LENIN'S TOMB

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

The Syrian revolt enters a new phase posted by Richard Seymour

As Bashar al-Assad flees the capital, the armed segments of the revolution appear to be inflicting blows on sections of the security apparatus and taking over major cities: the revolution is turning a corner. Robert Fisk reports that a crucial dynamic now is the fracturing of an alliance between the Sunni middle class and the Alawite regime, signalled by the spread of the revolt to Aleppo. And defections from the state-capitalist power bloc continue. Indeed, Juan Cole has suggested that such divisions must run deep in the Syrian state for the opposition to be capable of planting a bomb that can kill a senior minister.

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The course of this uprising, from the immolation of Hasan Ali Akleh in January 2011, redolent of Mohamed Bouazizi's death in Tunisia, to the suicide attack on the defence minister, has been brutal. In the early stages, the Syrian government had a monopoly on violence. It was police violence and the decades-long rule by the Ba'athist dictatorship, undergirded by repressive 'emergency law', which provoked the 'days of rage'; it was the police beating of a shopkeeper that provoked a spontaneous protest on 17th February 2011 in the capital, which was duly suppressed; it was the imprisonment of Kurdish and other political prisoners that led to the spread of hunger strikes against the regime by March 2011. And it was the security forces who started to murder protesters in large numbers that same month. It was they also who repeatedly opened fire on large and growing demonstrations in April 2011. In the ensuing months until today, they have used used everything from tear gas to live bullets to tank shells.

And the main organisations of the Syrian opposition pointedly refused the strategy of armed uprising, noting what had happened in Libya, and arguing that the terrain of armed conflict was the ground on which Assad was strongest. Nonetheless, the scale of the repression eventually produced an armed wing of the revolt. The Free Syrian Army became the main vector for armed insurgency, expanded by defections from the army and the security apparatus. Now it is making serious advances.

In response to the insurgency, the argument among a significant section of the antiwar left has been that this revolution has already been hijacked, that those who initially rose up have been sidelined and marginalised by forces allied with external powers, intelligence forces and so on. Thus, the arms, money and international support for the armed rebellion is said to be coming from Washington, and Riyadh, and Tel Aviv. The likely outcome is the decapitation of a regime that is problematic for the US, and its replacement with a regime that is more amenable to the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, they argue, the political forces likely to hegemonise the emerging situation are essentially reactionary and sectarian. The left, democratic and anti-imperialist forces are, they say, too weak to lead the fight against Assad's regime. And so, as Sami Ramadani puts it in the latest Labour Left Briefing, "the sacrifices of the Syrian people have been hijacked by NATO and the Saudi-Qatari dictators".

Tariq Ali was the latest to make this case on Russia Today (prompting an impassioned rebuttal from this left-wing Syrian blog). MediaLens, an organisation whose output I have promoted in the past, also takes this view, and reproaches myself and Owen Jones for being insufficiently attentive to the accumulating mass of evidence that the armed revolt is basically a creature of imperialism, its actions no more than, effectively, state terrorism. Obviously, I think this is mistaken.

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I'll start with imperialism. One has to expect that in a revolutionary situation, rival imperialist powers will try to influence the course of events. We have seen the US, UK, France and Russia all involved in Syria's battle in different ways. Washington has long provided funding and other types of support to opposition groups, and the CIA is alleged to be training groups outside the Syrian border. It has two specific reasons to be involved: taking out a strategic ally of Iran, and being seen to be on the side of democratic change in the Middle East. The nature of its involvement is dictated by its preference for some sort of coup d'etat rather than a popular revolution; they want to encourage more senior regime defections so that a faction of the old ruling elite can coordinate its forces, lead an armed assault on the bastions of the Assad regime, and then declare itself the new boss. That is most likely why they are selectively feeding arms to groups they deem reliable, and training various select groups outside the country.

Russia, of course, is nowhere near as powerful an imperialist state as the US. Its role is arguably slightly enhanced by the fact that it is backing up a centralised, well-armed regime (vis-a-vis the insurgent population), whereas the 'Western' imperialist powers have been trying to infiltrate and co-opt elements of a very loosely coordinated resistance. The rebels by all accounts are extremely poorly armed; the trickle of weapons from the Gulf states is nothing compared to the helicopters, tanks and other munitions which the Assad regime possesses and deploys with such indiscriminate force. However you assess the relative balance between the various intervening forces, though, the point is that if you want to talk about imperialism in Syria you cannot just ignore the intervention taking place on behalf of the regime.

In fairness, many of those commentators highlighting imperialist intervention have also noted the flow of arms from Russia to the regime - Charles Glass, for example. Moreover, none of them appear to be denying serious repression by the regime. Rather, Patrick Seale is typical in arguing that the transition to an armed strategy, provoked by the regime, has been immensely destructive, as this is the terrain on which the regime is the strongest.

Nonetheless, there is in some of this a type of 'blanket thinking' that one commonly encounters, in which a signposted quality of one organisation, or faction within an organisation, or individual within a faction, is taken to be expressive of the situation as a whole. Thus, for example, Ramadani characterises the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are characterised as "Saudi-Qatari-backed ... logistically backed by Turkey": which is some of the truth, but simply not the whole truth. I will return to this. Likewise, when Seale describes the opposition strategy as being one of provoking "Western military intervention to stop the killing on humanitarian grounds", he ignores the declarations of the Local Coordinating Committees (LCCs) which are the organisational, cellular basis of the revolt, and which have consistently opposed imperialist intervention. He also ignores the left-nationalist and Kurdish forces - there are traditions of anti-imperialism in Syria well beyond the Ba'ath Party.

Or, let's take as an example this article by the comedy writer Charlie Skelton which is being recited widely. It basically makes two arguments. One is that leading figures within the Syrian National Council have connections to various US-funded bodies. The other is that vocal neoconservatives are pressing for military intervention and 'regime change', and declare themselves pleased by the successes of the armed opposition such as the Free Syrian Army. In and of itself, this could be part of a valid argument: why should these people be the spokespersons for the Syrian revolution in the Anglophone media? Why should the interests of Syrians be hijacked for some imperialist grand strategy? However, inasmuch as this ignores the majority of what is taking place, instead looking solely at narrow networks of influence, this is indeed a form of 'blanket thinking', allowing small minorities to stand in for the whole.

