By Kevin Ovenden
The Arab revolution has widened the left’s horizons. In the region itself there is now a historic possibility of a new radical politics: successful resistance to the hegemonic Western powers and to Israel fused with the movement of the young and propertyless masses against the corrupt and complicit elites.
The fall of Ben Ali and Mubarak shattered decades of Western policy, rocking them onto the back foot. They are now moving onto the front foot, as the regional despots raid their political and military arsenals to cling on.
Thus the developing Arab movements and the left face new political challenges and strategic choices. That is the context of the legitimate debate Gilbert Achcar has framed over the Western military intervention in Libya.
Gilbert outlines a case for qualified political support for the soon to be Nato-commanded air and naval operations in Libya (no one on the international left is in a position to do anything materially/militarily themselves).
He writes as a well known Marxist and opponent of the Afghan and Iraq wars, a supporter of the Palestinian struggle and a genuine friend of the most radical edge of the Arab revolutions.
Gilbert Achcar is no part of the liberal attack pack, who in natural alliance with the neoconservatives brought us the disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq. But he argues that over Libya the left should support the action of powers who occupy those two countries, albeit with many caveats and with vigilant suspicion.
It is a badly mistaken position over Libya. When its logic is generalised – as Gilbert does – it plays dangerously into the hands of the reactionary forces which he and the left hope the Arab revolutions will eventually eradicate.
Western intervention across the region
Gilbert introduces two analogies to make the point that socialist principles are not articles of religious faith and are no substitute for providing concrete answers based on a “factual assessment” of concrete situations.
The point is helpful: the analogies, not. As he acknowledges, proceeding by analogy tends to generate confusing polemics over what is common between unique events, each of which is itself the subject of considerable controversy and of radically different factual assessments.
The Rwandan genocide, one of his examples, is arguably (at the very least) more a horrific lesson in the consequences of actual Western intervention, in its totality up to and including the eve of the slaughter, than it is a counter-example for those Gilbert takes to task for a “religious” opposition to all Western military action.
In any case, even the Western leaders who have driven the Libya bombing have not suggested that the events they say they forestalled were analogous to the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide – though the most rabid tabloids and the bomberatti have. It is self-defeating for the left to insert those connotations ourselves. It is even more damaging if we at the same time fail to foreground the most salient and distinctive feature of which the uprising in Libya is an expression – the wider Arab revolutionary upheaval.
That regional process, and what it means both for the Western powers and for those who have risen up in Libya, barely features in Gilbert’s analysis. Instead, he largely accepts the question as Nicolas Sarokzy, David Cameron and Barack Obama frame it: a particular, Libyan moral dilemma confronting their publics and states, whose wider actions are cropped out.
But their military action is not some singular response to a potential humanitarian crisis. It is more even than the latest chapter in a history of wars attended by specious humanitarian claims. That said, history alone – recent and ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan – should cause anyone who hopes for a progressive outcome to this bombing or who invests it with moral worth to pause and reflect.
The bloody past and present also contribute to the rational underpinning of a far from “religious” anti-war sentiment, which goes beyond the left to embrace an unprecedentedly large section of public opinion – a testament to the international movement against the Iraq war.
The context, however, is not merely historical. The same actors who are launching missile strikes over Libya are intervening at the same time and with the same objectives across the rest of the same region. (Unless we are unfeasibly to imagine that their motives, interests and aims are fundamentally different in Libya and in the Gulf – an unsustainable moral-political atomism, certainly for a Marxist.)
The same European Union mandarin – civilising-colonialist Robert Cooper – is briefing about bringing democracy to Libya and also writing apologias for the Saudi-orchestrated murder of democrats in Bahrain.
The same President Obama who said that attacks on hospitals were a casus belli against Tripoli is standing by his allies in Riyadh and Manama, who spent many days… attacking hospitals under the noses of the US Fifth Fleet.
The same Treasury revenue going up in smoke as missiles explode in Libya is subsidising Israel’s missiles blowing up people in Gaza – not two years ago, but today, now, with the threat of much more imminently.
The same Qatar that is belatedly providing air support for the attacks in Libya is simultaneously sending troops to attack democrats in the Persian Gulf.
For sure, there are great fractures and differences of emphasis as the US with its European and Arab allies seeks to cohere a response to the challenge posed by the Arab revolutions.
The US would like more palliative reforms from the Kings of Arabia; the Saudis want to give none. Hillary Clinton has cleaved as long as possible to the autocrat in Yemen; Alain Juppe, stung by the political crisis wrought by his predecessors’ intense relationship with Ben Ali, called earlier for Ali Abdullah Saleh to go.
But the overall aim is the same: to corral the revolutionary process and ensure it is steered along a path which is stable and compatible with the interests of the Western powers and whichever safe pairs of hands they can identify in each state.
Oil and Western policy
Those interests do ultimately come down to the control of Middle Eastern and North African hydrocarbons. Is the West’s policy about oil? On one level it is always about oil. When Silvio Berlusconi and Sarkozy embraced Muammar Gaddafi, the unspoken interest was oil. When they find themselves intervening to overthrow him, the underlying interest remains oil – just as it was when the West supported Saddam Hussein in his attack on revolutionary Iran and then, a decade later, drove him out of Kuwait, embargoed Iraq for 12 years, finally invading a second time and executing him.
The same imperial, capitalist objectives in the region can be served by different politiques d’Etat; to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, imperial chancellories have no eternal friends and no eternal enemies, only eternal interests – as Hosni Mubarak discovered at the eleventh hour.
So why the change in policy towards Gaddafi? There are those who serially tell us that this time it’s different, this time the Western governments are subordinating self-interest to humanitarianism. Gilbert is not one of them. But his argument lends them credibility – and if adopted by the left would encourage them to go further.
Gaddafi managed neither to fall on his sword, like Mubarak, nor to crush the opposition, like the Al Khalifa kleptocrats in Bahrain – but only after the intervention of the US’s oldest ally in the region, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
He did succeed through vicious repression and playing on sectional divisions in Libyan society in displacing the dynamic of the youth-led revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt (which has also been central in Sanaa, Yemen, for six weeks) with an armed conflict more resembling a civil war.
In those circumstances he became a liability for the West. On the eve of the bombing campaign Obama said that the instability in Libya threatened “vital US allies in the region”.
Gaddafi himself had already proven that he had no intention of posing such a threat. Those who think that he is some kind of anti-imperialist now would do well to reflect that even as he denounced the Western bombardment as “crusader aggression” he was proclaiming himself as the only possible Libyan leader to maintain peace with Israel and to prevent African migrants from entering Europe.
It is preposterous, as Gilbert says, to claim that Gaddafi has been hostile to Western interests over the last decade and that that is why the West want to topple him. But equally, it is evident over two last weeks that the flaking-rule of this recently acquired, flakey ally no longer served them well.
The wrangling in Western capitals over how to respond and bring a return to stability more plausibly reflects the uncertainty that has beset their attempts to rally a riposte to the Arab revolution than it does some dawning recognition of a hitherto absent moral sensibility. Unlike in Egypt, there was no army high command to switch allegiance to smoothly and safely.
The same hesitancy marked the Arab despots. They want an end to the revolutionary wave, but they have no loyalty to, still less liking for, Gaddafi – or necessarily for each other; the Qataris long campaigned for the toppling of Mubarak. The West’s actions are a single axe to fell a two-headed monster, they hope.
Gilbert says we should not “dismiss the weight of public opinion on Western governments” in deciding their actions, justified as preventing a slaughter in Benghazi.
Now, only the self-appointed and deluded leaders of “global civil society” would claim that public opinion in Europe and north America is what drove the decision to go to war. Britain and the US went to war on Iraq despite public opinion.
There is little enthusiasm for this war – that much is clear from the conflicting opinion polls. So we are left with the observation that public outrage at a predicted massacre was just one factor among many in Sarkozy’s and Cameron’s drive to get the missiles launched and bombs dropped.
Morality and Western bombs
Let us put to one side that it was the dire warnings of the very politicians who pushed for bombing – Juppe and William Hague preeminently – which informed the public discussion about a possible slaughter. Let us also return shortly to whether their warnings were right and what might have been done.
In a limited sense public compassion was significant. It determined the ideological register in which London, Paris and Washington have chosen to relegitimise their roles in the Arab region after the battering they have taken from Iraq and the fall of their allies in Tunisia and Egypt.
Gilbert touches on it when he identifies the West’s concern to ensure a continued “ability to invoke humanitarian pretexts for further imperialist wars like the ones in the Balkans or Iraq”. But that means that giving any credence to their current humanitarian pretext simply makes it easier for them to construct exactly the narrative for more Iraqs.
Emboldened Western powers make further wars more likely. Supporting their military actions contributes to that.
Unless we are to detach Libya from what the Western powers are doing and will do in the region and elsewhere, that consequence surely weighs on one side of the moral balance Gilbert enjoins us to strike: “what is decisive is the comparison between the human cost of this intervention and the cost that would have been incurred had it not happened”. The dead in Bahrain and Yemen deserve to be counted too.
The first cost we will come to know as events unfold in North Africa, the Middle East and beyond. The second, we can never know with certainty.
It has become largely accepted that Gaddafi was about to take Benghazi and would have killed thousands. The success and scale of Gaddafi’s repression do not for a second decide our opposition to it. But they are crucial to Gilbert’s test for whether we should support what the Western powers are doing.
So let’s assume that Juppe, Hague and others were right: Gaddafi was about to win and kill thousands. ”Can anyone claiming to belong to the left just ignore a popular movement’s plea for protection… when the type of protection requested is not one through which control over their country could be exerted?” asks Gilbert.
Up to then, however, the rebels’ requests had been ignored, not by the left, but by those to whom they were addressed. They asked the great powers who now pose as their protectors for access to weapons days into the uprising. They were refused.
At the time, Berlusconi’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini voiced most clearly the West’s suspicions about the Benghazi rebels: they were an unknown quantity but some were definitely Islamist (he warned ominously of the proclamation of an “Islamic Emirate” on the southern Mediterranean) and a banner opposing Western interference was prominently displayed.
So intelligence had to be gathered (special forces and spies were dispatched), guarantees had to be sought (commitments to Libya’s commercial treaties were swiftly obtained), the picture allowed to clarify and nothing be done which would enable any agency independent from the interests of the Western corporations and states which had got along famously with Gaddafi over the previous 10 years.
The condition that intervention would not amount to exerting control over the country was breached before the words in the UN resolution ruling out an occupation were typed up. What else might Sarkozy and Clinton in Paris three days before the UN vote have bargained over from a position of strength with the former regime figures who they plucked as representatives of the Benghazi opposition?
Gilbert does not address the baleful effects of the West’s embrace on the opposition itself. Nor does he consider how intervention led by the former North African colonial powers allows Gaddafi, of all people, to wrap himself in the shroud of Omar Mukhtar, the hero of the devastating Libyan war of independence against fascist Italy, thus giving him another weapon to shore up support.
The opposition may well have started as an admixture of forces comparable with the Tunisian and Egyptian movements. But the former regime elements, appointing themselves as leaders, and reliably pro-Western figures have unsurprisingly been promoted as the rebellion becomes more dependent on Western military force.
If war is an extension of political conflict by other means, then military conflict extends its own political logic. In a position of military weakness the Benghazi council has called for greater and greater Western military action.
Rebels complained early on that they were not in a position to call in Western air strikes. They may want US, French and British planes to be the opposition air arm, but they are under US/Nato command. It calls the shots. It isn’t the rebels’ airforce; they are now more Nato’s ground force.
The Benghazi council has not yet called for ground troops – which are not ruled out by the UN resolution – but if a stalemate sets in… what then? Perhaps some more on-the-ground “specialists” to guide in the missiles or some more “advisors” (special forces, ie highly trained killers, are already there)?
Should the left ignore the call for further help, even if a “popular movement” warns of massacres and, as the Pentagon has said, air action alone is not certain to achieve victory on the ground? Shouldn’t we support steps to make the missile strikes more accurate, to reduce “collateral damage”? Wouldn’t it be immoral not to?
Should we seek to expose the insincerity of the West by demanding more militarily action on behalf of the rebels if they don’t succeed quikely? Should we greet any move towards de facto partition with demands that the West “finishes the job” and removes the butcher Gaddafi?
Surely it would be immoral, having prevented the fall of Benghazi, to watch the fighting drag on and Gaddafi remain in control of most of the country? It is the rebels’ requests, after all, which authenticate the moral case for supporting the bombing, according to Gilbert. And they want more bombing.
The war has already gone further than the restricted no-fly-zone Gilbert says it would be immoral to oppose. The UN resolution went well beyond that. The opening attacks were not against aircraft but on ground forces and Gaddafi’s compound – they had the coordinates from Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt in 1986. Given the results of every other Western air war, is there any doubt that the cruise missiles and “smart bombs” have caused civilian casualties? (At the time of writing Western warplanes are fully engaged in bombing Ajdabiya so the rebels can take it.)
Herein lies the essential unreality of Gilbert’s position. He wants to scalpel out from the UN resolution and Nato bombing a humanitarian kernel that we must support. We should oppose the rest. We should monitor the course of an inherently chaotic war to ensure that military action doesn’t go beyond the humanitarian aims we have imputed.
