I mentioned the divisions in Syria's opposition a while ago, principally over the question of imperialist intervention and armed insurgency.  These divisions have recently frustrated unity talks between the different opposition factions.  The fact that Syria has an organised left, and a strong anti-imperialist pole in its opposition, makes intervention for the US (and EU) a much more difficult proposition than the light blitz of Libya.  It turns out that this may not be sufficient to prevent an intervention, however.  A recent Salon article describes how a coalition of lib imps and neocons is organising around the possibility of a quick, flighty regime-change in Syria - not just in the US, but in Europe.  

As has become the pattern in the Obama executive, the main vector for this kind of 'humanitarian intervention' in the administration is Clinton's State Department.  It was by persuading Clinton of the virtues of intervention in Libya that the lib imps - people like Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Anne-Marie Slaughter - won the case for war against its Realist opponents.  Beyond the US, France is once again leading the drive for war within the EU.  This may represent (the culmination of) a shift from the old Gaullist policy of independence from Washington, but it has a certain logic.  France is the original home of the doctrine of droit de l'ingerence, a concept it put to use in interventions in Chad, the Ivory Coast, Yugoslavia and elsewhere.  More generally, France's political dominance within an EU that has no centralised military authority would tend to give it a leading role where European interests in the Middle East are concerned.  The more intriguing factor here is Turkey.  Ankara's elites aren't too fond of the idea of releasing their grip on Cyprus to please the EU, and have in recent years slowed down a spate of reforms intended to ease membership of the Union.  Nonetheless, their hostility to the Syrian regime is plain enough in their decision to allow exiles and the 'Free Syria Army' to operate from within Turkey.  Could it be that the Turkish regime will this time allow itself to be used as a launch pad for an imperialist intervention?

That, of course, would still leave the question of how the Syrian terrain can be negotiated by any imperial coalition of the willing.  This is critical both for the warmongers and for the antiwar-mongers.  Those waging the intervention will need to be assured of having some sort of social base for a post-Assad regime once they've created it.  As for the antiwar-mongers.  Well, I don't wish to be rude, but I can already imagine the divisions and recriminations - some defending Assad, others plugging humanitarian intervention, the balkanization of opinion among anti-imperialists, the hair-splitting.  All that, unless there was actually a powerful Syrian revolt against intervention.  The pro-imperialist position within the Syrian opposition is occupied by the Syrian National Council (SNC), comprising liberals and conservative Islamists, mostly led by emigres with little basis in the domestic grassroots.  The SNC is calling for the establishment of "safe zones"  Predictably, but not accurately, pro-war politicians and diplomats deem the SNC a more representative organisation than its rivals.  The National Committee for Democratic Change, as well as the local coordination bodies, have warned against seeking intervention.  Despite vicious repression, they have also resisted moves toward an armed insurgency, perhaps fearing a repeat of the Libyan situation where early gains were quickly reversed by a far better organised state.  

Perhaps the greatest problem for any intervention is the resilence of the opposition, despite the killing which the opposition estimates has claimed 5,000 people.  The regime doesn't look as if it is about to collapse, but at the same time the opposition continues to draw enormous crowds and inflict damaging strikes.  Libya was a veritable cakewalk for NATO because the opposition was being defeated rapidly, its emancipatory impulse was being snuffed out, and a leadership comprising dissident bourgeois factions had filled the vacuum left by the masses when the latter began to retreat under Qadhafi's assault. Syria's opposition has not experienced anything like this yet, and is thus no easy meat for co-optation.

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Speaking of bungled acts of repression, the Egyptian military's assault on protesters after last Friday's mass protest has revived the country's revolutionary movement and (so I hear) put a general strike on the agenda.  Tahrir Square has been retaken.  This image (left) shows what the square looked like on Friday.  Following the protest, which was against the military council's usurpation of dictatorial power, dozens of people decided to stay on in the square overnight.  They were assaulted by troops using tear gas and rubber bullets in a bid to clear the square.  The resulting uproar saw tens of thousands drawn back out onto the square.  Repeated assaults seem only to have broadened the array of groups willing to stand against the military.  Beyond Tahrir, there have been mass protests in Alexandria and Suez, among other places.  The assembly of forces looks remarkably similar to that in February - trade unionists, liberals, socialists, Nasserists and Islamists, all out against the regime.  There are now calls for international solidarity as the revolutionary movement, in tens of thousands not dozens, faces down rubber bullets and tear gas.  The country's trade unions are calling for their 1.4m members to join protesters in the Tahrir Square sit-in.  The struggle is still 'in the balance', as it were, but what a turnaround.

For a time, it seemed as if the armed forces would control the tempo of events.  Elections would proceed in the manner prescribed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and most significant forces would participate.  The army would incite sectarianism against coptic Christians, and murder them with impunity.  The leadership of the Muslim Brothers - expecting to do well in any prospective elections under the banner of the Freedom and Justice Party - would tend to side with the army in maintaining 'order' against those leftists, liberals and Islamists who antagonised the new ruling order.  Indeed, at a crucial moment in July, a mass Islamist rally in Tahrir appeared to show that the alliance between the military and sections of the Islamists was being consolidated.  Salafists, jihadis and Muslim Brothers chanted slogans in favour of national unity, while speakers defended the SCAF.  The mobilisations of liberals and leftists against the regime, by contrast, looked small.  Shortly after the rally, armed thugs were sent by the army to assault opposition supporters camped in Tahrir Square.

Some, in response to this situation, went so far as to declare the revolutionary process at an end.  Others descended into indiscriminate rants about Islamists, and enjoined us to remember Iran, 1979.  Here was a case of Islamist counter-revolution if ever there was one.  Since many of the people I am referring to (I'm being deliberately vague, not to avoid giving offence, but to ensure that the offence is taken widely) are marxists, it is odd that their mistakes were so liberal.  They began and ended their assessment of the forces assembled in Egypt on the basis of an ascribed ideology, with little or no reference to class or other political determinants.  Whether or not ideology plays the dominant role in situating actors in a given struggle surely depends on the circumstances, but the imperative to be concrete was blithely evaded.  Abstraction governed their responses.  Relatedly, even while restricting the discussion to ideology, their discussion of that level of struggle was curiously flattened: Islamism was treated not as a complex, incoherent and frequently antagonistic combination of elements, but as a spiritual totality reducible to an incorrigible reactionary essence. 

