End of the Gaddafi Regime and the New Quagmire in Libya
August 23, 2011 at 9:46 pm | Posted in Capitalism, democracy, Human Rights, International Relations, Political Economy, Uncategorized, World Politics | Leave a commentTags: Brazil, Capitalism, China, democracy, France, Human Rights, India, international relations, interstate system, Libya, Middle East, military, NATO, Political Economy, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, world politics
If the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year regime is to be celebrated as much as the way in which it was brought about must be condemned. A bunch of regime turncoats, Western agents like the rebels’ “field commander” Khalifa Hifter, and assorted others organized protests against the regime in Benghazi some six months ago in the wake of the fall of autocrats in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt. When Gaddafi counter-attacked, under prodding from France’s Nicholas Sarkozy and Britain’s David Cameron, the United Nations sanctioned NATO to use its air power to “protect civilians” and imposed an arms embargo on Libya. As Simon Jenkins writes in the Guardian, from then mission creep set in–from establishing a ‘no-fly zone’ over Benghazi, the NATO mission turned into a bombing campaign against Tripoli. NATO leaders quickly claimed that Gaddafi had to go–from protecting civilians, regime change became the new goal and even the assassination of Colonel Gaddafi was contemplated.
Shamefully this came about because five members of the UN Security Council–Russia, China, Germany, Brazil, and India–abstained from the resolution 1973 sanctioning intervention, there was no sustained protests across the world against the massive aerial bombardment of Libya for five months by NATO forces. Emboldened by this global quiescence, the fall of the Gaddafi regime was accomplished by NATO’s Operation Siren at the break of the Ramadhan fast last Saturday. As Pepe Escobar writes:
With “Siren”, NATO came out all guns (literally) blazing; Apache gunships firing nonstop and jets bombing everything in sight. NATO supervised the landing of hundreds of troops from Misrata on the coast east of Tripoli while a NATO warship distributed heavy weapons.
On Sunday alone there may have been 1,300 civilian deaths in Tripoli, and at least 5,000 wounded. The Ministry of Health announced that hospitals were overflowing. Anyone who by that time believed relentless NATO bombing had anything to do with R2P and United Nations Resolution 1973 was living in an intensive care unit.
NATO preceded “Siren” with massive bombing of Zawiya – the key oil-refining city 50 kilometers west of Tripoli. That cut off Tripoli’s fuel supply lines. According to NATO itself, at least half of Libya’s armed forces were “degraded” – Pentagon/NATO speak for killed or seriously wounded. That means tens of thousands of dead people. That also explains the mysterious disappearance of the 65,000 soldiers in charge of defending Tripoli. And it largely explains why the Gaddafi regime, in power for 42 years, then crumbled in roughly 24 hours.
NATO’s Siren call – after 20,000 sorties, and more than 7,500 strikes against ground targets – was only made possible by a crucial decision by the Barack Obama administration in early July, enabling, as reported by The Washington Post, “the sharing of more sensitive materials with NATO, including imagery and signals intercepts that could be provided to British and French special operations troops on the ground in addition to pilots in the air”.
Only this massive NATO assault can explain the dramatic fall of Tripoli. But the fall of the Gaddafi regime poses several problems.
First, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, the fall of the autocrat has also destroyed the institutional props of the regime. Unlike in Egypt, there is no army to step into the breach. While this could mean better prospects for the establishment of a genuine democracy, it is more than counterbalanced by the widespread dispersal of arms among a divided people. Gaddafi had nurtured tribal rivalries as a means to ensure his own survival and these rivalries had already erupted among the rebels when its top military commander General Abdul Fattah Younes was killed by his own troops on July 28. Fierce armed rivalry between tribes and other groups may ensue prompting further international intervention.
Second, five months of unchecked bombing has destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and especially its oil industry. Before the civil war, Libya produced about 1.6 million barrels of oil a day but this has now dropped to about 50,000 barrels a day. Javier Blas reports in the Financial Times that under the most benign scenario, it woulds take until 2013 or well beyond for Libya to return to its pre-civil war levels of production.
But any such estimates do not account for the enormity of the destruction visited on Libya by NATO bombings–of the highways, bridges, hospitals, homes, essential services, utilities destroyed. Some of us remember all too well the Neocons saying that Iraq’s oil wealth will pay for the war and reconstruction–and look where that got the Iraqis. No aid to Libya can be expected from a Washington held captive to the ‘small government’ policies of the Tea Party acolytes or from a Eurozone dealing with sovereign debt of its weaker members. Like other states of the global South, Libya will be left in a quagmire as NATO seeks other locations to intervene and destroy with nary a whimper from the ‘emerging powers’ of Brazil, India, China, or South Africa!
Will Barack Obama be the first American president to invade Africa?
April 21, 2011 at 9:29 pm | Posted in Arms Control, democracy, Human Rights, International Relations, Political Economy, World Politics | Leave a commentTags: Africa, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Global South, interstate system, intervention, Italy, Libya, Middle East, NATO, North Africa, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, US hegemony, US politics
One month into the bombing of Libya by NATO forces, if anything the situation is worse than before. After an initial assault, the United States withdrew to a supporting role but those of its NATO allies that chose to participate in the military attack against Colonel Muammer Gaddafi’s forces–mainly France and the UK, with some support from Spain, Denmark, Canada, and Belgium–have discovered that they do not have the military force required to roll back the Libyan government troops. Without anti-tank planes, they were unable to stop the pro-Gaddafi forces’ advance against the rebels in the east or to relieve the siege of Misurata. President Barack Obama has now authorized the use of US Predator drones and is gradually being drawn out of the supporting role he had sought. Will the NATO allies and the US have to commit ground troops to resolve the impossible situation they have got themselves into? Will Barack Obama go down in history as the first American president to invade an African state?
Despite the aerial bombardment of Colonel Gaddafi’s forces, the ragtag militia of the rebels do not have the training or the weaponry to withstand his forces which have now adapted measures to blunt the effectiveness of air raids–using human shields, riding in pickup trucks, using camouflage. About the rebels, a New York Times correspondent wrote:
… by almost all measures by which a military might be assessed, they are a hapless bunch. They have almost no communication equipment. There is no visible officer or noncommissioned officer corps. Their weapons are a mishmash of hastily acquired arms, which few of them know how to use.
Military chiefs on both sides of the Altantic had urged caution but France’s Nicholas Sarkozy to boost his domestic poll ratings and Britain’s David Cameron seeking some of the glory that Margaret Thatcher reaped from her victory over Argentina in the Malvinas conflict urged President Obama to support their ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Libya. Yet, there was never any clarity as to who the rebels were–as General Carter Ham, commander of the US Africa Command, told Congressional leaders and it appears that they represent coastal tribes of Cyrenaica while the tribes of the interior and the west continue their allegiance to Colonel Gaddafi.