But means and ends were always wider. That’s why the vaunted international consensus collapsed within 24 hours. There was no actual demarcation between a supposed humanitarian mission and the wider objectives of the belligerents – especially of Sarkozy and Cameron, who openly proclaimed a doctrine of regime change.
The political futility of Gilbert’s position is apparent when he writes, “… we should definitely demand that bombings stop after Gaddafi’s air means have been neutralised”. The Pentagon declared them neutralised the day before his article appeared, but the bombing continued.
Alternatives to Nato action
So what is left of the argument that we should have supported a no-fly-zone which was superseded before the Security Council vote? Only that Benghazi was about to fall, there would be a massacre and there was no alternative to supporting Western action which, whatever its wider ambitions and methods, did prevent it. Let’s accept the claim of an imminent massacre and look at whether there was any alternative.
Gilbert dismisses the idea of the rebels arming as impractical: there were only “24 hours” for them to get the weapons and learn to use them. But any impracticality is a result of the political priorities of the Western powers.
For two weeks they refused weapons and imposed an embargo to stop any shipment while they sought guarantees that the Benghazi rebels would not use them against their vested interests in Libya, established under Gaddafi over the last decade. They blackmailed the genuinely revolutionary elements and suborned others of the Benghazi leadership as Gaddafi’s armour moved in. The left everywhere should say so clearly, not accept the fait accompli of coercion.
Gilbert argues that the left could oppose war against Serbia and Iraq because we were able to point to diplomatic alternatives, but that over Libya there were none. Now, I don’t know how realistic Vladimir Putin’s diplomacy was in relation to Slobodan Milosevic or how credible was Saddam Hussein’s offer to withdraw from Kuwait. But neither do I remember those being necessary conditions for the movements against the wars of 1991 and 1999.
Following Gilbert’s thesis nonetheless, there was a high level African Union delegation on its way to Tripoli to seek a diplomatic settlement when the Western bombing started. Gilbert suggests that Gaddafi is too irrational to be a party to a mediated solution. But we were told that Milosevic and Saddam were also mad dogs, genocidal dictators who would never accept a mediated solution. These are hardly strong grounds for opposing the Balkan and Iraq wars yet giving the West the benefit of the doubt over Libya.
Gilbert argues that any Arab-organised intervention would cause just as many civilian casualties and lead to just as much imperialist influence over Libya. He cites Saudi Arabia and Egypt as two possible interveners. A few moments’ factual assessment shows that such an intervention would likely open up very different possibilities.
It was almost certainly impossible for Saudi Arabia to lead an intervention perceived as supporting the Arab revolution. It was leading the suppression of the revolution in Bahrain at the same time. It is the most brittle and ancient of anciens regimes, which has rejected all calls for it to broaden its social base through serious reform. The tensions would have exposed it utterly and opened a breach for the Saudi opposition movement – much more so than in tiny Qatar. That’s why the House of Saud voted for the West to do it.
Egypt is different. Mubarak is gone. The army remains. But it presides over a society in which an actual revolution is still being fought out. It’s currently Washington’s biggest regional concern. An intervention led by Egypt would not have simply been a cat’s paw of London, Paris and Washington. Its reflex within Egypt would not have been of the “bomb the new Hitler” variety that is dredged up on these occasions in the imperialist countries. It would have been conditioned by the new found activism of the Egyptian people.
Egyptian socialists have issued a statement opposing the West’s military action in Libya and agitating for popular pressure to come to the aid of the rebellion in their western neighbour. You only have to picture Egyptian flags, of the kind that fluttered in Tahrir Square, being waved in Benghazi rather than the Tricolor and Union Jack to appreciate what the difference would be.
There were alternatives to supporting the West’s bombing. Of course, they were not ones Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama would freely choose. They had to be argued and fought for against the line of the Western governments. In that sense they were not as immediate as the willing decisions of those who control powerful states. But if the left were to accept that the only realistic solutions are those that the US, EU and Nato want to entertain, then we too succumb to blackmail and there seems little point in building an independent left. We face strategic choices.
Democracy and the Islamist scarecrow
The left wing of the Egyptian revolution – the most important in the region thus far – has rejected that blackmail. They are not people who can be dismissed as armchair critics sitting in comfort. And the mass forces that were ranged against Mubarak remain independent of Western tutelage.
Gilbert, however, privileges the Libyan rebels, who are now dependent on Paris and London, acting on Washington’s dime – Pentagon spending was 50 percent of the Nato total 10 years ago, now it is 75 percent.
In a deeply worrying aside, he asserts that whatever regime the Libyan rebels might form now would automatically be better than “the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood” playing a “crucial role” in post-Mubarak Egypt. That makes a terrible concession not merely to the Western powers’ military action, but to their politics and ideology as they try to reshape the Arab region under rejuvenated hegemony.
They want the public East and West to believe that regimes dependent on Western force of arms and constructed at conferences in Paris or London – like Nouri Al-Maliki’s in Iraq – are a priori better than long suppressed Islamic movements playing an independent, prominent role. The Arabs, they maintain, are not ready for unguided democracy. Israel’s Tzipi Livni is promulgating bespoke criteria for Arab parties to be admitted to the democratic club; they include recognising Israel.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood does not fit the Islamophobic demonology and in any case is an organic part of Egyptian society – a vital point for anyone who truly believes in national self-determination. As the political space has opened up so have the divisions in an organisation that was always more of a coalition than a monolithic party. There is a widening crack between a politically conservative old guard and a youth imbued with revolutionary aspirations. In fact, several parties look set to emerge from the Brotherhood’s ranks. They include those who emphasise radical democratic and social change as opposed to the imposition of restrictive mores.
The most popular model among the mainstream of the Brotherhood and among many other Islamists in the region is now the AKP government in Turkey. It is far from a socialist administration. But it beggars belief that on account of its Islamic roots it and those who emulate it must be by definition worse than the forces who hope to come to power in Libya under Western bombs and licence.
The Turkish government’s position over Libya is to call for Gaddafi to go, to limit action strictly to humanitarian objectives, to criticise military “excesses” and to oppose Western politicking. In those respects, it’s a position not unlike Gilbert’s. But he cedes the pass to those who are waving the Islamist scarecrow.
Events since the appearance of Gilbert’s article have made bald assertions of the superior progressive credentials of the now Western-dependent opposition in Benghazi untenable. Serious media organisations such as the LA Times – not conspiracist supporters of Gaddafi – have carried first hand reports of grizzly treatment of black migrant workers at the hands of Benghazi’s new security section. They are also rounding up those they say are “Gaddafi loyalists”. What fate lies in store?
We have been here before. We have seen other sectional movements prove incapable of transcending the divisions fostered or exploited by the regime they oppose, and thus failing to unite the bulk of society behind them. We have seen how in a bitter military conflict some have ended up playing on those divisions themselves. Some have even taken a portion of the brutality they have faced and hurled it back in kind.
In Benghazi under Western oversight we are not seeing the kind of sloughing off of the muck of ages that lit up Cairo’s Tahrir Square when Muslims and Christians linked arms against divide and rule and pressed the most radical revolutionary path.
For several reasons, among them Gaddafi’s repression, that process was marginal to the Libyan uprising. The Western powers certainly do not want to see it emerge now in Benghazi, or in Tripoli if Gaddafi falls. They won’t want the voices in Misrata that are skeptical of the West’s role to grow louder. And they are now in a stronger position to stop all that happening.
Imperial hypocrisies
Gilbert, of course, points out US and European hypocrisies. The apparent contradiction on which the hypocrisy rests is not incidental. It is rooted in a consistent set of deep interests which are far from contradictory: their hands on the spigot of the world’s energy economy against competitors from without and the mass of the people within.
But with Libya as his point of departure Gilbert’s resolution of the seeming inconsistencies of the West takes us in exactly the wrong direction. If followed, it would lead to a strategic divergence on the left and inadvertent relief to the hypocrites.
Gilbert spells out his approach by pondering the prospect of major Israeli air strikes against Gaza and a hypothetical call for a Western no-fly-zone in response: “Pickets should be organized at the UN in New York demanding it. We should all be prepared to do so, with now a powerful argument” – the argument that you did it over Libya so do it over Gaza.
In fact, while the deputy prime minister of Israel has mooted an imminent repeat of Operation Cast Lead, more limited air strikes are already happening, and more intensely than at any time in the last two years.
So this isn’t a question for the future. It is now. What is the response, and what ought it be?
In the region, the reaction among the left and progressives has been overwhelmingly to point to continuing Western – crucially US – backing for the state of Israel, the latest egregious example being yet another US veto of a Security Council resolution opposing illegal settlement building.
It’s been to highlight Tel Aviv’s request for a further $20 billion subvention from Washington. It has been to focus attention on the transitional government in Egypt to demand it reflect popular sentiment, break fully with the Mubarak/Sadat years, open the Rafah border, cut off gas supplies to Israel and declare for the Palestinian struggle. (It has already felt sufficient pressure to caution Israel against an all-out Gaza war.)
Similar arguments are being raised by the radical left and the now considerable pro-Palestinian movement in Europe and the US.
Their direction of travel is not for further Western military engagement in the Middle East following Libya – intervention that may come in Syria if events follow a similar pattern. It is for ending that engagement – direct and through Western support for the military machines of Israel and Saudi Arabia.
It is not to demand European and US diplomats descend in greater number to “help” bring peace and justice. It is to tell the likes of latter day Prince Metternich, the State Department’s Jeffrey Feldman, to get back to Washington and take with him his schemes for manipulating opposition forces which he perfected in the sectarian labyrinth of Lebanon.
It is not for the West to do more; it is for them to stop doing what they are doing.
This isn’t a semantic game. The movement that emerged in Tunis and Cairo shows the potential for a new agency in the Arab region – a radical force that is independent of elites, big and small, Western and domestic.
Sidi Bouzid and Tahrir Square restored Arabs themselves as the agents of progress in their region after the catastrophe of the neocon experiment with Iraq and all that went before. The West wants to reinsert itself, forcibly if necessary, as the principal actor, the arbiter of progress for the natives.
It might be objected that it is an uphill struggle for popular Arab movements to force a retreat in Western policy, and to frustrate their and the regional rulers’ interests. That’s true.
But it is far more preferable, and infinitely more realistic, than lobbying for the imperial powers to become something which they cannot be: a force for progress, if only they could be persuaded to resolve their supposed mixed motives and conflicted thinking in the right way.
This strategic choice is being fought out now in Yemen. The most dynamic elements in the society – the young people who gather outside Sanaa’s university – are choosing the Cairo of Tahrir Square over the Benghazi of Western suzerainty. But there are other powerful, sectarian or sectional political actors too. Some toy with Western or Saudi backing to compensate for a failure to pull decisive force behind their own bids to be the replacement for Saleh’s regime.
A similar political battle is starting in Syria, where the West does have a vital interest in toppling the regime – but not for one that would be even more of a problem for it and Israel. It doesn’t want a Tahrir Square in Damascus; it would like a Benghazi or Baghdad – and it will act accordingly.
The first phase of the Arab rising of 2011 carried echoes of the European revolutions of 1848. They made flesh the truly progressive modern force which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified in the Communist Manifesto published that year as “the independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”.
Such independence in the matured global capitalist system of today depends upon many things. Above all it cannot happen without spurning the embrace of the biggest capitalist powers and consistently opposing their ideologies, their political machinations and their killing machines.
Kevin Ovenden
26 March 2011
Beirut
Kevin Ovenden is a member of the executive of the Respect Party in Britain, an officer of the Stop the War Coalition and a leading Palestine solidarity activist.
John Palmer on said:
Keith, like others who share his stance, takes the position of socialists within the western imperialist states as his starting point in ruling out any tactical support for the so-called “No Fly” over Libya. But his starting point should be the position of the revolutionary forces seeking to overthrow the Gadaffi dictatorship in Libya. There seems to be no division of opinion among them that the intervention of the French/British/US air power was essential to prevent the revolution being drowned in blood in the streets of Benghazi. Is he saying it is always wrong for revolutionaries to take the position which the Libyan revolutionaries have clearly taken? What about James Connolly’s alliance with Imperial Germany (“our gallant European allies” in the words of the 1916 Proclamation) which was designed to secure German arms and military support. It did not involve any concessions by the Citizens Army from their “Neither King nor Kaiser” stand). Does Keith believe that the POUM or the small Trotskyist faction in Spain during the civil war would have opposed the deployment of the French or British air forces to counter the overwhelming power of the Nazi Luftwaffe?
The point is NOT the hypocritical double standards of the governments in London, Paris or Washington. Nor can we assume that because of this limited intervention they have now expropriated the Libyan revolution. It would take much more than this for that to happen. What is really striking is not the power of the western crusaders at present but their divisions and weakness.
John PalmerQuote text Reply
John on said:
#2
Keith? I take it you mean Kevin, John?
On the article itself, I think it offers a sharp analysis as to the dilemma facing anti imperialists living in those imperialist nations involved in NATO’s military intervention. It also more importantly navigates a path through the political complexities involved.
In order for any revolution in the region to maintain an independent path it cannot entertain the support at any level of the western powers, both for historical reasons and for the good of the region as a whole if it is to emerge from its decades long political infantilisation as a result of colonialism and imperialism.