So, it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers.  We needn't deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play.  They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation.  But, where they have supported progressive political struggles - for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship - they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations.  The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation.  In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists.  The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.

Thirty three people have been killed by armed forces in Tahrir Square since Friday.  The level of brutality is shocking.  I understand that the military opened fire with live rounds on protesters as they attempted to storm the Interior Ministry.  Yet, as you can see, the response from the revolutionaries continues to be defiant:

The military appears to be producing a situation from which there can be no return.  Either they will consolidate their power as a new despotism with a slender democratic facade - and elections are now in doubt - or they will be decisively weakened, and a new alignment of democratic forces will have the initiative.  As the revolutionaries of Egypt say, Glory to the martyrs, Victory to the revolution, Power and wealth to the people.

There has been some talk in the broadsheets of Syrian intellectuals supporting a US-led 'intervention'.  I've seen recently that the opposition has formed a Syrian National Council from exile to represent all the domestic opposition groups.  Initially it was reported in the Telegraph that the group opposed foreign intervention.  Now it is reported that they are discussing sanctions and a no-fly zone with overseas powers.  According to the Syrian activist and writer Michael Kilo, this pro-imperialist stance is one reason why the council isn't supported within Syria:

It's interesting to see how the opposition divides over 'intervention'.  While the SNC represents a coalition of liberals and Islamists, the National Committee for Democratic Change (NCDC), of which Kilo is a member, is organised around Arab nationalists, Marxists, independents, Kurds, etc.  This represents a broadly left pole that wasn't present in Libya (and still isn't, as far as I know). Also worth noting that the Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC), the pro-'intervention' group now working in Washington, supposedly represents the Muslim Brothers among others. 

The formation of a pro-imperialist exile lobby is a worrying and potentially dangerous development following on from Libya.  While I still have my doubts that such a war is coming, it's only fair to recall I had similar doubts at the beginning of March that Libya would be bombed.  In these circumstances, despite the fact that the administration has thus far been very cautious, it makes no sense to rule anything out.  And one important condition for any US-led invasion or bombing of Syria would be, I think, the formation of a clear, pro-'intervention' contingent among the opposition.  So, I'm just putting it out there: keep your eye on this story, see where it goes.

Update: this remarkable statement, apparently from the Local Coordinating Committees in Syria (the grassroots basis of the revolt), is worth quoting in full:

"This is a bad time to be a black man in Libya," reports Alex Thomson in this worrying segment:

There is frightening evidence of racist killings taking place across Libya as elements in the opposition-cum-regime now act on the unfounded rumours that "African" mercenaries acted as Qadhafi's fifth column.  As Kim Septunga reports:

There have been lynchings, mass arrests and beatings previously.  A painted slogan of the rebels in Misrata read, "the brigade for purging slaves, black skin".  But this, taking place as it does in the aftermath of triumph, is a qualitatively distinct phase, and it is a disgrace to the original emancipatory upsurge.  I argued previously that the more conservative, bourgeois elements in the opposition had every reason to promote racist scapegoating.  Since they had no interest in revolutionising Libyan society, it made perfect sense for them to say that the problem is just Qadhafi and some imported mercenaries, that all of Libya was united against the dictator and would throw him off were it not for the fifth columnists.  By mobilising the elements of racism that had thrived under Qadhafi, it displaces social antagonisms that are internal to Libya, reflecting class and other divisions, onto a nationalist plane.  No one need think of expropriating the wealth of the capitalist dissident if they're busy usurping the life of the black worker.  I also argued that this was one area in which the rebels could even do worse than Qadhafi.  If racism was never the dominant motive in the rebellion, it was nonetheless a motive of those dominant in the rebellion.  The prisons of Benghazi and elsewhere would not have filled with black and immigrant workers without the approval of the rebel leadership.  The coming days will tell whether this barbarism is to last.  I suspect the pressure from the new regime's international sponsors will be to come down hard on it, as racist lynch mobs tend to make a fool of anyone calling them - I don't know - "human rights dissidents".  But the new regime does have a promise to keep with the EU, viz. upholding the blockade on immigration from Africa to Europe, which will tend to institutionalise racist practises.

Gilbert Achcar separates the decent from the indecent left:

How have we come from "a legitimate and necessary debate" to decrying opposition to NATO intervention as "indecent"?  How has this lifelong anti-imperialist made this symptomatic descent into the trope of decency, the corollary of an attempt to morally browbeat opponents?  It is probably indicative of a certain insecurity in Achcar's position.  Let me explain.  Achcar maintains that Benghazi was facing a massacre on a scale of Thiers' crushing of the Paris Commune - implicitly, by virtue of superior weaponry, it would be an even greater massacre in relative terms.  If Achcar's example holds, then a proportionately similar massacre in Benghazi would have involved the systematic and indiscriminate killing of at least 8,000 people in a short space of time.  Leaving aside the question of decency for a second, and also leaving aside the possibility of non-military resolutions to this crisis (no one else bothered to pursue this, so why should I?), have we any reason to doubt that something like this would have happened in the event of Benghazi being conquered?

