise, but also to make sure the rebels’ political leaders had him under their direct control.

Many also say that Mr. Belhaj’s history as an Islamist is understandable because until this year, Islamist groups were the only ones able to struggle against Colonel Qaddafi’s particularly repressive rule.

After Mr. Belhaj and a small group of Libyan comrades returned from the jihad against the Soviets, they formed the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and had a secret base in the Green Mountain area of eastern Libya, until it was discovered and bombed, and many of its followers rounded up.

Mr. Belhaj escaped Libya in the late 1990s and, like many antigovernment exiles, was forced to move frequently as Libya used its oil resources as a way to pressure host countries.

“We focused on Libya and Libya only,” he said. “Our goal was to help our people. We didn’t participate in or support any action outside of Libya. We never had any link with Al Qaeda, and that could never be. We had a different agenda; global fighting was not our goal.”

He said that America’s reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks led to his group’s classification as terrorist.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the rapprochement between Libya and Western countries led to the apprehension of several anti-Qaddafi activists, who were returned to Libya by the United States.

While Mr. Belhaj insisted that he was not interested in revenge, it is not a period of his life that he has altogether forgotten. “If one day there is a legal way, I would like to see my torturers brought to court,” he said.

Steven Lee Myers and Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

By ROD NORDLAND

1 September 2011

@ The New York Times

Our writer tests the mood on the ground in Gaza City

Outside the office of the senior Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum are two striking photographs of the Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor Abdel Aziz Rantisi, assassinated by Israel within three weeks of each other in 2004. They are a reminder of how dominant a part of the Israeli-Palestinian story Gaza has been over the past decade. This week, however, it is on the sidelines; its Hamas rulers are unrepresented in New York, and for once it is the moderate West Bank leadership which is the focus of Israeli and American vexation.

Which doesn’t mean that Hamas is happy. There is a certain symmetry between its reaction to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s application for UN membership, and that of the US and Israel. Like President Obama, the Islamic faction complains that UN resolutions will not resolve the conflict. Hamas has, like Israel, objected to Mr Abbas’s “unilateral” step.

There may even be an identity of motives between some in Hamas and some in Israel who oppose a two-state solution – a goal Mr Abbas wants enshrined in the UN resolution – because each regards the entire territory from the Jordan to the Mediterranean as its own.

The reaction of Hamas officials has varied somewhat, perhaps reflecting uncertainty as to how to respond to the UN initiative, not to mention the fact that the most popular man in Gaza, the Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan, supports it. But Mr Barhoum claimed that Mr Abbas has fostered a UN resolution which recognises “our enemy” Israel, and in doing so has “cancelled the right of return” for the families of refugees who were forced from or fled their homes in what is now Israel during the war of 1948. This Mr Abbas denies, since the fate of the refugees is a core issue in any future negotiations with Israel.

But Mr Barhoum said that, while the two factions had earlier agreed to work together, “Abu Mazen [Mr Abbas] took this unilateral step without any consultation. There have been 14 UN resolutions in the past [on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]. Why does he think that this time it will bring something?” On Mr Abbas’s goal of a Palestinian state comprising the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, Mr Barhoum repeats the standard Hamas position that since 1988 it has been prepared to offer “a long period of truce because the occupation [Israel] needs security and we need independence.”

In Gaza, unlike the West Bank, there have been no demonstrations in support of the UN bid because of what Fatah says is a ban on them. But Mr Barhoum insists there was agreement last week with Fatah that there “was no need for demonstrations for or against”. Fatah officials have denied the existence of such an agreement. And Ahmed Yousef, a recently retired adviser to the de facto Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, talked of a “repression of freedom of expression” in Gaza, telling Voice of Palestine Radio that it came “when the world, especially Turkey and the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation,” supports Mr Abbas.

Ghazi Hamad, deputy foreign minister for Hamas also sounds more sympathetic to Mr Abbas’s motives. He says: “He went to the UN because after 20 years of negotiations he came to the conclusion that we have got nothing from them. In Hamas we support any effort in the UN or the international community to bring a Palestinian state.”

