Who said Gaddafi had to go?

[Jefferson23]

**** Long but well worth the time imo.

( You are invited to read this free essay from the London Review of Books. Register for free for immediate access to the entire article, and enjoy 24 hours of access to the entire LRB archive of over 12,500 essays and reviews.)


So Gaddafi is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure. What if anything has Libya got in exchange for all the death and destruction that have been visited on it over the past seven and a half months?

The overthrow of Gaddafi & Co was far from being a straightforward revolution against tyranny, but the West’s latest military intervention can’t be debunked as being simply about oil. Presented by the National Transitional Council (NTC) and cheered on by the Western media as an integral part of the Arab Spring, and thus supposedly of a kind with the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan drama is rather an addition to the list of Western or Western-backed wars against hostile, ‘defiant’, insufficiently ‘compliant’, or ‘rogue’ regimes: Afghanistan I (v. the Communist regime, 1979-92), Iraq I (1990-91), the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (over Kosovo, 1999), Afghanistan II (v. the Taliban regime, 2001) and Iraq II (2003), to which we might, with qualifications, add the military interventions in Panama (1989-90), Sierra Leone (2000) and the Ivory Coast (2011). An older series of events we might bear in mind includes the Bay of Pigs (1961), the intervention by Western mercenaries in the Congo (1964), the British-assisted palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment.

At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives rise to several different debates. The first of these, over the pros and cons of the military intervention, has tended to eclipse the others. But numerous states in Africa and Asia and no doubt Latin America as well (Cuba and Venezuela spring to mind) may wish to consider why the Jamahiriyya, despite mending its fences with Washington and London in 2003-4 and dealing reasonably with Paris and Rome, should have proved so vulnerable to their sudden hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine what the actions of the Western powers in relation to Africa and Asia, and the Arab world in particular, are doing to democratic principles and the idea of the rule of law.

The Afghans who rebelled against the Communist regimes of Noor Mohammed Taraki, Hafizullah Amin and the Soviet-backed Babrak Karmal, and in 1992 overthrew Mohammed Najibullah before laying waste to Kabul in protracted factional warfare, called themselves mujahedin, ‘fighters for the faith’. They were conducting a jihad against godless Marxists and saw no need to be coy about it in view of the enthusiastic media coverage as well as logistical support the West was giving them. But the Libyans who took up arms against Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyya have sedulously avoided this label, at least when near Western microphones. Religion had little to do with the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt: Islamists were almost entirely absent from the stage in Tunisia until the fall of Ben Ali; in Egypt the Muslim Brothers weren’t instigators of the protest movement (in which Coptic Christians also took part) and made sure their support remained discreet. And so the irrelevance of Islamism to the popular revolt against despotic regimes was part of the way the Arab Spring came to be read in the West. Libyan rebels and Gaddafi loyalists alike tacitly recognised this fact.

in full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n22/hugh-roberts/who-said-gaddafi-had-to-go

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[Jefferson23]

2. Thanks for the recommend xchrom, it was up to 3 but now down to zero, lol.

The OP is not interested in fulfilling a comfortable narrative.

[xchrom]

3. I get that.

It's an unfortunate narrative at best - people like us still wish Libyans the best.

But western:NATO involvement was never, ever altruistic.

[Jefferson23]

4. Exactly. n/t

[bvar22]

5. Thanks for this link.

In the modern history of US Military Interventions in the Middle East/Africa,
not a single one was for "Humanitarian Reasons".
I see no reason to assume that this one is any different.

I only had time to skim the article,
and am eager to study it.
Almost nothing with any depth has been produced by the US media.

Hopefully, I will have time tomorrow,
and will return with comments.



You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their excuses.
Solidarity99!
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[bvar22]

6. K&R..back UP to +5.

"They" didn't even bother to change the Marketing Hype for this new war.
They just scratched out "Saddam", wrote in "Gaddafi",
and went with it.