Most notably, the objectives of the NATO mission in Libya are unclear or cannot be achieved merely by an air campaign. Its efforts have certainly postponed the defeat of the insurgents but without ground troops, it cannot oust the Colonel from power even though Sarkozy, Brown, and Obama have all called for his departure as the only acceptable solution. Note that this was not mandated by the UN Security Council resolution 1973 which sanctions the NATO operation and the resolution had explicitly forbidden ‘foreign occupation troops of any form.’ Yet, Britain, France, and Italy have all said they would send ‘unarmed military advisors‘–a prospect almost certain to involve deeper involvement: what would happen if these ‘unarmed’ advisors were targeted by the Libyan government forces as they surely are a legitimate military target?
Insistence of the removal of Colonel Gaddafi from power rules out a negotiated settlement. A more likely prospect is that Libya will be partitioned into an eastern part which will effectively become a NATO protectorate with the bulk of Libya’s oil supplies. Neither France nor Britain has sufficient forces to keep pro-Gaddafi forces from attacking the Benghazi enclave–and it would require US boots on the ground–making the first African-American president of the US to be the first American president to invade and occupy an African state! After all, Khalifa Haftar who has been claiming to be the field commander of the rebel forces had been living near the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia for 20 years and they had provided him with a training camp.
The whole of Libya–east and west–would require massive reconstruction assistance given the damage done to its infrastructure by civil war and aerial bombardment. Who is going to fund this reconstruction? Is it ‘humanitarian to bomb the hell out of a country and then leave it in shambles? After all, the neo-conversatives claim that Iraq–which has far greater oil reserves–can pay for its own reconstruction remains hollow eight years after the US invasion.
Even if the Gaddafi regime were to implode due to economic sanctions and the loss of the bulk of its oil revenues, his boast of arming every Libyan is likely to plunge the country into a prolonged phase of violent disruptions.
Iceland–An Independent People
April 20, 2011 at 2:49 pm | Posted in democracy, Free Trade, International Relations, Labor, Political Economy, World Politics | 2 CommentsTags: 21st Century Capitalism, Euro, European Union, financial crisis, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Internnational Monetary Fund, Ireland, Libya, NATO, neo-liberalism, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, US hegemony, US politics, World-economy
In the midst of the NATO campaign against Libya and the budget deal between Republicans and the Democrats in the US, a far more historically significant event appears to have fallen off the radar. On April 9, 2011, the people of Iceland voted for the second time to reject a government proposal for Iceland taxpayers to repay some €4 billion to the governments of Britain and the Netherlands which had compensated their domestic depositors in the collapsed online bank, Icesave. Initially, the British and Dutch governments had pressured the Iceland government to agree to repay them over fifteen years at a 5.5 percent annual interest–which was estimated to cost each household in the tiny island nation about €45,000 over the period. This was rejected by 91 percent of the voters in a referendum in March 2010. After subsequent negotiations, London and Amesterdam agreed to lower the interest to 3.2 percent and stretch the repayment period to 30 years between 2016 and 2046. The deal was accepted by a large majority of 44 in favor and 16 opposed in the Althingi, Iceland’s parliament, which also rejected a clause to submit the bill to another referendum. Nevertheless, as the President, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, refused to sign the bill, it was automatically subject to a referendum wherein it was rejected by almost 60 percent of the voters.
The Dutch and British governments–which had used anti-terrorist legislation to seize assets of the failed Icelandic banks–have threatened to scupper Iceland’s application to join the European Union and to take the island nation to court. Reykjavik has insisted that the two governments would get most of their money back and the assets of the Landsbanki bank which set up the Icesave operation would be sold and was expected to realize 90 percent of the Icesave debt. What was at issue in the referendum was not whether London and Amsterdam would be compensated or not–but whether private citizens should be expected to shoulder the burden of repayment of a bank’s debt in which they had no hand in incurring and from which they did not benefit. The threat to take Iceland to court is important because it is to frighten off other states which also face indebtedness due to the financial crisis like Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. It is simply the question of whether the bankers have to bear the burden of the bad loans they have extended.
Iceland is, in fact, a case study of neo-liberalism gone awry. Before the late 1990s, Iceland’s financial sector had been small and the banks were largely government-owned. In 1998, the two leading parties–the Independence Party and the Centre Party–embarked on a privatization of the banking sector, assigning Landsbanki to grandees of the Independence Party and Kaupthing to the Centre Party. A new private bank, Glitnir, was also set up merging several smaller banks. None of these banks had much experience in international finance, but like South Korean banks a decade earlier, these banks tapped into abundant cheap credit and easy capital mobility. Unlike the South Korean banks, their strong ties to political parties, the merger of commercial and investment banking, and low soveriegn debt meant that they got extremely high grades from the credit ratings agencies and as Robert Wade and Silla Sigurgeirsdottir note: “government policy was now subordinated to their ends.”
With the government relaxing mortgage rules to permit loans up to 90 percent of value, the banks rode the wave–by buying shares in each other they inflated share prices and enticed depositors to shift their savings to shares. In less than 10 years after the privatization of banks, Iceland had the fifth highest GDP in the world, 60 percent higher than that of the United States, and the assets of their banks was valued at 800 percent of Iceland’s GDP. As land prices soared, Icelanders loaded up on lower-interest yen- or Swiss-franc debt.
By 2006, Iceland’s current account deficit had soared to 20 percent of its GDP. Late in that year, Landsbanki established an online bank, Icesave, to attract deposits from overseas clients and by offering highly attractive interest rates, it raked in millions of pounds from England, and later millions of euros especially from the Netherlands. This was soon copied by the two other banks. These were established as ‘branches’ rather than as ‘subsidiaries‘ which meant that they were to be supervised by the icelandic Central Bank rather than regulators in Britain or the Netherlands. Because of Iceland’s obligations as a member of the European Economic Area to insure bank deposits, no one thought to worry about whether the Icelandic Central Bank had the capacity to oversee the vastly extended operations of the island’s three major banks.
This happy bubble burst in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed, within a fortnight of which the three big Icelandic banks collapsed and by November of that year the krona had fallen from its pre-crisis level of 70 to the euro to 190 to the euro, so sharply cutting the islanders’ purchasing power that the three McDonald’s franchises were forced to close as the cost of importing ingredients made the price of burgers prohibitive! The country’s stock market lost 98 percent of its value! If ever there was a definition of crisis, this was it. It was the first time in over 30 years that a ‘developed’ state had to seek assistance from the International Monetary Fund.