Mr Hamad wants a “new strategy”, not based on what he regards as a false choice between Hamas “resistance” and Fatah “negotiations”. But he does not gloss over the crisis posed by the split and argues that Israel is also in a deep crisis: “Israel lost major allies: Turkey, Egypt; they may lose Jordan. They feel more isolated.” Noting that Turkey, the Arab League, and the OIS have supported Mr Abbas’s initiative, Mr Hamad says that they can help to empower Mr Abbas by using their influence in Europe and the US. “But first he needs to go back and finish reconciliation.”

By Donald Macintyre

23 September 2011

@ The Independent

Imperial Delusions: Ignoring The Lessons Of 9/11

Ten years ago, critics of America’s mad rush to war were right, but it didn’t matter.

Within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was clear that political leaders were going to use the attacks to justify war in Central Asia and the Middle East. And within hours, those of us critical of that policy began to offer principled and practical arguments against aggressive war as a response to the crimes.

It didn’t matter because neither the public nor policymakers were interested in principled or practical arguments. People wanted revenge, and the policymakers seized the opportunity to use U.S. military power. Critical thinking became a mark not of conscientious citizenship but of dangerous disloyalty.

We were right, but the wars came.

The destructive capacity of the U.S. military meant quick “victories” that just as quickly proved illusory. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, it became clearer that the position staked out by early opponents was correct — the wars not only were illegal (conforming to neither international nor constitutional law) and immoral (fought in ways that guaranteed large-scale civilian casualties and displacement), but a failure on any pragmatic criteria. The U.S. military has killed some of the people who were targeting the United States and destroyed some of their infrastructure and organization, but a decade later we are weaker and our sense of safety more fragile. The ability to dominate militarily proved to be both inadequate and transitory, as predicted.

Ten years later, we are still right and it still doesn’t matter.

There’s a simple reason for this: Empires rarely learn in time, because power tends to dull people’s capacity for critical self-reflection. While ascending to power, empires believe themselves to be invincible. While declining in power, they cling desperately to old myths of remembered glory.

Today the United States is morally bankrupt and spiritually broken. The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles — delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world’s resources by whatever means necessary. As the United States grew in wealth and power, bounty for the chosen came at the cost of misery for the many.

After World War II, as the United States became the dominant power not just in the Americas but on the world stage, the principles didn’t change. U.S. foreign policy sought to deepen and extend U.S. power around the world, especially in the energy-rich and strategically crucial Middle East; always with an eye on derailing any Third World societies’ attempts to pursue a course of independent development outside the U.S. sphere; and containing the possibility of challenges to U.S. dominance from other powerful states.

Does that summary sound like radical hysteria? Recall this statement from President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Democrats and Republicans, before and after, followed the same policy.

The George W. Bush administration offered a particularly intense ideological fanaticism, but the course charted by the Obama administration is much the same. Consider this 2006 statement by Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both administrations: “I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the world. We have been here for a long time. We will be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that — both our friends and those who might consider themselves our adversaries.”

If the new boss sounds a lot like the old boss, it’s because the problem isn’t just bad leaders but a bad system. That’s why a critique of today’s wars sounds a lot like critiques of wars past. Here’s Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assessment of the imperial war of his time: “[N]o one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.”

Will our autopsy report read “global war on terror”?

That sounds harsh, and it’s tempting to argue that we should refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honor those who died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to do that if the cheerleaders for the U.S. empire would refrain from using the day to justify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11. But given the events of the past decade, there is no way to take the politics out of the anniversary.

We should take time on 9/11 to remember the nearly 3,000 victims who died that day, but as responsible citizens, we also should face a harsh reality: While the terrorism of fanatical individuals and groups is a serious threat, much greater damage has been done by our nation-state caught up in its own fanatical notions of imperial greatness.

That’s why I feel no satisfaction in being part of the anti-war/anti-empire movement. Being right means nothing if we failed to create a more just foreign policy conducted by a more humble nation.

Ten years later, I feel the same thing that I felt on 9/11 — an indescribable grief over the senseless death of that day and of days to come.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing,” which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist.

By Robert Jensen

8 September 2011

@ Countercurrents.org

Historical Reconstruction Again?

And so, for reasons that are both complex and irritating, the past is being dragged into the present yet again; while we Malaysians bury our heads in the sand and neglect the future. By now most of us will be familiar with yet another controversy-in-a-teacup that has grabbed the headlines: namely the question of whether the events that took place during the attack on the police outpost in Bukit Kepong ought to be remembered as a historic event in the Malayan struggle for independence.

