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The Libyan People???

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Started 2 years ago by Brian M
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Brian M
Member

I'm confused....given that Kadaffi seems more than able to find soldiers and people to support him (even if he is paying them)...given that half the country seems to still follow the Green Book Nutcase...what is this amorphous, unified, singular, virtuous entity "The Libyan People" that we are raining death from the skies upon to support?

I'm confused as to why we are not imposing a similar No Fly Zone and Cease Fire in Bahrain as well. Why not? Especially since the Bahraini royal family is now shipping in mercenaries and foreign troops to gun down the protestors in Manama as well.

For that matter...why is there no U.N. resolution and no French airplanes dropping bombs on Washington? The Bush/Obama Administration (one seamless continuity, imo) has certainly massacred far more civillians than Kadaffi. And, the massacre is ongoing. Kadaffi hasn't turned any city into a focal point of birth defects and cancer like the good ol' U.S. Shock and Awe campaign did to Fallujah.

Irrational, reflexive patriotism is as bad as any fundamentalist religion. Skepticism is the only proper approach.

Posted 2 years ago #
UrsaMinor
Member

Political posturing, nothing more. Gaddafi's plea boils down to "Foreigners should leave the Libyan people alone so I can lob artillery at them at my leisure when they displease me."

Bahrain is not big enough or important enough to receive much attention, nor does the Bahraini royal family have any emnity directed at it by the international community because of terrorist activities like the Lockerbie bombing. We will be content to look the other way and let the Bahrainis 'manage' their internal affairs with violence because we have no perceived scores to settle and little interest in the outcome.

Posted 2 years ago #
Brian M
Member

I agree with you Ursa. This was a bit of moralizing and a rhetorical question on my part. I just hate propaganda and platitudes...I would never claim the Green Nut is a good leader...but we train and prop up hundreds of worse.

I would point out that many...most respond like Kadaffi when they are threatened. If they can. Obviously, divisions with the elite classes in Egypt and Tunisia led to different results. In the US< if a ragtag gang of university students, ethnic minorities, and disaffected middle class unemployed people started successfully looting military bases...the ammunition would be live. How many people died due to Saint Abraham of Springfield's determination to "save" the Union? 600,000 on both sides. Worth it? When yopu consider that the victorious North quickly caved and allowed the South to impose a Jim Crow for 100 years almost as bad as slavery...I'm not so sure.

Posted 2 years ago #
Brian M
Member

I would also point out that the United States is BY FAR the biggest supporter of terrorism in the world...and has been for generations. Heck, we are right now arming and training MEK terrorists and ethnic separatists in Iran that have killed civillians. Not to forget our cocaine-running, nun-massacring freedom fighters.

Posted 2 years ago #
Jeremiah
Member

Well, I can agree to a degree. If the US decides to play world policeman (which I tend to think they shouldn't) then they have to do it equitably. And that means if you crow about human rights suddenly you are in half the nations on earth and most of Africa. However this:

The Bush/Obama Administration (one seamless continuity, imo) has certainly massacred far more civillians than Kadaffi

Is just overblown rhetoric. Gaddafi has been in power for like 40 years. Despite the civilian deaths in the occupations of Iraq and conflict in Afghanistan to compare the two is ridiculous. Make no mistake, I was dead set against Iraq from the beginning but we can make the case for its folly and tragedy without going into hyperbole.

Also, Re: the Civil War. Sure it is easy to armchair quarterback from 150 years in the future, but we have absolutely no idea how things would have played out if it didn't happen. The result could have been a lot worse than the way things have been, we just have no way of knowing. This just sounds like ax-grinding which again is completely unnecessary considering there are plenty of legitimate things to gripe about (like the contras, etc).

Posted 2 years ago #
Elemenope
Moderator

How many people died due to Saint Abraham of Springfield's determination to "save" the Union? 600,000 on both sides. Worth it?

Yes.

When you consider that the victorious North quickly caved and allowed the South to impose a Jim Crow for 100 years almost as bad as slavery...I'm not so sure.

Oh, come on. This ignores the actual history of what went down almost wholesale, up to and including the Hayes/Tilden election debacle that all but forced Reconstruction to end (or else face Civil War pt. 2).