Imperialism is certainly involved. However, a few vulgar regime apologists to one side, no one is denying that there is more to it than that; that there are internal social and class antagonisms that have produced this revolt. If you want an analysis of the breakdown of the Syrian social compact in the last decade, amid a new wave of US imperialist violence which sent waves of refugees fleeing from Iraq, and Bashar al-Assad's neoliberal reforms, you should see Jonathan Maunder's article in the last International Socialism. The important point is that the regime can't survive. It is incapable of advancing the society any further, even on bourgeois terms. There is, therefore, only the question of how the regime will be brought down, and by whom.

The question is, is the geopolitical axis dominant? Is it this, rather than domestic antagonisms, which will determine the outcome of this revolt and its meaning?

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When you hear from ordinary Syrian activists, and not the exiles in the SNC, you don't hear a lot of support for an invasion or bombing: quite the contrary. The trouble is that there have been groups advocating intervention, and there has been a degree of intervention already. And while the rank and file have never been won over to the strategy of armed imperialist intervention, there isn't much unity over what strategy should be pursued and to what precise end. The question then is which forces can dominate and impose their line.

Before addressing this, one should say something about the organisational basis of this revolution. It isn't the leadership of the Syrian National Council (SNC), whose role as an 'umbrella' group belies their lack of influence on the ground. At the most basic, cellular level, it is the local coordinating committees (LCCs). A section of these, about 120 of them, have recognised the SNC since it was founded, and have some formal representation. In fact, they are grossly under-represented in the SNC structure compared to the liberal and Islamist opposition groups. And they don't make a very effective representation within the SNC structures, which means that when the SNC speaks it isn't necessarily speaking for the grassroots. However, a larger chunk, some 300 LCCs, have declined to recognise or affiliate to the SNC. The LCCs have opposed imperialist intervention, despite the bloodiness of Assad's repression; they have even tended to resist the trend toward militarisation of the uprising. Now, the LCCs, being localised resistance units based in the population, are not politically or ideologically unified. There are undoubtedly reactionary elements among them, as well as progressive and just politically indeterminate forces. So, the question of political representation is significant.

And at the level of political representation, there are various ideologically heterogeneous coalitions and groups. The SNC is understood to be the main 'umbrella' organisation unifying several strands from Kurdish to liberal groups. The leadership is disproportionately weighted toward exiles, while the actual systems of representation within the SNC are seriously skewed toward the bourgeois liberals and the Muslim Brothers. That's not the end of the world, given that some people have been invoking 'Al Qaeda' (really? people on the Left buying into this? Apparently so...) or just sectarian jihadis of one stripe or another. The fact is that Islamists and liberals are a part of the opposition in most of the old dictatorships of the Middle East, from Tunisia to Algeria to Yemen to Egypt to Bahrain etc etc etc. But these forces do represent the more conservative and bourgeois wing of the resistance to Assad. Generally speaking, like the LCCs, they have opposed the strategy of armed struggle - this is one of the reasons for their generally antagonistic relationship with the Free Syrian Army. But they did favour a strategy of armed intervention until forming an agreement in January with the left-nationalist National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, which rejected all imperialist intervention from outside the region: in other words, they would accept help from Arab states, but not from the 'West'. (Caveat: as will become clear, the SNC negotiators did not get this agreement ratified, and it may well be that the issue of imperialist intervention was one of the sticking points.)

Why, then, did the dominant forces in the SNC look for a time to imperialist intervention? I think it is obviously because these are not forces that are comfortable with mass mobilisation, least of all with armed mass mobilisation. A UN-mandated intervention - bombing, coordination with ground forces, etc. - would have solved this problem for them, achieving the objective of bringing down a repressive and moribund regime without mobilising the types of social forces that could challenge their hegemony in a post-Assad regime. Then they could have been piloted into office as the nucleus of a new regime, a modernising, neoliberal capitalist democracy. But as the prospects of such an intervention declined, as the grassroots failed to mobilise for some sort of NATO protectorate, and as the emphasis shifted to armed struggle via the Free Syrian Army (FSA) throughout the first half of this year, the SNC has been compelled to respond. It has developed a military bureau to relate to the FSA, albeit this has produced more claims of attempted manipulation.

Despite its international prominence, however, the SNC is not the only significant political formation organising opposition forces. The main organisation in which the Syrian left is organised is in the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, mentioned above - also known as the National Coordination Committee (NCC), tout court. This is the second most widely recognised organisation aside from the SNC, and has a much stronger basis within Syrian society. It is headquartered in Damascus rather than in Turkey, it has a strong basis in the LCCs and includes Kurdish, nationalist and socialist organisations. There have been attempts by both the SNC and NCC to overcome their differences and construct a sort of united front against Assad, but their political and strategic differences have made this impossible. Another factor obstructing unity is the NCC's position within Syria; it is far more exposed to military reprisals by the regime, and thus must pitch its demands very carefully. This is an important reason why it has emphasised a negotiated settlement as the answer to the crisis.

Also of significance is the Kurdish National Council, created by Kurdish forces in anticipation of having to fight their corner in a post-Assad regime: indeed, the reluctance of the majority of Kurds to actually support the SNC has been a significant factor in the composition and division of labour in the opposition. For Kurds oppressed in Assad's Syria, who do not automatically trust a future regime dominated by Sunni Arabs to protect minorities, it is seen as far more sensible to turn to a dense network of regional supporters and interests, described very well here.

The lack of unity between any political leadership and the revolutionary base - which extends to a lack of coordination between the coalitions and the armed groups, as we'll discuss in a moment - is a real weakness in the revolution. Aside from anything else, it makes it harder for the opposition to win over wider layers of the population - because people aren't sure exactly what they'll be supporting, what type of new regime will emerge from the struggle. There is a real fear of sectarian bloodshed, notwithstanding the cynical way in which the regime manipulates this fear. The military and civilian opposition leaders have tried to allay this fear, and FSA units say they are working with Allawi forces. But without a degree of unity and discipline, with the continued disjuncture between the turbulent base and the political leadership, and with Assad's forces heavily outgunning the opposition, this is a powerful disincentive for people to break ranks with the regime. Moreover, if some greater degree of cohesion and coordination is not reached, then the risk of some force outside the popular basis of the revolt (say, a few generals leading a proxy army) interpolating itself in the struggle and siezing the initiative, is increased.

This is not to argue that the SNC and NCC must converge around a common programme and then somehow impose themselves on the LCCs. I don't know how the political division of labour in the opposition could be optimised, and unity between the base and the leadership of such a movement would have to be negotiated and constructed on the basis of a recognition of the mutual interests of the social classes and ethnic groups embodied in the movement. Further, whether a merger would help or hinder the revolution probably depends very much what the agenda is and who is materially dominant in the emerging representative institutions. It does, however, explain why there have been and will continue to be attempts at forging some sort of unity, despite the ongoing antagonisms and differences between the various forces, and despite the very real problems with the SNC leadership.

