Back when Libya first started to fall apart in February 2011, I noted that Gaddafi was nearing the point where hanging from a lamppost might be an attractive alternative to an exile in Pyongyang. In the beginning, I wasn’t focused on possible U.S. intervention. I was just enjoying some of the more creative protest signs.
I was still cautiously hopeful that momentum from the Arab Spring might lead to some more representative government in the Arab world, with a corresponding drop in terrorism. But when Europe started calling for U.S. intervention in Libya, I was immediately resentful.
People complain about the U.S. intervening all over the globe, but when things get out of hand and innocent people are getting killed there is always pressure on Washington to do something. When we don’t, as in Rwanda, we get blamed for that, too. So, other than reimposing sanctions, what are we supposed to do about Libya? Are we supposed to take over their air space?
Personally, I think Gaddafi is on his way out, and the U.S. is all he has left to justify his rule. If we start pushing him out, it will only give him hope and a rationale for staying.
Obviously there is some limit of violence beyond which we can’t just sit back and passively watch. But this is another case where I resent our role as the sole superpower. Why can’t the Europeans take over Libyan air space if that is what the international community feels needs to be done? And who’s offering to pay the bill for any intervention?
Before long, I raised the key question: “Do we even know who we want to win?”
As pressure mounted on the president, I urged him to resist.
I’m nervous. but so far I am quite proud of how Barack Obama and Robert Gates have resisted calls to get our country overly involved in the situation in Libya. I fear reports of Gaddafi’s demise have been premature. But, probably a much more important consideration than Gaddafi’s fate is the general lack of knowledge about what might follow his regime. I am not concerned about radical Islamists taking over. I don’t think that is likely. I am concerned about no one taking over. I haven’t seen any compelling evidence that there are the makings of a functional government that can unite the country waiting in the wings.
Of course, it turned out that no one took over, which turned Libya into a failed state in which radical Islamists run rampant. But, while there was still time, I kept urging the president to stick to his guns.
The truth is that Libya really isn’t our problem or our responsibility. It’s all fine for our government to call for Gaddafi to step down. But we should not interject ourselves in what is likely to be a civil war to see who can control Libya’s vast oil reserves.
I’ll keep saying it because it needs to be said. It would be easy for Obama to really screw up his presidency by getting Libya wrong. So far, he’s right on the money.
I was comforted that both Robert Gates and the president were standing up to thoughtless interventionists like Joe Lieberman.
Maybe Lieberman should call his pal Silvio Berlusconi and ask him how Italy will do without access to their oil fields in Libya for a prolonged period as the country descends into tribal rivalry and chaos.
What disturbs me is the absolutely thoughtless way that so many Americans and American leaders are willing to commit our country to the use of violence and meddling in other countries. In some cases it is justifiable, but can someone do a week of research before they start sending in the 82nd Airborne?
I mean, Jesus, seriously…
Today, Libya is operating at one-tenth of their oil-producing capacity. This was something I kept warning about:
We have marginal corporate interests in the country, and we don’t want to see their oil off the market if that is going to lead to severe energy inflation in Europe. But that argues for stability, not for a sustained period of civil war and uncertainty. Getting Gaddafi to resign does nothing to assure stability. Who says that his opponents are unified? Who says they will agree to split the spoils equitably? Saddam ruled his country the way he did not only because he was a sadist but because the country would tear apart at the seams without some heavy-hand to keep things in order. The same may well be true about Gaddafi. I’m not opposed to the idea of democracy for Libyans, but we shouldn’t get too invested in the idea. There’s no evidence that Libya is ripe for parliamentary democracy. If it happens, great. If it doesn’t, let’s make sure we’re not to blame.
And I wouldn’t stop:
Let me say this again. We don’t know what kind of leadership would emerge from this opposition if they were to prevail, but they don’t even appear to have operational leadership in the field. We have no compelling reason to commit ourselves to this fight. It’s a mistake. And the president has been pushed very far out on a limb here, probably through a false sense of momentum arising from the successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. It will be painful to walk this back, but unless Hillary Clinton discovers a compelling, organized opposition in Benghazi when she arrives there this week, our commitment to regime change in Libya should be scaled back. It’s not our problem. Obama is in the process of making it our problem. We should stand ready to prevent massacres and offer asylum, but should not commit our military to do what the rebels cannot do themselves. If we want to pursue other angles, like seeking out potential alternatives to Gaddafi from within his circle, that seems to me to be unwise but still preferable to getting into a civil war on the side that our intelligence director says is likely to lose. Once we commit a tiny bit, we’ll wind up doing the fighting because we can’t afford to lose.