Unfortunately for all parties concerned it seems that the issue has been hijacked by politics and politicians yet again, as is wont to happen in Malaysia on a daily basis almost. More worrying still is how the manifold aspects of this event have been taken up selectively by different parties and actors to further their own arguments, while neglecting to look at the wider context against which the event took place. It is almost impossible to be truly objective when it comes to the writing and reading of history, and perhaps we can do away with that pretense. But for now perhaps some marginal notes on the matter might come in useful to clear the air a bit.

A. Was PAS pro-Communist?

One of the outcomes of this debate has been the resurrection of the old question of whether PAS (The Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party) was pro-Communist at that point in its history. This seems an odd question to ask in the first place, as it seems incongruous for an Islamic party to harbour any real sympathy for Communism, which has always been seen as the bugbear to the Islamist cause. But it has to be remembered that when the Malayan Islamic party was first formed in Novermber 1951, many of its founder-leaders were anti-colonial nationalists who were keen to see the end of British rule in Malaya. Some of them were former members of the Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (PKMM) and also the first Islamic party in the country, the Hizbul Muslimin (that was formed, and almost immediately banned, in 1948)

PAS’s left-leaning days were at their peak during the Presidency of Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy (1956-1969), who did not hide his opposition to British rule and who refused to negotiate a settlement with the British then. Dr. Burhanuddin was sympathetic to the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), whose anti-British sentiments he shared; but this does not mean he supported Communism as an ideology. PAS’s stand towards the MCP then (in the 1950s and 1960s) was thus a pragmatic one that was based on the same goal of rejecting British colonial rule. However, it has to be noted that PAS was equally wary of Beijing’s influence in the region, and there is nothing to suggest that the leaders of PAS would have ever accepted Malaya coming under Communist rule, albeit directly or indirectly, from Beijing.

B. Was the MCP a tool of Communist China?

That the MCP and its guerilla wing were against any and all forms of British colonial rule is simple enough to verify, and their record of anti-colonial struggle is there for anyone to investigate. The more difficult question to answer however is this: How independent was the MCP, and was it – as the British alleged – working to further China’s communist influence in the region then? The British were somewhat ham-fisted when dealing with the MCP, and it ought to be noted that the invention of the image of the MCP as a ‘Chinese threat’ was the work of the British colonial propaganda agencies then.

Here, however, a broader perspective on the matter might come in handy. Think of Malaya in the 1950s and envisage the region as a whole, as the Cold War was heating up. In Vietnam, Burma and Indonesia the Communists were gaining strength in numbers; and perhaps the biggest worry to Britain then (as to the departing French and Dutch colonial powers) was the possibility that all of southeast asia might turn Communist. Remember that this was the time when the region was called ‘the Second Front in the war against Communism’; and when the Western bloc was keen to ensure that Indonesia – being the biggest country in the region – would not come under the rule of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

In Indonesia, the PKI grew more and more powerful under the leadership of men like D.N Aidit, and was instrumental in developing the civilian para-military forces that later agitated for the destruction of Malaya during the ‘Ganyang Malaya’ (Crush Malaya) campaign. It was only after the failed coup of 1965 and the virtual extermination of the PKI between 1966 to 1970 that the Communist threat in Indonesia was contained, and ties between Malaya and Indonesia were normalised. It was against this background that the fear of the MCP – and the worry that it was backed by China – was articulated and developed in Malaya. While it is true that the MCP was anti-British, there is no evidence to suggest that it claimed the majority support of mainstream Malay-Muslims in the country, despite the presence of Malays in the 10th Regiment.

C. To negotiate or fight?

Perhaps the most contentious issue of all is whether the struggle for independence was really fought and won by the Leftists, Islamists or Nationalists in Malaysia. Here is where contingency steps in and one can only speculate.

The fact is that the security measures that were introduced during the declaration of the First Emergency (1948-1960) meant that almost all the left-leaning parties, trade union movements, workers groups etc had been eliminated or left feeble. Those who stood to gain from this were the conservative nationalists who opted instead to negotiate the terms of Malayan independence, and who negotiated on a number of issues including citizenship for the non-Malays etc. But no matter how one looks at it, the historical facts are that the left-leaning movements in the country were established long before the conservative-nationalist parties and movements. (The Malayan Anarchist party was founded in 1919, for instance; and the MCP in 1930. By contrast the MCA was only founded in February 1949.)

