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Death by humanitarianism
But we are at war- or, as our leaders prefer to put it, conducting ‘military operations’; so journalists and politicians, almost unanimously, merely repeat and elaborate that claim, rather than subjecting it to scrutiny. Despite the admission by Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy that the objective of the war against Libya is regime change, its ‘humanitarian’ justification provides the basis for public support and international acquiescence.
Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, for example, interviewed in the Independent on 24th April, defended the NATO bombing and air strikes as follows:
He says he understands those concerned about Britain's involvement but asks them to imagine "the slaughter of the lawyers, the students, the architects, the doctors, the nurses in Benghazi who Gaddafi said he was going to massacre. We would have been condemned for standing on the sidelines while this bloodbath continued."
The interviewer did not challenge this statement; and such assertions are indeed difficult to challenge- because once an enemy leader has been sufficiently vilified as an evil dictator and mass murderer, what prudent or ethical person would wish to defend such a figure? Hence almost any allegation of atrocity, in the past, present or projected future, can be made in support of ‘humanitarian’ war, with little fear of widespread contradiction.
It was ever thus. Commenting on the newspaper coverage of the relentless series of campaigns conducted by the English military forces during his time, Dr Samuel Johnson remarked in the year 1758:
In a time of war, the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves, and ill of the enemy; at this time the task of the news writers is easy…
Scarcely any thing awakens attention like a tale of cruelty. The writer of news never fails in the intermission of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins; and if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province.
Johnson concluded:
Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.
With support at home bolstered by the credulity accorded to such tales, the commanders of the British Empire extended its dominion across the globe, acquiring strategic and commercial advantage, slaves and subjects by the tens of millions, and material resources- tobacco, tea, cotton, and eventually- until partially eclipsed by the usurping United States- oil.
What Gaddafi really said
But did Muammar Gaddafi not promise to murder tens of thousands of peaceful civilians in Benghazi, thus justifying the onset of the Western attacks, and have not the Libyan government forces been targeting civilians in Misrata, thus justifying an intensification of the NATO ‘intervention’?
Writing in the Boston Globe on 14th April, Alan J. Kuperman, who is an associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, observed that:
…Khadafy [did not] ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The “no mercy” warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those “who throw their weapons away.” Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight “to the bitter end.’’
What did Muammar Gaddafi really say in that speech? With the resources available to the US and British media, it would have been an easy task to have an English translation of the full text of Gaddafi’s 17th March address to the people of Benghazi widely published. Given that the supposed contents of the speech were used as justification for launching international warfare, it is notable that this was not done.
However, Gaddafi’s 17th March speech can be found on YouTube. For the avoidance of doubt, these are the relevant sections of the speech, transcribed from the uncorrected simultaneous translation by AlJazeera:
“We will come to risk, and we will find those who have posed so much damage to the unity of our country. They can run away, they can go to Egypt, or wherever they want to go. But the traitors, who are agents for the West, for America and the UK, the Europeans and Americans won't be able to say anything to defend those traitors.”
“Those who would surrender their weapons and would join our sides, we are the people of Libya. Those who would surrender their weapons and would come in without their arms, we would forgive them, and would have amnesty for those who put down their weapons. And we will collect those weapons from the streets.
“Anyone who throws his arms away and stays at home would be protected and I tell them, my child, you and your family, throw away your gun and stay at home. But we will search each and every flat and house, and if we find weapons in those flats and residences, then we would consider them as enemies.
“They are attempting to destroy you. Leave your weapons outside and go indoors, into your homes and shut your doors. Cross over to the main squares of the city of Benghazi as a free man. Whom are you defending using artillery and weapons? Who would bring those dead back to life? Whom are you defending? You have been fooled, you have been taken advantage of. Throw away your weapon, and we will collect all these weapons, and you are safe.”
“They are using you as scapegoats. You will be the victims. Our people there, the elderly, and all the population in the city. Do not allow weapons into your homes. Not all these areas, the entrances to the city of Benghazi, we shoot. Leave your weapons out and find yourself an escape. Throw away your arms and find a way out of the city, and then you are saved. Those young men have been taken advantage of.
“Those infidels who are attempting to burn down our country to the ground. We should have no mercy on them. Those are the traitors. Used and abused by those infidels from Qatar, unfortunately, and Kuwait, and other Gulf countries. How stupid can you become, to allow yourself be taken advantage of to that extent in Benghazi. Now you are hungry, thirsty. We don't have a natural disaster like the one that happened in Japan recently, thank God, we have everything, we have our natural resources, but those traitors have been taking advantage of us. Those infidels and traitors we will have to deal with, we promise to deal with. But the peaceful individuals of our people should remain, whether they want to stay at home or go out to the squares, but they should put down their weapons, throw away their weapons.