But what will we have won? Good will? Don’t be silly.
Once it became clear that we were committed to regime change, I started arguing against arming a rebel force and promoting a civil war: “It isn’t humanitarian to turn a country into Somalia just so you can pretend that you don’t have any boots on the ground.”
And, of course, turning Libya into Somalia is exactly what we wound up doing. And I warned of that even at the moment of maximum American triumphalism.
I know the temptation is strong to talk smack about the Republicans’ lack of enthusiasm for our excellent adventure in Libya. I mean, it looks like Gaddafi is the hunted rat now, doesn’t it? And it really wasn’t so hard to accomplish if you think about it. Most of the world is fairly pleased or no worse than neutral about our role in this. Innocent people’s lives were saved. We’re on the cusp on getting some justifiable revenge for the Americans who were killed by Gaddafi in the 1980’s. Maybe Libya will get a decent government and actual representative democracy. And the president pulled it off without losing any airmen, or even any equipment as far as I know. So, why not ask some skeptics to eat crow?
I’ll tell you why. Right now in the streets of Tripoli, armed gunmen are running everywhere firing off their weapons indiscriminately, without the slightest hint of discipline. Gaddafi’s compound is being looted down to the copper. And when the Sun comes up tomorrow, it’s unclear who can or will restore order. Yesterday and today, the rebels were united by their desire to oust an odious regime. Tomorrow, powerful tribal and military leaders will be divided over who gets the spoils. Those loyal to Gaddafi may be small, but a small group can create outsized trouble.
I will say this. I was concerned that the war would remain a stalemate for longer than five months and that the country would be torn apart worse than turned out to in fact be the case. So, things have gone better than I feared up to this moment. Libya has a decent starting place, and there’s solid reason for hope. But the really hard part starts tomorrow.
So, looking back four years later, how many lives did we save by intervening in Libya? Is Libya a better place? Is their oil supply more secure? What can we say is actually better than it would have been if we had just minded our own business?
Go ahead and make your argument, but it wasn’t hard to predict that causing a regime change in a country where we had no allies and almost no intelligence would be reckless.
The Unraveling; In a failing state, an anti-Islamist general mounts a divisive campaign
We came, we saw, he died. Cackle, cackle.
Let’s also not neglect to mention the disaster in Honduras that Madame Secretary pretended didn’t involve US support and military assets. A Mission Gone Wrong again and again.
Oh my… I hadn’t seen that before. And Clinton is the best hope for liberal America?
It’s the Clinton/Bush USA. The rest of us pretend that we live in a democracy and only two families out of 320 million people are the best we have for the Presidency. Unlike our British cousins, we’re not ready to anoint one family in perpetuity for head of state, but we could live well with two. If we were more honest with ourselves, we could spare ourselves a lot of bother by flipping a coin every four years. The timing and not so much the outcomes won’t vary by much. GHWB couldn’t get his precious capital gains tax reduction and NAFTA through Congress; so, Clinton did it along with completing big stuff left on Reagan’s “to do list.” Clinton couldn’t accomplish regime change in Iraq; so, GWB did it.
Keep our fingers crossed that Obama will succeed in getting a good enough agreement with Iran because regime change in Iran is on both the Bush and Clinton’s “to do lists.”
The Libya intervention was a Ladies Event based on their R2P doctrine of regime change: Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. The US coordinated arms transfer from Libya to Northern Syria, so it’s their quagmire too! Who is ultimately responsible, our next President Hillary Clinton? How awful and a bleak future. Using the same tactics from the Brzezinski doctrine: Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and now Ukraine.
Of course the CIA put in their asset General Heftir into Libya, he is now joined by support from General Sisi of Egypt to the frustration of Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The weapons and munitions were spread across the Sahel region of Africa: Mali, Algeria and Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. The slaughter due to Western intervention has been awful. Berlusconi had an agreement with Gaddafi, there would be no shipe with refugees traveling from Libya ro the Italian island of Mandusa. Thousands have died in the seas due to this aspect and the refugees from North Africa and Syria are a motivation for European politics to jerk to the right and the populist, fascist, anti-immigration parties. Brilliant!