The simple truth that must be admitted is that if the rebels were not capable as a social force of toppling Gadaffi’s regime on their own terms, then the regime was not ready to be toppled. Region wide the state of flux that has resulted from the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have perhaps played a negative role in allowing active solidarity to be brought to bear from within both countries. But the history of western imperialism and colonialism in the region cannot be placed aside and alibied away in order to allow support for what its architects would have the world believe is humanitarian intervention. Any post Gaddafi regime which comes to power on the back of western intervention will be hopelessly compromised by the fact.
The comparison with Connolly is inaccurate. There we had two imperialist blocs fighting it out over colonies and, in the view of the Irish revolutionaries, it was correct to adopt a policy of the enemy of my friend, etc.
Here we have NATO forces, comprised of imperialist countries, taking one side in what is now a civil war in a former western colony.
As for Spain during its civil war, the Spanish Republic was the sovereign government, which was being undermined by a fascist insurgency with the backing of Europe’s fascist powers. Region wide it had to be seen as a struggle against the spread of fascism. Those who rightly viewed it as such were proved right when the consequences of failing to intervene in Spain were felt just a few years later.
Here in the Arab world we have western powers intervening to in my view steer what began as a spontaneous and independent revolutionary wave from below onto the safe ground of a western directed and western leaning outcome. It is not about pushing forward the Arab revolution, but containing it, with the predicament of the rebels providing the opportunity to do so.
JohnQuote text Reply
Kevin Ovenden on said:
@1 James I think you should reread the article a) because the discussion of problems with the analogical method would be helpful, and b) because the starting point is what the socialist left is saying across the Arab region c) because you don’t engage with the point that the requests from the LIbyan opposition were spurned by the Western powers until the uprising was so weak that it was subordinated to Western tutelage and d) because the points you make about divisions and weaknesses are made in the article.
Kevin OvendenQuote text Reply
Mark Victorystooge on said:
1. The reference in the Easter proclamation to “gallant allies in Europe” was controversial in 1916, bearing in mind that thousands of Irishmen in the British Army had already been killed by the “gallant allies in Europe” by the time of the Easter Rising. The Germans were in any case unable to give concrete support to the Easter Rising (a single ship carrying munitions was intercepted by the British, who never lost control of the seas around Ireland). Whereas the superpower and his friends have been able to intervene very quickly in Libya.
The Easter proclamation also talks after the mention of the “allies” about relying on their own strength. Unfortunately the opposition in Libya are much more dependent than that on their less-than-gallant allies.
Mark VictorystoogeQuote text Reply
John Palmer on said:
Sorry, I did mean, of course, to write Kevin. The fact that London, Paris etc may wish to “direct” the Libyan revolution certainly does not mean they will be able to do so. I see no evidence yet of this happening – does Kevin or John? They must also be careful not to imply that in some way the Gadaffi regime stands in some “anti-imperialist” camp. It certainly does not.
John PalmerQuote text Reply
John on said:
#5
I certainly do not imply that Gaddafi stands in some “anti-imperialist” camp, John. But the inevitable consequence of western intervention has been to place him there in the eyes of many across the Arab and African worlds and discredit the rebels. The revelations coming out that the rebels were forced to commit themselves to upholding existing contracts with western oil companies and others with investments in Libya before western invervention took place doesn’t exactly help their cause either.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@ 5 Wishing to direct it is of course not the same as actually doing so. They face many difficulties and fractures. Turkey is no longer a cipher for a Nato policy decided by Washington. But I see every indication that they are succeeding in doing so. What else do the commitments, extracted from the rebels at a moment of maximum weakness, to maintain all of the Gaddafi’s treaty and commercial obligations mean? The revolutionaries in Tahrir Square and in Mahalla made no such commitments. Quite the opposite. They demanded and continue to demand the tearing up of Mubarak’s foreign policy and of the neoliberal economic policies that have enriched the new and old elites in Egypt, as well as giving enormous concessions to multinational investors.
And, John (P), I don’t see why I must be “careful not to imply that in some way the Gadaffi regime stands in some ‘anti-imperialist’ camp” when I say explicitly that de does not, even at the moment when he is in a military conflict with Nato.
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Mark Victorystooge on said:
#8. Turkey did not veto NATO taking action in Libya (at one point it was thought it might). My guess is that their arm was twisted to be cooperative.
Last week the leftish Turkish newspaper “Bir Gun” reported that Turkish President Abdullah Gul warned Gaddafi to step down, otherwise what happened to Iraq would happen to Libya and its natural resources would be “plundered”. A friendly warning, or Gul passing on a threat from the US Empire? Turkey has been running with the hares and hunting with the hounds, but sooner or later it is going to feel the strain.
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frank on said:
An excellent piece.
In all colonial and semi-colonial struggles the genuinely revolutionary forces of the workers and the petit-bourgeoisie aim to do 2 things; to remove their oppressors both foreign and domestic and to unite the country around a series of democratic principles (parliaments, votes, freedoms of assembly, expression, etc, land reform) and equality (between woman and men, no privileges for one or another religion, racial equality, etc).
The thoroughness of this project is a function of the relationship of forces not just vis a vis the old regime and imperialism, but that which determines the nature of a successful outcome to the revolution, the balance of forces within the revolutionary movement. The more the party of the workers acts to lead the struggle, the more thoroughly are these tasks consummated – because the proletarian party also transforms the economic base of society that underpins the social and political tansformation of society.
So, the most thorough transformation was wrought by proletarian party leading the peasant party in 1917, and others have followed. The least thorough have been those where both workers and peasants were crushed before the colonial powers disengaged post-WWII, including large parts of Africa and the Arab world itself. Standing in between are countries where classes other than the workers gained the upper hand but did lead successful revolutions such as India and S. Africa.
The Benghazi rebels have unfortunately fallen at the first hurdle. They, or at least the leadership which the western powers has anointed, do not want to overthrow their oppressors, foreign and domestic, only the latter and, worse have allied themselves with the former to achieve it. How benign, popular and progressive they will be is determined by that alliance. To see how they will operate look no futher than Baghdad and Kabul.
No surprise then that the rebels fail even to address the second hurdle. It is clear that some of the basics of the struggle for national independence and self-determination have been violated- a partition of the country along sectional lines has clearly been contemplated, the appalling treatment of black migrant workers and the many black fighters for Gaddafi, the willingness to trade the nation’s natural resources for political advantage, above all, in ‘humanitarian’ terms, the willingness to call in air strikes against your fellow citizens including civilians.
Even the insouciant call for the destruction of the country’s military capability currently in Gaddafi’s hands belies a capitulation to imperialism. Western bombardment of planes already not allowed to fly will benefit only Western arms’ manufacturers when they come to be replaced- paid for at huge expense from the sweat of Libyans and ther natural resources.
In both World Wars the majority of Egyptian nationalists and socialists/communists refused the entreaties of German imperialism while they were attempting to overthrow British imperialism. It seems that the best elements of the Egyptian revolution now have learnt well from their forebears. The Benghazi rebels have not learnt so well from their own heroic predecessors and have opened the door to a new suprexploitation by imperialism, and a threat to the entire Arab revolution.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@9 They didn’t veto it. But not for the reasons you suggest. Sarkozy has wanted, and is pushing for even now, the operation to be under some ad hoc structure dominated by France and Britain, with US blessing. He doesn’t want Nato, because he doesn’t want Turkey to have a role. It is actually a very ambitious, hubristic move by Sarkozy to recover from the deep crisis caused by the intense relationship Paris had with Ben Ali right up to the moment he fell. That has already cost a French foreign minister and holed a prime minister below the waterline. Erdogan spells out his reasoning in an interview in today’s Guardian. It is about a Turkish cohered alternative to Western intervention. So he is promoting Turkey as the mediator for a ceasefire. Of course, it is a reflection of the interests of Turkey under the AKP to promote itself as a regional leader. But the US is the historic regional leader. And France is making a brash bid to up its role enormously. So the tensions are being played out in a matrix of competing interests and differing strengths.
Meanwhile, Britain is at war, and also, of course, in Afghanistan.
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David Ellis on said:
#10 `The Benghazi rebels have not learnt so well from their own heroic predecessors and have opened the door to a new suprexploitation by imperialism, and a threat to the entire Arab revolution.’
You old counter revolutionary Gadaffi-loving stalinist trout. Imperialism is acting entirely in its own interests so it is not for us to give it political cover but it would have been criminal of the revolt not to take advantage of the split between it and Gadaffi to liberate its towns and allow the people to return home. Well done to them. On the other hand we should oppose all attempts to liberate Tripoli from outside. We have seen how the West `liberates’ from Dresden to Hiroshima to Baghdad and Fallujah. It is the task of the citizens of Tripoli to rid themselves of the foul Gadaffi tyranny and reunify Libya under a revolutionary democracy side by side with their Benghazian brothers and sisters. Libya will still play an important part in the Arab Revolution and if Gadaffi is brought down from within give the whole thing a fresh impetus.
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sad sectarian on said:
The Rwandan genocide, one of his examples, is arguably (at the very least) more a horrific lesson in the consequences of actual Western intervention, in its totality up to and including the eve of the slaughter, than it is a counter-example for those Gilbert takes to task for a “religious” opposition to all Western military action.
Can you expand on that point, Kevin? I’ve just been reading up on those tragic events, and that proposition strikes me as counterintuitive, to say the least.
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Grim and Dim on said:
“counter revolutionary Gadaffi-loving stalinist trout.” In fifty years of reading internecine far left polemics I don’t recall encountering the phrase “Stalinist trout” before. Has David Ellis made an innovation in left-wing abuse? Will it be adopted by the Weekly Worker – perhaps a headline “Smash the SWP trouts!” And finally, is it unfair to trouts to compare them to Stalinists?
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@13 I can’t right now, I’m afraid. But if you’re reading on it, Mamdani is essential to understand the point I made.
It was, in any case, part of a larger point that such analogies are not useful, particularly when the main actors driving the war are not making them.
So I’d suggest that you write something on the Rwandan genocide and kick off a discussion specifically about that, which would be clarifying: doing it here now would divert the discussion and would not.
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neprimerimye on said:
In reply to John Palmer I suspect that the intervention of NATO has caused the political direction of the Libyan revolution to evolve to the right. If we look at the earilist period of the revolt we know that the forces in the streets were both young and radical arguing for the removal of Qaddafi and his replacement with a democratic republic. Vague and nebulous aims but the direction was quite clear. But as the insurrections in the various cities put wind into the sails of the revolution they were joined by other forces to their right and slowly the aims of the revolution became more and more restricted to the removal of Qaddafi and little else. Hendce worrying reports of an emerging police apparatus in Benghazi and elements of racism appearing in some sections of the insurgent forces. As well as increasing, if understandable, calls on imperialism to intervene with a No Fly policy. And this move towards more traditional bourgeois gaols has been reinforced and deepened as the days have passed with an increasing impact on the part of the coalition and NATO forces on the military level. Not only has the transitional Council prmoised to observe all commercial contracts signed by the Qaddafi regme but it is now sighing new contracts with Qatar long before the Libyan people have the opportunity to make their views known as to how the resources of the country will be used in future.
John Palmer also raises in passing the question as to how the revolutionary forces fighting in the Spanish Civil War might have reacted had Britain or France bombed the Luftwaffe. He suggests that they would not have objected to such actions and i suspect, but cannot know of course, that he is very wrong. Not simply because such actions would without doubt have triggered the Second World War a year or two earlier although that is for certain. But because the revolutionary forces would have understood, as they did in China, that such an intervention was designed to destroy the revolution by subjecting it ot the limited aims of the so called democracies.
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Mike Martin on said:
I think the purpose of raising a slogan against intervention is to clarify issues in the working class, whereas the tone of a lot of discussion seems to suggest we expect the ruling class to listen to our advice. It is important to know that the rulers act according to their interests. They do not listen to advice from erstwhile marxists although they might be interested to know which voices from below are speaking up for them.
There is no way that the “advisors” can calibrate the conduct of the war. It has started and has a logic of its own, mostly carefully planned, and going well beyond what has been expressed publicy. There is a new dynamic and it is not confined to Libya. The US and France and no doubt others have been cultivating opposition currents for years. The uprising may well have been spontaneous for thousands, but the leading elements are unlikely to share their democratic aspirations
The US (unless France gets in first) is repositioning itself to appear on the side of history. Its advice to its old friends is to make some small changes in the manner of ruling so as to avoid being swept away. Just like Egypt where democratic progress has been minimal.
US has acquired some new friends by playing the humanitarian card, so it will play it again and it will be harder to resist it each time having conceded ground at the start.
We cannot blame the rebels for wanting to avoid being hit by Gaddafy’s air force.But this should not dictate how socialists react. It has been pointed out that Irish Revolutionaries in 1916 sought arms from Imperial Germany. Quite right too, but as far as I know there was no Faustian Bargain. They did not compromise their aims in any way.
In Libya it is hard to discern what revolutionary tendencies are at work. There is a general call for freedom and against the regime but increasingly the movement seems to be led by relics of the old regime, and CIA assets.See link below.
Popular movements will rise again and again but will achieve little unless consciously directed towards taking power. The cross class movments are a dead end. Workers need to define their own independent class interests.