“There is no danger, they should not feel unsafe. There is no single officer in Benghazi who did not call us, who had been warning us that they have been threatened by people like Zarqawi of being slaughtered. Those who have been forced to follow those infidels, they have been forced to, those also will be forgiven, will be granted amnesty. Those are my children, and we should not leave those children to distort the image of our country after such a bright history.”
War of deception
So Gaddafi did indeed threaten to have “no mercy” on those “traitors” who decided to stay in the city and hold onto their weapons; it can also be argued that Gaddafi is not to be trusted, and that no credence should be accorded to his repeated assurances of safety for the peaceful residents and those who put down their arms. But only by the wildest stretch of political and journalistic deception could the Libyan leader’s statement be portrayed as a promise to slaughter thousands of the peaceful civilians of Benghazi.
Of course, public acceptance of the proclaimed humanitarian nature of the war against Libya has not rested purely on the alleged threats in this speech. The uncritical reporting and wide dissemination of lurid allegations against the Libyan regime began in February, with the start of the campaign for the so-called ‘no-fly-zone’. The key allegations were never substantiated, but had the necessary effect- helping to demonise Muammar Gaddafi and create the political conditions for the onset of bombing and missile strikes.
The assertion that Gaddafi was employing hordes of foreign African mercenaries to attack the Libyan people was refuted by a report from Human Rights Watch. The claims by the BBC and Al Jazeera that Libyan government forces used aircraft to bomb and strafe peaceful demonstrators were untrue, according to satellite monitoring by the Russian military.
Later, it emerged that the allegations that 1,000, 2,000 or more unarmed protestors had been massacred by pro-regime forces were also false. On 10th March, AFP reported that medics in Benghazi gave the figure of 400 dead from the beginning of the revolt, in Derna, Baida, Brega, Benghazi, Ras Lanuf and Bin Jawad; a figure which included the casualties of more than two weeks of civil war. Remarkably, only one woman was among the dead, “killed by a stray bullet while on her balcony in Benghazi during clashes between rebels and loyalists”.
But instead of publicising the disproof, the Western mass media merely went quiet about the discredited claims and moved on, first to the story of the ’promised’ massacre in Benghazi, and next to the alleged targeting of civilians in Misrata.
The casualty figures from Misrata, however, tell a different story. In his Boston Globe article, Alan Kuperman takes up this issue and makes several other pertinent points:
EVIDENCE IS now in that President Barack Obama grossly exaggerated the humanitarian threat to justify military action in Libya. The president claimed that intervention was necessary to prevent a “bloodbath” in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city and last rebel stronghold.
But Human Rights Watch has released data on Misurata, the next-biggest city in Libya and scene of protracted fighting, revealing that Moammar Khadafy is not deliberately massacring civilians but rather narrowly targeting the armed rebels who fight against his government.
Misurata’s population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people — including combatants — have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22 — less than 3 percent — are women. If Khadafy were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties.
Obama insisted that prospects were grim without intervention. “If we waited one more day, Benghazi … could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.’’ Thus, the president concluded, “preventing genocide’’ justified US military action.
But intervention did not prevent genocide, because no such bloodbath was in the offing. To the contrary, by emboldening rebellion, US interference has prolonged Libya’s civil war and the resultant suffering of innocents.
The best evidence that Khadafy did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured either fully or partially — including Zawiya, Misurata, and Ajdabiya, which together have a population greater than Benghazi.
Libyan forces did kill hundreds as they regained control of cities. Collateral damage is inevitable in counter-insurgency. And strict laws of war may have been exceeded.
But Khadafy’s acts were a far cry from Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Bosnia, and other killing fields. Libya’s air force, prior to imposition of a UN-authorized no-fly zone, targeted rebel positions, not civilian concentrations. Despite ubiquitous cellphones equipped with cameras and video, there is no graphic evidence of deliberate massacre. Images abound of victims killed or wounded in crossfire — each one a tragedy — but that is urban warfare, not genocide.
It should be pointed out that Professor Kuperman is no peacenik or left-winger, but an academic of the realist wing of foreign policy studies in the USA. His analysis was cited approvingly by another leading realist foreign policy scholar, Stephen M. Walt.
Women, children and men
It is notable also that the HRW report recorded that eight children were among the injured in Misrata. Along with the casualty figures from eastern Libya on 10th March, the proportion of women and children injured in the fighting in Misrata is revealing.
