Gary Younge, writing on the Innocence of the Liberal Hawk, on why any sane person should be troubled by the context of Western intervention in Libya:
Far from being a knee-jerk response to Western military action, opposition to the bombing marks a considered reflection on the West’s knee-jerk impulse to mistake war for foreign policy. This impulse follows a well-worn circular logic in three parts: (1) Something must be done now. (2) This is something. (3) So we must do it. And that something invariably involves bombing.
Such sophistry treats “now” as its own abstract point in time: a moment that bears no legacy and carries no consequences. Amnesia and ignorance are the privileges of the powerful. But the powerless, who live with the ramifications, do not have the luxury of forgetting. They do not forget Shatila, Falluja, Abu Ghraib or Jenin—to name but a few horrific war crimes in which the West was complicit.
This time around, however, there is no need for historical references, because the hypocrisy is playing out in real time. When protests started in Tunisia in January, the French foreign minister offered the Tunisian police training to “restore calm.” The day before Libya was attacked, dozens of protesters were shot dead in Yemen. Less than a week before, Saudi forces invaded Bahrain, where many protesters have been killed. These are American allies.
So while the West clearly has the power to intervene, given its history of colonialism and imperialism, it has no more credibility to do so on humanitarian grounds in this region than Iran would to bomb Bahrain in defense of the Shiites who are currently being killed there.
Invoking history, tut tut. We operate according to impulse buy rules in America, buddy. We see the candy, we buy it! And the celebrity tabloids, too! We’re warlocks infused with tiger blood singing about Friday in an always updating mashup of passionate tweets and cardboard principles. There was no yesterday. It is always tomorrow. For now.
Good grief. Lately I’ve been wondering what larger geopolitical interests are served by the French-led (sic) Arab League approved (sic) military campaign against Gadaffi forces in Libya. Among my speculations has been the possibility that, at least on the diplomatic side, this intervention establishes a policy that could possibly justify a future similar response to Iranian repression of its indigenous democracy movement. It’s mostly just thinking aloud, not a coherent argument, not something I would say with any degree of certainty.
What I find particularly concerning is the prospect that what we might call the Qaddafi Precedent will be used in the not-to-distant future to justify and threaten the use of U.S. military forces against an American ally: Israel.
So. Yeah.
Okay, there is a big difference between the U.S. relationship with Iran and with Israel, as should be obvious to anyone who looks at the past 40 years of history or the billions in foreign assistance the U.S. had sent to Israel. Nevermind the difference between Israel and Libya, duh. But that completely eludes Gaffney, who is not merely idly speculating, but advances an imaginary scenario involving UN Security Council recognition of the Palestinian Authority, the “vehemently anti-Israel” Susan Rice and — get this — “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose unalloyed sympathy for the Palestinian cause dates back at least to her days as First Lady.”
Right. Clinton. No friend to Israel. Okay. It gets more ridiculous from there, as Media Matters explains in OMG! detail. I won’t replicate it here. It’s just too damn insane. However, while I continue to wonder about the larger global implications of this war action in Libya, I would like to thank Gaffney for holding up the fun house mirror to my musings from the abyss he fell into long ago and from which I will step ever so carefully away.
Frank Gaffney having one of his episodes. Via TPM.
For more right wing lunacy, Salon collects a roundup of reactions from the usual radio and blogging suspects.
Shorter Juan Williams: Only liberals fear radio dominated by Palin, Rush and Beck; therefore, NPR is a flack for liberal Democrats. This has nothing to do with NPR firing me. Here, listen to this selectively edited tape brought to you by the same guys who screwed over Shirley Sherrod.
Edited to Add: Contrary to his claim that he did not call for de-funding NPR after he was fired, Williams did EXACTLY THAT — on Bill O’Reilly’s program no less! As a host! Thanks to my friend Pinky for providing me the link on YouTube.
As North African countries rise up and cast out their dictators, Western powers have been trying to find a way to manage the situation. It’s not easy: everyone is so peaceful and democratic and cooperative with each other. Even the Muslim Brotherhood is working with politically active women to bring about change. How can corporatist democracies possibly interfere with these transformations to protect their interests?