Who Is Bernard-Henri Lévy?
○ Elitist Philosopher Unmasked As Hasbara Agent for Israel
○ Neocons Push Obama to Go Beyond a Punitive Strike in Syria
○ French Jewish intellectuals excoriated for their support to topple Saddam Hussein – 2003
The other, ongoing “Ladies’ Event — meet a Victoria Nuland partner in crimes: Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine’s new Finance Minister and until December 2, 2014 not a citizen of Ukraine but of the US.
A former US diplomat and potentially rising Ukrainian oligarch thanks to USG funding.
Nuland, Jaresko, Clinton, etal are Maggie Thatcherites and no ladies at all.
link
I actually do think that in terms of raw numbers more people are alive than would have been if nothing was done. But whether that makes things better or not? About even.
Its certainly possible it would have gone like Syria anyway which basically means its a no win in the Arab world any way you slice it. I would advocate assisting Tunisia in locking down their Libyan border.
It would be nice if our mainstream “news” organizations would make any attempt to inform the public of just how badly wrong things have gone in Libya. Perhaps that would curb enthusiasm for yet more interventions in places where we have no effing idea what we’re doing. Of course, that’s hardly an effect that the owners of said “news” organizations wish to produce.
The coverage of Libya only appears when there is something spectacular. There are in fact four competing states, two of them of some size competing for the hinterlands and holding the cities. And up to five or six groups contending for the cities, of which the most showy is ISIS/ISIL/Daesh’s caliphate wanna-bes in Derna, Sirte, and Benghazi. Of those, Derna was a base for al Quaeda operatives during the Libyan revolution and likely the only town that ISIS/ISIL/Daesh could possibly control as a base for the Libyan “province” of the aspirational caliphate.
The difficulty that Libya faced in 2011 is that the regional militias could agree on one thing–getting rid of Gadhafi, but too many of their leaders wanted to be the next Gadhafi and used regional conflicts of interest and ethnic antagonisms to try to build their power.
The complications that the US intervention introduced was the drive to a bigfooted US response (which President Obama wisely dialed back) and the neoconservative approach to country domination through CIA special operations in Benghazi. That introduced foreign troops into a volatile situation with all the cultural ignorance and ugly American-ness that has lost us respect all over the world.
The other complication was that the US was not the only state running its national interest under the cover of the Arab Spring. In retrospect Qatar was doing the same. In the absence of solid US media coverage, Al Jazeera built its reputation on its coverage of the Arab Spring in Egypt and spun that out through the corresponding movement in Libya. Their play was to bring the Moslem Brotherhood to power in Egypt and likely in Libya and Syria as well. They failed miserably in Egypt because the Moslem Brotherhood seized parliamentary power illegitimately (with similar tactics to US Republicans), railroaded through a Constitution that was not popular, and began to suppress the Egyptian liberal elites (who sought refuge with a military government). And they also began shipping arms to Syria as the Libyan revolution wound down, moving Syria from protests to civil war.
It is going to take a solid, intense, thorough Congressional investigation to determine what the US special operations role in all this actually was. And how much it was moving at cross-purposes to bringing conflict to an end and restoring ordinary daily life.
I think what finally died in the Libyan action was the notion that the US (or any country) can be the midwife of a democratic revolution that brings to power a popular government in the style of the Czech Velvet Revolution. It is instructive that the original Arab Spring revolution in Tunisia is still struggling and feeling its way forward but has not yet collapsed. And I think that USians tend to forget the chaos of the Articles of Confederation period and that it took until 1865 and a disastrous civil war for the US to find the sort of unity that we expect immediately from these spontaneous revolutions.
In one respect I don’t care how much oil the conflict in Libya is keeping in the ground. Petrostates are notorious for income inequalities; more oil increases government corruption and interregional tensions over the revenues from oil.
From the perspective of Libya, your arguments have proven correct. But from the perspective of what was driving US intervention, likely the folks pushing intervention (minus Sarkozy) might think it was a success. Marine le Pen did not get elected in the French elections. Muslim immigrants did not create a long-term refugee crisis in Italy (then under austerity and the rule of Berlusconi) or in France (aggravating the cultural conflict between France’s ethnic French population at its native-born Muslim population). The conflict was over and Gadhafi gone in less than a year from intervention. And there was a period during which there was a parliament and the political factions were sorting out a new political framework. Some solid investigative reporting of what external pressures, if any, were being exerted on the various factions and what caused the gradual transition from militias to competing de facto warlords would be interesting.