In the light of all this, Iceland’s voters have had the courage to face up to the crisis. It was the first country to kick out the government which had failed so spectacularly. Unlike its neighbor in the North Atlantic–Ireland which underwrote its own banking collapse and loader every household with €80,000 in debt–Iceland let the three banks go under and they imposed capital controls to prevent the flight of capital. Though unemployment in Iceland today is 7.5 percent in Iceland–up from 2 percent in 2002–but just over half of Ireland’s 13.6 percent. Though the krona lost almost half its value, inflation is down sharply and without having to pay back foreign creditors, its government finances are in much better shape than those of Greece, Ireland, or Portugal.
Libya and the Politics of Intervention
March 28, 2011 at 10:17 pm | Posted in Arms Control, Human Rights, International Relations, Nuclear Non-Proliferation, World Politics | 2 CommentsTags: Afghanistan, Africa, African Union, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Global South, Holland, interstate system, Israel, Libya, Middle East, NATO, North Africa, Norway, Palestine, Persian Gulf, Russia, Spain, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, US hegemony, Yemen
US-led attacks appear to have turned the tide against Colonel Muammer Gaddafi’s counter-revolution in Libya. Attacks by some 120 Tomahawk cruise missiles–each costing $575,000–and some eight days of air raids have established a ‘no-fly zone’ over Libya and US, French, British, Danish, Canadian, and other air forces have also targeted the Libyan government’s ground forces to deadly effect. The Libyan rebels, who had been virtually encircled in Benghazi have, as a result been able to roll back the government forces from Brega, Ras Lanuf, Ajdabiyia, and other towns in the east and are now attacking the town of Sirte, Gaddafi’s birth place.
How are we to react to this exercise of Western military might against a state of the Global South? People like Gilbert Achcar and Juan Cole have vigorously defended the intervention in Libya. To them, the alternative would have been a brutal massacre of Gaddafi’s opponents by the better trained and equipped militias of the regime. For them, there were no other countervailing forces capable of intervening–not the African Union or Arab States. Western intervention was the only available option to stop a murderous dictator. It was sanctioned by the Arab League and the rebels themselves had pleaded for a ‘no-fly’ zone–a plea from a popular movement that could not be ignored. This was, a humanitarian intervention and not an attempt to secure access to Libya’s oil resources. After all, as Achcar points out, virtually all Western countries had oil companies operating in Libya already: ”Italy’s ENI, Germany’s Wintershall, Britain’s BP, France’s Total and GDF Suez, US companies ConocoPhillips, Hess, and Occidental, British-Dutch Shell, Spain’s Repsol, Canada’s Suncor, Norway’s Statoil.”
There is of course the obvious objection: the West applies double standards, not only to Israel’s murderous assault on the Palestinians in Gaza but also to the brutal repression of protest movements in Bahrain and Yemen. As Richard Falk puts it:
How is this Libyan response different in character than the tactics relied upon by the regimes in Yemen and Bahrain, and in the face of far less of a threat to the status quo, and even that taking the form of political resistance, not military action. In Libya the opposition forces were relying almost from the outset on heavy weapons, while elsewhere in the region the people were in the streets in massive numbers, and mostly with no weapons, and in a few instances, with very primitive ones (stones, simple guns) that were used in retaliation for regime violence.
Indeed, almost from the very beginning of the protests, the rebels had taken arms and before Colonel Gaddafi’s forces launched a counter-assault, ragtag rebel militias had taken towns militarily from the regime’s gendarmes. Claiming that the regime was using African mercenaries, the rebels targeted anyone who looked “African’ including members of Libya’s African tribes because it is both an African and an Arab state.
Analogies are often drawn to the situation in Rwanda but as the allusion to the African tribes in Libya suggests, no binary ethnic divide exists in Libya. There are many tribes and the confrontation between the regime and its opposition does not fracture along a single overriding ethnic divide and there is no genocidal intent in what is essentially a civil war between the regime and its opponents.
The character of the opposition also remains ambiguous–they include former members of the regime, local notables, radical Islamists, and eastern tribes opposed to western tribes. This was not the democratic movement that had swept autocrats from office in Tunisia and Egypt. The Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council may have supported the imposition of ‘no-fly’ zone but they do not speak for the Arab street and many of their members–Bahrain, Yemen–are actively engaged in brutally repressing democracy movements in their own states, and Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council have intervened in Bahrain to help the al-Khalifa family crush its opponents.
The United Nations Security Council authorized the intervention–but only because the five members who abstained (Russia, China, India, Brazil, Germany) did not exercise their responsibilities. If they did not have enough information as the Indian delegate said–they should have abstained. The Russian Foreign Minister has subsequently said that the US-led air raids have far exceeded the Security Council’s authorization: this had been also raised by Amr Moussa, the Secretary General of the Arab League before he was pressured to retract his words.
Moreover, since Gaddafi has paid off many tribes, especially in the west, with oil revenues over the last 40 years, he has a solid core of support. What happens when the rebel forces attacks these population centers? Does the Security Council resolution to ‘protect the civilians’ not apply to them?
As also mentioned in an earlier post, if the regime follows through on its promise to arm its supporters, it could lead to a prolonged period of civil strife if Gaddafi is ousted as remnants of his supports could mount an armed resistance. This could lead to a new flow of African asylum-seekers to Europe. After all, as Achcar notes, a deal struck between Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Gaddafi reduced the flow of asylum-seekers to Italy from 36,000 in 2008 to a mere 4,300 in 2010. A prolonged stalemate or civil war in Libya, moreover as Vijay Prashad has written would constrain the West’s “ability to transit the oil that sits under its soil, and so dangerously harm the “way of life” of those who matter. Events had to be hastened.”
Intervention in Libya also raises a question: if Gaddafi had not abandoned his nuclear program in 2003, would the West have intervened in its civil war. Even though Gaddafi had sided with Idi Amin, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda harshly criticizes ”by now habit of the Western countries over-using their superiority in technology to impose war on less developed societies without impeachable logic. This will be the igniting of an arms race in the world.”
Finally, to the argument that there was no alternative to Western intervention in preventing a blood bath, the African Union had created an ad hoc commission to negotiate between the Libyan regime and its opponents but it was not allowed to begin its work on account of the air strikes and missile launches.