We do.  Taking Achcar's example further, a proportionately similar massacre in Misrata would result in the systematic and indiscriminate killing of about 5,000 people in a short space of time.  But Human Rights Watch documents a total of 257 deaths over the first two months of war in the city of Misrata, including both combatants and civilians (though the majority are estimated to be combatants).  Misrata suffered some of the worst, most sustained fighting.  Its recapture by Qadhafi's forces during March would have provided the opportunity for a horrendous, indiscriminate massacre with thousands of executions.  Yet nothing of the kind occured.  Estimates of the total number of deaths vary, of course, and it is unlikely that HRW documented every single death.  The highest estimate I've seen for the city is from a news report in mid-May, where the total number of deaths on all sides, from all war-related causes, was estimated at 1,000+.  This is suggestive of deaths resulting from insurgency and counterinsurgency.  In fact, there do not seem to be any documented massacres approaching the scale Achcar refers to, despite Qadhafi's advances in reclaiming much lost territory during the war.  So, the entire case for the no-fly zone is indeed based on speculation.  There are good grounds on which one may doubt it.

Deferring the question of decency for yet another moment, there is another problem here.  Achcar depicts a range of estimates of deaths resulting from killings in the first month alone as ranging between somewhat higher than 2,200 and as high as 10,000.  It is quite correct that Qadhafi went further, faster in repressing the rebellion than other Arab states had thus far done.  Libyan police forces had opened machine gun fire on protesters.  As the rebellion spread, Qadhafi opted to force a war on the opposition, presumably calculating that he stood a better chance of survival if he shifted the battle onto a terrain where had a clear advantage.  Yet even given this, there is as yet no credible basis for the figure of 10,000 killed in the first month alone.  Achcar has previously attributed this figure to the ICC.  In the interview, the source for the estimates given is a Wikipedia entry, which cites an IRIB report attributing the figure to the ICC.  In fact, the figure originates from a report initially posted on Twitter by the newspaper Al Arabiya, citing the comments of a Libyan ICC member based in Paris who claimed that after just one week of rebellion, the regime had killed 10,000 people and wounded 50,000.  Bear in mind, that's not deaths on all sides and from all causes - it's regime killings during a single week.  And it's not well founded.  At the same time as this claim was being circulated, HRW put the total deaths at about 233.  By the end of February, the UN general secretary estimated about 1,000 deaths.  So Achcar misattributes his claim and gives it a credence it does not merit - the author of The Arabs and the Holocaust is not at his forensic best here, to put it no more strongly than that.

In fact, it was not until mid-June that such a figure was cited by a credible source.  This was when the UN war crimes expert, Cherif Bassiouni, estimated that after four months of fighting including NATO bombing, there were potentially between 10-15,000 dead on all sides, both civilian and combatant.  Parenthetically, Bassiouni's inquiry had presented evidence of war crimes by Qadhafi's forces, including attacks on civilians, as well as some by the opposition.  But he did not allege indiscriminate massacres, and certainly nothing approaching a scale warned of by Achcar.  So, there are yet further reasons to doubt Achcar's case that a massacre of close to ten thousand in one city alone was afoot in late March.  We have not yet broached whether it would be decent to do so, but we'll come to that.

Another problem with Achcar's line of argument is that he refers to a "no-fly zone" as if this was what was under contention.  It is now at the tail-end of August, and the argument over a no-fly zone has long since been passe.  The UN resolution went far beyond a no-fly zone.  NATO's intervention likewise went beyond a no-fly zone, involving a combination of bombardment, intelligence and special forces operations which subordinated the rebel movement to the military and political direction of external powers.  This was precisely what was anticipated by the knee-jerk anti-imperialists.  (Hitchens, much as one hates to cite him in this context, had a point when he used to say that a knee-jerk is a sign of a healthy reflex).  But if there were reasons to doubt the idea of a coming massacre in Benghazi, and if the argument was not over a limited measure to prevent that outcome (a 'no-fly zone'), but rather over a more comprehensive intervention to subordinate the revolt to US interests, then what is left of Achcar's strictures?  As he himself makes clear in the interview quoted above, the figures are important to his case.  "One must compare the civilian casualties that resulted from NATO strikes with the potential civilian casualties that they prevented through limiting the firepower of Gaddafi's forces towards rebel-held populated areas."  If he is right, then the intervention saved lives.  If there is any reason for doubting it, then his position begins to look problematic.  It won't do to pretend that such doubts amount to a claim that Benghazi rebels who supported intervention were "cowardly" - it's possible to understand the terrible position they were in, and the fears that they had of repression at Qadhafi's hands, without ceding the right to make an independent judgment.  On the other hand, if a massacre really was afoot, and NATO intervention the only way to prevent it, is Achcar's critical-non-support and decent-non-opposition as wholesome as his strident posture suggests?  Is anything short of active lobbying to secure the necessary intervention, even with all caveats and criticisms, "acceptable"?  It begins to look like a very unstable, improvised and ultimately mealy-mouthed position.  In fact, despite the strengths of his analysis, I think there are important aspects of his interpretation of events that have been flawed from inception.

For example, he began by asserting that Washington's interests indirectly and temporarily coincided with those of the opposition, in the following way: Qadhafi was likely to perpetrate a massacre to rival that in Hama in 1982.  This would have obliged the US to seek an oil embargo against the regime which, at a time of rising global energy costs, was not sustainable.  The invasion of Iraq notably came just as world oil prices were showing a structural tendency to rise.  The only condition under which the US was prepared to relax sanctions against Iraq would be in the event of Hussein's overthrow.  So, "regime change" became the mantra.  Similarly, when Qadhafi's continued tenure threatened to drive up oil prices further, the US had an interest in overthrowing him.

Achcar continues to support this argument, but it falls down on a number of grounds.  The first, obviously, is the dubious status of this coming massacre, leaving aside how the US would have been 'forced' to respond.  The second is the actual imposition of sanctions affecting Libyan oil companies beginning in February.  The third is the the fact that the US has not shown any sign of being particularly worried by high oil prices - indeed, while Achcar interprets the war on Iraq as an attempt to free up oil and reduce prices, he must be aware that one predictable consequence of the invasion and occupation of Iraq was to drive up energy prices to record highs.  There is one more objection that we'll return to.