We have certainly not heard the last of “humanitarian intervention” and it seems a big mistake for any on the left to start treating these on a case by case basis; the politics of the last atrocity (or the next atrocity)
A CIA Commander for Libyan Rebels
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/pers-m28.shtml
Reports Suggest French Intelligence Encouraged Anti-Gaddafy Protests
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/inte-m28.shtml
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Karl Stewart on said:
Grim and Dim, it’s well known that Joe loved a piece of trout now and then – as does Gadaffi. And anyone who doesn’t know that must be a trout-loving-Stalinist-of-the-Gadaffi-type!!
Our thanks, once again, to comrade David Ellis.
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sylvia ebberly on said:
EXCELLENT ARTICLE KEVIN-
Never trust or rely on the imperialists
By David Fennell http://www.socialistaction.net/International/Middle-East/Libya/Never-trust-or-rely-on-the-imperialists.html
The events in Libya are already revealing the hypocrisy and lies in the British, US and French governments’ claims about why they have launched their military campaign in Libya.
They said it was to protect civilians – instead their bombing raids are killing civilians. Worse still, weapons that do people permanent harm, and which should be outlawed, such as depleted uranium, are being used. Anyone who wants to know what that means for the future of Libyans need only read the accounts of the horrifying birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq, after the US used similar weapons.
Those who thought the imperialists were intervening in Libya to enforce a ‘no fly zone’ should simply read the accounts of how NATO airstrikes were used to lead the assault on Ajdabiya. As the BBC reported:
‘Libyan rebels backed by allied air raids say they have seized control of the frontline oil town of Ajdabiya from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s forces. The BBC’s Ben Brown in Ajdabiya says there are scenes of jubilation among the insurgents… Saturday’s breakthrough came after a seventh night of bombardment by allies enforcing a UN-mandated no-fly zone. There were a series of massive coalition air strikes around Ajdabiya overnight, targeting Gaddafi forces.’
Meanwhile of course, there was no action by the US, Britain or France to ‘protect civilians’ during the Israeli air assault on Gaza. Nor any action to ‘protect civilians’ against the massacre carried out by the pro-Western dictator Saleh in Yemen. Nor, naturally, any condemnation of the Saudi intervention in Bahrain. Nor was there any US government demand for Egypt’s dictator Mubarak to go in the way it called for Gaddafi to depart.
The only thing that gives any coherent explanation to the imperialists’ interventions and non-interventions in the Middle East is that they support those who will give them access to oil – and who will support the murderous Israeli state, which is itself seen as a key guarantor of the US, Britain and France’s domination of oil.
The present alignment of forces in Libya is clear. Whatever the original intention of the Libyan rebels, they have become entirely dependent on an alliance of imperialist military powers and the most reactionary Arab regimes such as the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. In this situation, any victory by them in the military struggle in Libya could only produce a Libya entirely subordinate to foreign imperialists. It is for this reason that Gaddafi, despite the brutal character of his dictatorship, has succeeded in creating a certain level of real social mobilisation – which is the only explanation of the scale of military resistance that is being shown against overwhelming imperialist air power.
The character of Gaddafi’s dictatorship led many in the Middle East to support the initial movement of the rebels against him. But an understanding of the real relation of social forces is now beginning to dawn on some. Egypt’s Socialist Renewal Current has produced a very interesting document which explains the situation.
‘If we take a closer look at the option of foreign intervention, we can notice that from the first day it was clear that the air embargo will not lead to changing the balance of power in favour of the rebels, because the greatest threat to the latter is artillery and tanks rather than aircraft. Hence, we saw the coalition forces hitting Gaddafi’s forces on the ground since the first day of the intervention.
This development poses serious risks. It is inevitable that it would lead to the killing of civilians en masse. It is also clear that Gaddafi will not fall easily. Hence, it is more likely that the war will last for a very long period of time… The end result of all this is that the situation could turn from a popular war against mercenaries to a civil war in the literal sense of the word….
‘On the other hand, we all know that the colonial powers which are attacking Gaddafi are waging their war for purely selfish calculations. These states are the same ones who supported Gaddafi and relied on him a short while ago. We have also to recognize that the Western intervention is aimed at tightening the imperialist control on the Libyan oil and strengthening Western presence in a region which is experiencing revolutions that represent a serious threat to Western interests. In light of this situation, the Libyan revolution is facing the risk of changing from a war against a repressive regime to a war between the forces backed by imperialism and the forces hostile to it.’
The only point to make regarding this analysis is that it is clear that there is not a ‘risk’ of the war becoming one between ‘the forces backed by imperialism and the forces hostile to it.’ It has already become so.
But the threat of this imperialist action goes further than just Libya. The establishment of a pure imperialist client in Libya would be used directly against progress in the country’s neighbours which have just undergone revolutions – Egypt and Tunisia. Successful imperialist military intervention in Libya will also be used as a precedent, and a lever, for future assaults on Hezbollah, Hamas and other Arab revolutionary movements.
The difference between a regime such as Gaddafi’s and the imperialists is simple. Gaddafi is a local gangster who, in world terms, controls few blocks of a city. The imperialists’ crimes are by comparison like those of a mafia boss such as Al Capone. Gaddafi could never even approach the crimes the imperialists are capable of – killing two million in Vietnam, many hundreds of thousands at a minimum in Iraq, dropping atomic bombs on Japan. No good will ever come of inviting Al Capone in to deal with a local gangster.
The unfolding of the events in Libya shows one of the most fundamental of all rules in politics. Never trust and never rely on the imperialists. It is to be hoped that those in the Middle East, and everywhere, who initially had illusions in the imperialist intervention in Libya will not have to pay too bitter a price to learn this lesson.
http://www.socialistaction.net/International/Middle-East/Libya/Never-trust-or-rely-on-the-imperialists.html
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John Palmer on said:
neprimerimye is convinced that the left in Spain would have denounced the British or French airforces if they had intervened to counter the Luftwaffe bombing of Spain after 1936. I am not so sure. They were very critical of the anti-intervention stance taken by the French Popular Front and the British governments at the time.
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Bob on said:
Given that this post is framed as a reply to Gilbert Achcar, it would have been helpful to provide a link to Achcar’s article, so readers could consult his arguments directly rather than rely on Kevin Ovenden’s polemically slanted summary of them. Then they could make up their own minds as to how “badly mistaken” Achcar’s position on Libya is.
Achcar’s article is from ZNet (here) and was his response to the discussion prompted by an earlier interview he gave (here).
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Bob on said:
#19 “Gaddafi, despite the brutal character of his dictatorship, has succeeded in creating a certain level of real social mobilisation – which is the only explanation of the scale of military resistance that is being shown against overwhelming imperialist air power.
“The character of Gaddafi’s dictatorship led many in the Middle East to support the initial movement of the rebels against him. But an understanding of the real relation of social forces is now beginning to dawn on some.”
So, to summarise, the position of Socialist Action is critical support for Gaddafi against the imperialist-backed rebels. Have I got that right?
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Nick Wright on said:
Very well argued piece by Kevin Ovenden and a valuable riposte to those who would place the Libyan events in an imaginary context defined as an abstract movement for human rights. The significance of these events across the region can only be unlocked by a specific analysis of the national contexts and the differentiated responses of imperialism and its local clients. This is why Kevin’s approach is so productive.
One striking feature of the situation as it has developed is the reluctance of the US to be seen to play the decisive role even though they have the preponderance of military hardware currently deployed. Another is the divisions that have appeared among the core states of the European Union with Angela Merkel constrained to stand back from the rush to war.
Solidarity with Sarkozy and comradeship with Cameron is the inevitable resting place for those who would deny the essence of the EU as an instrument for inter-imperialist rivalry. The European Union has no more enthusiastic advocate than John Palmer and no one more active in finding seemingly ‘left wing’ arguments to support its main direction of travel.
His facile analogy with the Spanish war, would Spanish Trotskyites “ . . . have opposed the deployment of the French or British air forces to counter the overwhelming power of the Nazi Luftwaffe?”
The question is if Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, whose strategic aim was to get Hitler to direct his attack against the Soviet Union, were to have deployed the RAF – recently returned from using chemical warfare against Iraqi Kurdish villagers would it not more likely been as an auxiliary to the Luftwaffe?
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@21 Calm down, Bob. The article makes perfect sense without Gilbert’s original piece. And I happen to have good reason to believe that those who are best placed to feel aggrieved or misrepresented do not feel so.
It is a fraternal, but very serious discussion. It is a legitimate debate, as Gilbert said in his follow up piece to which this is responding. I’m also suggesting it is strategic. So let’s deal with it in those keys, shall we?
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Bob on said:
In the ZNet interview, Achcar stated:
I still haven’t read an adequate reply to that point by anyone opposing the UN-backed intervention.
One attempt was by Seumas Milne, whose answer was to deny that there was any real threat to the citizens of Benghazi at all. He asserted that Gaddafi’s “ramshackle forces” would not have been “able to overrun an armed and hostile city of 700,000 people any time soon”.
This is the only place I’ve seen that particular argument deployed. Which is hardly surprising, because it strikes me as total nonsense. While Gaddafi’s armed forces might have been “ramshackle” in comparison with those of western European nations or the US, they were clearly vastly superior to those of the Libyan rebels, in terms of heavy weaponry and monopoly of airpower. Without the UN-backed intervention, it would have been only a matter of time before Benghazi fell, with great loss of life, and the result would have been the crushing of the Libyan revolt and the re-imposition of Gaddafi’s dictatorship.
Still, the people of Benghazi (or at least those of them who were left alive) could have consoled themselves with the thought that, from the standpoint of anti-imperialism, this outcome was vastly preferable to UN military intervention.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
“Solidarity with Sarkozy and comradeship with Cameron is the inevitable resting place for those who would deny the essence of the EU as an instrument for inter-imperialist rivalry.”
That’s really very good, Nick – I shall nick it forthwith.
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neprimerimye on said:
John Palmer #20 argues that it is possible that revolutionaries in the 1930s might have supported imperialist intervention in the Spanish Civil War as they most certainly argued against the lack of such intervention in their own countries. This is true but an argument aginst the policies pursued by any imperialist power is not an argment for interventon by said poers is it?
What is important is how military aid might have been granted to the Spanish government and we do know that the aidsent by the Russian state capitalist regime was used to defeat the revolutionary process in Spain just as imperialist military intervention today is, in a different fashion, being used to defeat the Libyan revolution today.
PS Mike Martins arguments are such tosh given that the politcal tradition which he claims as his own long gave uncritical support to both Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein. The anti-union politics of his organisation are also curious given that the leader of his tiny party is the CEO of a major publishing company. A company that is non-union I note.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@25 Bob, the post addresses Gilbert’s point – which is in essence an adaptation of the just-in-time argument that others, the liberal imperialists, have deployed before. Now you may not agree withe the detailed response I made to Gilbert’s argument and his rejection of alternatives to bombing as unfeasible. But please do engage with what those arguments are. Just pretending they have not been made does not do this debate justice.
I’m prepared to have a slanging match with liberal humanists like Nick Cohen, if necessary. But the debate framed by Gilbert is different. It is an argument within the Marxist and radical left. I don’t know if you count yourself as part of that group of people. But if so, then you ought to be prepared to engage with the strategic issues the article raises.
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prianikoff on said:
Archar giving critical support to UN 1973 was completely and utterly wrong; sowing illusions in “rogressive imperialism”
It’s not in anyway analogous to Connolly getting arms from the Germans, or to Tito being armed by the British.
In those cases there was no question of a foreign power calling the shots, whereas in Libya NATO now does.
Contrary to Kevin Ovenden (and George Galloway’s) view, Turkey is not a “progressive alternative”
Turkey hasn’t left NATO over the bombing of Libya, just argued for a slightly different policy there.
Turkish troops may yet be used as the acceptable face of NATO on the ground.
I’ll explain why later.
In many respects the timing of the US-led bombing attack on Gaddafi was brilliant (from their point of view)
The relatively small number of forces at his disposal were stretched out along a coastal road 500 miles long, very hard to resupply and wide open to attack from the air.
The voices within the rebel ranks opposing intervention were largely drowned out by the fear of reprisals in Benghazi.
The Libyan National Council fell into the hands of the USA and NATO’s diplomacy and there’s no doubt that at leadership level, it’s full of people with connections to the US, specialists in privatisation and relatives of the Senussi dynasty.
Having destroyed Libya’s airforce, destroyed its air defence system and rendered Gadaffi’s tanks inoperative, the military situation has been completely reversed.
But don’t rule out further divide and rule measures by NATO.
Neither side in this civil war have been deploying more than 5-10,000 troops.
To succesfully occupy a city the size of Tripoli or Benghazi would require far more than that.
So the end game is not in sight.
This is where Turkey may come in.
Gaddafi’s regime is on the rocks, but he enjoys considerable political support in the Capital.
A pro-National Council uprising would probably be put down quite easily.
So it’s likely that there will be some attempt to mediate and persuade him and his family to go.
Obviously the potential for double-cross is enormous and he’s likely to resist it to the last.
But Turkish troops are probably the most suitable force to police such an agreement.
They might well be acceptable to the National Council and with a bit more pressure on Tripoli, might become acceptable to the government side.
Remember command of the operation is now being transferred to NATO and Erdogan has offered to broker a ceasefire.
Obama is anxious to avoid further US entanglement and if anything the voices to the right of him in the US are even MORE anxious.
(Many of them oppposed the Operation in the first place)
Obama also has to placate Turkey and prevent a split in NATO.