It is also perhaps worth wondering whether the United States which had been opposed to the French and British clamor for intervention, suddenly changed its mind just as Der Spiegel published photographs of grinning American troops posing with Afghan corpses–an event that got scant coverage in the event of the war against Libya. Otherwise, it may have got as much coverage as the atrocities in the Abu Gharib prison in Iraq. So much for humanitarian intervention!
Western Imperialism, Libya, and the Arab Revolts
March 22, 2011 at 3:42 am | Posted in democracy, International Relations, World Politics | 2 CommentsTags: France, Global South, India, international relations, interstate system, intervention, Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Middle East, North Africa, Persian Gulf, Qatar, Serbia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, US hegemony
The United States and some of its European allies have once again launched an attack against a state in the Global South–this time as a humanitarian intervention to prevent Colonel Muammar Gaddafi from ‘slaughtering’ his opponents in Libya, and backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution and a resolution by the League of Arab States. Strikingly, none of the combatant governments–the United States, Britain, France, or the lesser European powers–sought legislative approval for before launching missiles and war planes against Libya. For an assault against a third-rate military power, it seems such democratic niceties need not be observed.
Even if it was a foregone conclusion that their national legislatures would have supported the assault against Colonel Gaddafi’s forces–as the British House of Commons did by a lopsided margin–this was largely due to a blanketing of other options in the mainstream media which made no mention of the ad hoc commission established by the Peace and Security Council of the African Union to mediate between the Colonel and his opponents. Equally importantly, in the absence of a detailed debate, there has been little planning on what would happen were a stalemate to develop–a possibility that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted was a real possibility–or in a post-Gaddafi Libya
Indeed, this is hardly a war against Libya. The superiority of the United States in the air is so overwhelming that as Tom Englehardt has noted there is no element of danger for the pilots of US planes who last faced a serious threat in Vietnam in the early 1970s. The Serbian air force did not even bother to take to the air in the war over Kosovo, and in the First Gulf War, the powerful Iraqi air force flew most of its planes to Iran rather than engage with the US-led forces. For American pilots it is as safe to bomb another country as it is to pilot drones over Afghanistan from the Creech Air Force base in Nevada where “those leaving [the base] pass that warns them to “drive carefully” as this is “the most dangerous part of your day”!
With the absence of any danger to US pilots, this resembles colonial wars where well-armed European troops mowed down with their repeater rifles hordes of native warriors armed only with spears and bows and arrows. Once American planes have taken out all Libyan air defense systems, British and French planes will enforce a no-fly zone, again at no risk to themselves. Underlining the suspension of the ordinary calculus of war, President Barack Obama embarked on his previously scheduled tour of three South American states even as his planes and missiles were pounding Libya.
For NIcolas Sarkozy of France, after the right wing Front National led by Marine Le Pen made historic gains in the first round of municipal elections, an image as a ‘war President‘ may just be the thing to propel him to victory in next year’s presidential elections–damn the consequences for Libyans, in true imperialist tradition!
But the sheer ferocity of the assault is causing anguish even among those who initially called for the imposition of a no-fly zone. Though the League of Arab States had called for the imposition of a no-fly zone, images of the carnage wrought by missiles and bombs led its Secretary-General Amr Moussa to say after the second day of air strikes: ”what is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians.” Intense pressure however made him back-track, despite widespread revulsion in the Arab world at the carnage sustained by Libyan civilians. Nevertheless, only two small states–Qatar and the United Arab Emirates–among the 22-member states of the League have agreed to take part in war effort. Russia and China which abstained from the Security Council vote have voiced concerns about the attacks and India, which also abstained from the Security Council resolution, became the first country to call for a cessation of air strikes.
The role of the League of Arab States also appears compromised. First, Robert Fisk reported that Washington had asked Saudi Arabia to furnish arms to the rebels in Benghazi to which King Abdullah, facing his own problems, had failed to respond even though he loathes the Libyan leader who had tried to have him assassinated just over a year ago. Then the Wall Street Journal reported that with Washington’s encouragement and knowledge, the Egyptian military had begun to slip arms to the rebels. This raises the question of whether the post-Mubarak regime is going to play the role of another Western puppet–indeed Amr Moussa sudden back-tracking of his condemnation of the killings of civilians in the Western air raids gives no assurance of an independent regime emerging from the ashes of Mubarak’s autocracy. Indeed, it may well be that as Ali Abunimah wrote in the Electronic Intifada: “The greatest danger to the Egyptian revolution and the prospects for a free and independent Egypt emanates not from the baltagiyya–the mercenaries and thugs the regime sent to beat, stone, stab, shoot and kill protestors in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities– but from Washington.”
Many of the commentators who support the assault against forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi suggest, even if grudgingly, that only the Western powers have the means to stop his slaughter of his opponents. This is not only to conveniently forget that the Colonel has ruled Libya with an iron hand but also that after he agreed to give up his weapons of mass destruction and join the war on terror, Western powers cosied up to him for lucrartive arms and oil contracts.
It is also to ignore that the African Union had opposed military intervention in the Libyan conflict and that the AU’s own ad hoc commission which Colonel Gaddafi had agreed to meet was not permitted to work as Western military intervention effectively ruled out a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
Most importantly, there appears to be no clarity on the goals of the air attacks on Libya. The British and American military leaderships claim that the removal of Colonel Gaddafi is not the aim of the air strikes–and indeed not within the scope of the Security Council resolution–but their political leaderships assert that regime change is indeed the goal. Responding to the attacks, the Libyan regime has said that it would arm civilians to fight against ‘crusader colonialists’–this could lead to a prolonged conflict were the regime to be deposed as what is left of his forces and supporters launch a bloody civil war. A civil war on the footsteps of Europe could lead to a flood of refugees and may well pave the way to occupation. Alternatively, in the case of a stalemate, Benghazi and eastern Libya may turn into a Western protectorate.
Japan: Geoeconomic Consequences of Nature’s Fury and Human Folly
March 18, 2011 at 4:02 pm | Posted in Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Outsourcing, Political Economy, Production | Leave a commentTags: 21st Century Capitalism, East Asia, European Union, Global South, Japan, Manufacturing, US Economy, World-economy
Scarcely believable images of the destruction wrought by a 9.0 earthquake that struck 250 miles northeast of Tokyo and unleashed a tsunami that generated 10 meter high waves–of entire communities being obliterated–and made worse by triggering a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has been at the center of world news. While concern has understandably been on the human cost of the tragedy, the economic costs are also staggering. While it is too early to make an assessment, early estimates already suggest that world economic growth may fall by at least a full percentage point.