OMG!!!
He's a Brutal Dictator who Kills his OWN People!!!
If you're not FOR the New WAR in Libya,
you're WITH The Communists AlQaeda The Terrorists Saddam Qaddafi!!!
:patriot:

[Demeter]

7. Let's not forget Haiti, the Whipping Boy of the World

forever to be punished for a slave rebellion.

[truth2power]

8. Recommend. Great find, Jefferson. Thanks for posting....

I only skimmed the article to read later, but it looks like the truth is finally getting more play.

I was attacked here for noting that Libya was one of only a few countries with the highest standard of living in Africa. Other social amenities, such as universal health care, were dismissed because, well...Ghaddafi was a tyrant.

Also, what part did Goldman Sachs play in Ghaddafi's overthrow. The Goldman people ran afoul of Libyan govt. officials and had to flee the country under bodyguard :P after "losing" 98% of Libya's sovereign wealth fund investment. hmm...

IMO (and maybe this is discussed in the article), even more than access to oil, the overthrow of Ghaddafi had to do with the pan-African bank and his impertinence in not wanting to be indebted to the IMF in perpetuity.


* * * * *

Could you clarify: Is what you linked the entire article? The LRB site seems to indicate that one needs to register to get the full article. I dislike registering on these sites because then my email inbox fills up with all kinds of "alerts" forever after. If this is not the full article, it would be only slightly less inconvenient for me to get the hard copy from my nearby public library. Thanks.

[Jefferson23]

11. Yes, you have the entire piece, no need to sign up, although

it is a great source.

No mention of Goldman Sachs, but you are correct about the standard of living etc.

When you have the time read the entire piece, but this excerpt confirms a great deal:

*Cameron and Obama had made clear that the last thing they wanted was a ceasefire, that the NTC could violate Article 1 of the resolution with impunity and that in doing so it would be acting with the agreement of its Security Council sponsors. Gaddafi’s first ceasefire offer came to nothing, as did his second offer of 20 March. A week later, Turkey, which had been working within the Nato framework to help organise the provision of humanitarian aid to Benghazi, announced that it had been talking to both sides and offered to broker a ceasefire. The offer was given what Ernest Bevin would have called ‘a complete ignoral’ and nothing came of it either, as nothing came of a later initiative, seeking a ceasefire and negotiations (to which Gaddafi explicitly agreed), undertaken by the African Union in April. It too was rejected out of hand by the NTC, which demanded Gaddafi’s resignation as a condition of any ceasefire. This demand went beyond even Obama’s earlier list of conditions, none of which had figured in Resolution 1973. More to the point, it was a demand that made a ceasefire impossible, since securing a ceasefire requires commanders with decisive authority over their armies, and removing Gaddafi would have meant that no one any longer had overall authority over the regime’s forces.*

[truth2power]

12. I printed out the article and I'm half-way through it. I wonder what's going to happen

to healthcare, education, literacy in Libya now. Guess they'll soon be on parity with the U.S. What a step up. Hooray!:eyes:

Re: Gaddafi and Goldman:

Here are a couple of short videos. They were in my bookmark list. I don't remember saving them. One is Max Keiser and the other is Cenk Uygur.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4OVKvNrLsY&feature=fvwp&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUkNnQE-9B4

Here's an article:

How Goldmans cost Gaddafi a $1.3bn fortune


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/how-goldmans-cost-gaddafi-a-13bn-fortune-2291506.html

The Libyan Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund worth tens of billions of dollars into which the Gaddafi administration poured the money it made from oil sales, handed over $1.3bn to the bank in 2008 with a mandate to invest in foreign currency markets and other structured products."

>snip

"But by early 2009 Goldman Sachs had lost 98 per cent of what it had been given, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. It is believed that senior Goldman Sachs officials were then summoned to Tripoli, and were told that, after losing the cash in just a handful of complex trades, the bank would need to offer some sort of compensation. The bank alleges that its officials were physically threatened during meetings in Tripoli, but denies that it hired bodyguards for its staff."