He won’t turn to the African Union as an intermediary because it’s not under his control
So my view is that Turkey will soon be actively involved.
I don’t see this as reassuring for the left in the Middle East – at all.
The Turkish army remains a counter-revolutionary force.
If it moves into North Africa it could be against further moves to the left in Tunisia or Egypt.
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Vanya on said:
I hope people aren’t going to start taking the piss out of David Ellis again.
Let’s face it, this is the guy who warned us all of the danger that the demo on Saturday might get hijacked by the WRP in order to turn it into a pro-Gadaffi rally.
I was really worried when I arrived at the Embankment, particularly when I saw this bloke selling Newsline. I thought “shit, this is it! Half a million people are going to be manipulated by this dodgy character and his mates, even though he looks like he may be about to ditch the Newslines and spend the money on some cans of special brew.”
Imagine my relief to discover that everyone had listened to Comrade Ellis and the dastardly plot had been foiled!
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Mike Martin on said:
#27
Nepman, which bits of my comments are tosh?
Did you read the links?
Re Gaddafy Hussein etc that was the WRP of the late G Healy. I am in political sympathy with the world socialist web / Socialist Equality, founded by people who fought against Healy politically, and in no sense support Gaddafy or Hussein (unlike Newsline)
On unions, would you happen to know when they are going to start a fight back as distinct from making a platform for Miliband? Their mates in Wisconsin did not do too well. Rushed to sign contracts to beat the deadline so that they would not lose the check off when the new law comes in. Unfortunately that meant to agreeing to all the employers cuts. Still, can’t have everything can you? At least the Union officials are safe for now. Live to screw the members another day.
I know absolutely nothing about a printshop. If there really is one and the staff want a union I would support that, though I expect they can argue down their own wages if they really try.
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Bob on said:
#28 “Now you may not agree withe the detailed response I made to Gilbert’s argument and his rejection of alternatives to bombing as unfeasible. But please do engage with what those arguments are.”
Well, I’ve read through your piece twice, Kevin, and I still don’t understand what practical alternatives you’re suggesting to military intervention as a means of preventing Gaddafi from taking Benghazi and suppressing the revolt.
The nearest I can find is this: “there was a high level African Union delegation on its way to Tripoli to seek a diplomatic settlement when the Western bombing started”.
This is the line that Andy Newman has been pushing too, that there was the realistic prospect of a negotiated peace, but I just don’t buy it. Why should Gaddafi have accepted some compromise settlement with the rebels when his military superiority meant that he was going to crush them anyway?
Even now, when Gaddafi is in retreat, his regime is still offering little in the way of compromise. According to a report in Asharq Alawsat yesterday, the most Saif al-Islam Gaddafi is prepared to offer is that his father will step down and he will take over as head of state for a period of 2-3 years during which he will oversee Libya’s transition to democracy.
And that’s all the regime is prepared to offer its opponents even when it’s losing!
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@29 I haven’t said Turkey is a “progressive alternative”. Nor has George Galloway, except in so far as the AKP government is clearly an advance on all the governments in the Middle East now. If all of them were replaced overnight with the democratic system of Turkey and the space that that would afford the left and proletariat to organise it would be an enormous step forward – not socialist, of course, and not even the most plebian form of parliamentary democracy.
Erdogan is calling for the end of bombing. That is a good thing and a ceasefire is a good thing – the alternative is greater and greater Nato intervention, and with it the suborning/blackmailing of whatever regime(s) emerge from this now disastrous process.
I think this purism of trying to find others’ illusions in false goods is just a dead end for the left. Particularly when it is wrapped up in a huge amount of speculation about the potential deployment of Turkish troops in Libya and, frankly, some hand waving and argument-by-numbers when it comes to Nato and Turkey’s role.
Gilbert’s raised strategic questions. And they flow from the central issue now posed by the Nato military action – are you for it or against it. I haven’t checked over the last three days, but given what Gilbert gave as his grounds for the qualified support for military action initially, I would imagine that he is now against the ongoing Nato bombing.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@32 The arms embargo could have been lifted four weeks ago to allow the rebels to get arms. It’s a point I make in the article (perhaps a third reading? Only joking!). But it wasn’t lifted. It was tightened, by the Western powers. Juppe and Hague might like everyone to think that the politics and alternatives only began nine days ago when the opposition was blackmailed and weak and they were pushing for direct Western military action.
But why should the left excuse them for what they did in the two weeks prior to that?
Intervention by Egypt was an alternative. I consider why it was not an alternative the Western powers were prepared to consider. But if the only alternatives are their alternatives then the left might as well give up – over everything.
The point about the African Union was actually a rebuttal of a negative claim that Gilbert made.
Now it might be even after all of that that the US’s Africa Command chief General Carter Ham is being honest and accurate in an email to the New York Times in which he says:
“The regime still vastly overmatches opposition forces militarily. The regime possesses the capability to roll them back very quickly. Coalition air power is the major reason that has not happened.”
But if that is so, then supporters of military action should be honest and accurate. If Ham is right, the uprising failed to break the regime and win the bulk of forces behind it. It is being sustained now not by Libyan forces but only by Nato force of arms. This has nothing to do with civilian casualties and massacres (except that more will happen the longer this war goes on). It has to do with a military struggle over who will govern Libya – or parts thereof.
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Bob on said:
#34 “The arms embargo could have been lifted four weeks ago to allow the rebels to get arms. It’s a point I make in the article (perhaps a third reading? Only joking!). But it wasn’t lifted. It was tightened, by the Western powers.”
The US neocon Richard Perle was on telly the other night making the same point. It was indeed the refusal of western powers to facilitate the arming of the Libyan rebels that helped Gaddafi’s forces to roll them back to the point where they were about to take Benghazi.
But that still doesn’t answer the question of what would have happened if the the UN had not authorised attacks on Gaddafi’s forces when they were about to take Benghazi.
The city would have fallen. There would have been a massacre. The rebellion would have been militarily defeated. Gaddafi would have proceeded to re-impose his authority across the country by bloodily repressing those who had opposed him. The UN intervention prevented that.
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Mick Woods on said:
It’s been a tricky one this because imperialism for their interests seem to have stepped in to support a popular revolt of sorts. I use the term “revolt of sorts” because I’m far from clear about the composition or program of the opposition as I’m sure the rest of you are. I would suggest not indulging in knee-jerk nonsense, not moralising the situation (yes we all know the imperialists are hypocritcal f***ers), and trying to analyse the situation a bit without posing.
Might I offer an analogy- if NATO had bombed the concentration of Serb armour queued up outside Srbrenica in 1995 it might’ve saved 5-8 thousand Bosniak lives. We needn’t have supported it and certainly not supported the existence of NATO as an institution but we might’ve kept a bit quiet denouncing the action itself. The same might’ve occured in Benghazi, maybe it wouldn’t have but are we qualified to take the risk with the lives of the Libyan rebels whose leaders were frantically calling for air support and were clearly fearing a massacre?
Mick WoodsQuote text Reply
John on said:
#35
Bob, do you think the rebels have been handing flowers to members of Gadaffi’s forces when they’ve captured them. There have been credible reports of atrocities being carried out against specifically black African soldiers who’ve been captured, not to mention blacks in general, by the rebels.
Gaddafi, if he emerges victorious, will certainly mete out harsh justice to the rebels. It will be even worse now that the West has intervened on their side to kill members of his army and civilians. This is the point. Western intervention has made the likelihood of slaughter more not less likely whatever happens now.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@37 One of the problems with that, Mick, is that at exactly the same time Western manufactured armour was crossing a causeway from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain and the people who provide that armour, and ongoing spare parts, did nothing to stop it or to highlight it, thereby generating the public discussion about the massacres or potential for massacres in Bahrain.
I think a precondition for any moral action would be to stop you ally murdering people – which could be done by non-military means – before exercising your own self-interest under the guise of humanitarianism elsewhere.
Gilbert ask us to weigh up the body count. I think all the people deserve to be counted. Not just those who it is assumed would have been killed if bombing hadn’t started. And once Gaddafi’s armour was destroyed and his forces withdrew from Benghazi. Shouldn’t it all have stopped then? If saving Benghazi was the rationale, why is the bombing going on now? Indeed, why is the body count growing? These of course are dead we can count – or can come to count.
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Nick Wright on said:
Prianikoff makes some good points @29 (although the Libyan air defence system would never survive an attack by any modern weapons system and never posed a threat to NATO and thus its destruction is largely symbolic).
Very interesting this morning was Paddy Ashdown’s realistic assessment that in ground force terms – and even with NATO providing air support – that the Benghazi side would not be able to overcome the Tripoli side. Hence the search for an intermediary that could strike a balance in favour of the continued exploitation of Libya’s resources and without unleashing social forces that might bring the Libyan process more into harmony with the mass movement in the rest of the region.
It may be that Turkey will fulfil this role but the left in that country has no illusions about the character of their government.
http://21stcenturymanifesto.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/turkey-and-libya/
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Louis Proyect on said:
In both World Wars the majority of Egyptian nationalists and socialists/communists refused the entreaties of German imperialism while they were attempting to overthrow British imperialism.
—
I am opposed to “humanitarian intervention” but where do you think Qaddafi got his jets and tanks from? A Salvation Army thrift shop?
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neprimerimye on said:
#31 Mike Martin wrote “I am in political sympathy with the world socialist web / Socialist Equality, founded by people who fought against Healy politically, and in no sense support Gaddafy or Hussein”
Fact the SEP did back both Qaddafi and Saddam at the time they took money from the latter. Not a word was said about this at the time by the lider maximo of the SEP or any of his minions.
“On unions, would you happen to know when they are going to start a fight back as distinct from making a platform for Miliband?”
Well there you have it Saturday was a rally for Miliband and not an expression of opposition to Con-Dem cuts! Not a hint here of the policy of the Trotskyist movement that has long fought for a reform of the trades unions and critical support of the officials when they actually do something. Instead all we see from Mike Martin and the SEP is empty minded and long winded demagogic denunciation of the only mass organisations of the working class.
“I know absolutely nothing about a printshop.”
For the record I note that David North, leader of the Socialist Equality Party as David Green acts as CEO of Grand River Printing & Imaging (GRPI—www.grpinc.com/grandriver-history.html), one of Michigan’s larger printing companies, which reported $25 million in business transaction in.
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prianikoff on said:
@40 “where do you think Qaddafi got his jets and tanks from?”
Almost all Libyan attack aircraft are Migs, Sukhois and Illyushins from the former USSR and Russia.
(It has a couple of 1970′s Mirages supplied by France and some US transporter planes)
Almost all of the tanks and missiles Libya has are Soviet supplied too.
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Mike Martin on said:
#41 NEP. Day after day we see that your friends in the Libya TNC are working ever more with the coalition of the greedy to cut deals over oil. Liberal interventionism takes sides in the civil war (that they helped to prepare) bombs a path to Tripoli for these “democrats” and sets the stage for a new alignment of forces throughout the middle east and Africa.
The discussion on this thread was very constructive, but you had to go and dig up Gerry Healy. Healy’s organisation was the WRP and was indeed notorious for his relationships in the Middle East (It is not so much the money as what you have to do in return) Healy was destoyed politically by a principled attack from the International Committee nd a minority in the WRP itself. The Socialist Equality Party is a recent development mainly by the people who challenged Healy. They have documented and analysed the whole process, the roots of Healy’s political degeneration. It is a pity that other tendencies do not have an equally serious attitude to their own history (not to mention deviations and hesitations along the way) The World Socialist Web Site ( http://www.wsws.org ) carries many references should you wish to look into these issues properly.
Of course the mass demo on Saturday was against the Government and it cuts, but it is pretty clear that the Unions have a very limited and limiting perspective. If you want to work – presumably very long term – as a Trotskyist in the Unions, then good luck. However, if you actually win the leadership you still only have a union not a political movement. Who are these Trotskyists of whom you speak?
Most viable way forward would seem to be for rank and file to act independently of union structures to oppose cuts. This in turn raises political issues; already too much for the existing unions. I can remember when the left talked of little else but rank and file struggles, committees , campaigns. What happened to all that?
I am not sure what you want me to conclude about the print business. Is your view of socialism based solely on some vague moral code about not soiling your hands with commerce? Where would that leave Engels?
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prianikoff on said:
Supplementary to #42:-
Following a visit by the Libyan Defence Minister Abu Bakr Yunis Jaber to Moscow in January 2010, Russia signed a new deal to supply Libya with $1.8 billion worth of arms.
This was in addition to 5 previous arms deals worth $2 billion, already signed between the two countries.
The Russian government remained silent on whether the deal would contain fighter planes and anti-aircraft missiles, as well as small arms.
Russian PM Vladimir Putin played a central role in the deal.
On the 10th March 2011 Russia banned all weapons sales to Libya, effectively suspending its arms contracts with the government of Muammar Gaddafi.
A Kremlin statement released on Thursday indicated that an order signed by Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, “bans the export from the Russian Federation to Libya as well as the sale, delivery and transfer… of all types of arms and related materials, including weapons and ammunition, combat vehicles and military hardware”.
This may be one of the reasons for the public disagreement between Putin and Medvedev over NATO’s Operation in Libya.