In the most immediate instance, it would cause enormous supply chain disruptions to production as Japanese manufacturers produce a whole array of sophisticated components and finished products. For an economy vitally dependent on exports this could be a vital blow–but it would also affect manufacturers world-wide as they source components from Japan, Additionally, the demand for reconstruction funds for Japan could reasonably be expected to lead to a redirection of financial flows with adverse consequences not only for debt-ridden economies like those of the United States but also for the ‘emerging economies’ of the Global South.
The estimated $200 billion required to rebuild Japan after the earthquake on March 11, 2011 and the tsunami already triggered a 6 percent rise in the yen with 5 days–from a peak of ¥76.25 to the dollar to ¥81.20–as investors started repatriating funds for Japanese reconstruction before the G-7 economies intervened in currency markets in a concerted effort to drive the yen lower and help stabilize the Japanese economy as a higher yen would have made Japanese exports dearer overseas and hence driven down demand for them.
Fears that radiation from the crippled nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi may be transported through Japanese exports has led to many restaurants to ban Japanese food items like sushi, Kobe beef, and sake. But there has also been apprehension that consumers may be exposed to radiation when driving a Prius car or using a Japanese DVD–a severe blow to an export dependent economy. Even though such fears may be misplaced because the main manufacturing centers are located away from areas near the crippled nuclear reactors and most manufacturing occurs indoors in factories and hence is not directly exposed to airborne radioactive particles, apprehensions are by nature irrational and could lead to a steep decline in consumer demand.
On March 17, General Motors became the first automobile manufacturer to announce that it will temporarily halt production in its truck plant in Shreveport, Louisiana because of a shortage of Japanese-made parts as a result of the natural disasters in that island nation. The fact that was GM rather than Toyota, Honda, or Nissan to be the first auto manufacturer to stop production because of supply-related problems stemming from the natural disasters underlines the gravity and extent of the disruption of supply-chains from Japan for producers the world over. 10 percent of Volvo’s parts for instance comes from 33 Japanese suppliers, 9 of which were in areas affected by the disasters and Volkswagen has warned of medium-term supply problems. Some Japanese manufacturers–Mitsubishi and Nissan–have opened some of their facilities while Toyota is due to open some of its plants early next week. It is uncertain how long these can operate because they and their suppliers may face problems obtaining raw materials and parts and in shipping finished products due to logistical problems caused by the earthquake, tsunami, and the exclusion zone imposed by fears of a nuclear meltdown at the reactors in Fukushima Daiichi. A Detroit based consultant, John Hoffecker, estimates that an average car had 20,000 components and the abrupt loss of any one component could halt production in its tracks, especially because most manufacturers have implemented just-in-time production systems that reduce inventories.
Given Japan’s advanced manufacturing technologies, disruptions are not limited of course to the automobile sector. Sony Ericsson and Nokia have warned that they face supply problems for their smart phones, for instance. Apple Computer’s latest gadget the iPad 2 depends on the advanced manufacturing technologies of Japan for crucial components like flash memory to store audio and video files that are manufactured by Toyota which shut down its manufacturing facilities due to the earthquake and tsunami. Other iPad 2 components sourced from Japan include “AKM Semiconductor and DRAM memory produced by Elpida Memory. A touchscreen overlay glass is likely from Asahi Glass.” Even if these suppliers are not directly hit by the earthquake, tsunami, or t, the logistical disruptions caused by the natural disasters including obtaining raw materials and parts and shipping finished goods are likely to hamper production.
it is impossible to assess the costs of reconstruction. Initial estimates of $200 billion were based on the experience of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Not only was the present earthquake much more destructive in scale but it was also accompanied by a massive tsunami and a nuclear meltdown. With a debt-to-GDP ratio double that of the United States, and credit-rating agencies being more prudent after the financial crisis of 2008-09, raising funds at a tolerable rate of interest could be difficult. Unlike the United States which could pump $600 billion as stimulus during the financial crisis, the yen does not enjoy international reserve currency status and hence this is not an option for the Japanese.
This raises the possibility that Japan, which is the third largest holder of US Treasuries, will sell off large chunks of the $877 billion it holds to finance its reconstruction–a sell-off that will have a major impact on interest rates all across the world and depress the value of US Treasuries and could trigger an avalanche of sales of the Treasuries as other holders seek to minimize their holdings. It could cause another enormous liquidity crisis as the financial crisis just did and comes at a time when the economies of the US and the European Union are still weak.
No-fly zones, Libya and the Arab Revolt
March 17, 2011 at 8:26 pm | Posted in democracy, Human Rights, International Relations, World Politics | 2 CommentsTags: African Union, Arab League, Bahrain, Brazil, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Germany, India, interstate system, intervention, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Mauritania, Middle East, NATO, North Africa, Oman, Palestine, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, US hegemony, Yemen
The United Nations Security Council–with the abstention of Russia, China, Germany, India, and Brazil–has done what military analysts have said would be folly: it has voted to impose a ‘no-fly zone’ on Libya and ‘take all necessary action’ short of ‘a foreign occupation force of any form’ to force Colonel Muammar Gaddafi out of power. ‘All necessary action’ could involve a ‘no-drive zone’ to cripple the Libyan regime’s armored vehicles from attacking Benghazi, Misrata, Tobruk, and other remaining rebel strongholds as well as sending in military advisers.
Advocates of the resolution have evoked humanitarian reasons–chiefly the regime’s brutal counter-assault using its air force and paramilitary forces to roll back the rebels–for intervention. This is buttressed by the belief that Libya is not even a third-rate power and its defenses can easily be destroyed. And the rebels are clothed in the accoutrements of democracy though the only thing that unifies the rebels is their opposition to the Gaddafi regime and it is not clear what a post-Gaddafi Libya will look like or even whether it will remain unified.
If humanitarian reasons are the chief justification, then it is clear that there is a double standard that is applied. Much has been made of the Arab League’s call for the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya, but there has been no report of the fact that it was opposed by both Syria and Algeria. The states in support of the resolution–Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Oman, and Yemen–are hardly paragons of democracy. The governments of Yemen and Bahrain have brutally crushed demonstrations in their own countries; and Saudi Arabia and four other Gulf Cooperation Council states have sent more than 2000 troops to Bahrain to help the regime stay in power! Saudi Arabia has moreover prohibited protests in its eastern province, declaring such protests “illegal and un-Islamic”–and Saudi Arabia has more than 8,000 political prisoners!
More importantly, there has been virtually no report in mainstream media in the West, that the African Union has condemned attempts to impose a no-fly zone on Libya. The AU’s 15-member peace and security council resolved, to “reaffirm[s] its firm commitment to the respect of the unity and territorial integrity of Libya, as well as its rejection of any form of foreign intervention in Libya.” It formed an ad hoc committee composed of South Africa, Mauritania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to engage in dialogue with all parties in Libya for a speedy resolution of the crisis.