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As for the armed contingent, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) has been summarily vilified and demonised by many polemicists. Consistent with the 'blanket thinking' referred to previously, the FSA has been deemed a sectarian gang, terrorists, a Saudi-Qatari front, and so on. The first and most important thing about the FSA is that it is made up of anything between 25,000 and 40,000 assorted rebels - defectors from the armed forces, both soldiers and officers, and various civilians who volunteered to fight. As such, it is as politically and ideologically variegated a formation as the LCCs. Nominally, the FSA is led by Colonel Riad al-Asaad, a defector from the air force whose family members have been executed by the regime. But the reality, as Nir Rosen describes, is more complex: "The FSA is a name endorsed and signed on to by diverse armed opposition actors throughout the country, who each operate in a similar manner and towards a similar goal, but each with local leadership. Local armed groups have only limited communication with those in neighbouring towns or provinces - and, moreover, they were operating long before the summer." In other words, this is a highly localised, cellular structure with limited cohesion.

Contrary to what has been asserted in some polemics, then, the FSA is not simply a contingent of the SNC. It formed independently, several months into the uprising, following a series of lethal assaults on protests by the regime, specifically in response to the suppression in Daraa. It incorporated armed groups that had been operating locally with autonomous leadership for a while. Its relationship with the SNC, despite attempts by the leaderships to patch over differences, has been strongly antagonistic - largely because of the SNC leadership's opposition to the strategy of armed insurgency and its fears of being unable to control the outcome. Earlier in the year, a split from the SNC formed briefly over this point, with a group formed within the council to support armed struggle. Therefore, those who describe the FSA as "the armed wing" of the SNC, as The American Conservative did, are only exposing their ignorance, as well as that blanket-thinking. The same applies to those who say that the FSA is a Turkish-Saudi-Qatari client. Undoubtedly, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies have an interest in this struggle. Certainly, the leadership of the FSA is currently situated in Turkey, and enjoys Turkish support. And Turkey is a NATO member. But the extent of any support must be judged to be poor, because by all reports the army remains an extremely loose, and lightly armed force. Purely on military grounds, the regime has always enjoyed the advantage, and continues to do so. Moreover, the FSA is just far too disarticulated and heteroclite to be converted into someone's proxy army - unless you assume that any degree of external support automatically makes one a proxy, which strikes me as specious reasoning.

Finally, there is the question of the FSA's human rights record. Those who want to oppose the revolt say that the armed insurgents are a bunch of thugs or even - some will actually use this propaganda term - 'terrorists'. Well, the fact is that the armies have captured and tortured and killed people they believed to be regime supporters or informants. I believe they have blown up regime apparatuses and probably have killed civilians in the process. My answer? You can criticise this or that attack, you can say that the Islamists who bombed Damascus and issued a sectarian statement are not allies of revolution. But you can't keep saying this is a 'civil war' and then express shock when one side, the weaker side, the side that has been attacked and provoked, the side that is ranged against a repressive dictatorship, actually fights a war.

For the regime is fighting a bitter war for its own survival, and it is destroying urban living areas in the process. Do you want to go and look at Jadaliyya, and see the kinds of reports they post every day? Do you want to see the footage of what the Syrian armed forces are doing to residential areas, not to mention to the residents? Unless you're a pacifist, in which case I respect your opinion but disagree with you (in that patronising way that you will have become used to), the only bases for criticising such tactics are either on pro-regime grounds, or on purely tactical grounds. Among the tactical grounds are the objection that 1) this is the territory on which the regime is strongest (true, but I think the signs are that this can be overcome), and 2) there is a tendency in militarised conflict for democratic, rank-and-file forces to be squeezed out (not necessarily the case, but a real potentiality in such situations which one doesn't overlook). Of course, those tactical observations are valid, and people are entitled to their view. My own sense is that the regime has made it impossible to do anything but launch an armed insurgency and so these problems will just have to be confronted.

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All this raises the question, then: what accounts for the advances being made by the insurgency given its relative military weakness and strategic divisions? Part of the answer is that there is no surety of continued advance. It's an extremely unstable situation, wherein the initiative could fall back into the regime forces' hands surprisingly quickly. The current gains have been chalked up rather quickly, and not without serious cost. Nonetheless, the dominant factor clearly is the narrowing of the social basis of the regime, and the growing conviction among ruling class elements, as well as the aspiring middle classes, that Assad and the state-capitalist bloc that rules Syria can neither keep control, nor update the country's productive capacity, nor reform its rampantly corrupt and despotic political system.

Much has been made of Assad's supposed popularity, and the fact that he does have a significant social base. Even if the signs are now that the core bases of his regime are starting to split, the durability of the pro-Assad bulwark has to be encountered and understood. Recently, there was a Yougov poll of Syrians, which Jonathan Steele drew attention to in the Guardian. 55% of those Syrians polled said they wanted Assad to stay, and the number one reason they gave for saying this was fear for the future of their country. Now, you can take or leave a poll conducted under such circumstances. After all, the poll was conducted across the whole Arab world, with only 97 of its respondents based in Syria. How reliable can it be? And it would seem pedantic and beside the point to expect anyone targeted by Assad's forces to pay any heed to it. Nonetheless, there's a real issue here in that at least a sizeable plurality of people are more worried by what will happen after Assad falls than by what Assad is doing now.

A significant factor in this, as mentioned, is the problem of sectarianism. There is no inherent reason why a country as ethnically and religiously diverse as Syria should suffer from sectarianism: this is something that has to be worked on, and actively produced. The Ba'ath regime certainly didn't invent sectarianism, but in pivoting its regime on an alliance between the Alawi officer corps and the Sunni bourgeoisie, it did represent itself as the safeguard against a sectarian bloodbath and has constantly played on this fear ever since, even while it has brutally repressed minorities. Given the breakdown of the class and ethnic alliance making up the regime's base, sectarianism as a disciplinary technology is one of the last hegemonic assets the regime possesses. The importance of opposition forces being explicitly anti-sectarian (as has been seen repeatedly) can thus hardly be over-stated. At the same time, fear of imperialist intervention and some sort of Iraq-like devastation being visited on the country, is also real. Syria, as the host of many of Iraq's refugees, experienced up close the effects of that trauma. Nor is there much in Libya's situation today that I can say I would recommend to the people of Syria. So, it has been of some importance that despite serious bloodshed the LCCs and NCC maintained resistance to the SNC approach of trying to forge an alliance with imperialism.