The above has some important implications.  The imposition of the oil embargo, for example, was an important aspect of NATO's war, blocking the government's attempts to raise revenues.  It meant that the opposition leadership could gain recognition, trading rights and permission to sell oil and thus survive as a viable material force calling itself a government - provided it satisfied its US and EU sponsors.  So when Achcar asserted that NATO was deliberately drawing out the war and frustrating the rebels' chances of success, in order to give them time to bring the transitional council fully under control, he was arguably in denial about the extent to which the opposition was already fully under control.  (In fact, the NATO strategy stands completely vindicated on military grounds alone.  The targeted bombing, preventing the concentration of Qadhafi's forces and encouraging the fragmentation of the regime, ensured the opposition's ultimate success at minimal outlay and no real risk to NATO forces).  If further evidence that Achcar is in denial on this score is needed, consider that he continued to depict the opposition leadership as "a mix of political and intellectual democratic and human rights dissidents", long after this had become a completely unrealistic and unworldly representation ignoring the multitude of former regime elements, businessmen, military figures, and people like Khalifa Hifter, who have no earthly business being called "human rights dissidents".  It is they, people like General Abdallah Fatah Younes and Ibraham Dabbashi, who were the earliest and most vociferous advocates of an alliance with NATO.  It is those elements whose hand was strengthened by NATO's intervention. 

The biggest problem, though, is that his analysis of US strategy is far too reductionist, taking no account of the serious strategic cleavages evident at the top of the Washington foreign policy establishment.  Some of the realists expressed a fear of being dragged into yet another Middle East 'quagmire'.  Others were convinced that if Qadhafi was overthrown by a popular revolt, there would be a vacuum of authority in which jihadis would thrive.  But the strongest supporters of intervention were 'humanitarian interventionists', whose case was similar to that of the liberal hawk, Anne-Marie Slaughter (who I believe has been an advisor of Obama on foreign policy).  To wit, there's an expanding young and educated population in the Middle East, which has been deprived of political channels and economic opportunity, and which will therefore be a major problem for the US unless American power seems to champion their interests.  The US, it is thus argued, must respond to this revolutionary wave by siding with reform and not just the old guard dictatorships.  Leave aside the empirical basis of this analysis - it is sufficient to note that it is taken seriously by influential sectors of the US foreign policy elite.  As such, the intervention can be seen less as a war for oil than an attempt to cohere a response to a revolution that threatened US control, limited enough to minimise the worries of realists and defence establishment figures like Robert Gates and Carter Ham while giving the US a chance to rebuild its 'humanitarian' credit.

This is what the indecent left opposed: not the staving off of a hypothetical massacre, but the predictable, successful hijacking of a popular revolt by imperialist powers in alliance with the relatively conservative elites dominant in the transitional council.  By moralising about the decency or otherwise of anti-imperialist arguments, and pinning so much of his argument on the invocation of humanitarian emergency, Achcar obscures the politics of intervention.  The question at stake was and is: should the population of Libya rule Libya?  Since intervention ensured that the answer would be "no", it was correct to oppose it.

'Mission creep' is the official euphemism for when a military intervention expands well beyond its original parameters, even having apparently achieved its putative objective. In another vernacular, this would be called escalation. But what we're seeing today is less a military escalation - my impression is that NATO forces are stringing this out, perhaps to avoid giving the undisciplined rebels too much space for movement - than an ideological escalation. To explain. Some weeks ago, a no-fly zone, which rapidly became an aerial bombing campaign, followed by special forces and intelligence-led intervention on the ground, was supposed to prevent a massacre in Benghazi. That massacre supposedly averted, the bombing continued, apparently to continue to protect civilians, even though the killing - of civilians, rebels, and conscript soldiers - does not seem to have abated.

Today, The Observer amplifies calls from "rebels" (in fact, one 'rebel leader') for the deployment NATO "troops on the ground". This is to happen urgently - "now, now, now" - to prevent another "massacre" as Libyan armed forces besiege Misrata. The luckless inhabitants would be in an even worse situation than they are now if left to the care and tending of US forces. So, it is fortunate for them that this invasion is, by all current indications, unlikely to happen. Robert Gates was presumably not kidding when he said: "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'". Both Obama and Clinton have indicated that they're happy to proceed with the current situation, a manageable stalemate. Far more likely is some sort of settlement which excludes both Qadhafi and the majority of the social forces that were involved in the initial uprisings. Yet, the fact that successive operations seem to segue so plausibly from no-fly-zone to bombing, to special forces and CIA penetration and finally to demands for ground troops should be grounds for alarm.

Historical memory, even recent historical memory, is almost completely excluded from the arid terrain of 'humanitarian intervention'. If, as I've argued, its currency is urgency, its temporal and spatial focus is always narrowly 'here, now'. It cannot afford for us to look beyond this particular emergency and the clamorous demands for its containment through military force. We are expected to behave as if we don't remember that only a few weeks ago, we were all assured that ground invasion wasn't even on the agenda, as there would be no repeat of Iraq. Memory fails us in other ways too. The latest disclosure is that Qadhafi is using cluster bombs as part of his counterinsurgency war. Cluster bombs are a vile weapon, by nature indiscriminate. They are designed and thus intended to spread their lethal punishment over a wide area, and kill the maximum number of people in that radius, while also leaving colourful unexploded treats to be picked up by curious children. Yet that critique, a fairly modest one, would be instantly disdained by the same political alliances now supposedly operating on behalf of the Libyan rebellion. We need not ask, of course, what sort of weapons they prefer to use, unless we crave the unctuous assurances that they are 'precision' (ah), 'laser-guided' (gosh), and 'surgical' (oooh).