The original mission was not to cause regime change, according the the President, but to degrade Gadhafi’s aircraft and heavy weapon advantage over the rebelling militias. And to protect Benghazi from retaliatory genocide by Gadhafi. Was the Obama administration lying to the public about its intentions or was what happened the result of mission creep?
Your quote above is the best argument I know of for having diplomatic relations with every nation and for having a thorough performance assessment of what exactly we are getting for the $60 billion a year we are tossing to the intelligence agencies.
Yes, the responsibility-to-protect argument for intervention is pretty much unworkable.
But our total foreign policy seems to be on autopilot, doesn’t it. Zero learning and 100% doubling down.
And once again we have confirmed tha air power can suppress air defense systems, destroy airfields, destroy stored artillery and tanks once those targets are found, destroy armored columns in motion. But once the fighting gets to the smalls arms level, intervention is useless and even counterproductive.
What gave the intervention UN approval was the argument of the Assistant Ambassador of Libya to the UN’s speech that Gadhafi’s action was the approach of genocide (Gadhafi’s speech supposedly said he would kill the rebels in Benghazi like rats). The defection of Libyan ministers to the side of the rebels provided momentum to the request for intervention.
Some hardworking investigative reporter needs to do a retrospective on these events with actors outside the US to determine how much was authentic and how much kabuki. Relying on US-centric media to determine what happened always places the US as the principle actor even in events in which it might not have been. But given CIA special operations and DoD propaganda, the US public never knows when they are being played.
But given CIA special operations and DoD propaganda, the US public never knows when they are being played.
In real time, in Libya it couldn’t have been clearer that US assets — arms, money — had been deployed in Libya to fuel, if not initiate, the insurgency in eastern Libya that was composed of one part radical Muslims and one part those that had visions of glory days for them under the old king.
In real time unless you have a Chelsea Manning dump of cables, it is never clear who is doing what. Nor is it clear who it was who was defecting because the Western press failed to cover Libyan politics because under Gadhafi political opinions were suppressed. Only after Gadhafi was gone did political loyalties come out of the closet.
And the period of interest would be January through March 2011. As I remember the UN and US decisions came around March 17.
It might be clear in real time to a specialist with specialized resources. But there was in fact at that point in time no reliable source of information for the general public. But even after the fact, we do not have definitive evidence of what the US was up to, when it was acting, and what its intentions were. All we have is the fact that the assassination of Ambassador Stevens exposed a CIA facility and a bunch of contractors who are telling self-serving stories in order to pay back decision-makers who they accuse of not following through on some plan or other that has not been clearly described.
And in close to real time, it was clear that there were insurgencies in Misrata, Zintan, and Tripoli for a variety of other reasons. In Zintan and northwest Tripolitania in general ethnic Berbers were seeking recognition of their language and non-discrimination. Until the most recent collapse of parliament, they had obtained those goals. Misrata has a political culture that sees itself as the maker of regimes; Gadhafi got his first major support there; the defeat of the siege of Misrata brought down Gadhafi; Misrata is the source of a lot of the current sectionalism. Benghazi seems to be the focus of external meddling because it is the largest city close to oil ports.
because the Western press failed to cover Libyan politics
The western press is generally crappy — but enough solid stuff leaks through that anyone not expecting to be spoonfed, can take the solid stuff and combined with some research on the subject can get a good enough read on the factors and factions involved and project where a conflict will lead.
We saw the original protestors in Egypt not only not asking for western military assistance but also told us to stay out because it was their fight. The tipoff for westerners wrt Libya was the speed with which those that appeared to have initiated the conflict were begging for outside assistance.
My information primary came from daily watching of Al Jazeera’s coverage, which began when I found them the only web site covering what was going on in Egypt and then extended into the interspersed coverage of what was going on in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria as each country erupted in protest.
