Good my lord, she came from Libya — The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare.
The war on Libya must surely rank as one of the
stupidest martial enterprises since Napoleon took it into his head to
invade Russia in 1812.
Let’s start with the fierce hand-to-hand combat
between members of the coalition (Britain, France and the US), arguing
about the basic aims of the killing operation. How does “take all
necessary measures” square with the ban on any “foreign occupation force
of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” Could the coalition
simply kill Qaddafi and recognize a provisional government in Benghazi?
Who exactly are the revolutionaries and national liberators in eastern
Libya?
In US, the intervention was instigated
by liberal interventionists: notably three women, starting with
Samantha Power, who runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human
Rights in Obama’s National Security Council. She’s an Irish American,
41 years old, who made her name back in the Bush years with her book A Problem from Hell, a
study of the U.S. foreign-policy response to genocide, and the failure
of Clinton administration to react forcefully to the Rwandan
massacres. She had to resign from her advisory position on the Obama
campaign in April of 2008, after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” in
an interview with the Scotsman, but was restored to good grace after Obama’s election, and the monster in her sights became Qaddafi.
America’s UN ambassador is Susan Rice, the first
African American woman to be named to that post. She’s long been an
ardent interventionist. In 1996, as part of the Clinton administration,
she supported the multinational force that invaded Zaire from Rwanda in
1996 and overthrew dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, saying privately that
“Anything’s better than Mobutu.” But on February 23 she came under
fierce attack in the Huffington Post at the hands of Richard
Grenell, who’d served on the US delegation to the UN in the Bush years.
Grenell dwelt harshly on instances where in his judgement Rice and her
ultimate boss Obama were drooping the ball, and displaying lack of
leadership amid the tumults engulfing the middle east and specifically
in failing to support the uprising against Qaddafi.
Both Rice and Clinton took Grenell’s salvo to heart.
Prodded by the fiery Power they abruptly stiffened their postures and
Clinton lobbed her furious salvoes at Qaddafi, “the crazy colonel”. For
Clinton it was a precise re-run of her efforts to portray Obama as a
peace wimp back in 2008, liable to snooze all too peacefully when the
red phone rang at 3am.
For his part, Obama wasn’t keen on intervention,
seeing it as a costly swamp, yet another war and one opposed by Defense
Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the liberal
interventions and the neo-cons were in full cry and Obama, perennially
fearful of being outflanked, succumbed, hastening to one of the least
convincing statements of war aims in the nation’s history. He earned a
threat of impeachment from leftist congressman Dennis Kucinich for
arrogating war-making powers constitutionally reserved for the US
Congress, though it has to be said that protest from the left
proved pretty feeble. As always, many on the left yearn for an
intervention they can finally support and many of them
murmured ecstatically, “This is the one.” Of course, the sensible
position simply states that nothing good ever came out of a Western
intervention by the major powers, whether humanitarian in proclaimed
purpose or not.
So much for the instigators of the mad intervention in
the US. In France the intellectual author was the salon dandy and “new
philosopher” Bernard-Henri Lévy, familiarly known to his admirers and
detractors as BHL. As described by Larry Portis in CounterPunch magazine, BHL arrived in Benghazi on March 3, 2011.
“Two days later BHL was interviewed on various
television networks. He appeared before the camera in his habitual
uniform – immaculate white shirt with upturned collar, black suit coat,
and disheveled hair.
“His message was urgent but reassuring. “No,” he said,
Qaddafi is not capable of launching an offensive against the
opposition. He does not have the means to do so. However, he does have
planes. This is the real danger.” BHL called for the scrambling of
radio communications, the destruction of landing strips in all regions
of Libya, and the bombardment of Qaddafi’s personal bunker. In brief,
this would be a humanitarian intervention, the modalities of which he
did not specify.
“Next step, as BHL explained: “I called him [Sarkozy]
from Benghazi. And when I returned, I went to the Elysée Palace to see
him and tell him that the people on the National Transition Council are
good guys.” Indeed, on March 6, BHL returned to France and met with
Sarkozy. Four days later, on March 10, he saw Sarkozy again, this time
with three Libyans whom he had encouraged to visit France, along with
Sarkozy’s top advisors. On March 11, Sarkozy declared the Libyan
National Transition Council the only legitimate representative of the
Libyan people. Back in Benghazi, people screamed in relief and cheered
Sarkozy’s name, popularity at last for Sarko, whose approval ratings in
France have been hovering around the 20 per cent mark.”
So much for the circumstances in which the
intervention was conceived. It had nothing to do with oil; everything to
do with ego and political self promotion. But to whom exactly did the
interveners lend imperial succor? There was great vagueness here, beyond
enthusiastic references to the romantic revolutionaries of Benghazi,
and much ridicule for Qaddafi’s identification of his opponents in
eastern Libya as Al Qaida.