Thank goodness for Libya. Gaddafi is not going quietly, his forces are reacting violently against the people, forcing the opposition to respond in kind. This creates a huge humanitarian crisis — a very real one — but also an opening for “intervention.” According to TIME, this is just what the ObamAdmin was waiting for. And man, is this script familiar or what?
The first reason to believe the U.S. and its allies may intervene in Libya is Gaddafi: “You start from the premise that he’s crazy,” says the senior Administration official.
Well, naturally. We don’t go after sane dictators and terrorists, like Pinochet or Mubarak. Saddam was crazy, Osama was crazy, and if anyone fits the bill for Crazy, it’s Gaddafi. Granted, all of these crazy folk were perfectly fine partners to lavish with money and weapons when they cooperated with the global strategic interests of Western energy companies and intelligence services. But now we’re ruining the narrative. Proceed:
Still, the forces favoring a robust humanitarian intervention in Libya are surprisingly broad. Administration figures such as Hillary Clinton; Samantha Power, a senior director at the National Security Council; and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., have experience with the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, and are sensitive to the urgency of responding decisively. Some also see an opportunity to rehabilitate the U.S. role in international humanitarian intervention, which Power told TIME in 2006 had been “killed for a generation” by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Outside pressures exist too. European energy companies are deeply invested in Libyan oil and gas fields, which yield significant percentages of their production. U.S. counterterrorism officials have noted the disproportionate number of Libyans turning up in the ranks of al-Qaeda both in northern Africa and in Iraq. Domestically, Republicans like Senator John McCain have criticized Obama for not doing more in Libya, and potential GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich argued in 2005 for international intervention to end war crimes even without U.N. approval. “In certain circumstances, a government’s abnegation of its responsibilities to protect its own people is so severe that the failure of the Security Council to act must not be used as an excuse for the world to stand by as atrocities continue,” Gingrich wrote at the time.
Energy companies, check. Hawkish Republicans, check. Hawkish centrist Democrats, check. Aspiring candidates for President, check. Screw the UN Security Council, check. Overcoming the sense of impotence felt from losing the Vietnam — I mean, the Iraq war, check.
Yeah, it’s all very familiar. Like waking up to “I Got You, Babe” every morning and facing the prospect of reporting on Punxsutawney Phil for the zillionth time.
Oh, well. I’ll play my part and ask: Did anyone run these intervention plans by the Libyan revolutionaries? Last I checked, the rebel forces were doing a fine job of pushing Gaddafi’s forces into a corner. Of course, the regime is pushing back hard, and there is no certainty of victory for the revolution. Yet Gaddafi is down to loyalists and mercenaries, while the rebels have the rest of the army joining the ranks of the Libyan people. My money is on the latter.
The right wing attack on unions has spread throughout 16 states so far, and there is no reason it won’t spread farther. Republicans have a political stake in targeting a significant funding and organizational force for Democrats, the teabaggers seethe with misplaced resentment against public employees, and words like “austerity” and “fiscal discipline” and “deficit” occupy Bieber-ish rotation on the punditry playlist.
So it is remarkable that the protests in Wisconsin are entering their second week, and have inspired similar public demonstrations in the rest of the country. It is really, really tempting to analogize Egypt — and when GOP lawmakers block Internet access to a lefty website supporting the Wisconsin protesters or when Scott Walker admits to having “thought about” using agents provocateur to disrupt the protests*, it’s hard to resist invoking the Mubarak regime’s last desperate efforts to forestall its eventual demise. Hopefully he won’t go full-on Ghadaffi.
But Wisconsin is not Egypt, certainly not Libya. We need to be much more organized and leveraged among other active elements of society to pull off that kind of revolution. Until then, however, it sure would be swell if the recipients of so much financial and grassroots support from labor would return the favor at this critical moment. Kudos to the 14 Wisconsin state senators boycotting the quorum. But I’m tawkin’ about da Prezzy-dent. The more librul commentators at MSNBC have been beating the drum that President Obama should fulfill his campaign promise to defend collective bargaining rights. Maybe it’s a lot to expect a President to, in his campaign words, “put on a comfortable pair of shoes and I will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States.” But if Dubya could stand on rubble and bellow through a bullhorn….