The earliest action in Libya was around February 10, 2011. A crowd in Benghazi attacked a police station and then took over an army tank. A crowd protested for a couple of days in Tripoli. And then in Tripoli, a couple of technicals (pickup trucks with mounted guns) asserted to be Chadian mercenary troops of the Gadhafi government slaughtered peaceful protesters in the main square of Tripoli using 105mm anti-aircraft guns. This was the atrocity that caused (or reportedly caused defections within the Gadhafi government officials). The protests at that point weren’t demanding the end of Gadhafi’s rule but an opening up of democracy. After that event the protests grew in Tripoli, in Benghazi, in Misrata, and in As Zawiyah. In As Zawiyah, the Gadhafi government began rolling back the protests with the use of the military. The military then put Misrata under siege. Finally the military began rolling toward Benghazi. That was all within the first week or 10 days. Benghazi and Zintan began organizing militias, and Zintan came under siege. By the end of February, three or four Cyrenaica-born military leaders had broken with Gadhafi and gone to organize the militias into a fighting force. And they began to take territory rapidly moving toward Gadhafi’s home town of Sirte, where they were stopped short and rolled back over a week to ten days or so to the outskirts of Benghazi. It was when the rebel militia realized that they might lose Benghazi that they used diplomatic channels to ask for help after two Libyan pilots had landed in Italy and asked for asylum and were debriefed by Italian officials. That diplomatic effort began the first of March and midway in it the Assistant Ambassador from Libya to the UN broke with the Ambassador and spoke to the UN Human Rights Commission describing the necessity of the world to act. He later repeated his plea to the UN Security Council. The Security Council approved Article 7 action with Russia and China abstaining (when they could have used a veto). France organized an impromptu group to implement the Article 7 action as NATO’s governing body was not interested in getting involved outside Europe. The governments at that hasty meeting came to agreement about how to do it as the Libyan army was beginning to shell Benghazi. The first action of the war was French jets destroying Libyan tanks on the outskirts of Benghazi. That was around March 17.
If all that was orchestrated as a Western operation, it unfolded faster and more flawlessly than any false flag operation recently. The Libyan militias pointedly told the alliance that they did not want Western troops on the ground in Libya. When the US did begin its operations, it did so with all the shock and awe nonsense that its PR people had engineered for home consumption since the “successful” First Gulf War. The reaction to that was not helpful and Obama ordered the military to dial it back–at least the PR and news coverage part. And US briefings disappeared from view.
Communications to Misrata were cut off for two months, and the siege lasted three months. Until the end of the siege of Misrata, the Western air runs were targeting only massed heavy weapons and Libyan army bases and resisting air support close to cities. At some point after three months, Western forces were able to communicate with the Misrata militias, who could spot Gadhafi artillery batteries within the city. Gradually that siege was broken. And a similar arrangement was established in Zintan. The Misrata troops then moved east towards Sirte and west towards Tripoli. The Zintan siege was broken and Zintan troops move towards Tripoli as Benghazi troops began moving toward Sirte. The last three battles were at the Tripoli airport, where a political prison was attacked and prisoners freed (no doubt a bunch of Islamist among them), Wadi al Shaati, and finally Sirte (where Gadhafi was caputured and killed).
Watching events unfold on a daily basis, the response of the West to the appeals of the Cyrenaicians seemed to proceed slowly. Only with tens of thousands of Libyan refugees going in small boats to and Italian island seemed to move the Europeans, who were more concerned about incoming Libyans (indeed, they modified the Schingen agreement to restrict refugee movement).
It seemed to me at the time that Western intervention was an immediate response and once in questions about “What is the end game?” in the summer of 2011 prompted the decision to assist regime change. It seemed that until the summer of 2011 the West did not think Gadhafi dislodgeable and the end game actually looked like an agreement that kept Gadhafi in power and ratcheted down the civil war. And that the US attacked the Gadhafi compound at the end only to hasten the end game, not as a well-thought-out plan.
What the current situation seems to be is a spat between Zintan-Benghazi militias on the one hand and Misrata militias on the other. Into the vacuum Gadhafi’s old base of Sirte becomes an Islamist base and one of the places in which ISIL is operating. Derna, which even in 2011 was recognized as an al Quaeda area is the other area in which ISIL is operating. That is consistent with the Ba’aath alliance with ISIS and previously al Quaeda factions in Iraq and Syria.
Despite efforts to frame events as a US-dominated narrative positively or negatively, my growing sense is that US power is increasingly irrelevant in the Maghreb and Levant. Folks there, like the YPG Kurdish party of Kobane and the Shia militias in Iraq allied with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria are going to be major players over against whatever Salafist faction come to represent Sunnis in Syria and Iraq.