Alan Kuperman’s remark that “if Khadafy were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties” may be criticised on the basis that in a war zone, particularly in an Arab society, women could be expected to stay indoors much of the time to keep them out of harm’s way- so the female casualties, even under indiscriminate attacks, might be substantially less than 50%.
Yet much of the military conflict in Misrata has, according to Western news coverage, involved rocket and shell fire by government troops against residential areas, and indeed many buildings have been destroyed. Were the forces of the Libyan government deliberately targeting the civilian population of Misrata (as distinct from locations used by rebel fighters), the figures for the adult women injured of less than 3% of the total, and of children less than 1% of the total, would be impossible.
In striking contrast to the statistics for the wounded in Misrata by 10th April, and the dead in eastern Libya by 10th March, are the proportions among those killed and injured in Gaza by 12th January 2009, in the first two weeks of Israel’s supposed ‘war against Hamas’. Israel’s Western allies colluded with the zionist state’s assertion that it was targeting terrorist fighters, and accepted with only mild disquiet the Israeli claim that the civilians killed and maimed were merely collateral damage.
Yet, among the 910 killed by the Israelis by 12th January, there were 292 children and 75 women; over 8% of the dead were adult women, and more than 30% were children. Among the 4,250 injured, approximately 50% were women and children.
No Western country proposed air and missile strikes against Israel, or a ‘no-fly-zone’, or even the freezing of its assets and economic sanctions. Rather, it continues to receive two billion dollars annually in US military and economic aid.
When considering the ‘humanitarian’ claims of the NATO war, another point made by Kuperman, that US (and British, French, and now Italian) interference has, “by emboldening rebellion […] prolonged Libya’s civil war and the resultant suffering of innocents“ is an important one. It should be added that the killing and maiming not merely of the ‘innocents’ but of the young men who are fighting (who, on both the government and the rebel side, are dying and being horribly injured in defence of their ideals and what they believe to be the best interests of their country) is also an appalling consequence of the continuing war.
As well as the Libyan government forces, the rebel side are also killing people; this has included, in the rebel-controlled areas, the lynching of black migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa, reportedly in considerable numbers.
On 3rd April, Reuters reported on a statement issued by the government of Chad:
Chad on Sunday called on coalition forces to protect its citizens in rebel-held areas in Libya, saying dozens had been accused and executed for allegedly being mercenaries in the pay of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi […]
"Since the beginning of the Libyan crisis, Chadians in Libya, especially those in areas controlled by the transitional national council, have been singled out," a statement from Chad's government spokesman Kalzeubet Pahimi Deubet said.
"Dozens of Chadians have known this sad fate," he said.
The statement said several Chadian nationals had been arrested, some were "paraded on television as mercenaries and sometimes executed" despite denials that Libya had recruited any mercenaries from its southern neighbour […]
"The Chadian government is calling on international coalition forces involved in Libya and international human rights organisation to stop these abuses against Chadians and other migrant African workers," the statement said.
‘Humanitarian’ killing vs. peace
And what of those directly killed by the NATO forces? The civilian casualty reports by the Libyan media have been treated with skepticism in the West, although the Catholic Bishop in Tripoli has claimed to have reliable accounts of scores of civilian deaths due to the Western strikes.
NATO regards government buildings and communication centres as legitimate targets; and one can be sure from the three dozen or more on the rebel side who have died under Western ‘friendly fire’ that the victims of NATO munitions, even when intended to hit genuinely military targets, are not only ‘enemy’ troops.
However, in the main they do kill ‘enemy’ soldiers, and clearly in large numbers.
From the early days of the fighting in Libya, the alternative of mediation and negotiation has been available. Yet the USA and other Western countries have consistently rejected all such proposals, and encouraged the Libyan rebels to do likewise. The initiative for a peace commission put forward by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela following the outbreak of the civil war was welcomed by Gaddafi, but dismissed out of hand by the West; and also by the rebels, who at that time had not only taken control of most of the country, but were also hopeful of Western military support.
Subsequently the African Union appointed a peace delegation, which sought to enter Libya following the passing of Resolution 1973 by the UN Security Council; but the powers conducting the ‘no fly zone’ denied the AU delegates permission to enter Libya.
A second AU mission succeeded in gaining NATO permission to enter Libya, and on 11th April was received in Tripoli where the Libyan government agreed to all its proposals. However on 12th April, not only did the rebel forces’ Transitional National Council reject the peace plan, on the grounds that a precondition for talks must be the immediate removal of Colonel Gaddafi, but British Foreign Secretary William Hague and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen both made statements dismissing the AU proposals.