If you observe the tendencies in each case of revolution, you see amid concrete differences important similarities. For example, there were considerable differences between the Mubarak and Assad regimes and in the tempo and pattern of resistance and opposition. This was not just in terms of foreign policy and the relationship to US imperialism, but also in terms of the prominence of the state as a factor in neoliberal restructuring which was far more important in Syria, the impact of the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing flows of refugees and fighters, the role of an organised labour movement in sparking rebellion which has so far played very little role in Syria (strikes have tended to be organised mainly be professional or petty bourgeois groups - another serious limitation faced by the revolution), and the role of military repression and insurgency in each state.

Even so, there are broad convergences which point to a general pattern. Most important of these are:

1) within these societies, a secular tendency toward a widening of social inequality, coupled with a narrowing at the top of society, resulting from the imposition of neoliberal accumulation patterns.

2) the fraying of the class alliances sustaining the regime as a consequence.

3) the exhaustion of the regime's resources for adaptation, and intelligent reform, such that all concessions come far too late and after such immense repression that it is hard to take them seriously.

4) the declining capacity of the state to maintain consent (or rather, encircle and marginalise dissent) either through material consessions or terror.

5) the re-emergence of long-standing opposition forces in new configurations during the period immediately before and since January 2011, with middle class liberal, Islamist and Arab nationalist forces playing a key role.

6) the emergence of forms of popular organisation - militias in some cases, revolutionary councils in others - performing aspects of organisation that would ordinarily be carried out by the state, and assuming a degree of popular legitimacy in contention with the regime.

7) the defection of significant sections of the ruling class and state personnel, who attempt to play a dominant, leading role in the anti-regime struggle and assume control of reformed apparatuses afterward.

My estimation is that in the context of the global crisis, and amid a general weakening of US imperialism - notwithstanding the relatively swift coup in Libya - these regimes are going to continue to breakdown, and opposition is going to continue to develop in revolutionary forms, ie in forms that challenge the very legitimacy of the state itself. The old state system, based around a cleavage between a chain of pro-US dictatorships and an opposing rump of nominally resistant dictatorships, is what is collapsing here. That is something that the advocates of negotiations as a panacea here might wish to reflect on. Certainly, I have no problem with negotiations as a tactic, particularly in situations of relative weakness. But these are revolutionary crises inasmuch as they severely test the right of the old rulers to continue to rule in the old ways.

These processes, not just in Syria but across the Middle East, are richly overdetermined by the various crises of global capitalism, which are so deep, so protracted, and giving rise to much social upheaval, that it is beyond the capacity of even the most powerful states to bring them under control. Into these complex processes, as we have seen, imperialist powers can impose themselves in various, often destructive, ways; but those commentators who spend all their time charting the agenda of US imperialism and its webs of influence in the region would do well to scale back and get a wider perspective. There is no reason at this moment to think that imperialist intervention is, or is going to be, the dominant axis determining the outcome and meaning of this process.

Labels: capitalist crisis, egypt, libya, middle east, neoliberalism, revolution, syria, tunisia, US imperialism

Monday, July 16, 2012

Liberal Defence of Murder: Relaunch posted by Richard Seymour

The paperback is out, complete with a detailed new afterword and some lavish reviews on the cover, and I'll be starting the relaunch of The Liberal Defence of Murder this Wednesday at 7pm, in the very swish Mosaic Rooms, between Earl's Court and High Street Kensington. This will be a very, very glamorous evening, and you are all expected to comport yourselves in a manner befitting the affair: principally by turning up, laughing at my jokes and then tastefully buying several copies of my fancy new paperback. So, shape up, and remember: I shall be quietly judging all of you in the audience, and making mental notes as to who is 'in' this season. Effectively, you will be auditioning.

Labels: british empire, colonialism, cruise missile liberals, iraq, liberal imperialism, liberalism, libya, middle east, the liberal defence of murder, US imperialism

Monday, February 27, 2012

The antiwar movement's dilemma posted by Richard Seymour

My article in The Guardian, drawing on some of the research I did for American Insurgents:

The war on Libya produced a strange effect in British politics. The majority of the public opposed the war, but very little of this opposition was expressed on the streets. Nor is the possibility of intervention in Syria producing sizeable protests as yet.
The first and most obvious reason for this abstention is that behind a general scepticism about war lies a more conflicted sentiment, as people overwhelmingly sympathise with the democratic uprisings in both Syria and Libya. In a situation like this, the ideological relics of "humanitarian intervention" can be reactivated, as they were when the government packaged its bombing of Libya as a limited venture in support of human rights. But this is not the only factor. In the US, the election of Barack Obama took tens of thousands of Democrat-supporting activists off the streets. It would be mistaken to discount an extension of this effect to the UK. The stabilisation of the occupation of Iraq and the subsequent withdrawal of troops has also contributed...

Labels: anti-imperialism, antiwar, egypt, imperialism, iran, libya, middle east, revolution, syria, US imperialism

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Another humanitarian intervention. posted by Richard Seymour

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.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', air strikes, dictatorship, imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, revolution, syria, US imperialism

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Egyptian revolution posted by Richard Seymour

Some salient developments in Egypt today: The Muslim Brothers asked their supporters not to attend the protest in Tahrir Square today. This is causing a serious rift in the organisation, especially given the scale of the protests. Hundreds of thousands have demonstrated today, including about 100,000 in Tahrir Square (remarkable given the scale of army repression designed to keep people away), a further 100,000 in Alexandria. Despite the enormous amount of powerful and toxic tear gas being used, and the dozens killed and thousands wounded, "huge crowds" are reportedly still making their way into Tahrir. Watch the live feed for yourself:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The army is starting to hesitate. Field Marshal Tantawi has accepted the resignation of the cabinet and offered to speed up the transition to civilian rule - though without naming a date and without addressing the substance of popular grievances, it was similar to many of the speeches Mubarak made before his overthrow. The protesters aren't buying it. It's an open question whether others, who are not at the centre of the revolutionary movement, will. And some notable defections have occured. Here an army officer splits from the military leadership and joins the protesters:

It is not helpful to overstate the significance of such defections. But recall that an important condition for the overthrow of Mubarak was the disintegration of his police force and the refusal of the army leadership to support him. At the time, the army accumulated moral capital for not supporting the main attacks on protesters. Since then, their conduct - worse than Mubarak, says Amnesty - has turned that black into red. The military itself is now the clear problem; and presumably what is needed is a breakdown in military command.