Unsurprisingly, the foreign policy 'Realists', such as Stephen Walt and Alan Kuperman, have been most critical of the humanitarian appeal in international relations. Kuperman draws attention to statistics provided by Human Rights Watch which, he says, undermine the claim that Qadhafi is deliberately massacring civilians. He points out that in Misrata, a city of 400,000, the total number of civilian and combatant deaths over the last two months is 257. The great majority of those who died, he vouches, are males, presumably adult males - though as an adult male, I would like to protest most vehemently that they too can be civilians. His wider point is that Qadhafi did not perpetrate an indiscriminate massacre in those cities re-captured by his forces, and was thus unlikely to perpetrate an indiscriminate massacre in Benghazi in the event of its capture. Rather, Qadhafi has been waging a classic counterinsurgency war with predictable 'collateral damage'.

There are a number of ways in which one can and should object to this argument. One should point out that HRW's statistics are unlikely to be comprehensive, their monitors cannot have gauged every last killing, and the tempo of repression seems to be increasing. One should also say that the use of the phrase 'collateral damage' is a grubby evasion. The whole point of counterinsurgency war is that the category of 'non-combatant' is eroded and finally deleted, because the population becomes the enemy. When one embarks on a counterinsurgency war one chooses that civilians will die. Qadhafi responded to a political rebellion by turning it into a military conflict, which he has ruthlessly pursued, and so can't hide behind 'collateral damage'. Yet, the coarseness of Kuperman's war talk aside, there appears to be no intelligent objection to the basic assertion that what Qadhafi has been doing falls far short of the 'genocide' that some have mooted. For example, it is really not at all obvious, as the Triple Alliance of Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy claim, that "tens of thousands of lives have been protected", whatever that means. Even the very large-scale massacre feared by some were unlikely, and smaller massacres were avoidable - if, and only if, Qadhafi was permitted to remain in political control of Libya.

And this is Kuperman's second point. The language of humanitarianism obscured the politics of this war. The issue was never simply one of stopping massacres. If it was about bloodshed, it could easily have been avoided or at least minimised by other means. The issue is 'regime change'. Or to be more precise, it is: should the popular forces in Libya be permitted to govern Libya? Qadhafi's incumbency depended on the answer being 'no'. In a different way, I would maintain, US regional hegemony also depends on the answer being 'no'. This is why the intervention seems to be gradually, though bloodily, cruising (or creeping?) toward some sort of imperial carve-up between regime elements, ex-regime elements, and émigrés retained by the CIA. The current negotiations, and the stance signposted in the Triple Alliance's 'pathway to peace' document, indicate that what is sought now is for Qadhafi himself to be forced out, leaving a conservative, pro-American regime in place. This will be Washington's glittering contribution to the great Middle East revolutions of 2011. And a watchful world will be left to chew on the fact that this is the US showing its better side, and that it could easily have been much worse.

I'm just writing this up because I was supposed to video the event, and I forgot to bring my camera. There was an exceptionally rowdy, impassioned debate over Libya and intervention in central London tonight. It was a little shambolic, to be frank, though well turned out and, erm, entertaining. I don't know why it is that war brings out the worst in everyone, but there was immediately a rather noisome tone set by the first two speakers, Sukant Chandan and Oliver Duggan. Oliver, speaking in favour of intervention, delivered his argument with a sort of sarcastic, prosecutorial demeanour that didn't really work. He didn't know that much about Libya or the Middle East, but did know how to complain about "conspiracy theories", and distinguished himself with flaky arguments of the kind: "if this war was about oil, why don't they intervene in Saudi Arabia?" Laughter ensued. To be fair, he also knew how to say words like "fatuous", and he was perfectly assured when berating the restive audience - "come on, try not to be such a rabble, it's embarrassing". And he had some amusing exchanges with Lowkey MC, whom he claimed was somehow a 'biased' chairperson (tee hee).

But he was relatively innocuous compared to Sukant Chandan, whose breathtaking defence of the Qadhafi regime and insistence on hectoring Libyans present, including Hamid from the Libyan Youth Movement, left activists infuriated. I mean, literally fuming. Sukant's opening line was a cracker, to be sure. "Qadhafi never called me a p***. My beef is not with Qadhafi, it's with the Brits." The subsequent argument involved harnessing unexceptionable observations about imperialism to a less tenable argument that Qadhafi's regime represented some kind of advanced welfare state, and that his opponents are 'Contras'. He also argued that the uprising in Syria was an imperialist subvention, intended to undermine Hezbollah. Stunned gasps and disbelieving laughter from the Libyan activists in the audience.

Hamid offered only a qualified and very reluctant defence of the NATO intervention. "We did not want NATO to come, but what alternatives did we have? No one helped us, no one armed us. We know what the West is about, we know what NATO is - but if someone tells us what the alternative is, I will be happy to hear it." I don't agree with this, for reasons you know well enough, and I admit I rolled my eyes impatiently when he claimed that Libya had carried out Lockerbie. But he ended up spending far more of his time attempting to defend the reputation of the revolution from its calumniator, and to this extent I found I had far more in common with him than I had with the Son of Malcolm. At one point, as Sukant repeatedly barracked Hamid, demanding that he stipulate his opposition to Africom setting up a base in Libya and confirm that Palestine is the number one issue for Middle Eastern freedom - yes, literally, demanded - an Egyptian woman stood up and begged him to "drop it". "This is why people are pissed off with you. It's not about imperialism, we agree with you on all of that, it's that you're so arrogant!" After a few more mouthfuls of frustrated anger, she walked out. And there was more where that came from. As the crowd dwindled, people walking out or just drifting away, and the heckling and back and forth with audience members became more chaotic, the only people who backed Sukant up were a small amen corner, who nodded along at his most obvious pronouncements.

My own arguments will be familiar to you by now, so I won't rehearse them here. Yes, I think I persuaded a few people, or at least gave them reason to pause. In the end, I think this turns out to be a sort of parable about a very unproductive and divisive kind of Third Worldism. Sukant wants to unite the people of the global south against imperialism, but succeeded largely in uniting people against himself. He's tragically stuck repeating the slogans of a bygone era, defending its ostensible 'gains' amid a revolutionary process that, of its nature, will unsettle all the coordinates that we're used to working with. We have to learn to think on our feet, adapt, learn from these struggles, and listen to those waging them. Otherwise we may just find that the ideas that were revolutionary yesterday end up fortifying the forces of conservatism and reaction today.