Putin’s view is shared by the Russian Foreign Ministry, which wanted Russia to Veto UN 1973, and a section of the Russian military leadership.
see:-
“Russia announces Libya arms deal worth $1.8bn” 30 January 2010
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8489167.stm
“Russia bans arms sales to Libya” 10 Mar 2011
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2011/03/20113107287576160.html
“Putin-Medvedev split reflects Russian divisions on Libya”29/3/2011
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20110322/163143981.html
prianikoffQuote text Reply
prianikoff on said:
Gaddafi was a fairly typical third world Bonaparte, who moved to the left during the Cold War and to the right after the demise of the USSR.
While Western Governments might have been prepared to work with such figures and to try to buy them off, they’ve never been prepared to fully accept them.
At the first opportunity, when internal divisions are sufficient, the West works agressively to overthrow them.
Gadaffi seems to be genuinely confused by this perfidy, but it’s very much par for the course as far as Imperialist diplomacy is concerned.
Western Goverments are always only too ready to trumpet human rights abuses in the third world while covering up their own records of war crime.
Libya under Gaddafi would have been regarded as a “State with a Socialist Orientation” by the Soviet foreign office.
Therefore close relations were developed with its military by supplying it with arms and training its forces to use them.
The situation is analagous to Egypt prior to the Yom Kippur War.
Without resupply from Russia, the Libyan armed forces will eventually be degraded to the point that they are unable to fight.
After Camp David Agreements America rebuilt Egypt’s armed forces and it now produces American-designed Abrams Tanks under license.
Much the same situation is likely to happen should the TNC forces assume control in Libya.
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Duncan Chapel on said:
Kevin’s article is very useful. I am sure I am not the only one who has been surprised by Achcar’s stance on this. Many thanks to Socialist Unity for publishing it. I’ll suggest to some other sites that they might want to republish it.
Duncan ChapelQuote text Reply
Giovanni Piterangello on said:
Notice the inconsistency of the argument in Prof Achcar original article on Znet or on this website http://www.israeli-occupation.org/2011-03-20/gilbert-achcar-libyan-developments/ :
On the one hand he says: The UNSC resolution has given imperialist forces the right to assault and position themselves in a way to make sure that the next dictatorship in Libya will be a better imperialist lackey than Qaddafi. This is the force of international law, which is the whole in its state of becoming as a resultant vector of global powers, weighing down on a situation where the benefactors are the US and its allies.
And, on the other hand: in response to this, Prof. Achcar believes ‘that from an anti-imperialist perspective one cannot and should not oppose the no-fly zone, given that there is no plausible alternative for protecting the endangered population. … But again, one must maintain a very critical attitude toward what the Western powers might do.’ So here, a one whose opinion is yet to be mediated in real time so as to form an oppositional social force to imperialist aggression is being counterpoised against a process, which is the distilled, but profane, will of the international community that was playing out in real time just before our eyes. There is a discrepancy between one’s position now, and the whole whose position developed as it has into the imperialist aggression on Libya. It is as if the one who is to be critical of imperialist aggression now, is separate from the historical process that has galvanized the very aggression he or she is to be critical of. This one came from outer space just at the moment when the massacres began. These individuals were not there before to mediate their anti imperialist positions and form alternatives to the massacres in real time. Alternatives according to the logic of Prof Achcar are formed in a hypothetical context. Just now, not before now, for before now, the one was not there; what is one to do? one has no choice but to support the US and monitor it. In the language of Salon politics, Qaddafi is going to kill his own people, and the US will do a better job at protecting them, but one has to make sure that the US will not go overboard and commit more massacres.
Is that but a reflection of the defeat of the revolutionary left. Is it not possible for the left to form and shape alternatives in real time. Whatever happened to leftist principles of playing on contradictions in the enemy camp.
What is taking place now is in part the responsibility of supposedly leftist but pro-imperialist positions adopted earlier during the US aggression on Iraq. These factions had confounded and conflated the argument against Saddam with the argument against imperialism into a single space. US imperialism used the left’s ethical pandering to inflict a massacre of immense proportions on the Iraqi people and to control one of the most critical regions on the globe. From a Kantian moral equivalence standpoint, the imperialist and Qaddafi or the imperialist and Saddam are all criminals. But this is not about ahistorical ethics. It is about an organised gang called imperialism, which is headed by a Don, called the US elite and, which thrives on war and on starving poor people everywhere. What is unethical is a world order presided upon by US imperialism, and which in one of its minor criminal facets, can drive food prices up and starve billions by simply lowering its interest rate. What is unethical is the sum total of global poverty, morbidity and war, which is the practice of imperialism. It is this real unethical process that has to be defeated by weakening it when it falls prey to internecine fighting and by making sure that if one of the thugs in one of the turfs decides to cut loose, that the US does not use its power in the UNSC to step in and control.
It is allegedly leftist positions of this nature that assisted the US in putting its foot soldiers in Iraq. The US now is tenfold stronger than it used to be because it controls Iraqi oil and it will be another ten times stronger if it controls Libyan oil. Control mind you is what colonialism is all about (see Rosa luxembourg on how inter imperialsit rivarly plays out in inexplicable economic terms, but in terms of laying claim to territory, which forms value and surplus irrespective of its non monetised nature), not the fetisihised price system of oil pricing.
The aggression now in Libya is already the historical resultant of all the actions of all the ones, including you and I, and all that we did in the past that maintained the US in a position of power and the organized left or the progressive peace loving forces in a weak and battered state. What we must do is organize and form protests against imperialist intervention in Libya first and, only when that stops, against its Libyan crackpot dictator. I do not think that Prof. Achcar argument is sound because it conflates the forces that are shaping events, i.e. the imperialist US and its European allies, which are the mediated entities in real time of formidable capitalist social forces that are steering history, and the individual’s present position on a conflict into which his or her unmediated personal opinion will have little bearing. It literally says what is one to do at present when faced with a possible massacre of the Libyan people at the hands of its mad dictator and with what the US and its allies have been doing. It assumes that the individual has come from outer space and the only option left to him or her is to be supportive, but in a critical way, of a UNSC resolution, which is meant to fortify US imperialist control over Libya. The individual in Marxian terms is not simply an opinion formed outside of real time in a hypothetical fashion. The individual is the practice of politics mediated in the social class. One means nothing without a politicized social class opposed to the practice of imperialism and imperialist strategy headed by the US. We know that the US and its allies are not in Libya to make things better. In fact, the situation is worse because the US and its allies supported the dictatorship to begin with. We should separate the argument against Qaddafi and the argument against imperialist intervention so as not to use an ahistroical ethical content as a pretext to absolve the US of its crime. To oppose imperialist intervention is to promote peace on a worldwide scale. Anti-imperialist practice is ethical practice and it must begin by opposing imperialist control, not simply hoping that anti imperialist opinion will change things. L’uomo che vive di speranza, muore dalla disperazione, or in English: the man who lives by hope, will die by despair.
Giovanni PiterangelloQuote text Reply
Stephen Marks on said:
Interesting analysis from a radical pan-africanist perpsective by Horace Campbell in Pambazuka;
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72004
‘Unless Libyans themselves own the struggle against Gaddafi, opponents to his regime may find that even if he has been removed from power, ‘Gaddafism’ will continue – but this time propped up by the West, Horace Campbell warns’.
Stephen MarksQuote text Reply
Andy Newman on said:
#48
Yes Stephen
That is a very interesting article, I wrote somethinfg myself engaging with Horace’s position last weekend, but have been too busy since to polish it for publication.
I hope to do so tomorrow
Andy NewmanQuote text Reply
Mick Woods on said:
Kevin, I think your post #38 is a reply to my post #36. If so I take your point about Bahrain and agree entirely, also agree that UN resolution #1973 was for better or worse resolved with the withdrawal of G’s forces from Benghazi.
What now? No matter how one feels about our rulers’ “humanitarian” intervention we need to now demand an end to foreign military interference as a minimum. I am frankly unsure whether calls to arm the insurgents would contribute to the best possible resolution of this crisis and wonder who would support a ceasefire at this point given it would probably benefit Ghadafi and would likely lead to de-facto division of the country.
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frank on said:
As the US steps up its military aggression against the people of Sirte, I think it’s time for the supporters of imperialist intervention to draw back.
Gone is any pretence that this is now about preventing Gaddafi from using his planes to attack civilians(for which we have seen no evidence). They cannot fly. Gone too any idea that it is about protecting Ben Ghazi as it is the easterners who are on the offensive. The British and French are increasingly brazen in their pronouncements this is about regime change, while Obama is dimplomatically more circumspect.
I would pose this question to supporters of intervention: What is the evidence that Gaddafi is qualitatively worse than Saddam? Saddam started a regional war that led to a million deaths and bombed and gassed his own people. Or what is different in the Libya situation in total? Saddam had faced far more widespread and well-organised rsistance from Kurds, ‘marsh Arabs’, and Shia.
The imperialists’ change of his regime has led to the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands, the whole of society thrown backwards (on any measure of development that sneaks out under the cloak of US secrecy) and its replacement with a corrupt, gangsterish regime whose non-communalism is evidenced by its murder of unarmed protestors all across the country http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8340/kurdistan-protests-could-drive-iraq-to-the-brink and http://thenewadmin.com/top-stories/clashes-deaths-follow-iraq-protests/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12576613.
What is about Gaddafi or Libya that justifies imperialist-led regime change, when it was opposed by principled anti-imperalists in relation to Iraq, nothwithstanding the crimes of Saddam?
frankQuote text Reply
neprimerimye on said:
Off topic but anything for a laugh which is all Mike Martins org is #43.
” Healy’s organisation was the WRP and was indeed notorious for his relationships in the Middle East (It is not so much the money as what you have to do in return) Healy was destoyed politically by a principled attack from the International Committee nd a minority in the WRP itself. The Socialist Equality Party is a recent development mainly by the people who challenged Healy.”
The WRP was disgraced long before its collapse in the 1980s. As for the SEP it directly grew out of the WRP and is not a “recent development” in the least.
“Of course the mass demo on Saturday was against the Government and it cuts, but it is pretty clear that the Unions have a very limited and limiting perspective. If you want to work – presumably very long term – as a Trotskyist in the Unions, then good luck. However, if you actually win the leadership you still only have a union not a political movement.”
Which scenario differs in no sense what so ever from the situation in the lifetime of Trotsky so the opposition of the SEP to working in the unions is plain old fashioned ultra-leftism or in plain language bullshit.
“I am not sure what you want me to conclude about the print business. Is your view of socialism based solely on some vague moral code about not soiling your hands with commerce? Where would that leave Engels?”
Conclude what you like I care not a jot. But I note that Engels kept his politics and his business apart. Other than using his private funds to sustain both his political work and that of Marx. Your chum North by way of contrast set his business up on the foundation of a political print operation that was abandoned when the SEP went over to an on line activism and totally departed reality.
neprimerimyeQuote text Reply
Vanya on said:
#51 Very good question Frank.
VanyaQuote text Reply
Kevin Ovenden on said:
@51 That is, indeed, an excellent question, Frank.
Some people (and I *don’t* have Gilbert in mind) are likely to respond to that along the lines of “I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er”.
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Dr Paul on said:
I think that the situation in Libya is rapidly imitating that in Iraq eight years back. It’s a war to depose Gadaffi. The big powers are barely concealing their call for regime change, and bombing the Libyan state forces whether they are attacking civilian targets or not.
The rebels are increasingly acting as stooges for the big powers, and their future orientation is indicated not by the ‘democratic’ statement they have issued — that is purely to fool Western liberals (and how easily are they fooled!) — but by the appointment of the long-term CIA asset Khalifa Hifter, a former Gadaffi heavy, as their military leader.
What democratic elements there are in the rebel camp are being swamped by an unholy alliance of ex-Gadaffi thugs, Islamists (although that might cheer a few on this site) and chancers, all trying to ingratiate themselves with the big powers and get a cut from the oil revenues when the big powers eventually force Gadaffi out of power. Whether the war ends with a carve-up between the remnants of Gadaffi’s regime and the rebels, or with the latter’s victory, the scene is being set for an Iraq-style post-Gadaffi blow-out amongst the winners, whilst the big powers jockey amongst themselves to control Libya’s oil revenues.
Like any democratic forces in Iraq, those in Libya will be squashed by reactionary forces, be they old or more recent renegades from Gadaffi’s regime, Islamist thugs (recall that Libya provided bin Laden with a disproportionately large number of cadres) and other riff-raff, whilst the occupation forces look on.
Marx once wrote that history repeats itself first time as tragedy, second time as farce. That’s not always right. Libya is as big a tragedy as Iraq.
Dr PaulQuote text Reply
Jellytot on said:
Marx once wrote that history repeats itself first time as tragedy, second time as farce. That’s not always right. Libya is as big a tragedy as Iraq.
Absolutely. I’ll admit that a very small part of me was pleased to see that armoured column wiped out at the gates of Benghazi as I certainly feared a terrible massarce in that city.