But such a stand would complicate his relationship with school reformers like Michelle Rhee. Or make his Fight For Scraps — sorry, I mean his Race To The Top program look like the attack on neighborhood schools in poor districts that it is. These are weapons in the ongoing class warfare against the middle class and the poor. Which side is Obama really on?
* Yes, I feel some hometown pride to learn that the prankster impersonating David Koch is a Buffalonian.
Scanning the news reports of protests world-wide, I found a pair of images that were not about rallying or dodging tear gas. Just quiet moments of protesters doing something mundane.
From Bahrain:
“Protesters emboldened by the pull-back of the army, prepare barbecued fish for lunch in Pearl Square in Manama, Bahrain.”(Source: The Guardian UK)
From Wisconsin:
“Two protesters practice yoga inside the Capitol building on Saturday. (AP/Wisconsin State Journal, Michael P. King)” (From Salon.com)
The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.
Perhaps we should take some cues from not only the Egyptians, but the British — demand corporations pay their taxes:
nstead of the fake populism of the Tea Party, there is a movement based on real populism. It shows that there is an alternative to making the poor and the middle class pay for a crisis caused by the rich. It shifts the national conversation. Instead of letting the government cut our services and increase our taxes, the people demand that it cut the endless and lavish aid for the rich and make them pay the massive sums they dodge in taxes.
This may sound like a fantasy—but it has all happened. The name of this parallel universe is Britain. As recently as this past fall, people here were asking the same questions liberal Americans have been glumly contemplating: Why is everyone being so passive? Why are we letting ourselves be ripped off? Why are people staying in their homes watching their flat-screens while our politicians strip away services so they can fatten the superrich even more?
Well, it’s a start. I might go a step further and begin seizing corporate assets and breaking up monopolies and reducing the global imprint of corporations altogether. These things take time.
Remember when right wing fools were trying to give George W. Bush all the credit for democracy movements rising up in the Middle East? Those were the days.
Seriously, this kills me. At least with the “Bush Was Right” meme, there was an underlying agreement that people demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East was a good thing. But now we can’t even agree upon the fundamental reality that the vast majority of Egyptians are demanding an open, free and democratic government. Now we have the Neo-Birchers — the Glenn Becks, the Sean Hannities, the Frank Gaffneys — insisting that they are dupes of a worldwide conspiracy to impose a socialist caliphate. Not only in the Middle East, but with Muslim Brotherhood affiliates waiting to wreak havoc in Britain and the U.S., egged on by the socialist agenda of the Obama White House.*
What the hell? I understand disagreements about abortion, about global warming, even about evolution — but about this? It’s disgusting. Shameless. The craven authoritarianism and insipid racism underlying this disinformation utterly appalls me.
So does this cartoon. Thanks for spreading Mubarak propaganda, Bob.
*Meanwhile Omar Suleiman, current vice president and former go-to guy for extraordinary rendition and torture, appears on Egyptian state television blaming all thee unrest on meddlers with “foreign agendas.” That pretty much puts him and Beck on the same page.
Taking a break from watching and reading about the revolutionary activity in Egypt so I can, ya know, write about it. It’s called “processing.” Or vomiting, your pick.
So the WaPo was the first Respectable Beltway News Organ to publish an opinion piece giving George Bush credit for the wave of popular democratic uprisings against Middle Eastern dictatorships. Yes, Instapundit and its clones jerked that knee first, but until it makes traction with the big boys, it’s not a meme with real revisionist potential. Yet you knew it was coming. When the national security threat posed by Iraq began to look shaky (much earlier for the more observant and better informed than for others, btw), exporting free market democracy was a fallback position. Neocons took a perfectly reasonable position — that the U.S. has been supporting dictatorships in the Middle East in a devil’s bargain that will do us more long-term harm than good — and turned it into a reason to wage wars of expansion, resource pillage and client state building. Now they are treating popular uprisings against U.S. client states as comparable to an illegal invasion and occupation that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. For Iraqis themselves, the irony is not lost.