Matt Taibbi asks why Obama is bailing out Qadhafi. Of course, this puts it far too simply. What the administration has been doing, it seems, is bailing out the regimes across the Middle East to prevent their collapse - it didn't work. The ongoing support for Libya's core banking institutions, particularly the state-owned Central Bank of Libya, which have been exempted from Obama's sanctions, can be seen as a 'bail out' the regime but not for Qadhafi. The regime is a complex of institutions condensing and organising the class structure of Libya, and can be reconstituted without Qadhafi, and even without his charming sons - though the latter seem particularly eager to be in on any post-war settlement. It's hardly a shock. The Obama administration is not interested in a revolutionary transformation of Libya. A deal with the involvement of Moussa Koussa, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younis and the other regime defectors in the transitional council, and anyone else who can be bribed or otherwise induced to defect would surely protect the major institutions of the Libyan state, the interests of its ruling class, and the holdings of international investors.

We now know what Washington's model is for the Middle East, in its most attractive guise. In answer to Tahrir Square, they have smoking craters filled with the charred remains of rebels, and conscript soldiers, and civilians and other blameless people who must have seen the joy in Egypt and Tunisia and wished it for themselves. In answer to the turbulent, democratic republic with a vibrant and assertive working class, with its tumult of leftist, Nasserist, Islamist and liberal currents, its 'revolution from below', they offer a prolonged civil war at best culminating in a settlement with Saif and his sibling. In answer to the popular committees, they have private agreements with regime defectors - not forgetting that, in a sense, the NATO powers prosecuting the aerial war are themselves very recent regime defectors. The Washington model has other variants, of course, which have been on display in Yemen and Bahrain. But the more glamorous liberal adaptation is present for all to see in Libya and it is notable for having more apologists than it has outright defenders.

Can I just risk a modest proposition? NATO, the CIA and the special forces belonging to the world's imperialist states are not forces of progress in this world. Does anyone disagree with that? If not, then it follows as surely as night follows day that the successful cooptation of the Libyan revolution by NATO, the CIA and special forces is a victory for reaction. It's no good hoping that the small, poorly armed, poorly trained militias of the east of Libya, who are now utterly dependent on external support, will somehow shake themselves free of such constraints once - if - they take power. Even if they eventually get some of the Libyan money that has been frozen by international banks, as UN Resolution 1973 promises, it will have come all too late to have been decisive.

I can well see how conservatives and liberals would see no loss at all in such a situation, nothing indeed but a net gain. It means after all that even if Qadhafi were to be overthrown at this point, it would not have been by a popular revolution. It would not have been because the revolution broadened its base and spread into Tripoli or Sirte. It would not have been under circumstances in which the panoply of social and political forces in Libya were fused into a victorious revolutionary bloc - e pluribus unum and all that. And it would not have seen Qadhafi's regime replaced by a popular one serving popular needs. Were Qadhafi to fall tomorrow, he would fall to a network of former regime elements and their external backers. The regime that replaced Qadhafi may well be more liberal, the sort that young Saif was to be entrusted to deliver at one point, but it would not be a popular or democratic one. The migration deals with the EU, the oil deals with multinationals, and the arms deals to ensure the suppression of more radical political forces (under the rubric of containing 'Al Qaeda', that ubiquitous, shapeshifting enemy of the free world) would all be central planks of a post-bellum regime.

The liberal argument, which is to the fore, is strikingly apolitical - and narcissistic. Only rarely do its advocates relate it to the shapeshifting revolutionary process currently underway in the Middle East. Rarer still is anything that could pass for analysis of Libya's internal dynamics. On the contrary, its preferred starting point is the solitary, decontextualised crisis point in which the 'West' can redeem itself through military action. There is in this the echo of colonial discourse: the missionaries, the deserving victims, the empire as protector of the meek and virtuous. It's very important for the defenders of 'humanitarian intervention', 'Responsibility 2 Protect' and so on (the clutter of inelegant jargon that accompanies such doctrines is a sure sign of their incoherence) that there should be an opportunity to use firepower, to moralise the means of violence. This is one reason, incidentally, why it never even occurred to them to wonder how it is that - unlike in Iraq, which war they castigate as irresponsible - there was never even the pretence of diplomacy. I am no pacifist, but I don't like to be told that there are no alternatives to air-borne death when the alternatives haven't even been tried.

If the issue was the minimisation of bloodshed, then a logical solution would have been to allow Turkey and others to facilitate negotiations. Yes, I know. A negotiated settlement would be a step back from outright victory for the rebels. But that is an increasingly improbable outcome anyway, and I thought we were trying to save lives here? And as it happens, a diplomatic solution seems to be exactly what is on the cards now. The transitional council leadership in Benghazi has acknowledged as much. Qadhafi is sending ambassadors to talk to interested parties about a ceasefire settlement. If this is how the situation is going to be resolved, then it would have been better that it had been resolved this way several weeks ago. If the aerial bombardment was supposed to stop massacres, it doesn't seem to have done so. From 'Save Sarajevo' to 'Save Benghazi', however, the liberal imperialists are in their glory when on the warpath, and as facile with rationalisations and false consolations as they are contemptuous of the same when deployed by the right.