Posted 2 years ago #
B.O.B.
Member

I don't know Jeremiah. The last I heard the estimated death toll in the Libya uprising was around 3-4000, and during Ghaddafi's tenure I doubt his regime has "disappeared" more than 10-20,000, probably not that many. Even at twice that it comes nowhere near the current estimates of over 100,000 civilians killed in Iraq since '03. So the statement that you dismissed as overblown rhetoric is actually pretty accurate.

I think that this is yet another one of those political decisions that is made based entirely on purely self interested utilitarianism. The U.S. had to step in or be accused of ignoring what is largely viewed as a "noble cause" or of only invading countries where "the people" don't benefit. However it had to be done with the support of the U.N. and the Arab League, and with no long term ground troop involvement in order to assure the world that we aren't doing that whole unilateral undeclared aggressive war thing anymore.

I think that this would likely have been handled differently if it weren't in the context of recent popular uprisings in the (strategically vital) region, if Ghaddafi weren't (justifiably) associated with terrorism in the collective western psyche, or is Libya were not an oil exporter. After all how many genocides have taken place in Africa of similar or greater scale in the last few decades without any sort of timely or substantial western military intervention?

Posted 2 years ago #
UrsaMinor
Member

It's all about economic interests. If we don't have a perceived stake in the outcome, conflicts like Darfur don't even appear on our supposedly humanitarian radar.

The invasion of Iraq was pure penis-extension. I'm less certain about Afghanistan.

Posted 2 years ago #
Brian M
Member

elemenope: It's a blog comment. Allow me some overblown rhetoric and simplification!

Of course, we do not know what would have happened. The fact remains that Abraham Lincoln used violent force to preserve his state...and that killed 600,000 people. Am I southern apologist? Not at all. (I might argue further that arguably Southern values, especially militarism, dominate too much the unified American state...another negative result) I'm not sure that post-war political realities destropying civil rights for almost a century answers my question as to whether

Posted 2 years ago #
B.O.B.
Member

I am not much of a conspiracy theorist, but the whole "Invade Afghanistan to secure the proposed pipeline from the Caspian Sea region's oil and gas fields to Pakistan or India's Arabian Sea coast, and bypass the Russians" seems pretty compelling considering a year or two later we were once again invading Iraq a.k.a.the space between the massive Saudi oil fields and the only real military threat in the region, and the only real threat to the security of the oil passing through the straits of Hormuz (Iran). This all just happened to occur within 5 years of what is generally agreed on as the point of global peak oil production. Something stinks.

Posted 2 years ago #
UrsaMinor
Member

Still sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. Pipelines are extremely vulnerable military targets. One good missile strike and the system grinds to a halt. Sure, we're going to maneuver militarily to secure our oil supply, but we're going to do in more workable ways.

Posted 2 years ago #
B.O.B.
Member

Agreed. I would however add that the U.S. could get by with western hemisphere petroleum sources. I think this is as much about ensuring that nobody but us gains a strategic advantage by establishing control over resources as it is about securing "our" oil supplies. Perhaps even more to the point is that whether the U.S. needs the oil or not many of the corporations that influence U.S. policy reap large profits from the extraction and transport of middle eastern oil. I think we are there to secure profits for campaign contributors as well as energy resources.

Posted 2 years ago #
DDM
Member

Qadaffi seems more than able to find soldiers and people to support him (even if he is paying them)

Libya doesn't have freedom of the press; it's all controlled by Qadaffi. My understanding is that Qaddafi is labeling the opposition as Al-Qaeda invaders and the people are eating it up.

Posted 2 years ago #
Brian M
Member

DDM: Bush labeled Sadaam as responsible for the World Trade Center Bombing (among other excuses) and told the population we are liberating Iraq at little cost, and the American people went happily along with Iraq War.

The bipartisan American Consensus...i.e., that we are the Light of the World and have the right, no the DUTY, to control everything, dominates the American media as firmly as any dictator's press censorship office.

B.O.B. I agree. I think we are playing The Great Game.

Do I think the American leadership is uniquely amoral or evil or sociopathic? Not really. Empires do what empires do.