Were there were a leak of the cables involved in the Libya War. They might show that one part of the US security state was operating contrary to another part and that the “principals” in DC has little clue what actually was going on on the ground, some part of it from the usual bureucratic information massaging and some part of it under the rubric of plausible deniability. “POTUS doesn’t need to know this.” can be a seductive trail of irresponsibility.
By “research” I didn’t mean obsessive focus on all aspects of an unfolding event in real time. Like the internet, that can lead to information overload without context and meaning.
As I joined anti-Vietnam protests in the late 1960s, I began asking myself how did the US get there in the first place. So, I began reading. First familiarizing myself with the period when the US picked up where France had left off. That was good enough to conclude that US policies had been wrong but consistent with US imperialist proclivities that as an American I was already familiar with but not as deeply or well-informed enough to appreciate why this would continue after we got out of Vietnam. But that didn’t inform me of the people that lived in N. and S. Vietnam. So, I had to read more history. The long story of the people, and their culture and economies being exploited and brutalized by the French and later Japanese and later still the French again. Then it became very easy to see why Ho Chi Minh and his followers were enlightened Vietnamese patriots. US actions weren’t only wrong, but IMHO evil.
Did the same to understand Cuba and US policies. And came to a similar conclusion. Unfortunately, there’s not enough time left for ordinary working folks to study up on all the on-going world conflicts. But figuring out a couple of important ones, makes it easier to see through real time US propaganda in later ones. The only one that did confuse me — and I had zero free time to study up on — was Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo. Didn’t get the best read on the amount of western propaganda involved in that nor an adequate understanding of the peoples, etc. Libya was far easier to read — a much less complicated recent history than the Balkans, fewer major factions, and more easily identifiable propaganda, partly because there was more of it.
From practically day one, there was no similarity between the Libyan uprising and those that had taken place in Tunisia and Egypt. Why? Ghaddafi was an erratic and generally horrible dictator. Delving into that question along with pre-existing knowledge that Ghaddafi had long been on a US enemies list whereas Ben Ali and Murbarek hadn’t been made it easy to see the US fingerprints all over the uprising.
There are two aspects to Libya that are illuminating to Syria/ISIS. The first is crisis response. We are pretty good at that, as we demonstrated in Libya and we are sort of demonstrating against ISIS. We can act as a SWAT team that goes in and defeats other forces, breaks shit up and goes home.
But rebuilding a stable country is an entirely other matter. We aren’t good at that, because ultimately that isn’t our job. It’s a job for Libyans. But “Libyan” is a fiction. It’s a colonial province composed of ancient tribes and tribal grievance.
We did exactly what we said we would do in Libya: prevent a potential genocide. We were clear that we would not do “boots of the ground” or state-building.
One lesson we should have learned in Iraq (and that Iraq is still teaching us daily) is that you cannot impose a social contract via an occupation force. And you should be very careful about breaking a country with idealistic aims of doing that.
But Libya and currently Syria are already broken. (Yes, we contributed to the breaking of Syria.)
Foreign policy is almost always reactive. We can respond to “big” events like Qaddafi’s threats against Benghazi, but the day-to-day misery of the world is beyond our ability to intervene.
I think the two are mutually exclusive. Should we intervene in Syria? I honestly don’t know. ISIS is repellent beyond words. But destroying them actually feeds into their message.
But I do know we shouldn’t touch trying to create a viable Syria. Even if we knew how to and wanted to commit the resources, we couldn’t.
Adding: The idea that we CAN create a social contract where none exists (or that we should) is a form of arrogance that unites Dubya with left wing critics of involvement in a place like Libya. I’m sure what was in Hillary’s mind in the debate over Libya was Rwanda. Should we have intervened in Rwanda? We could have stopped the killing, but we couldn’t have made Rwanda viable and we can’t make Libya viable. We can’t make Iraq or Syria viable either.
Either the people there need to do it, or they need to redraw the map to accommodate the fact that certain people cannot create a polity with certain other people.
I would add that we have to let go of the outcome in the Middle East. The only reasonable policy is risk containment. That may on occasion mean we intervene – but that should be the exception and not the rule.
A more succinct way of putting what I was trying to get at, thanks.
If a country has a revolution and you cannot extract a product from it (like, say, oil) it’s like having that oil banked away, for maybe sometime in a year or ten when you may need it.