Last thing, the US has made it clear that it is backing the military to the finish. It has to. Because if the military regime collapses in Egypt, then the US-led attempts to take control of the situation in the Middle East will be in tatters. The initiative would be in the hands of the revolutionary masses, not just in Egypt - the centre of gravity - but also in Syria and Yemen. Israel's regional power would be further weakened. Even the straightforward, low cost victory in Libya - whose new regime excludes both the Islamists and the Berbers - could begin to unravel.

Labels: dictatorship, egypt, libya, middle east, revolution, syria, US imperialism

Friday, September 23, 2011

Yemen's revolution and declining US power posted by Richard Seymour

I am sorry not have to kept up to date with the inspiring resistance in Syria and Yemen. I note that David Cameron's speech at the UN used the example of Libya to argue for more interventions, citing both these countries as being in need of 'reform'. For what it's worth, it presently seems unlikely that Britain will be able to drive further military interventions, as the conditions that made a relatively low cost and low commitment intervention in Libya possible aren't likely to be replicated elsewhere. However, the adoption of the language of 'reform' is very interesting, and signals that the strategy of the dominant states has shifted from simply backing the ancient regimes to looking for a managed transition to more liberal societies. The spirit of this was, I think, summed up in Blair's panicked remarks upon the Egyptian revolution:

"All over that region, there is essentially one issue, which is how do they evolve and modernise, both in terms of their economy, their society and their politics.
"All I'm saying is that, in the case of Egypt and in the case in Yemen, because there are other factors in this – not least those who would use any vacuum in order to foment extremism – that you do this in what I would call a stable and ordered way."
Blair said the west should engage with countries such as Egypt in the process of change "so that you weren't left with what is actually the most dangerous problem in the Middle East, which is that an elite that has an open minded attitude but it's out of touch with popular opinion, and popular opinion that can often – because it has not been given popular expression in its politics – end up frankly with the wrong idea and a closed idea."

Cameron would not be as crude as Blair, since he is an opportunist while the latter is an out and out bampot, but I think he shares essentially the same idea. As regards Yemen, it's been obvious for a while now that despite Washington's backing for repression and involvement in killing opposition leaders dubbed 'Al Qaeda', they're no longer content to leave Saleh in charge. The scale and endurance of the resistance, coming as it does from fractured sources and with different motives, combined with internal plotting against Saleh, has forced Washington to change tack (see Obama's UN speech). As Sheila Carapico points out in MERIP, they have done so reluctantly, and with a clear lack of sympathy for the protesters. In April, when they thought a face-saving deal might be reached, the US embassy in Sanaa issued a press release urging "'Yemeni citizens' to show good faith by 'avoiding all provocative demonstrations, marches and speeches in the coming days'."

The ongoing UN negotiations over a power transfer concern the terms of Saleh's departure, and constitute an effort by the US to engineer a settlement it can live with. Meanwhile, as the regime continues to use live rounds, tear gas, sewage water cannons, artillery and tanks to suppress the opposition, it is so important that the opposition has not been demobilised as the Obama administration would like it to be. This is a mass rally in Yemen today following a week of repression:

This suggests that, despite the very intelligent, cautious and successful intervention in Libya, US power has still taken a very significant regional knock, and its ability to control events is in question. Look at what's happening with Palestine. Egypt relaxing Rafah crossing restrictions, and supporting Fatah-Hamas peace talks, the Israeli embassy beseiged, Turkey continuing its historic break with Israel, and now the Palestinian statehood bid which, with all caveats noted, has left the Israeli leadership manifestly rattled. Obama has just sent Israel more weapons, and he will almost certainly instruct his ambassador to the UN to veto the bid. Susan Rice, the administration's uber-humanitarian-interventionist, threatened the UN with the withdrawal of US funding if member states backed Palestinian statehood. Still, a majority of states may approve the bid, and that would be a defeat for the US and Israel. As importantly, the Palestinian leadership has decided to sidestep America as the key mediator in the process. Both the US and Israel insist that there can be no talk of statehood outside the 'peace process'. But Mahmoud Abbas, after all these years, is acting as if he knows that the 'peace process' is intended to suffocate the very possibility of Palestinian statehood, which is not a small thing.

Labels: gaza, Israel, libya, middle east, palestine, revolution, US imperialism, yemen

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Libyan divisions, and a mirage of revolution posted by Richard Seymour

Oh, and while I'm here, this criticism overlaps with something I'm doing at the moment, so I may as well just deal with it now:

Richard Seymour has a more hardline anti-interventionist post on Libya which, while it makes a number of important points, nevertheless seems to me like it strikes rather the wrong note. Seymour observes that “The rebel army is commanded by someone who is most likely a CIA agent”, and goes on to predict that the US and its allies will quickly move to set up a pliable regime pro-Western “liberals” who will go along with the designs of neoliberalism.
I agree with this, as far as it goes. But Seymour goes on to say that “I don’t think we’re witnessing a revolutionary process here.” This strikes me as far too simplistic. The leadership of the TNC may not be revolutionaries, but they appear to have only the most tenuous control over the forces that actually defeated Gaddafi, like the Berber units in the Western mountains and the dozens of privately organized militias. Recall that it was just a few weeks ago that the rebels looked to be too busy assassinating one another to make any military gains. The usual bourgeois foreign-policy types are warning of splits and “instability” on the rebel side, because what the US and NATO want most is a stable and cooperative regime. But the fractiousness and disorganization that so terrifies the Western foreign policy intelligentsia is precisely what may yet allow a revolutionary dynamic to emerge.

A few quick points, then. First, tellingly, the author does not say that there is a revolutionary situation in Libya, merely that a "revolutionary dynamic" may emerge from the current chaos. So, although I may be accused of striking the wrong note, I am not accused of being wrong. Secondly, if there is a danger in striking the wrong note, at least part of that danger comes from wishful thinking. If a revolutionary situation is to emerge from the fratricidal chaos among Libya's elites today (which is real), we have to ask where it would come from, who would lead it, what would be its dominant political thrust, etc? If we're talking about something that is on the cards and not merely a distant hope, it should be possible to specify what sort of alliance and what sort of political leadership might be involved.

I grant that the divisions in the leadership reflect the difficulties that the dominant neoliberal clique have had in incorporating a wider array of social forces under their leadership. Even so, the basis for these divisions appears to be largely over fiefdoms, and very little over popular demands. On the other hand, there appears to be shockingly little dissent over the ongoing matter of racial cleansing which, far from abating, is intensifying. Put the hollow expressions of regret from the transitional council (NTC), regarding "a small number of incidents" for which they bear primary responsibility, to one side. Scapegoating 'Africans' is just how a neoliberal elite in alliance with former colonial powers preserves its 'national' legitimacy. Yet it is unlikely that this would work as effectively as it does if the opposition had a left-wing, or an organised labour contingent. As yet it has neither.