Of course we can speculate until the cows come home over the question of the many ‘what-ifs’ had the circumstances of the past were different. What if the MCP was not banned? What if the MCP was successful in its guerilla campaign? What if half the Malay population had supported the leftists, etc etc.

But in the event, as things turned out, the radical left was all but absent in the final stages of negotiation and it was the UMNO-MCA alliance that sorted out the final terms of Britain’s withdrawal from Malaya. Lets not be too sanguine about this: Britain did not ‘leave’ Malaya willingly, but was compelled to do so thanks to the destruction of its colonial economy in the wake of World War II. Its main aim then was to ensure that its capital investments in its former colonies would not be nationalised, as was the case in Indonesia when Sukarno simply confiscated all Dutch capital assets and nationalised them. Unsurprisingly, Britain wanted to ensure that its investments in tin and rubber were not lost in the wake of its withdrawal.

However we are left with several ponderables:

Malaya (then under Tunku Abdul Rahman) negotiated its independence on terms that were mutually beneficial to both sides. The British were not shot to pieces or blown to bits, and despite the loss of lives in the guerilla war the human cost was less than what was paid in Vietnam and Indonesia. Conversely, in the three countries where the anti-colonial struggle was led by the native armed forces – Indonesia, Vietnam and Burma – the army then came to power and dabbled directly in politics for decades to come. Had a similar war been fought in Malaya, could there have been a situation where a nationalist army would then come to power too, with generals and colonels taking over government as they did in Vietnam, Indonesia and Burma?

Which then brings us to the debate over ‘negotiation vs struggle’. Just take a flight to Vietnam or Indonesia and everywhere you will see statues of freedom-fighters, generals, colonels, guerilla leaders etc. Malaya’s first generation of leaders, on the other hand, had almost never fired a shot or stabbed anyone with a bayonet. But is that a bad thing? While I understand the value of patriotism and valour in the face of adversity; one also has to ask: if and when we are confronted by a departing adversary who wishes to negotiate the terms of withdrawal, should we negotiate or fight? I am personally bored by all this tostesterone-driven talk of macho deeds of heroism, and frankly hate any sort of violence. Looking to India, we ought to remember that while there were Indian nationalists who were prepared to fight the British militarily (like Subhas Chandra Bose), India’s independence was negotiated too – through passive civil disobedience and persistent resistance, rather than guns and grenades. The same could be said of South Africa, where Apartheid was brought to an end by claiming the moral high ground rather than to sink to the same level of guttaral violence like the regime’s.

SHOULD the Malayan nationalists have opted for negotiation or struggle then? Now quite honestly I do not see how this question can be answered objectively by anyone (even myself). What we can say, with some certainty, is that in the cases of the countries where local nationalist militias/armies did oppose the departing colonial powers the results have been military intervention, and subsequent military presence in politics. (The Indonesian armed forces during the time of Sukarno and Suharto claimed the right to be political, by virtue of its institutional history and its role in the anti-colonial war.) What then? Could Malaya/Malaysia have then become a militarised state? We simply do not know, and speculation beyond this is, simply, futile.

At the root of the present impasse in Malaysia seems to be the question of who writes our national history and who interprets/defines it. Perhaps one of the reasons why we keep returning to these debates time and again is the worry that our history has not been as inclusive as it ought to be. We cannot deny that in the end it was the UMNO/MCA alliance that won the terms of Malaya’s first independence in 1957. But we also cannot, and should not, deny the historical role played by other groups including the trade unions movements, the workers movements, the nascent vernacular press, the native intelligentsia, the cultural groups, the Islamists and the Leftists as well. ALL of them were part of this collective drama that we call our national history. And our national history has to be precisely that: a National History that mirrors the complexity and diversity of this complex thing called ‘Malaysia’.   My lament, as an academic by default, is that objectivity and balance have long since left the stage and gone flying through the window. Yet we should not forget that a lopsided, skewered and biased history is not simply an incorrect or incomplete record of our past; it would also be a broken legacy that sadly will be passed on to the generations to come. And that is not a singular loss to any one of us, but to all.

By Dr. Farish Ahmad Noor

13 September 2011

Dr. Farish Ahmad Noor is the Senior Fellow for the Contemporary Islam Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Nanyang Technological University (NTU).