On the surface, the American leadership is probably less ruthless than past imperial projects. On the surface. Somehow...entire cities nonetheless are leveled, wedding parties and ten year olds slaughtered, entire populations displaced. But...there is that wonderful, high flown rhetoric. We are protecting "The Libyan People" from their evil overlord. We are establishing democracy in Iraq. We are fighting the evil communists in Nicaragua. And people die... And the War Pigs gather in their masses and get very, very rich.

The rhetoric just gets old.

Posted 2 years ago #
Brian M
Member

Interesting questions at Black Agenda Report:

The western media, and the governments they serve, are caught in crossfire of contradictions. The U.S. wants desperately to position itself on the “right” side of some aspect of the unfolding Arab Reawakening. The West dearly wishes to appropriate to itself a section of the “Arab revolt,” so as to bomb an evil “dictator” on their behalf. The western media’s job is to do the public relations work, presenting these “pro-western” combatants in the most attractive light. However, it appears the media are having trouble packaging the Libyan rebels as sufficiently virtuous “freedom fighters” – one suspects because, on closer inspection, many turn out to be fundamentalists or tribalists.

“Why is the rebellion apparently incapable of taking advantage of mass desertions from the armed forces?”

And, what happened to the estimated 6,000 former regime troops that deserted at the start of the rebellion? Some former Khadafi officers occupy high profile positions in the rebel ranks, but the equivalent of several brigades worth of deserters is not in evidence. This, again, raises the question of who the rebel leaders really are; why are they apparently incapable of taking advantage of mass desertions from the armed forces? One cannot help but suspect the presence of unwholesome elements around whom former soldiers and others cannot bring themselves to effectively coalesce.

Posted 2 years ago #
Nox
Member

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20080101.htm

Posted 2 years ago #
Brian M
Member

Awesome essay, Nox.

Posted 2 years ago #
Nox
Member

Yeah, Noam's a badass.

John Oliver also gave an interesting explanation of this phenomenon on last night's Daily Show.

Posted 2 years ago #
FO
Member

My basic assumption is that we look the other way and pursue our interest.
Libya has been the exception (this is why I was so happy about it), while with Bahrain we'll stick to the above.

In general, the popular uprising and the bloody crushing of it that foollowed was the ONLY reason for which I support the intervention.
Now that the military intervention has crippled Quaddafi, more than more bombing some economical maneuvering could be useful, but Francee and UK seem too keen on bombing more.
Part of the strategy could be to expand trade and commercial support with the rebels while embargoing the loyalists, which would prevent Quaddafi from paying his mercenaries.

Posted 2 years ago #
Brian M
Member

The glorious leader of the rebellion....a U.S. sponsored technocrat. LOL. Ahmed Chalabi, anyone? (Jack Crow)

"Mahmoud Jibril - foreign affairs
Before the uprising, Mr Jibril was involved in a project called "Libyan Vision" with other intellectuals, which sought to establish a democratic state. He is also head of the rebel council's crisis committee, which aims to streamline decision making.

Born in 1952, Mr Jibril has both a master's degree in political science and a PhD in strategic planning and decision-making from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

After completing his doctorate in 1984, he taught strategic planning and decision-making at the university for several years. He also wrote several books and ran leadership training programmes in several Arab states.

He later became the head of the Libyan National Planning Council. Then in 2009, he was appointed chairman of the National Economic Development Board (NEDB), reporting directly to the prime minister.

A leaked US diplomatic cable from November 2009 written by the US ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, described Mr Jibril as "a serious interlocutor who 'gets' the US perspective".

"He is also not shy about sharing his views of US foreign policy, for example, opining that the US spoiled a golden opportunity to capitalise on its 'soft power' (McDonald's, etc) after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 by putting 'boots on the ground' in the Middle East," Mr Cretz wrote.

An earlier US diplomatic cable described Mr Jibril as 'reform-minded'...""

""Translation: Jibril is a US educated technocrat whom the Office of Economic Development would love to get into place in order enforce a strict neoliberal structural adjustment line, in Libya.

Well, he's probably going to get his chance. Good looking out, pro-intervention lefties. Good looking out. You weren't useful idiots or anything...""

Posted 2 years ago #

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The Libyan People???

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