It is also true that there is a certain amount of fluidity in the situation and, in the interregnum, a limited space for localised grassroots initiative. Yet, for this to become a revolutionary situation, masses of people would have to not only break with the NTC, but also identify with a rising alternative leadership. The fact is that the Libyan uprising, from inception, has had no alternative leadership. (This is not unrelated to there being no left-wing, and no organised labour contingent).* The NTC's weaknesses do not, therefore, add up to strength on the part of potential popular rivals. And the NTC does now have the immense resources of imperialism backing it up.

So, where is this revolutionary potential? Is it anything other than a shibboleth at this point?

*This isn't an immutable fact, but it is the reality at present. And it happens to be rooted in a couple of facts about Libya's development under Qadhafi. First, the Jamahiriyya didn't allow political parties or independent trade unions because, in theory, it didn't need them. It was supposed to be governed by popular committees and workers' self-management (outside the crucial oil and banking sectors, of course). In practise, Libya was a national security state like its regional equivalents, in which the old ruling class - particularly those sections integrated into the state - saw its power consolidated, and even legitimised under a seemingly radical new regime. The only sustained opposition that could develop took the form of armed Islamist insurgency. Unsurprisingly, the only potential opposition to the neoliberals today are the Islamists who, contrary the scaremongering of some pro-Qadhafi opinion, are not in a position to take over the country. Secondly, the social basis of the dominant faction of the opposition derives from Qadhafi's re-orientation toward the US and EU since the late 1990s. This meant further integration into global capitalism along neoliberal lines as part of the price of relaxing sanctions, which had cost the economy billions.

The arrival of platoons of lobbyists, oil industry flaks, economists, statesmen and neoliberal technocrats, epecially in the latter half of the 2000s, did a great deal to accelerate the development of a private sector capitalist elite. Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter played an important role in a programme designed to "create a new pro-business elite", with dozens passing through a 'leadership' programme run by the Boston consultancy firm, Monitor Group. Porter, along with Saif al-Qadhafi, helped launch the Libyan Economic Development Board which pushed privatization policies. This was then headed by current chair of the National Transitional Council, Mahmoud Jibril. Vice-chair Ali al-Issawi also helped develop the same policies as a minister responsible for the Economy, Trade & Investment. Thus, only when a strategic cleavage opened up within Libya's ruling class - I would characterise it as one between a relatively conservative state capitalist elite cautious about reform and a neoliberal elite impatient for reform, a fissure accelerated by the region's uprisings - was it possible for a viable mass political opposition to emerge. It's precisely because of the ruling class split that the Libyan rebels were able to so quickly achieve an advantage that the Egyptian revolutionaries lacked - dual power, centred on the control of major urban centres. Yet it's quite logical in these circumstances for a section of the ruling class to be politically, ideologically and even institutionally dominant within that opposition. This is what happened. The alliance with NATO consolidated that dominance, after the revolutionary dynamic had been crushed by Qadhafi's forces.

Labels: imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, qadhafi, revolution, US imperialism

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

All they are saying is give war a chance. posted by Richard Seymour

Something I wrote for ABC Australia about Libya:

Libya, the source of so many American nightmares, is fast becoming an American dream.
Reagan was tortured by Tripoli, and its big boss man, sassing the US. He imposed sanctions, and bombed the country, but had no peace. Bush the Younger was reconciled with the prodigal Colonel Gaddafi, but somehow this alliance seemed, well, un-American.
Obama, though, will have the privilege of being an ally of an ostensibly free Libya that he helped birth into existence. At minimal outlay (a mere $1 billion, which is peanuts in Pentagon terms), and with relatively few lives lost from bombing, a US-led operation has deposed a Middle East regime and empowered a transitional regime that is committed to human rights and free elections.
After the carnage of Iraq, such a simple, swift and (apparently) morally uncomplicated victory seemed impossible.
Lest we swoon too quickly, however, it is worth remembering that there are other ways to look at this.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', dictatorship, liberal imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, obama, revolution, US imperialism

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Libya's revolution disgraced by racism posted by Richard Seymour

Myself in The Guardian on the depressing racist killings in Libya:

"This is a bad time to be a black man in Libya," reported Alex Thomson on Channel 4 News on Sunday. Elsewhere, Kim Sengupta reported for the Independent on the 30 bodies lying decomposing in Tripoli. The majority of them, allegedly mercenaries for Muammar Gaddafi, were black. They had been killed at a makeshift hospital, some on stretchers, some in an ambulance. "Libyan people don't like people with dark skins," a militiaman explained in reference to the arrests of black men.
The basis of this is rumours, disseminated early in the rebellion, of African mercenaries being unleashed on the opposition. Amnesty International's Donatella Rivera was among researchers who examined this allegation and found no evidence for it. Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch similarly had not "identified one mercenary" among the scores of men being arrested and falsely labelled by journalists as such...

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', dictatorship, liberal imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, obama, racism, revolution, US imperialism

Monday, August 29, 2011

Racist vengeance in Libya posted by Richard Seymour

"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:

Around 30 men lay decomposing in the heat. Many of them had their hands tied behind their back, either with plastic handcuffs or ropes. One had a scarf stuffed into his mouth. Almost all of the victims were black men. Their bodies had been dumped near the scene of two of the fierce battles between rebel and regime forces in Tripoli.

"Come and see. These are blacks, Africans, hired by Gaddafi, mercenaries," shouted Ahmed Bin Sabri, lifting the tent flap to show the body of one dead patient, his grey T-shirt stained dark red with blood, the saline pipe running into his arm black with flies. Why had an injured man receiving treatment been executed? Mr Sabri, more a camp follower than a fighter, shrugged. It was seemingly incomprehensible to him that anything wrong had been done.

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.