There is no certainty that the military operation will be a smooth and easy one. Less than a month ago, US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, had told cadets at West Point that any secretary of defense who advises a president to intervene militarily in Asia or Africa ought to have his head examined. Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that even the imposition of a ‘no-fly zone’ let alone all the other ‘necessary actions’ voted on by the Security Council will be “an extraordinarily complex operation to set up”–and of course, the major burden will be on the United States which is already engaged in two wars. British Prime Minister David Cameron may have led the charge for a ‘no-fly zone’ but Britain does not even have an aircraft carrier! General Wesley Clark, who commanded NATO forces in Kosovo, has argued that intervention in Libya does not meet critical tests: it is not in US national interest, the purpose of intervention is not clear, political prospects were Gaddafi to be ousted is unclear.
A ‘no-fly zone’ moreover, might have had a chance of success ten days ago when the Gaddafi regime launched its counter-assault. Now with the rebels in full retreat, and the regime ascendant–with the regime poised to assault the rebel capital of Benghazi–it is not clear whether a no-fly zone alone will suffice. A ‘no-drive zone’ is an even more ‘complex operation’ and increases the odds of British, American, and French casualties–Germany has refused to contribute troops to a NATO operation against Libya and Turkey is unlikely to participate as well. Colonel Gaddafi has promised to take the battle into the Mediterranean and that increases the prospects of Western civilian casualties and an escalation of the war. It will be a war Gaddafi may well lose, but it is not likely that NATO can extricate itself easily–and remember there is no international sanction for a foreign occupation force ‘of any form’ in the Security Council resolution!
If intervention is to promote democracy, George Monbiot notes that the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Libya 158th of 167 countries on its Democracy Index while Saudi Arabia is ranked 160th–and in Libya “women are not officially treated as lepers were in medieval Europe.”
Here, the double standard is all too obvious. Saudi Arabia in the only remaining “swing producer”–the only oil-producing nation with enough excess capacity to raise production if supplies fall short of demand. But US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks suspect that Saudi claims of reserves are exaggerated by almost 40 percent.
The Arab Revolt is not really about democracy–elections have not delivered results in the past, and when election results have angered the United States as in the Hamas triumph in Palestine, the US has condemned the results and applauded Israel’s punitive punishment of Gaza. The protests are about a wholesale change–not merely a change of rulers–because where there is a legal opposition, the opposition is often equally discredited.
Key to the revolt has been an explosion of information–not only through al-Jazeera, but also through the Internet, travel, and TV–and the enormous growth of people aged below 25 to levels unmatched almost anywhere else. The youth exposed to a wider range of information and experiences have greater aspirations–and now that two of the tyrants have been ousted, the sense of empowerment is raised as Brian Whittaker notes.
It is this sense of empowerment that will take a beating if Western forces occupy Libya for a long while. It will signal pro-Western governments in the Persian Gulf–Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich sheikdoms that they can count on mealy-mouthed appeals for restraint from Washington, London, and Paris as they crush their domestic oppositions. Ironically, this may play well in Iran’s favor. The Islamic Republic is very careful not to portray the conflicts in a sectarian light: if it can portray it as an attack on Muslims, and when Saudi Arabia, the Custodian of Holy Places, sends its troops to slaughter other Muslims, Iran raised the issue not with the Arab League but with the Organization of Islamic Conference. The Iranian Foreign Minister asked the Conference: “How can one accept that a government has proceeded to invite foreign military forces for the crackdown of its own citizens?” Tehran will gain even more credibility with the Arab forces when American, British, and French forces intervene in Libya.
Gaddafi’s Counter-revolution
March 13, 2011 at 3:41 pm | Posted in Human Rights, International Relations, World Politics | Leave a commentTags: Bahrain, Egypt, European Union, France, interstate system, intervention, Libya, Middle East, NATO, North Africa, Oman, Tunisia, United Kingdom, US hegemony, Yemen
If the revolt in Libya initially followed the script in Tunisia and Egypt, with protestors calling for democracy and the ouster of an autocrat who had ruled over them for long, it was quickly evident that the Libyan story would have its own murderous twists. Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi had after all supported to the end his fellow autocrats–Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak–and urged them to retain their presidencies ‘life.’ And as he had centralized all power and deliberately kept the army weak, there were no generals who could send him packing. It was clear that he was not going to go timidly.
After an initial period of paralysis, when the rebels quickly consolidated their control over the oil-rich eastern parts of the country and began advancing to towards the regime strongholds of Sirte and Tripoli, Gaddafi launched a murderous counter-assault with tanks, heavy artillery, and air planes. The paramilitary forces commanded by his sons were far better equipped that the rebels and the military deserters who had joined them and have been steadily rolling back the rebels. Stopping the rebel advance in Bin Jawad, a small town between the oil refinery port of Ras Lanuf and Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte. The regime’s forces have now captured the ports of Ras Lanuf and Brega and are advancing towards the rebel headquarters of Benghazi, though Misurata in central Libya still appears to be holding out despite assaults by the pro-Gaddafi forces.
After having swiftly called for Gaddafi to go, the United States and West European leaders are now in a quandary. In the first instance, it is not clear whether President Barack Obama gets it at all: on March 4, he told Florida Democrats in Miami:
“All the forces that we’re seeing at work in Egypt are forces that naturally should be aligned with us, should be aligned with Israel — if we make good decisions now and we understand sort of the sweep of history.”
The fact that demonstrators across North Africa and the Persian Gulf are not chanting anti-Israel or anti-US slogans merely shows that the protests are rooted in domestic conditions, not that they are pro-Israel. Indeed, the demand for accountable governments is a demand for governments not to be subserviently enforcing Israeli policies as Mubarak had done!
When the British Prime Minister David Cameron initially called for a no-fly zone, and other Western leaders called on Gaddafi to go, it was expected to increase pressure on him to follow Ben Ali and Mubarak and leave quietly. And as the Libyan rebels were rolling from the east towards Tripoli everyone was keen to ensure that this was a Libyan revolution, one without foreign assistance. But the regime’s counter-assualt has changed all this. Now the rebels, the Benghazi-based Libyan National Council, recognized by France as the legitimate government of the country is calling for the imposition of a no-fly zone, a call endorsed by the Gulf Cooperation Council and the League of Arab States. On March 11, the European Union also said it would keep military action as an option “provided there is demonstrable need, a clear legal basis and support from the region.”