In fact two documents strongly backed Qaddafi on this
issue. The first was a secret cable to the State Department from the US
embassy in Tripoli in 2008, part of the Wikileaks trove, entitled “
Extremism in Eastern Libya,” which revealed that this area was rife with anti-American, pro-jihad sentiment.
According to the cable, the most troubling aspect
“… is the pride that many eastern Libyans,
particularly those in and around Dernah, appear to take in the role
their native sons have played in the insurgency in Iraq … [and the]
ability of radical imams to propagate messages urging support for and
participation in jihad.”
The second document or rather set of documents are the
so-called Sinjar Records, captured Al Qaeda documents that fell into
American hands in 2007. They were duly analyzed by the Combating
Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Al-Qaeda is
a bureaucratic outfit and the Records contain precise details on
personnel, including those who came to Iraq to fight and when called
for, to commit suicide, fighting American and Coalition forces.
The West Point analysts’ statistical study of the
al-Qaeda personnel records concludes that one country provided “far
more” foreign fighters in per capita terms than any other: namely,
Libya. The records show that the “vast majority of Libyan fighters that
included their hometown in the Sinjar Records resided in the country’s
Northeast.” Benghazi provided many volunteers. So did Darnah, a town
about 200 kms east of Benghazi, in which an Islamic emirate was declared
when the rebellion against Qaddafi started. New York Times
reporter Anthony Shadid even spoke with Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi who
promulgated the Islamic emirate. Al-Hasadi “praises Osama bin Laden’s
‘good points,’” Shadid reported, though he prudently denounced the 9/11
attacks on the United States. Other sources have said that this keen
admirer of Osama would prove most influential in the formation of any
provisional government.
The West Point study of the Iraqi Sinjar Records
calculates that of the 440 foreign al-Qaeda recruits whose hometowns are
known, 21 came from Benghazi, thereby making it the fourth most common
hometown listed in the records. Fifty-three of the al-Qaeda recruits
came from Darnah, the highest total of any of the hometowns listed in
the records. The second highest number, 51, came from Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia. Darnah (80,000) has less than 2 per cent the population of
Riyadh. Darnah contributed “far and away the largest per capita number
of fighters.”
As former CIA operations officer Brian Fairchild
observed, “Amid the apparent absence of any plan for post-Gaddafi
governance, an ignorance of Libya’s tribal nature and our poor record of
dealing with tribes, American government documents conclusively
establish that the epicenter of the revolt is rife with anti-American
and pro-jihad sentiment, and with al-Qaeda’s explicit support for the
revolt, it is appropriate to ask our policymakers how American military
intervention in support of this revolt in any way serves vital U.S.
strategic interests.”
* * *
By October of that year, Muammar Qaddafi was dead and stuffed in a
meat locker. Denied post mortem imagery of Osama bin Laden and Anwar
al-Awlaki, the world was presented with photographs of Qaddafi,
dispatched with a bullet to the head after being wounded by NATO’s
ground troops outside Sirte.
Did the terminal command, Finish Him Off, come via cell phone from
the US State Department whose Secretary, Hillary Clinton, had earlier
called for his death, or by dint of local initiative, under winking eyes
in Washington?
In any event, since Qaddafi was a prisoner at the time of his
execution, it was a war crime and we trust that in the years of her
retirement Mrs Clinton will be detained amid some foreign vacation and
handed a subpoena.
We suppose the first triumphalist imperial post-mortem photo of such
an execution in our lifetimes is that of Che Guevara, killed on the
CIA’s orders at La Higuera in Bolivia on October 9, 1967. Perhaps Che’s
finest hour came with his leadership of the Cuban anti-imperial forces
deployed in Africa, defeating South African and white mercenary forces
in one of the greatest acts of revolutionary solidarity the world has
ever seen.
Qaddafi, even in his latterday accomodationist phase, was always a
bitter affront to Empire, a “devil” figure in a tradition stretching
back to the Mahdi, whose men killed General Gordon in the Sudan in 1885.
We remember fondly the leftists and Republicans who trekked to Tripoli
in the 1960s to appeal to Qaddafi for funds for their causes, some of
them returning amply supplied with money and detailed counsel.
Dollar for dollar we doubt Qaddafi had a rival in any assessment of
the amount of oil revenues in his domain actually distributed for benign
social purposes. Derision is heaped on his Green Book, but in intention
it can surely stand favorable comparison with kindred Western texts.
Anyone labeled by Ronald Reagan as “This mad dog of the Middle East” has
an honored place in our personal pantheon.