The global financial vultures have been circling for a long time.

[bvar22]

9. Another diamond from this essay:

"The idea that Gaddafi represented nothing in Libyan society, that he was taking on his entire people and his people were all against him was another distortion of the facts. As we now know from the length of the war, the huge pro-Gaddafi demonstration in Tripoli on 1 July, the fierce resistance Gaddafi’s forces put up, the month it took the rebels to get anywhere at all at Bani Walid and the further month at Sirte, Gaddafi’s regime enjoyed a substantial measure of support, as the NTC did.

Libyan society was divided and political division was in itself a hopeful development since it signified the end of the old political unanimity enjoined and maintained by the Jamahiriyya. In this light, the Western governments’ portrayal of ‘the Libyan people’ as uniformly ranged against Gaddafi had a sinister implication, precisely because it insinuated a new Western-sponsored unanimity back into Libyan life. This profoundly undemocratic idea followed naturally from the equally undemocratic idea that, in the absence of electoral consultation or even an opinion poll to ascertain the Libyans’ actual views, the British, French and American governments had the right and authority to determine who was part of the Libyan people and who wasn’t.

No one supporting the Gaddafi regime counted. Because they were not part of ‘the Libyan people’ they could not be among the civilians to be protected, even if they were civilians as a matter of mere fact. And they were not protected; they were killed by Nato air strikes as well as by uncontrolled rebel units. The number of such civilian victims on the wrong side of the war must be many times the total death toll as of 21 February. But they don’t count, any more than the thousands of young men in Gaddafi’s army who innocently imagined that they too were part of ‘the Libyan people’ and were only doing their duty to the state counted when they were incinerated by Nato’s planes or extra-judicially executed en masse after capture, as in Sirte.

(In the essay, this is one long paragraph.
I introduced the breaks to make it more readable on a computer screen)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n22/hugh-roberts/who-said-gaddafi-had-to-go

Arab Spring in Tunisia



Arab Spring in Egypt



Libyan Civil War


As the facts emerge from Libya,
it is becoming clear that Western Disaster Capitalists piggy-backed on the legitimate populist uprisings
of the Arab Spring to annex Libya to their NeoLiberal "Free Market" Empire.

” For all his dictatorial megalomania, Gaddafi is a committed pan-African - a fierce defender of African unity. Libya was not in debt to international bankers. It did not borrow cash from the International Monetary Fund for any "structural adjustment". It used oil money for social services - including the Great Man Made River project, and investment/aid to sub-Saharan countries. Its independent central bank was not manipulated by the Western financial system. All in all a very bad example for the developing world.”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD27Ak01.html

The plan for Libya is the same as the one for Iraq.
Libya WILL be turned into a NeoLiberal Free Market HELL
in which the Western Banks & Resource Extraction Corporations and the IMF WILL own everything.


The propaganda blitz/blackout for the annexation of Libya to the "Free Market" was total in the USA.
There was absolutely NO Opposition Voice or even questions allowed in the US Media, Print or Video.
There were NONE (ZERO).
Saddam Gaddafi was an evil dictator, and THAT was ALL America needed to know.

At least for Iraq, there WAS a whisper of opposition that found its way into the US Media,
but 10 years after, it appears that the control of the Media Outlets in the USA is complete.
(Notice that THIS essay is from Britain)

...but THIS time, its ALL GOOD,
because Obama did it!!!

“The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” ---Senator Obama, 12-20-2007







Solidarity99!
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[Jefferson23]

10. Glad you enjoyed the OP, and yes, Pepe is a great source too imo.

Hugh Roberts covers the history very well, without it one can presume far too much, so I appreciate
the precision as well as the length of his work here.


What can one say about our involvement under a Democrat in the White House, I find more encouragement from our American
brethren on the streets of our cities when considering "change".