If the purpose of intervention–even the imposition of a ‘no-fly zone’–is to protect civilians, it reeks of double-standards. Not only have the United States, European leaders, or the Arab League not reacted in a similar manner to the killing of protesters elsewhere–in Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, not to speak of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories–but members of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League are themselves guilty of killing protesters. At the time of writing, Yemeni forces are killing protesters in Sana’a and wounding hundreds elsewhere in the country.
While the imposition of a no-fly zone–an act of war and would imply at the very least the bombing of Libyan anti-aircraft defenses–may prevent Gaddafi from launching air raids, Anthony Cordesman, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes it will not severely dampen the regime’s counter-assault. It will do nothing to its heavy artillery and its trained paramilitary forces.
Arming the rebels poses problems of another order. The Libyan National Council is headed by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former Justice Minister in the Gaddafi regime but the names and identities of many of its members have not been revealed. They appear to be united only in their opposition to Gaddafi and include the entire spectrum from Islamic fundamentalists to pro-democracy activists and workers and the relative balance between these factions is anything but clear. What is clear is that the rebels have little or no military training and hence it is anything but certain that they can withstand the regime’s counter-assault even if they were provided with arms.
It is also clear that Gaddafi has a powerful constituency, bought off with his oil revenues and tribal loyalties. This inevitably implies that effective intervention on the terms being discussed by the European Union, NATO, and the United States would involve putting US and European forces on the ground. it is not clear how the US can sustain a third war in difficult financial circumstances and the intervention may strengthen Gaddafi’s hands if the Libyans see “French and English speaking troops conducting Iraq War style raids into their homes” as Vijay Prashad has rightly suggested. And any intervention coming on the heels of the US House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims will be doubly egregious.
Indeed, the autocrats represented in the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council may well have called for the imposition of a no-fly zone to divert attention from the domestic problems fueling the protests back to anti-imperialism!
What is additionally noteworthy is that the military government in Egypt has not taken a strong stand against the assault launched by the Libyan regime. Its military, provisioned by the US, its infinitely better equipped than the Libyan forces and yet does nothing to intervene. Rather than supporting the Libyan protestors it does not even help Egyptian workers in Libya get back home!
If Gaddafi is able to capture Benghazi, then the tide of Arab rebellions would have been turned especially as the Saudis have allocated $37 billion to buy the loyalty of its people and the Gulf Cooperation Council is channeling $20 billion to Bahrain and Oman to similarly buy off their oppositions.
Alternatively, we could see an effective partitioning of Libya into a rebel dominated eastern wing and a Gaddafi controlled west. If this happens the control of oil, mainly located in the east and the very sparsely populated South would be crucial and the stalemate could be prolonged.
Oil, Civil War, and the Politics of Intervention
March 6, 2011 at 1:34 pm | Posted in democracy, Human Rights, International Relations, Political Economy, World Politics | 2 CommentsTags: Egypt, Global South, interstate system, Israel, Libya, Middle East, military, North Africa, Political Economy, Tunisia, US hegemony, US politics
Reports of four British Special Air Service (SAS) troops being captured 30 kilometers from Benghazi is ominous especially since the rebels they were ostensibly sent to help had no inkling that these troops were being parachuted into the areas they control. The refusal of the Gaddafi regime to crumble in the face of widespread protests–unlike the regimes in Tunisia to its west and Egypt to its east–has meant that the struggle for power in that oil-rich desert state had flared into a full-blown civil war.
While it is much too early to predict how the civil war will pan out, it has provided a wedge for US and European leaders to speculate openly about intervening in Libya. That Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman called to arm the rebels comes as no surprise, it is troubling that President Barack Obama has refused to take the options of imposing a ‘no-fly zone’ and military intervention off the table, especially after his Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, injected a rare bit of sanity when he told cadets at West Point:
“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
Ostensibly, the case for intervention is couched in humanitarian terms and cloaked under the UN doctrine of the “responsibility to protect.” It is easy to dismiss the humanitarian justifications as Seumas Milne has shown:
“When more than 300 people were killed by Hosni Mubarak’s security forces in a couple of weeks, Washington initially called for “restraint on both sides”. In Iraq, 50,000 US occupation troops protect a government which last Friday [25 Feb 2011] killed 29 peaceful demonstrators demanding reform. In Bahrain, home of the US fifth fleet, the regime has been shooting and gassing protesters with British-supplied equipment for weeks.”
The ‘prime directive’ if you will of the UN doctrine of “responsibility to protect” is that intervention does no harm–and on these grounds, any intervention in Libya would fail spectacularly! Even some opponents of the Libyan regime have warned against foreign intervention. Certain Russian and Chinese vetoes ensure that there will be no UN Security Council sanction for intervention and that any intervention will be under NATO auspices–or by the US, the UK and some of their allies acting on their own initiative.
If there is intervention, it is almost certain that it will have to be followed by an occupation–the opposition is disparate and only united against the regime; it is clear that the regime has some significant support–otherwise it would not have been able to mount an offensive. Since both factions will have access to weapons, an occupation to pacify the country would have to follow.
Moreover, for all the talk of Libyan government forces launching murderous assaults against its citizens, the Libyan military has been largely ineffective. Opposition forces already are reported to control some 80 percent of Libya’s oil supplies. Government planes have been unable to bomb targets–leading to speculation that the sympathies of pilots are with the rebels though it is at least equally plausible that it is because they are poorly trained.
Aljazeera English that the strength of the Libyan military is overly exaggerated. Years of sanctions and poor maintenance has meant that much of its military hardware are obsolescent or unusable and it estimates that the regime has only about 10-12 thousand well-trained and well-armed troops.
The very weakness of the Libyan forces makes threats of foreign intervention ominous. If US, British or NATO forces can intervene on a pretext, they can establish bases in Libya as they can install another kleptocratic regime–once such bases are established, they take a life of their own and are rarely dismantled as shown by the history of post-Second World War US bases.
Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa and that as world demand for petroleum surges insatiably, there is a greater urgency to control sources of supply. However, Michael Klare has documented that every effort by the UK and the US to control supplies has led to disaster–stretching from the coup d’etat that London and Washington engineered to depose the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, to the fall of the Shah in 1979, and to the two invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003. To site bases that could be used for war against another Arab country would be anathema to the protestors.
Advocates of foreign intervention, as Milne also notes,
“seem brazenly untroubled by the fact that throughout the Arab world, foreign intervention, occupation and support for dictatorship is regarded as central to the problems of the region. Inextricably tied up with the demand for democratic freedoms is a profound desire for independence and self-determination.”