Labels: dictatorship, eu, immigration, imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO, qadhafi, racism, revolution

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Gilbert Achcar and the decent left posted by Richard Seymour

Gilbert Achcar separates the decent from the indecent left:

At the onset of NATO’s Operation Unified Protector in Libya, the main justification for it was that Gaddafi’s forces would massacre the resistance and civilians living in the places taken by the resistance, especially Benghazi. What has been learned since then about how likely such a scenario was?
In situations of urgency, there is no better judge than the people directly concerned, and there was unanimity on that score. Did you ever hear of any significant group in Benghazi opposed to the request of a No-Fly zone made to the UN and advocating another way to prevent Gaddafi’s troops from taking the city? ... Anyone who from far away disputes the fact that Benghazi would have been crushed is just lacking decency in my view. Telling a besieged people from the safety of a Western city that they are cowards – because that’s what disputing their claim that they were facing a massacre amounts to – is just indecent.
That’s about the balance of forces. What about the likelihood that if Benghazi had fallen there would have been a massacre? Isn’t that still a matter of speculation?
No, not at all. Let me first remind you that the repression that Gaddafi unleashed in February, from the very beginning of the Libyan uprising, was much greater than anything else we have seen since then. Take even the case of Syria: today, several months after the protest movement started in March, it is estimated that the number of people killed in Syria has reached 2,200. The range of estimates of the number of people who were killed in Libya in the first month alone, before the Western intervention, starts at more than that figure and reaches 10,000. The use by Gaddafi of all sorts of weapons, including his air force, was much more extensive and intensive than anything we have seen until now in other Arab countries.
... When Adolphe Thiers’s forces took back Paris at the time of the Commune in 1871, with much less lethal weaponry they killed and executed 25,000 persons. This is the kind of massacre that Benghazi was facing, and that is why I said under such circumstances – when the city’s population and the rebellion requested, even implored the UN to provide them with air cover, and in the absence of any alternative – that it was neither acceptable nor decent from the comfort of London or New York to say, ‘No to the no-fly zone’. Those on the left who did so were in my view reacting out of knee-jerk anti-imperialism, showing little care for the people concerned on the ground. That’s not my understanding of what it means to be on the left. [Emphases added]

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.

Labels: anti-imperialism, dictatorship, gilbert achcar, imperialism, liberal imperialism, libya, middle east, NATO

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Libya is free - it must be occupied posted by Richard Seymour

This is from the head of the Committee on Foreign Relations:

The task is daunting but not hopeless. So far the rebels have done fairly well in policing the cities they have taken over. The fact they participated in the liberation of their country may have helped as there appears to be a sense of responsibility and ownership, something sorely absent in Iraq.
In the days ahead, looting – which so tainted the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 – must be prevented. Diehard supporters of the regime will have to be disarmed or defeated.
Tribal war must be averted. Justice and not revenge need to be the order of the day if Libya is not to come to resemble the civil war of post-Saddam Iraq in the first instance, or the chaos and terrorism of Somalia and Yemen.

...

Most former supporters of the regime should be integrated into the new Libya. Doing so would send a powerful signal to the country and the world that post-Gaddafi Libya will be governed by law and not revenge or whim.
All this poses serious challenges to the outside world. The 7,000 sorties flown by Nato aircraft played a central role in the rebel victory. The “humanitarian” intervention introduced to save lives believed to be threatened was, in fact, a political intervention introduced to bring about regime change. Now Nato has to deal with its own success.
International assistance, probably including an international force, is likely to be needed for some time to help restore and maintain order. The size and composition of the force will depend on what is requested and welcomed by the Libyan National Transitional Council and what is required by the situation on the ground.
President Barack Obama may need to reconsider his assertion that there would not be any American boots on the ground; leadership is hard to assert without a presence.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', liberal imperialism, libya, NATO, obama, the liberal defence of murder, US imperialism

Sunday, August 21, 2011

No tears for Qadhafi; no cheers for NATO posted by Richard Seymour

Qadhafi is finished, as I rashly predicted he would be. It looks like his personal bodyguards have surrendered, and rebels are marching through the centre of Tripoli. Moussa Ibrahim, performing this tragicomical Ali role, reportedly claims that the masses are on their way to Tripoli to protect the regime. Since he doesn't really believe this, no one else has to either. I have no doubt that there will be riotous celebrations in Benghazi, Tripoli, Zawiya and elsewhere tonight. The decomposition of the regime, just months after it seemed to have retaken control, will be what people are cheering for. And only a churl or a regime loyalist would begrudge it.

But mark the sequel. The rebel army is commanded by someone who is most likely a CIA agent. As far as I know, it has around 1,000 trained soldiers, within a total force of about 30-40,000 people (and within a population of 6.5m people). It is directed on the ground by intelligence and special forces. It isn't well armed, and it will probably now be either rapidly disarmed, or integrated into the post-Qadhafi state. There may be a small number of jihadis among them, but these will either adapt, integrate, or be hunted down and killed on the basis of the new Libya's remit of fighting 'Al Qaeda'. (Recall, preventing an 'Al Qaeda' takeover was one of the major justifications for intervention when the think-tanks started thinking tanks). There is as yet no political force through which the masses could act independently of the new government, were they even of a mind to do so. The rebels will be disarmed, and the initiative will rest with pro-US politicians and other ruling class spokespeople.

As a result, I would strongly caution against getting carried away with the prospect of permanent revolution here. I think the US and its allies will very quickly stabilise this situation. There will be no analogue to 'de-Baathification'. The old state structures will be preserved and adapted, and the new government will enjoy considerable legitimacy provided it delivers on a basic menu of elections and political rights. Moreover, the parties that win those elections will likely be the more pro-capitalist elements allied to the ruling class factions in the leadership of the transitional council. The government that now follows will be less oppressive and more democratic than the one it ousted, and it will probably be less sectional than the Qadhafi regime.

It would be hard for the coming government to do worse than Qadhafi. In one respect, however, they may do just that. EU powers will certainly demand that the new regime hold to their promise to continue Qadhafi's policy of containing immigration from Africa to the EU. Given the way that some elements in this rebellion have treated black and migrant workers - you know, lynchings and that - the EU can probably have full confidence in the new regime's handling of this remit. It always made sense, of course, for the bourgeois elements of the rebellion to scapegoat black workers as the 'alien' elements, the fifth column depended on by Qadhafi. In government, the temptation to resort to racist hysteria in order to frustrate and divide potential opposition will be magnified many times over.

So, I'm just saying, I don't think we're witnessing a revolutionary process here. I think that's been halted a long time ago. And it will take time and organisation before it resumes, if it does.

Labels: dictatorship, libya, middle east, NATO, qadhafi, revolution, US imperialism

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Libya: downfall? posted by Richard Seymour

How quickly things change. It wasn't very long ago that most news articles highlighted the fractious, poorly armed, badly trained, indisciplined character of the opposition, and the territorial gains made by Qadhafi. After the killing of General Abdel Fattah Younes, the entirety of the Transitional National Council was sacked by its head, Mustafa Abdel Jalil. It looked utterly shamblic, more than ever locked in fratricidal power struggles, looking less and less like the real government that it claimed to be. Then there were the criticisms for atrocities toward 'African' (ie black) migrant workers and others, which undermined the appeal to human rights which many of the leading figures in the rebellion have built their reputation on.