So, as I say, it is natural that the usual assortment of cynics, security wonks and liberal hawks should be content with this annexing, even if their arguments in its favour make little sense. No one who supported the revolution, however, can be as content without also being a little naive or descending into bad faith arguments of the type: "we don't trust the bourgeois cops, but a rape victim should still call the police." Say what you like about the police, but one generally doesn't to find them blowing up neighbourhoods. Their role, in a word, is the suppression of conflict. The role of imperialist states in the world system is, to put it mildly, not that. And they are, I will not say 'lawless', but not susceptible to any of the constraints that apply to even the most British of police officers. And I am not myself prepared to see the US, or any of its surrogates, as a global policeman just yet. Worse still are the wised up comments to the effect that "the world is a murky place, blah blah, which should not be seen in black and white terms, yawn yawn, and we can't force people to die for the sake of some purist anti-imperialism, etc etc". No, indeed, but it's hardly better to expect people to die for the sake a woolly platitude. The war's handful of leftist apologists are living off the waning hope that out of this process will come a people's revolution. Why do they think this likely? No reason. Just cos. Press them particularly hard, and they'll revert to the parable of the good policeman, stretching the analogy beyond the point of satire in the process.

We can live in hope, of course. The proletariat, introduced into these arguments as a deus ex machina that will guarantee against any sell-out, betrayal, shoddy deal or undemocratic imposition, is the repository of this hope. But the workers of the eastern coastal cities and towns, having shown considerable courage in fighting Qadhafi's forces, were unable to defeat them. And they have not been able to prevent the former regime elements from asserting control of the revolt, or from cutting a deal with NATO. The number of rebels who are actually armed and in control is numerically small. As of late March, there were only about 1,000 trained fighters among the rebels. There are estimated to be about 17,000 volunteers, but they are untrained, poorly armed, and themselves a minority of the populations in which they operate. The Libyan working class - set aside the fact that much of the actual working class resides in areas beyond rebel control - is not in control of this process. General Abdel Fatah Younis, the former interior minister, is not even in control of this process. The opposition leaders are now adjuncts to a NATO strategy which may not even have been disclosed to them. Let's at least give credit where it's due. This is NATO's war. And that means, this is Washington's war.

Those who argued that the bombing campaign in Libya was a desperate effort by the US and its allies to cohere around a strategy, in the face of a regional uprising that had thrown them onto the back foot, now have an additional support for their position. The US is pulling out of the air war, amid divisions and recriminations, and is saying that it will not engage in the training or arming of the rebels. In short, it is retreating from any explicit military involvement in the Libyan revolt. This may amount to an admission of failure. Perhaps such a withdrawal was always planned, and the US is merely handing the baby to the more eager NATO allies. But remember that the US had an explicit posture that it would not support either a no-fly zone, or any use of force beyond that. This was true right up until the drafting of UN resolution 1973. It seems obvious that behind the scenes there were some ongoing debates, and that an argument prevailed in the week or so leading up to the UN Security Council debate, that the US should get involved and lead the operation, despite the reluctance of Robert Gates and General Carter Ham who runs Africom, which coordinated the initial bombing raids. Nothing now has substantially changed, no great victories have been notched up that would seem to make US withdrawal make sense except as a partial retreat in the face of a tactical impasse. Of course, low-key, intelligence-led operations are reportedly continuing, it's a tactical retreat rather than a complete reverse. And of course, the NATO bombing isn't coming to an end. Yet, the US withdrawal surely deserves some consideration.

Let's recall that the express motivations for the intervention were two-fold; one was humanitarian, to which we'll return; the other was securitarian, pivoting on the concern that Libya would if the rebellion continued become a 'failed state', ungovernable, ungoverned, and providing a gateway for immigration and 'jihadism' to Europe. In this sense, the intervention followed the logic both of the 'war on terror' and of its cousin, 'Fortress Europe'. This justification has always been dubious, and politically ambivalent in its effects. If the claim that 'jihadism' would find a friendly home in a free Libya was always alarmist, it has nonetheless been susceptible to criticisms from within the usually loyal press that the war is just encouraging 'Al Qaeda'.

And setting aside the political objections to such logic and the intellectual objections to concepts such as 'failed states', how were the indicated ends supposed to be accomplished? Through a land invasion and a process of 'state-building'? Not if the US Defense Secretary Robert Gates had his way. By overthrowing Qadhafi and bringing the National Transitional Council to power? Not according to British military top brass. Well, then, a no-fly zone and a bombing campaign. And yet, what is the bombing campaign supposed to achieve in the long-term? No one argues that this of itself this will lead to Qadhafi's overthrow, or even his replacement with a stable, pro-'Western' regime. And, true enough, it has not. It has altered the balance of forces, but in such a way as to prolong the war rather than settle it. Qadhafi's recent recovery in some parts of the country may be reversed, but he is unlikely to lose the core western territories that he now commands. Is this the kind of stability that is sought? A constant war of attrition between two slightly better matched forces? What's the alternative, apart from a land invasion? Something like the Afghanistan campaign, involving special forces, and the arming and training of rebels? Well, think about that: the early 'victory' in Afghanistan was achieved because the Taliban fled, and the ground army used by the current occupiers was a reasonably long-standing, numerous, well-trained and politically disciplined outfit with some social base in the Uzbek north of Agfhanistan. The rebels in Libya are not that numerous - not the armed rebels - politically heterogenous, not subordinated to a centralised leadership, and mostly very recently acquainted with weapons. Qadhafi's forces are not going to melt away. And even if they did, remember how the Afghanistan campaign actually turned out? I'm not sure that even in the grammar of imperialism this intervention shows any sign of coherence. I can well imagine that if you're a state planner looking at this back-and-forth charade, you would start to question your sanity in having undertaken such an intervention in the first place.

***

What of the humanitarian remit? We shall skate lightly over civilian casualties that have been incurred by the bombing. Suffice to say that we are being exposed to the usual routines on that front. In one such routine, all claims of civilian deaths are attributed to the target regime, thus implying that they have no credibility. In another, they are caused by the regime using civilians as human shields, by refusing to camp out in a glow-in-the-dark tent in the middle of nowhere and thus make an easier target. In a third, slightly more baroque, Qadhafi is accused of digging up bodies and strategically arranging them to create the impression of a massacre. The truth is that we will not know, until some sort of retrospective excess mortality survey is carried out, what the human cost of the bombing is. And at any rate, one is reluctant to be drawn into the gruesome calculus of war - which, by implication, is that if 'they' kill more than 'we' do, then 'we' win the humanitarian argument.