Riots across North Africa and the Persian Gulf for once is not about imperialism or Israel–but about food and employment, for democracy and dignity, and against corruption and nepotism. Here too Libya is noteworthy in that it has the best Human Development Index among all African states. Here it is a case of the young and the middle class demanding an end to autocracy more than the bread-and-butter struggles that animated the Egyptian revolts and these rebels are not going to tolerate the establishment of another pro-Western kleptocracy.
First as Tragedy, then again as Tragedy
March 3, 2011 at 5:24 pm | Posted in Capitalism, Human Rights, International Relations, Political Economy, World Politics | Leave a commentTags: Brazil, China, democracy, Egypt, India, international relations, intervention, Israel, Libya, Middle East, North Africa, oil, Russia, Tunisia, United States, Venezuela
As images of demonstrators in their tens and hundreds of thousands surge all across the capitals of North Africa and the Persian Gulf demanding the ouster of their autocratic rulers, it not only caught the elites in these states flat-footed but also elites in the West who had cosied to, and even propped up, these autocrats to ensure the steady flow of oil, secure the imprisonment of the Palestinians, and as partners in the ‘global war on terror.’ Less that four years ago, Anthony Giddens–former director of the London School of Economics which had accepted £1.5 million from a foundation run by Saif al-Islam Gadafy, the dictator’s son–wrote that Muammar Gadafy is serious about social and political change and that in two or three decades Libya will be the “Norway of North Africa: prosperous, egalitarian and forward-looking.” And even as demonstrators were flocking to Midan Tahrir in Cairo, Vice President Joe Biden could not bring himself to say that President Hosni Mubarak—whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a ‘family friend‘–was a dictator!
Yet, the reaction of Western governments to the uprisings in Egypt and Libya could not have been more different–tragedy and farce…or perhaps tragedy repeating as tragedy as Eduardo Galeano adapted Marx’s famous dictum for the Third World.
In Egypt, the US administration initially equivocated–before President Barack Obama finally called on Mubarak to leave office, US policies zigged and zagged repeatedly. Once Mubarak appointed his henchman and army intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as the first-ever vice president in his almost 30-year reign, the United States and its European allies shifted their support to Suleiman as he planned to diffuse the crisis by constitutional reform and outreach to opposition groups. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton explained that these things ‘take time’ even as Suleiman told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview that democracy can come only “when people here have the culture of democracy.” It only remained for the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to say what everybody already knew: “A democratic Egypt that abrogates its treaty with Israel and becomes hospitable to radical Islamists is not in our interests.”
There was no such equivocation as demonstrators took to the streets and squares of Bengazi and Tripoli. Here, almost as soon as protestors took to the streets, the US administration and its European allies–even Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi who had particularly strong ties to the Libyan leader–were quick to call for a regime change, freeze Libyan assets, impose sanctions, call for UN Security Council resolutions condemning Muammar Gafafy, and even speculate on military intervention–to ‘take out’ Libyan air defenses to impose a ‘no-fly zone’ and with Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman even advocating the supply of arms to the Libyan opposition. And the Security Council even had the bald-faced temerity to refer Libya to the International Criminal Court which the United States does not even recognize as Seumas Milne noted in the Guardian!
Calls to intervene militarily and at least to impose a ‘no-fly zone’ were couched in humanitarian terms, and explicitly because of the Libyan regimes murderous assault on its own citizens. Brutal as the Libyan regime has been, it underlines the hypocrisy of the West that the weapons used by the Libyan government forces were supplied by these very Western powers and that in the present upheavals in Libya, Gadafy’s forces have killed far fewer people than Israel did in Gaza in early 2009 just before the George W. Bush Administration left office as Pepe Escobar wrote in AsiaTimes Online. And as the protests were gathering steam in Libya, the Afghan government found that NATO forces had killed 65 civilians including 40 children in the eastern Kunbar province, a fact conveniently ignored in the shrill outrage over Gadafy’s brutality! And of course the US occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan do not even keep a tally of the civilians killed there in one of the greatest war crimes of recent history.
The disparity between Western responses to uprisings in Egypt and Libya are partly due to the nature of the two regimes. The Mubarak regime is central to the continued oppression of the Palestinians–they have been collaborators in the incarceration of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israel’s gruesome blockade to punish the residents for electing Hamas–so much too for Western advocacy of democracy: elect our puppets or we will wreak havoc on your house is the message from Washington and the European capitals! The Egyptian armed forces had, as a result, not only got many billions in aid from the US, but its senior leadership had developed close ties with the American military.
Military leaders in Egypt had also profited handsomely from the Mubarak regime. Since reporting on the Egyptian military is a crime, the extent of its economic holdings are unclear and estimates of its share of the national economy range from 5 to 40 percent. General Sayed Meshal, former head of the Ministry of Military Production claimed that it employed 40,000 civilians and took in about $345 million a year. The popular uprising, the people’s revolution, provided them a convenient cover to derail Mubarak’s plan to anoint his son as his successor and by assuming charge of the country, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces can be expected to safeguard their own privileges, prerogatives, and powers.
There was no Libyan counterpart to the Egyptian army. Having come to power in a military coup himself, Muammar Gadafy was quick to ensure that there was no other power center to challenge his rule. His sons and other family members controlled powerful militias that were better equipped than the regular army and he carefully cultivated the top brass of the air force. There were no comparable links between the US and Libyan militaries. Here the powerful militias and the Libyan elite were directly tied to Gadafy and without him, their power, privilege, and prerogatives would evaporate.
Unlike Tunisia–where also the West-supported autocrat, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was sent packing by a popular protest–and Egypt, Libya has oil. Unrest in North Africa and the Persian Gulf has already pushed up oil prices and since 85 percent of Libya’s oil exports are directed towards Europe, a continued spike in oil prices would threaten Eurozone economies already buffeted by credit crises in Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain. If NATO can intervene in Libya, and install a pro-Western post-Gadafy government, it will not only ensure Europe’s oil supplies but provide Israel with additional security. And NATO forces will have easy access to, and oversight over, the 4,128 kilometer Trans-Saharan pipeline from Nigeria to Algeria scheduled to be operational in 2015.
What is also troubling in all this is that the so-called emerging powers–India, Brazil, South Africa–have been deafeningly silent. The stage of global politics, it seems, is still reserved for the North Americans and the Europeans–though fortunately the Russians and the Chinese may be counted on to bloc any UN endorsement of military action by NATO forces. If ever there was an opportunity to mediate in the crisis in Libya, it is the Arab League and the African Union that should take the lead–and indeed, it is Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who has offered his services to the Arab League to mediate the crisis.
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