I certainly didn’t have a “shrugged shoulders – too bad – shit happens” attitude of somebody like Callinicos as evidenced in his column in this weeks’ SW:
There is the final argument, used by both Gilbert and BHL, that intervention prevented a massacre in Benghazi. The sad fact is that massacres are a chronic feature of capitalism. The revolutionary left is, alas, too weak to stop them.
http://www.socialistworker.org.uk/art.php?id=24350
The more it continues though it’s pretty evident as to what’s going on and the predatory instincts of the intervionists. I still want Gadaffi gone, although I fear he will live it up in luxury in some foreign villa, and we can just hope that the Libyans can build something out of the mess and can be influenced by more progressive strains emerging in the Middle East. I fear though that Libya will be another Client State/Watchdog in that region.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
BBC: Gaddafi’s troops force rebels back: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12892798
Assuming this is remotely accurate, perhaps it’s time for left supporters (I’m not particularly interested in the liberal imperialist serial offenders) of this war to address what’s happening. Should the left be calling for more intense Nato military action so the rebels can advance? Should it say that if we don’t do that then there is a risk of a massacre – so we must? Or should it say that the bombing should stop and a ceasefire brokered? The latter is very difficult, for sure. But is the genuine left position really to bomb much more intensely until a rebel force can advance to take a capital? That way lies massacres.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@56 I think that’s very unfair on Alex Callinicos. He writes a column which, iirc, is limited to about 700 words. He took on a rather major intervention by Achcar, which was much longer (as is my squib above).
One of the points he tried to address, necessarily telegraphically, is that Achcar, a Marxist scholar-activist, was mistaken in posing this in the seemingly Manichean moral terms of the liberal interventionists and of Sarkozy, Cameron, Obama and – wallahi – Bernard Henri Levy.
He was making the point that on a strictly moral calculus then the left finds itself helpless to stop all sorts of massacres – in the Great Lakes region of African and now, again, on the West of the continent, for example. Alex is arguing that the politics of the intervention are as important as the Contra-loving BHL, who claims partial authorship for it, says it is. The people conducting the war are openly talking about politics. It is not amoral for the left to as well.
Given the misgivings you express, I think it would be a good idea to cut others who are voicing the same or similar some slack.
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Jellytot on said:
Or should it say that the bombing should stop and a ceasefire brokered?
That seems the only principled position to take for the reasons you give, although I would doubt if ‘left supporters’ actually have any influence in the big scheme of things.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
“I would doubt if ‘left supporters’ actually have any influence in the big scheme of things”
Unfortunately, that is true. And that was the gist of Alex’s lament.
Kevin OvendenQuote text Reply
Jellytot on said:
@57
I take your points but AC’s lines, “There is the final argument, used by both Gilbert and BHL, that intervention prevented a massacre in Benghazi. The sad fact is that massacres are a chronic feature of capitalism.” jarred with me and did honestly come across as me as, “Oh well, shit happens”.
It seems any potential Bengazhi (or Tobruk) massacre was an inconvience to be swept aside because it gets in the way. Tariq Ali in today’s Guardian goes into denial mode and writes;
“It is absurd to think that the reasons for bombing Tripoli or for the turkey shoot outside Benghazi are designed to protect civilians
My point is that the French strikes on March 19th almost certainly did stop the Libyan Army going from ‘house to house’ in Benghazi as they threatened. The anti-war Left need to address this as it’s a definite weak link in the argument and one that the usual suspects will and are exploiting.
JellytotQuote text Reply
Dr Paul on said:
In respect of massacres, what should — as is perfectly possible — the anti-Gadaffi forces rampage through pro-Gadaffi areas, killing anyone suspected of being friendly to or even neutral towards him? Don’t think that this is impossible; we have seen internecine massacres with both sides guilty in Yugoslavia and Iraq. Will we see big-power air-raids on the rebels, in order to prevent civilian casualties? I think merely to pose the question is to give a pretty accurate answer.
Dr PaulQuote text Reply
Kevin Ovenden on said:
@61 I agree the anti-war left should address that claim. There are two ways, not mutually exclusive, to do so. The first is to investigate the claim. That’s difficult and speculative. But so is the claim. The second is to accept it for the sake of argument and consider what the alternatives were to military action and why they were not pursued. We should do both.
Given how long Misrata held out, there is no reason to assume that Benghazi would not have. But I agree that such discussions should can callous.
Let me put it this way – great moral force is ascribed to this intervention and it rests on stopping a massacre in Benghazi. Whether that might have happened or not, it is not an imminent threat now – “maybe just hours away” as Alain Juppe said.
Where is the moral force now? The force that is there resides in the statements by the same Alain Juppe – Gaddafi must go, and that is what is driving continuing bombing – because the rebels are not guaranteed to achieve this.
The worries about all of this were almost written on Obama’s face the other night. But the weaknesses and problems of the intervention do not make it any more moral.
Kevin OvendenQuote text Reply
Ed D on said:
Kevin, you’re in a difficult moral position since you openly admit you would oppose UN intervention no matter what the circumstances. There is no situation in the world, ever, where you would support western led intervention. It’s a deeply ideological and geopolitical stance so facts on the ground do not alter the decision. Therefore playing down the plight of Benghazi would appear disingenious since it is not a calculation you are factoring into your decision making – humanitarian concerns are irrelevent to your position.
Ed DQuote text Reply
Noah on said:
Kevin #63: “…great moral force is ascribed to this intervention and it rests on stopping a massacre in Benghazi.”
For sure. So why should we give credence to the assertions by Cameron, Obama etc that the Western airstrikes averted a massacre of civilians in Benghazi?
As always in these Western wars against Third World countries, the ‘enemy’ leader is demonised, and any fiendish action can be alleged agaist them; it becomes difficult to dispute such allegations because those who do are accused of being apologists for whichever evil dictator is the current hate-figure.
And in this case, the allegation is that of a potential massacre.
There can be little doubt that the bombardment of Libya by NATO countries has already killed hundreds of Libyans- the people in the Libyan army units and installations as well as the however many civilians who have so far died as ‘collateral’.
If you launch an act of international war against a state which poses no military threat to you, you should, at the very least, have to show pretty good evidence and argument for the allegation on which you base your cruise missile attacks and airstrikes.
No such evidence or argument has been produced. And, in the several cities taken by the rebels, re-taken by the Libyan government, and re-re-taken by the rebels, what massacres of civilians by the pro-Gaddafi forces took place? One can be sure that, if such massacres had occurred, the details would be on the front pages of all the Western newspapers.
Instead, we have selective quotes from a speech by Gaddafi, in which he said that government troops would go ‘house to house’ and show no mercy to rebels who refused to lay down their weapons. That speech was clearly designed to induce the armed rebels to either surrender or run away, and is no more bloodthirsty than would be expected in a situation of civil or other warfare.
In the same speech, Gaddafi offered an amnesty for rebels who agreed to give up their weapons. The speech contained no threat to commit a massacre against unarmed civilians.
The conjecture that the re-taking of Benghazi by Libyan government forces would have resulted in a massacre of civilians is just that- pure conjecture, to provide cover for another imperialist war for oil and strategic advantage.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@65 I agree with that, Noah. I decided not to spend a lot of time arguing that point with Gilbert, but instead to investigate what his argument looks like if it were true that thousands of people were about to be killed. And it still looks bad.
But on your point – the challenge from the war party may well tell against them in the coming weeks. They said they stopped a lot of people being killed. But as this goes on a lot of people are actually going to be killed. And they face the burden – or ought to be made to – of justifying the actual deaths, not holding up the shrouds of putative ones.
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Jellytot on said:
@66 As always in these Western wars against Third World countries, the ‘enemy’ leader is demonised
Reading some of the accounts of what Saddam’s security forces actually did, the demonisation wasn’t that difficult a task. It’s one thing to engage in “whataboutery” (which seems all the rage on all sides of the political spectrum nowadays), quite another to engage in atrocity denial for political purposes. It’s a disaster for any principled anti-war movement to seek to ignore or downplay the crimes of the West’s enemy-of-the-moment. It’s a gift for the “Nick Cohens” of this world which they can spin into best-selling books: “What’s Left – The Sequel”
The conjecture that the re-taking of Benghazi by Libyan government forces would have resulted in a massacre of civilians is just that- pure conjecture, to provide cover for another imperialist war for oil and strategic advantage.
Benghazi was commonly viewed by just about everyone as a centre of the rebellion. People there were fearful of “being put to the sword” thus in the day before the French airstrikes there began a movement of civilians eastwards towards Tobruk. It’s not inconceivable to suggest that in the days and months after a Gadaffi victory there would have been a combination of massive blood-letting in the East combined with the ‘cleasning’ of ‘unreliable’ tribes with peoples being forced across the border into Egypt and into Europe. To try and infer that the risks were slight or an illusion is bad politics.
That stated, I agree about the danger of the same thing happening in reverse.
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Binh on said:
I wrote a more narrowly focused reply to Achcar:
http://counterpunch.org/bihn03282011.html
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Ed D on said:
It also must be remembered Gaddafi’s harshest tactics were used at the very beginning when he thought he could get away with it. This is what led his ambassadors to resign on mass and call for a new fly zone. Thanks to the threat of airstrikes, and now because of them, he’s had to tone it down. That’s why it’s important that the international community does reserve the right to intervene – without it there would be a lot more killing in the world by rulers who think they have nothing to fear.
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Ed D on said:
But on your point – the challenge from the war party may well tell against them in the coming weeks. They said they stopped a lot of people being killed. But as this goes on a lot of people are actually going to be killed. And they face the burden – or ought to be made to – of justifying the actual deaths, not holding up the shrouds of putative ones.
You sort of have a point there. I’ve always disagreed that this action, and others like it, should be framed purely in terms of preventing deaths, since obviously it depends on why the deaths are happening. For instance, you could conceive of a situation where Gaddafi massacres some people in Benghazi but then enforce a strict police state so there are no more deaths. And there could, theoretically, be more deaths in the struggle for freedom and democracy by the rebels, yet that would obviously be a much better outcome than a Gaddafi police state. It’s like the old chessnut about their being no crime in Saudi Arabia or North Korea, but nobody would suggest we adopt their system. Clearly freedom is more important.
I’m sure the international leaders understand this predictament but they’re hamstrung by the international legalities so have to frame it in this way, so you’re right to believe you could use such a situation for propaganda it occurred. But I’m sure we’re all shocked at just a how few civilian causalities have occurred so far by Nato. The weapons systems and the procedures have improved dramatically.
Lastly, the other issue of framing it purely in terms of deaths is the case of Iraq. Once Al Qaeda and the Baathists discovered the western public would consider the war to be wrong if they killed a lot of people, they decided to kill a lot of people. Now, if this situation goes on for a long time in Libya, Al Qaeda may well try that successful tactic again. It may even inspire some bitter Gaddafi loyalists to launch terror attacks after they have lost, knowing it will still have a powerful effect on how the situation is perceived in the west. But in reality we know that however many people they kill, that wouldn’t change the rightness of the cause and would be grotesque moral degeneracy to fall into that logic. It’s like saying it was wrong to defeat Nazi Germany because more people died in WW2.
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Noah on said:
Jellytot #67: “Reading some of the accounts of what Saddam’s security forces actually did, the demonisation wasn’t that difficult a task.”
For sure, Saddam did some appalling things. But that did not mean that the key allegation made by the US & UK to justify the war (ie, WMD) was true. In fact, as we all know now, it was utterly false- though plenty of people, even among those who were against the war, believed it at the time.
And some of the main allegations made against Gaddafi- eg, bombing peaceful demonstrators, 2,000 demonstrators massacred, using ‘African mecenaries’ against protestors- have already been discredited.
Also you say: “People there [Benghazi] were fearful of “being put to the sword” thus in the day before the French airstrikes there began a movement of civilians eastwards towards Tobruk.”
Well sure. And no doubt Gadaffi also hoped that many of the rebel fighters and activists would leave Benghazi, making the city easier to take & control.
You add: “It’s not inconceivable to suggest that in the days and months after a Gadaffi victory there would have been a combination of massive blood-letting in the East combined with the ‘cleasning’ of ‘unreliable’ tribes with peoples being forced across the border into Egypt and into Europe. To try and infer that the risks were slight or an illusion is bad politics.”
Fine. But those are conjectures. And how to reduce the risk of further bloodshed given that potential? Surely by mediation & negotiation. A mission from the African Union was due to arrive in Libya, but was pre-empted by the start of the Western attacks.
What could that mission have achieved, had the NATO countries supported it instead of launching airstrikes etc? In that (also conjectured) scenario, clearly not the removal of Gadaffi, given his military advantage on the ground at that time. However, at the least, Western-backed negotiation could have achieved the amnesty, or orderly exile, of rebel leaders and key supporters, and avoided any major blood-letting.
So it is far from the case that, even if a bloodbath in Benghazi had been on the cards, Western warfare was the only alternative.
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Ed D on said:
So it is far from the case that, even if a bloodbath in Benghazi had been on the cards, Western warfare was the only alternative
What if you studied it and concluded it was the only alternative? Would you then support it? Of course you would not. Therefore you and Ovenden are not the best people to address this issue. The only people that can do this are those that would support intervention under certain circumstances but not on this occasion. They could still be wrong, of course, but at least they’d have some crediblity rather than just being a crude anti western propagandist who is arguing in favour of allowing a dictator to massacre people on the basis of nothing more than it would poke the west in the eye.
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prianikoff on said:
This link usefully brings together Kevin Ovenden’s piece, a reply to Archar by Alex Callinicos in SW UK and Lance Selfa’s response in US Socialist Worker.
http://links.org.au/node/2241
In his SW article, Callinicos says:- “Gilbert is right, revolutionaries have sometimes been prepared to take help from imperialist powers.” mentioning the following analogy:-
Soon after the Russian Revolution of 1917, invading German armies were threatening the survival of the infant Soviet republic. Britain and France offered help. Lenin wrote to the Bolshevik central committee: “Please add my vote in favour of taking potatoes and weapons from the Anglo-French imperialist robbers.”