Three days later, the US, French and British leaders issued their joint letter which reinforced this intransigence by insisting that the war must continue until regime change is achieved; and on April 30th, both NATO and the Libyan rebel leadership rejected a further proposal, this time from Gaddafi himself, for a ceasefire and negotiations. Thus, within Western policy, the objective of regime change trumps any effort to end the fighting.
It should be noted that the April 15th statement by Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy on regime change was not a matter of ‘mission creep’, but rather the eventual admission of what had always been, well before the Western bombing and cruise missile strikes began, the objective of the (planned) military action. It could not have been proclaimed before Resolution 1973 was put to the UN Security Council, because that would have ensured a veto by China and Russia. It could not even have been announced before the air and missile war became an official NATO operation, because that would have made it very difficult to gain the agreement of Germany and Turkey.
On March 24th Robert Shrum, a senior strategist in the US Democratic Party, wrote an article entitled ‘It really is about regime change in Libya’, in which he emphasised the necessity for Obama, at that stage and previously, to conceal the objective of the war; and also to conceal, as the US and NATO are still doing- although nobody believes their denials- the policy of attempting to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi. Shrum remarked:
Having forged a genuine multilateralism on Libya and pulled off the miracle of no Chinese or Russian veto in the Security Council, the administration now has to speak diplomatically while wielding big missiles. But through the white noise of the media and political scrum, some truths ought to be clear even if Obama and company can’t clearly say them.
As for Gadhafi, our objective — the only acceptable outcome — has to be regime change. The president can’t say that either, because the U.N. resolution doesn’t; that was the price of diplomacy. But surely this can’t constrain the final outcome. And of course, Gadhafi ought to be a target even if a U.S. general says he isn’t — and that we simply bombed his fortress to knock out military communications, not to get him. Why is the killer in chief off-limits if a 19-year-old conscripted into his brutal army has to face the bombs and missiles of March?
Is the no-fly zone enough? Are we willing to let Gadhafi stay in power — or is he a target? There are plain answers to all of these questions — but they can’t come from the administration — at least not yet.
In his article, Robert Shrum underlined the cynicism of the USA’s international positions:
…why intervene in Libya, but not Yemen or Bahrain? The question reflects a simplistic equivalence that ignores a fundamental reality: Despite the rhetoric of universalist democracy, effective foreign policy demands a balance between our interests and our ideals. In Bahrain, a longtime ally at a strategically important location on the Arabian Peninsula, the conflict is at least as sectarian as it is political. It would be a disaster to have one free election there where Shiites sympathetic to Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs would prevail and then close the process down, allying or ultimately even merging with Iran, which covets Bahrain as just another Iranian province. This wouldn’t be democratic in any true and lasting sense. That’s something else Obama can’t say, so he urges a process of peaceful consultation while Saudi Arabia dispatches troops to restore order. Maybe, just maybe, there will be some incremental progress toward wider political participation. But Bahrain isn’t Libya — and the pursuit of American values can’t be a heedless exercise that vitiates American interests.
Yemen and Bahrain, like Saudi Arabia, have US puppet rulers. And Saudi Arabia is diplomatically supported by the USA in invading Bahrain to prevent a free election- because the Bahrainis would not use their votes in accordance with the strategic interests of the United States. (One can also note that meanwhile in Côte d'Ivoire, French troops installed Alassane Ouattara as president, although Ouattara’s forces had recently carried out a massacre of an estimated 800 civilians.)
The three letter word
But what is this American interest (and British and French interest) in the Arab countries, which in order not to be vitiated, here requires the West to back brutal and unelected regimes, and there requires them to wage war against other such regimes, as in Iraq and Libya?
President Chavez of Venezuela, President Museveni of Uganda and Prime Minister Putin of Russia have spelt it out in three letters- oil.
It is, however, not merely about securing contracts on the most lucrative terms for Western petroleum companies, important though that is. The matter of oil resources and global strategy are inextricably intertwined in Western policy towards the Arab region.
Although it was vigorously denied at the time of the 2003 invasion, it was later admitted by former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan that the key reason for requiring regime change in Iraq was the oil; and, in the context of arguing against the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, the veteran US strategist Henry Kissinger and President Bush himself asserted that the occupation must continue in order that Iraq’s oil reserves should not fall into the wrong hands- ‘extremists and radicals’ or pro-Iranian elements.
Greenspan stated:
I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
And he added:
From a rational point of view, I cannot understand why we don't name what is evident and indeed a wholly defensible pre-emptive position.