I also think it the height of bad faith to ground an argument for intervention of this kind on the premise that a massacre in Benghazi was forthcoming and this was the only way to stop it. To begin with, if that was the case, and the massacre was stopped, why are the bombs still falling? I'm afraid the logic of this kind of intervention, of indeterminate duration, with indeterminate goals, extends well beyond the management of an immediate emergency, even assuming that the intervention was genuinely motivated by this and that it made all the difference in that respect. There has to be a longer term objective - but what is it? Is the humanitarian argument that Qadhafi should be overthrown, or that there should be a partition, or that Qadhafi's forces should just be prevented for now from finishing off the rebellion? Obviously, supporters of 'humanitarian intervention' would prefer the former, but as they've hitched their wagon to the NATO military coalition, they are trapped in the logic of military action: and they are largely not prepared to support the kinds of military action, such as invasion and heavy bombing, and subsequent occupation and 'state-building' that overthrow would entail. Quite rightly too - people learn, slowly. Partition is the next possibility.

As mentioned, the air strikes, are unlikely to overthow the Qadhafi regime. Absent a ground invasion, which would be catastrophic for all sorts of reasons which I hope I don't have to spell out, the most likely result was a stalemate, tending toward de facto partition, with an east loosely governed by a pro-US elite composed of former regime elements concentrated in the coastal towns and cities, and the rump dictatorship in the west being able to rally its forces under the banner of resisting imperialism. Given long-standing regional divisions in the country, such a result would not only be a terrible betrayal of the emancipatory impulse that produced the uprising in the first place, but also potentially catastrophic, prolonging not only the conflict itself but also NATO's aerial bombardment. I suppose it's worth elaborating on this point a little, as I had occasion recently to 'debate' the subject of intervention in Libya with someone who confessed to not being an expert about Libya - this was an understatement, and a peculiar one, as I think if you're going to support bombing a country you ought at least to know something about the people upon the bombs will be falling - yet insisted that it would be no bad thing if Libya was partitioned because it was an artificial, rather than an organic, state. Lest you, reader, were inclined to be as blasé, I would just remind you that all states are artifices, that the idea of an 'organic' state is itself a fanciful artefact of 19th Century blood-and-soil romanticism, and that the break up of such artifices - consider Yugoslavia - is usually no picnic, particularly if effected through civil war. The de facto partition of Libya may or may not happen, but it's increasingly recognised as a logical prospect given the continuation of air strikes, and the ongoing stalemate which the air strikes seem almost designed to produce.

The last option I mentioned, simply delaying the repression of the rebellion, is obviously ridiculous. By that I don't mean to say it's impossible. It's just that it would make a mockery of any humanitarian remit. Yet, if a ground invasion is ruled out, for good reasons, and partition is unappealing, for reasons which ought to be obvious, what does that leave? A negotiated settlement perhaps? You don't say! Oddly, such diplomacy - even if it's for show - usually precedes an extension of military force. You have to wonder, if the argument is humanitarian, and the end result sought a pacific one with as little bloodshed as possible, why such an option wasn't even entertained for a second before the air strikes began - despite the fact that there were several long weeks in which the powers hitherto allied to Qadhafi could have broached such possibilities. What? "We don't negotiate with terrorists"? Get real.

However, this just reminds us that the humanitarian argument presupposes the foreclosure of options that was built-in to the intervention in the first place. It's quite right that opponents of the war have pointed out that there were a number of alternatives to a bombing campaign from the start, if the motive was to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. Those being, as I review the antiwar blogs, columns and newspapers: the handing over Libya's frozen funds to the Transitional Council to enable them to arm themselves; a regional intervention building on extant support provided by Egypt; a diplomatic settlement, in the event that outright military victory on the part of the rebels was out of the question. But when people ask what your alternative to bombing is - "what would YOU do?" - they are asking us to hypothesize, to speculate, and to do so in a terrain in which most people, including the advocates of humanitarian intervention themselves, have no experience whatever. That is, they're asking for a speculation concerning military logic, in which most are not trained, as it might play out in a situation where do not have intelligence, or networks of associates or informers. And such hypotheses are necessarily less immediately compelling than the seeming obviousness and corporeal bluntness of imperialist solutions. The question, once addressed, should be reversed: the burden of justification is on those who are doing the bombing or supporting it. The option that needs to be interrogated is the one being pursued: bombing. And it won't do to justify it on the basis of abstract humanitarianism. Humanitarianism is a contested, political term, and arguments predicated on it can only be assessed and settled in the political sphere.

And the fact is that the political bases for such a war are hopelessly confused. It can't be justified on the ground of liberal internationalism, since we're not talking about spreading democracy or promoting a liberal world order - that idea has taken a serious knock in the last decade. But the Realist grounds for the war seem even more incoherent. This is hardly a power-balancing operation, and any 'security threat' that can be conjured up is both less than convincing and potentially liable to fly back in any scaremonger's face if the same 'threat' is imputed to the rebels themselves. As for any attempt to justify the bombing on leftist internationalist grounds, of supporting the revolution, that is perhaps the least convincing of all. The logic of this, if taken to its conclusion, is that should air strikes fail to result in Qadhafi's overthrow, then the US and its allies should invade and finish the job. Any ideas where that might lead to? The US has a long history of intervening in revolutionary situations: the Spanish-American War, the Mexican revolution, the Russian civil war, the Greek civil war, the Vietnamese revolution, indeed a whole series of anti-colonial and leftist revolutions in Latin America, Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East. In not one of them has the United States military been a pro-revolutionary force. In this case, the US and its European allies have been consistently intervening in the region on the side of the counter-revolution. Expecting such forces to be part of any revolutionary transformation of the Middle East is frankly unworldly. In the last analysis, there seems to be no coherent, intelligent way to defend this war.