From The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) August 1917-February 1918 (London, 1974
But he comes down against intervention in the end,saying.
“The sad fact is that massacres are a chronic feature of capitalism. The revolutionary left is, alas, too weak to stop them.”
Of course Lenin was discussing utilising the differences between rival imperialisms, fighting a war against each other, to defend an embryonic Socialist revolution.
This is nothing like the situation in Libya today.
The international bourgeoisie as a whole are fighting a war against Libya and the leadership of the Transitional National Council have moved firmly into their orbit.
Having established their no-fly zone, seized Libyan bank accounts, blockaded the country and sized up the rebel leadership, Obama and Cameron are now talking about arming them.
Not only does this mean the TNC are becoming the auxillliaries of NATO’s intervention, rather than independent actors, it probably won’t even work.
How does a force that have been using Russian-made weapons, switch over in mid-war to US and NATO issue ones?
The answer is, they almost certainly can’t.
Not without the deployment of large numbers of NATO “advisers”.
Yesterday’s sudden disappearance of NATO aircraft over Libya may have even been to make the point that the TNC can’t win without them.
All the evidence is that large numbers of people in Tripoli and Sirte have been armed and will resist any attempt by NATO or the TNC to enter their cities.
The real danger of a massacre may be if the NATO offensive isn’t stopped.
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Mick Woods on said:
It occurs to me that given Ghadaffi’s failure to take Benghazi and the TNC’s failure to expand and hold ground westward we have a stalemate which could either be due to local (possibly clan based loyalties) or logistics. This could be a sensible time for a ceasefire but I doubt there is an international body with the authority or neutrality to broker one. Possibly the African Union?
A fortnight ago I would’ve supported calling for arms to the rebels.
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Andy Newman on said:
meanwhile … …
half a million refugees have fled from Cote d’Ivoire with reliable commentatators describing the febrile atmosphere there as similar to the immediate pre-genocide period in Rwanda.
I know I will be simply accused of whatabboutery, but Libya and Cote d’Ivoire are two African nations, both within short haul flight range from Europe; and the events are contemporaneous.
So perhaps James Bloodworth and Mondobo and the other advocates of “taking up the white man’s burden” might like to clarify why there has been such a difference in Western response, and as they think the case for military action in Libya s so compelling, what is the reason they don’t think it is so compelling in Cote d’Ivoire?
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Ed D on said:
So perhaps James Bloodworth and Mondobo and the other advocates of “taking up the white man’s burden” might like to clarify why there has been such a difference in Western response, and as they think the case for military action in Libya s so compelling, what is the reason they don’t think it is so compelling in Cote d’Ivoire?
Well it works both ways. Why are you guys so obsessed with stopping the west doing anything in the Arab world rather than focusing on conflicts in Africa? The whole Darfur thing was at it’s height during the Iraq war yet none of you were interested.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@74 This has all the signs of getting horrifically worse. It is staggering – I know I should be surprised at my age by I still am – that this is just brushed aside. I imagine the British media have had it as a footnote. The Middle Eastern media have been much better.
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Ed D on said:
Why have you been writing long articles about Libya and not this other conflict, Kevin?
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Andy Newman on said:
#77
idiot.
The British left have been engaged with discussing Libya because there is a BRITISH military involvement in bombing Libya, and the BRITISH prime minister was an architect of that military intervention.
It is an important part of democracy that politicians are held to account, and indeed it is part of society’s moral contract with the armed forces that civilians will not engage in the use of military force without the democratic legitimacy given by debating whether the military action is legal and justified.
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Andy Newman on said:
#75
On dafur
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=4367
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Ed D on said:
The British left have been engaged with discussing Libya because there is a BRITISH military involvement in bombing Libya, and the BRITISH prime minister was an architect of that military intervention.
But isn’t that the problem? You’re motivated by what the west is doing way above humanitarian concerns on the flimsy basis that you live in the UK. What happened to universialism? Kevin admits he would oppose intervention by the west even if it would help – it’s deeply ideological and geopolitical – so it’s a bit of a cheek to ask why we’re not doing anything about Cote d’Ivoire when you know you would oppose that too. It’s so cynical. If we were not helping Libya then precisely the same questions would be asked about this “well why aren’t you doing anything about Libya? Because of the oil?”
Yes, thanks for reminding us exactly what I was refering to about Sudan. It was either ignored or played down by the antiwar left so as you could focus on bashing the yanks.
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Andy Newman on said:
#80
The Save Dafur campaign claimed that there was a genocide, with 400000 dead, which was used as part of a political campaign in favour of US military intervention.
In fact, much more credible international agencies had evidence that there was no genocide, and military action would not assist. Those arguing for military actio in Dafr significantly raised huge sums of cash which could have been used to save lives through providing sanitary potable water.
Significantly as well, where there were African Union military forces on the ground in Dafur already enforcing a ceasefire, the USA blocked the funds that were paying them.
With regard to Cote d’Ivoire, French economic and military infleucne is already a major contributory factor to the crisis, so Western military intervention is highly unlikely to be useful. However, regional initiatives to solve the crisis by the African Union could be bolstered by greater Western diplomatic support.
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Ed D on said:
“In fact, much more credible international agencies had evidence that there was no genocide, and military action would not assist.”
Whether you want to call it genocide or not is largely semantics, but it’s clear whole villages were being burnt down and massacres were going on by the pro government militia that was very close to that. It would not have been that difficult to save lives by sending in some troops to protect the refugee camps. Yet you were opposed to this on ideological grounds and persistently rubbished the reports by the mainstream aid agencies which you described as “not credible”. It was a shameful episode.
Now you try to use the Cote d’Ivoire to make a point about Libya.
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Andy Newman on said:
#82
the accusation of genocide is not “semantics”, it is a word with legal and political consequences.
It was indeed the mainstream aid agencies who were saying there was no genocide, there were excess deaths related to the war due to famine, disease and lack of potable water. What was needed was old fashioned refugee support, with food, medicine and sanitation.
It was not mainstream aid agencies in Dafur, who were produding reports of genocide, but New York based political lobbyists, without reference to any credible evidence.
There was a tragic and brutal war, with atrocities on both sides, as people fought ovr water resources. Western military intervention could not imporove that situation
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Ed D on said:
Andy, actually some aid agencies were calling for intervention, to your horror, like the one run by that Irish guy.
You’re relating the antiwar left perceived widsom about Darfur to someone who doesn’t accept their propaganda. Like on Libya now, i was following events at the time so cannot be bullshitted about it and this “both sides” crap.
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Nadia Chern on said:
EdD, you are truly pro war in every circumstance aren’t you? Every single war related issue of the last eight years has seen you jump to defend liberal interventionist dogma. It obviously does not matter what the context or the evidence – you will defend bombing and invasion in the name of progress.
If you’re so happy with the progressive intent of our rulers including Blair and Bush, why do you hang around left sites? You’re clearly cheerleading the military.
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David on said:
I would like to point out that the French leaders didn’t reach out their hand when Ronald Reagan wanted to take military action against Kadhafi in the 1990s after the terrorist attacks with direct links to the Libyan leader. Now President Sarkozy is one of the principal actors of the military intervention in Libya, which means he has realized the threat posed by the region when left without supervision.
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Mark Victorystooge on said:
#50. Frank’s point is an interesting one. “What is about Gaddafi or Libya that justifies imperialist-led regime change, when it was opposed by principled anti-imperalists in relation to Iraq, nothwithstanding the crimes of Saddam?”
There are a number of reasons. One is the left’s enthusiasm for the outbreaks in the Middle East, which carried over when the turmoil spread to Libya. There was a reluctance to question too closely what the “revolutionaries” stood for in Libya, though they are coming under more scrutiny now.
Another is that events have happened far faster. There was a build-up of a number of months to the Iraq war, which allowed an anti-war movement to develop.
Yet another reason might be that in some ways the situation resembles the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, when Kurds and Shia rose up in Iraq and were suppressed. I remember some on the left railing against the “hypocrisy” of the USA etc. not going to their aid, but this is a case of being careful what you wish for. “Humanitarian intervention” is a useful cover for various motivations, and before long the left won’t where “humanitarian intervention” ends and old-fashioned imperialism begins.
And the excuses for intervention are many and varied. One of the triggers for the 1879 Zulu War, for example, was an incident when a wife of a Zulu chieftain named Sihayo fled from Zululand and crossed into British Natal. Some Zulu warriors pursued her and brought her back, where she was killed. This nasty domestic abuse scenario gave the British an excuse to invade, saying that Natal’s borders had been infringed, but they thought the Zulus were a threat that needed removing, and if it had not been that, it would have been something else.
On the subject of Libya today, I think the UN resolution (missing re Iraq) has also made a difference, even though the USA etc. are going far beyond it. The truth is that if you scratch much of the left, you will find the “Guardian” reader underneath the flaming red Bolshevik exterior.
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Mick Woods on said:
#86
I rather suspect that he is more motivated to improve his poll ratings viz-à-viz Le Front Nationale than for any external reason.
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Kevin Ovenden on said:
@88 I think the domestic front for Sarkozy was proximately very important in him playing the lead role in the drive for Western action, and subsequently the push to act on the interests of French imperialism in the Med.
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Mark Victorystooge on said:
And further to my point at #87, the “left” is a complex and diverse sort of beast, dwelling in the midst of capitalist and imperial-controlled societies and hardly immune to their ideological influence. As it was in 1914, so it is now.
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prianikoff on said:
“Socialist Resistance”, the tendency to which Gilbert Archar is close, published an interview with him in March, justifying limited intervention in Libya as follows:-
“I don’t think anyone, even from an anti-imperialist perspective, could object to the delivery of arms to the uprising, or even the operation of a no-fly zone, if the rebels ask for it – but there should be no land deployment. Anything leading to the presence of foreign forces on Libyan soil should be opposed and rejected as very dangerous”
See:-
http://socialistresistance.org/1780/first-and-above-all-its-a-democratic-uprising
This has attracted quite a lot of criticism from amongst its periphery.
Some comments were very hostile, but one or two long-term UsFI supporters were in favour of Archar’s position.
According to SR’s editors, Archar’s was a personal position.
They state that their official line is against imperalist intervention, even when under a “humanitarian banner”
They also link to an article in “International Viewpoint” by the FI bureau, which both opposed intervention, but criticized Ortega, Castro and Chavez for denouncing “the risk of an intervention by American imperialism instead of supporting the struggle of the Libyan people”.
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2001
A thornier question is the role of UsFi supporters in the European Parliament, including a member of the Portuguese Left Bloc and a Danish MEP.
Socialist Organizer, the US supporters of the rival FI claimants (the “Lambertists”) alleges that these MEP’s and the NPA in France have actively supported European Intervention in Libya.
They say that the NPA published a communiqué to this effect on the day that UN 1973 was passed and demanded the recognition of the TNC as the “only legitimate representative of the Libyan people”
They also say that the NPA called a demonstration in support of this position.
See “Imperialist Intervention Tows in the “Left” and the “Far Left” ”
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
http://www2.socialistorganizer.org/
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prianikoff on said:
Meanwhile, the Lambertist’s leading member in the region has been restating their demand for a Constituent Assembly:-
Louisa Hanoune, the secretary general of the Workers’ Party of Algeria (PT) has reiterated her Party’s call for the establishment of a Constituent Assembly.
At the plenum of their executive from March 25 to 27, Parliamentary Deputy Hanoune pleaded for the revision of the Algerian Constitution, the dissolution of Parliament and a deep commitment to administrative reforms.
“The current parliament lacks credibility, ” she said, denouncing the actions of some MPs who use parliamentary privilege for personal gain.
She wants a revision to the electoral laws prior to the next elections.
She also called for state companies that had been dissolved since the 1980′s to be rebuilt with new priorities, in order to create jobs.
She cited the example of a closed textile mill in Sikidda, where women workers had organised themselves into a committee to re-open it.
“These committees aren’t just unions, they have a political purpose too”
Addressing the situation in North Africa and the Middle East, Ms Hanoune said it was “marked by legitimate popular revolts which the imperialist powers respond to by trying to impose their diktats”.
She said that there was an attempt underway to reconfigure a Greater Middle East, in order to raid its oil and mineral wealth.
She denounced what she called attempts by NATO to establish itself in Algeria
In a statement from their plenum, the party condemned the “foreign military intervention in Libya, which has already caused dozens of deaths since March 19, 2011″
It reaffirmed the right of the Libyan people to decide its own fate and dispose of its wealth, without outside interference or foreign military intervention.
Sources ( all in French)
http://www.letempsdz.com/content/view/55280/1/
http://www.lexpressiondz.com/article/2/2011-03-29/87731.html
http://www.algeriesoir.com/algerie-presse/280311-louisa-hanoune-l-assemblee-constituante-seule-alternative.html
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Robert on said:
Article by Richard over at the Tomb
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/04/where-is-bombing-of-libya-going.html
Personally I’m dead against interfering in someone else’s civil war on principle. Arming the weaker side just prolongs the war and is hardly ethical.
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prianikoff on said:
Apologies for mispelling Gilbert Achcar’s name @91.
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