Libya: what next?

So what next in Libya? The USA will be keen to re-establish ‘stability’ first and foremost. We all know what stability means: setting up a regime that will be in every way a puppet of the ‘benign’ godlike Superstate, and which looks pretty much like the last one. That is why Eisenhower invaded Guatemala. And that is why Kennedy also invaded Guatemala. The wrong kind of democracy. As in Vietnam, Chile, Gaza.

And we can look at Iraq for an example of perfidious US/UK politics. Saddam was our man until he went into business for himself; then suddenly he became Evil Personified - and the fact that his chemical weaponry was sold to him by the US and UK was brushed aside repeatedly. Similarly, Gaddafi morphed from terrorist supporter to Friend of the West, which then ignored his internal repressions. Libya is regarded as a favoured customer, with the UK boasting the largest pavilion at the last Libyan arms fair. Thus it was with the Thatcher Government and Indonesia.

In January 2009, Nick Clegg wrote in The Guardian that Britain should stop selling arms to Israel following its bombardment of Gaza. He made a broader point: the UK should not supply weapons to countries involved in external aggression or internal repression.
He has been conspicuously silent on this subject since he became deputy prime minister.

Interviewed on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, Tuesday 1st March, John Major exposed the Establishment position on this for once and for all. He claimed, with some bitterness, that the people who were complaining about arms sales would be the same ones who would be out on the street demonstrating against job cuts when the arms industry suffers.

Now Iraq has ‘stability’: a new, stand-in dictatorship, hotwired to Washington as before. And all those deaths? Just numbers, as Harry Lime would say. But our government and supine news media - the Mail, Sun, Telegraph etc will have it that we ‘won’ the war and liberated the Iraqis while saving ourselves from the threat of WMD.

It does look now as if the UN could be readying itself for intervention. Our very own David Owen has been calling for a degree of UN-sanctioned interference. Or America could just stick to tradition and start pouring bombs all over the parts of Libya that it suspects contains the people who least represent its interests.

In a recent blog, Susil Gupta said,
Should the crisis continue, the Guardian argues, “intervention on the ground would have to be considered. The Egyptian army has the means, other Arab countries could contribute, and western forces could help.” Yes, and it would all be over by Christmas.

It is obvious that these war-enthusiasts have not thought this through – but then they would not be doing any of the fighting. The plain fact is that there are no feasible military interventions even if the major powers could agree on an intervention plan, which is very far from being the case. Consider the options.

Imposing a no fly zone. This would require extensive air patrols by foreign air forces. They would have little effect since air power is not key to Gadhafi’s strategy. It would, however, create an atmosphere of major war and give Gadhafi a propaganda boost.

Creating a military barrier or cordon sanitaire around eastern Libya to protect rebel positions. Likewise this would crystallise the situation into a two-sided war, which could only play into Gadhafi’s hands. It is to the advantage of those that want to topple Gadhafi to avoid a war of entrenchment fixed positions, preventing them from permeating every level of society and undermine further his crumbing power base. In any case such Western intervention would be impossible to implement. No Western commander is going to deploy troops at short notice into a theatre unknown to his troops but well-known to an enemy who, in any case, cannot be easily distinguished from friendly forces. It is a recipe for disaster.

Sending in a ‘peace keeping’ African Union force to separate the parties. One way to unite every Libyan behind Gadhafi, given the reputation of such forces in the past.

Sending in a ‘peace keeping’ force made up of troops from Arab countries as The Guardian recommends. One way to unite every Libyan behind Gadhafi and infect and inflame the whole of the Middle East with the vicissitudes of a Libyan civil war.

...
I would say that any kind of outside involvement would most likely unite the Libyans against the invaders if it did not break up the country into a protracted civil war. The good news is that America is seriously in hock after a century of overspending and colonial overstretching, so that it is unlikely to be as gung-ho as it used to be over this kind of scenario. And sanctions? Remember the sanctions in Iraq: how effective they were in hastening the deaths of the very young, the very old and the seriously ill. But in any case Libya is a different kind of country entirely - its edges are very ‘porous’ and it is probably as far removed from a self-contained walled-in state as you could get.

But whatever form any interference might take, it would certainly not be aimed at consolidating the democratic revolution by the People. It will be for re-establishing the pipelines of oil and money. Stability.


The Guardian has published some excellent letters on this subject including ones from friends Tony Greenstein and Peter Downey:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/01/liberal-intervention-in-arab-world?INTCMP=SRCH