So we’ve had wars throughout oil country. Wasn’t it PNAC that had drawn up who got what oilfields in Iraq years before the invasion? We are also in the middle of a pretty flat world economy, so flat that it’s looking like the beginning of another depression. Oil prices are down. If you’re investing in conquering countries that have oil reserves, immediate exploitation is not necessary. Let it sit in the ground for awhile during the next depression. Let the natives wear each other down. When it’s necessary to start pumping oil out of Libya, or Iraq, then it’s a good investment to pluck that country out of chaos.
What am I saying. Chaos is good business. If the government in Kiev blows up those natural gas lines going from Russia to Eastern Europe there will be a sudden need for energy. Suddenly we will see Libya go back online. Ker-ching ker-ching.
December 2014, Iraq Oil Exports Highest Since 1980
Iraq Crude Oil Production 1980-2013
I’ve been against pretty much every US military action since I was 10, back in 1990. Don’t regret any of it.
Empire never works out for anyone but the people controlling it and profiting from it. They hollow out the country to build a military to project outward.
They earn themselves profits from the MIC stock they own, the MIC industries they own and operate, and the markets they “open” for the corporations they own to extract resources and dump products into.
That is what Empire has always been good for, and is only good for.
Great point made in this article… What is it like to be bombed? Well, the residents of Manhattan should know after 9/11…
“I thought Americans would finally begin to understand what being bombed is like.
What has always amazed me about countries at war is the way the killing of the innocent in foreign lands is ignored. People who wouldn’t step on an ant at home have no interest in finding out what horrors their country is perpetrating abroad. This heartless attitude becomes even more offensive when one thinks back to those terrified people in New York running through fire and smoke from the collapsing towers. In the days after the attacks, our pundits and politicians clamored for a quick and brutal retaliation that would not be overly concerned with distinguishing the innocent from the guilty. In other words, let’s just start bombing the bastards and not worry about who gets killed–or about the likelihood that the bombed might want to have their own revenge one day.”
“Forget about the trillions spent already on these wars, the thousands of Americans dead and maimed, the many more dead and tens of millions displaced in these countries we had no business destroying and in whose theological and territorial disputes we had no business meddling, let’s see if our bombs and our soldiers succeed this time around and are greeted at last as liberators all across the Middle East. Don’t hold your breath. But since our corrupt political class loves war because it fills their coffers with money and makes them look both righteous and tough, we shall have more of these counterproductive wars, even if they lead sooner or later to our ruin.”
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/feb/17/our-wars-our-victims/?insrc=hpbl
I guess we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the trauma of a US air attack… it’s all for the best in the long run, right New York?
why do you think so many turned out against war in 2002? ppl were very upset at shock and awe and said precisely that – that’s what we just went through and we don’t wish it on anyone
I don’t recall any protests against bombing Afghanistan. iirc — bombing it back to the stone age seemed to be the prevailing sentiment. Not that the millions of ordinary Afghans had anything to do with 9/11, but with the US military sledgehammer and the irrational fury of USians, Afghanistan looked enough like a nail that it was fine to pound it. Then came the neat trick of converting that US public sentiment to continue bombing somewhere “over there” from Afghanistan to Iraq. Perplexed some people who sort of noticed that Iraq didn’t equal Afghanistan, but they quickly left the thinking to those in power.
Were you in New York at the time?
the point, to which I responded, is that having your city exploded leads to a different response to watching it on the news
let me explain more fully: I spent a couple months on the street talking with ppl etc (most of a few months) ppl had several responses: some ppl quit their jobs and “did something else” to make the world a better place and resolve world conflicts; some joined the military; a large percentage just tried to get through the day. a lot of young ppl moved away; some got married/ divorced/ pregnant i.e. tried to change their person life; some ppl tried to do their jobs, business as usual (this was impossible in many parts of the city because the city was not functioning) and the fire burned until Feb so any time one might be assailed with the smell of burning bodies. and there was the constant sirens of finding body parts, etc
I don’t know where you get off thinking ppl were supposed to be out organizing protests. what’s with the glib snarkiness? the entire city was barely functioning and most ppl were in shock. [and btw a lot of great ppl came to help out]
Yes, ppl here recognized that the Bush admin hijacked the event in the service of war – it didn’t work in the area directly affected that was my point.