According to Kissinger:
American forces […] are in Iraq not as a favour to its government or as a reward for its conduct. They are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.
In a speech in November 2006, George W. Bush raised the possibility that, were it not for the US military presence, Arab radicals could use control of energy resources to counter American support for Israel. The Washington Post reported:
Bush said extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its alliance with Israel.
The White House then issued a clarification:
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Saturday that Bush's latest argument does not reflect a real shift. “We're still not saying we went into Iraq for oil. That's not true,” he said. “But there is the realistic strategic concern that if a country with such enormous oil reserves and the corresponding revenues you can derive from that is controlled by essentially a terrorist organization, it could be destabilizing for the region.”
Fratto […] argued that even if radicals could not move the markets dramatically with Iraqi oil, they would use the country as a base to topple other governments in the Middle East such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which would give them “a lot more oil to blackmail with.”
So, the US uses its military power to ensure that ‘moderates’ (ie, regimes friendly to the USA) control the oil resources, because otherwise those resources could be used for ‘blackmail’- that is, to promote an agenda contrary to that of the United States.
That is merely a statement of what the US has to lose should it cease to dominate the Arab world. The converse is the implicit advantage which the USA holds, on a global strategic level, by having ‘friendly’ and puppet regimes in power in the ‘wider Middle East’ and by regularly demonstrating, by acts of war, its determination to maintain or increase its power in that region.
Alongside its leading position in key high-tech industries, its domination of global finance, its cultural influence and- of course- its immense military superiority; having the region which is, by far, our planet’s most important producer of exportable energy resources within the US sphere of power and influence is a crucial factor in maintaining the position of the United States as the world’s only superpower.
Regarding the motives of France, Britain and Italy- it is no coincidence that these are the former colonial powers in the Middle East and North Africa, keen to use the opportunity occasioned by the Libyan conflict to reprise and enhance their role in the region.
The African dimension
Why to choose Libya, specifically, for military-enforced regime change? Because, unlike nearly all of the Arab dictators and princes, Colonel Gaddafi, despite his extensive compromises with the main NATO countries since September 11th 2001- following which he sought to make common cause with the USA and Western Europe against Al-Qaeda- has never been a puppet of the Western powers. In 2009 he threatened to nationalise the operations of foreign oil companies in Libya and proposed that other OPEC countries should do the same; by that threat he negotiated a significant increase in his government’s revenue, and a corresponding decrease in the Western companies revenue, from the Libyan oilfields.
Further, Libya is a potential prize not merely for Arab reasons but also for African reasons. Africa, particularly since China began to make deals with countries in that continent for investment and extraction of minerals, is increasingly the focus of Western concern.
Under Gaddafi, Libya has taken an important political role in the African continent and has been a key player within the African Union, the fact of its oil wealth giving Libya an influence outweighing its small population.
In 2006, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld initiated Africom, the USA’s unified military command structure for Africa. While seeking to avoid open confrontation with the United States, Gaddafi along with a small minority of other African leaders resisted the establishment of Africom; and, despite inconsistencies, he has generally promoted a pan-Africanist agenda, countering Western domination.
The recognition of Libya’s role in the continent is evident from the clear stance taken by some sub-Saharan African leaders against the Western bombing of Libya, and particularly from the thoughtful and balanced analysis made by Yoweri Museveni.
****
As I write, the Libyan government has announced the identities of four of the recent victims of the war- Saif Al-Arab, a postgraduate economics student aged 29, and three children, all under twelve years old. Journalists were taken to the wreckage of the family home, in a middle-class area of Tripoli, blown up by three Western missiles; a fourth missile lay unexploded in the broken floor.
If and when the Western authorities admit that they were responsible for these deaths, the only possible justification can be that, as the youngest son and grandchildren of Muammar Gaddafi, they were acceptable collateral damage in one aspect of our war effort, the ongoing attempts to assassinate the Libyan leader.
At least we know something about these few among the many that we have killed.
When our own boys are returned in coffins from their fight for control of foreign lands, quite recently in Iraq and currently in Afghanistan, their photographs and accounts of their lives are published, their family members and lovers interviewed; the loss of each one rightly and collectively considered a tragedy.
How many hundred have been torn or burned to death by NATO bombs and missiles in Libya, and how many hundred more have been indirectly killed by NATO, due to the Western insistence on prolonging the war? Even putting aside the civilian casualties, the men under arms who have been killed were fighting on their own soil; each one who dies, on either side, believing that they gave their lives for the best interests of their country.
For us, in the nations which destroyed them, they are faceless, their brief life stories not even imagined.