Another irony is that throughout Bush’s presidency, neocons were quite critical of what they considered a betrayal by the administration of Egyptian democratic aspirations. Here from an opinion piece at the American Enterprise Institute — the neocon think tank where so many bullshit rationalizations for the Iraq invasion were gestated:
On April 30, the Egyptian government extended the country’s emergency laws for two more years. Under such laws, the government can censor media, ban public demonstrations and detain political dissidents indefinitely. Most political activists had hoped that Mr. Mubarak, under pressure from Washington, would annul them. But the White House remained silent.
Determining U.S. rhetoric to be hollow, Mr. Mubarak pushed further. On May 18, thousands of police clamped down on demonstrators expressing solidarity for two pro-reform judges, Hesham Bastawisi and Mahmoud Mekki, who sit on Egypt’s highest appellate court. The government harassed the judges after they questioned government vote rigging during September’s presidential election. Security forces have rounded up scores of other pro-democracy activists.
Still, democracy activists continued their vigils. President Bush’s words at his second inauguration seem to have resonance in the Arab world: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors.” But excuse the oppressors is exactly what the White House did.
As the latter piece makes clear, these uprisings have been a long time coming, and are independent of the policy desires and national interests of foreign powers, including those of Washington, DC. Robert Grenier expresses eloquently and with some humor thoughts I have been having lately as I have watched my government struggle to come to terms with the events in Egypt:
Events in the Middle East have slipped away from us. Having long since opted in favour of political stability over the risks and uncertainties of democracy, having told ourselves that the people of the region are not ready to shoulder the burdens of freedom, having stressed that the necessary underpinnings of self-government go well beyond mere elections, suddenly the US has nothing it can credibly say as people take to the streets to try to seize control of their collective destiny.
All the US can do is “watch and respond”, trying to make the best of what it transparently regards as a bad situation.
Our words betray us. US spokesmen stress the protesters’ desire for jobs and for economic opportunity, as though that were the full extent of their aspirations. They entreat the wobbling, repressive governments in the region to “respect civil society”, and the right of the people to protest peacefully, as though these thoroughly discredited autocrats were actually capable of reform.
They urge calm and restraint. One listens in vain, however, for a ringing endorsement of freedom, or for a statement of encouragement to those willing to risk everything to assert their rights and their human dignity – values which the US nominally regards as universal.
Grenier continues with thoughts on the limits of American influence in the region, limits made narrower by the betrayals and compromises Washington has made in the name of my country. With the recent appointment of Omar Suleiman as Mubarak’s V.P. — the go-to guy for the CIA’s program of extra-rendition of terror suspects it wanted to torture without getting its hands dirty — we should be incredibly skeptical about Secretary of State Clinton’s bureaucratic insistence on an orderly six-month transition process. This here video should put that shit in perspective.
Official U.S. responses to the wave of revolutions rolling over Arab dictatorships should tell us something about my government’s attitudes toward other people’s freedoms. In his State of the Union address, the president praised Tunisia as an example of people’s democratic aspirations. Secretary of State Clinton continues to urge the Mubarak government to refrain from violence in reacting to protests — to what practical effect, not much, but it has its rhetorical value, I suppose.
But Yemen? How should we gauge the official reaction to street protests against the U.S.-backed regime there? Tepid. At WaPo, Greg Sargent summarizes why:
The administration has relied on Saleh as a key partner in their counterterrorism efforts. The Washington Post’s Dana Priest has reported that American forces have assisted the Yemeni government in counterterrorism operations against AQAP. Saleh has given the U.S. cover for its use of targeted drone strikes against AQAP by taking credit for them. Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen says that nevertheless, the drone strikes have provoked popular sympathies for extremists.
Johnsen has also argued that the administration’s focus on seeing Yemen “only through the prism of counterterrorism” has produced the kind of instability they were trying to avoid. Yemen’s population is also poorer, and there’s far more potential for extremist groups to take advantage of a potential power vacuum.
For the poor, of course, there has always been a vacuum, at least in terms of services, stability, and standard of living. Dropping bombs on them because their neighborhoods have been infiltrated by select enemies of Western powers may not be the best long-term strategy for promoting peace and stability in the region — not to mention the people’s democratic aspirations.