Certainly, the claim to represent a popular mass movement was hardly credible. These were largely former regime elements wholly dependent on external powers, without whom they could not trade in oil or gain international recognition, and on whose military artillery and strategy they were completely reliant. They had been compelled to turn to imperialism partly to overcome their lack of authority within the revolt. Their weakest point had been the failure of the revolt to spread to Tripoli, which seemed unlikely to fall to the sorts of relatively light bombing sorties that NATO was deploying. Aerial bombing was no substitute for the spread of the revolution, which was actually receding as the initiative passed into the hands of Africom planners and others. Leading politicians in the UK and France were admitting that Qadhafi would not be driven out by military force, and calling for a negotiated settlement.

But after a week of gains, the rebels suddenly look as if they've got Tripoli surrounded, and Al Jazeera is reporting gunfire from within the capital. If I were the sort of person to make rash predictions, I would say that Qadhafi might not survive the next 48 hours. But then, let me be even more rash and suggest what would follow from that. I think we would see a recomposition of the old regime, without Qadhafi but with the basic state structures intact. The former regime elements would become regime elements, within a pro-US, neoliberal state with some limited political democracy. In addition, those calling for intervention in Syria would be strengthened, as the Pentagon's faith in military power would have been revived. This would be a significant regroupment for the US and allied states after recent setbacks. It doesn't matter how ridiculous this war has been, or how much of a mockery the process has made of the revolutionary process that instigated it. And it doesn't matter what subsequently happens inside Libya as long as it isn't outright civil war. Problems can be glossed over. The only thing that would register in the spectacle is that the US and its allies had successfully piloted their own model for the Middle East, with the word 'quagmire' barely uttered.

Labels: barack obama, hegemony, libya, middle east, qadhafi, revolution, syria, US imperialism

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Libya posted by Richard Seymour

The war on Libya has not gone well. Kim Sengupta's report yesterday detailed this starkly:

"Fresh diplomatic efforts are under way to try to end Libya's bloody civil war, with the UN special envoy flying to Tripoli to hold talks after Britain followed France in accepting that Muammar Gaddafi cannot be bombed into exile.
"The change of stance by the two most active countries in the international coalition is an acceptance of realities on the ground. Despite more than four months of sustained air strikes by Nato, the rebels have failed to secure any military advantage. Colonel Gaddafi has survived what observers perceive as attempts to eliminate him and, despite the defection of a number of senior commanders, there is no sign that he will be dethroned in a palace coup.
"The regime controls around 20 per cent more territory than it did in the immediate aftermath of the uprising on 17 February."

If the Gadaffi regime is now more in control of Libya than before, then this completely undermines the simplistic view put about by the supporters of war - and unfortunately by some elements of the resistance - that the situation was simply one of a hated tyrant hanging on through mercenary violence. Of course, he uses whatever resources he has at his disposal, but a) it would seem that the involvement of imperialism has driven some Libyans back into the Gadaffi camp, as it's unlikely he would maintain control without some degree of support, and b) we know that rebellious sectors started to go back to Gadaffi within mere weeks of the revolt taking off, meaning in part that his resources of legitimising his regime were not exhausted even before the US-led intervention. Despite the defections, he has consolidated his regime in a way that would have seemed improbably in the early weeks of revolt. It's important to bear in mind what this means. Both Ben Ali and Mubarak had the support of the US and its major allies - especially Mubarak. They had considerable resources for repression, and there was financial aid being channelled to them, talks aimed at offering reforms to the opposition... and in the end they proved too brittle, too narrowly based, to stay in power. The state apparatus began to fragment and decompose. The protests kept spreading, and withstood the bloodshed. Nothing they could offer or threaten was sufficient. Gadaffi on the other hand has hung on in the face of not only a lack of support from his former imperialist allies, but active political, diplomatic and military opposition. That he did so to a considerable extent through sheer military superiority doesn't mean that the regime hasn't a real social basis.

Perhaps as important has been the weaknesses of the rebellion. I argued that the chief problem facing the revolt was that it had taken off before any civil society infrastructure had been built up to sustain the opposition. This meant that unrepresentative former regime elements were well-placed to step into the fray and take effective control. As a result of the defeats they faced, those arguing for an alliance with NATO grew stronger and gained more control. There's no question that if NATO really wanted to, they could defeat Gadaffi. It would, however, require a level of commitment (serious ground forces) that they aren't ready to use. I think this is because, far from this being a pre-planned wave of expansionism by the US, the decision to launch an aerial assault constituted a desperate act of crisis management which the 'realists' in the administration were never particularly happy with. Only the zealots of 'humanitarian intervention' could seriously have contemplated the kind of protracted, bloody land war in Libya that would have been necessary to win. So, the bet on an alliance with NATO now appears to have been doomed from the start, even on its own terms - even if the best outcome sought was nothing more than a slightly more liberal regime incorporated into the imperialist camp.

Now, what can Libya expect? The leading war powers are once more bruiting negotiations, but to what end? Gadaffi may be persuaded to abandon direct control, in which case the result will most likely be a moderately reformed continuity regime, with ties to European and US capital fully restored. There appears to be little prospect of his going into exile. But that's not all. The transitional council led by former regime elements continues to state that it is the only legitimate authority in Libya. It has been internationally recognised as such by a number of crucial powers. But this is pure cynicism. The imperialist powers know that the transitional council can't control all of Libya. They're certainly not taking any steps now to give them the military means to do so. So this means that the tendencies toward partion are sharpened. There are signs of such a resolution being offered as a 'temporary' measure to secure the peace and allow some process of national reconciliation to take place (note that this conflict has increasingly been described as a civil war). This would be economically disabling for all of Libya, including those territories controlled by the rebels. It would also be dangerous in ways that I hope I don't need to spell out.

The final justification for this debacle will be that speedy intervention, however half-hearted, prevented a massacre. Now, there may once have been reason to believe this. But there no longer is. Gadaffi has enough blood on his hands, and deserved to fall to the insurgents, but there's no reason to submit to war propaganda. In reality, as Patrick Cockburn put it, summarising the Amnesty report, "there is no proof of mass killing of civilians on the scale of Syria or Yemen". Which is an interesting way of putting it. It's no secret that the coalition that was supposedly preventing a genocidal bloodbath in Libya was actually behind much of the bloodshed in Yemen. This completely demolishes the last leg of the moral case for war. The 'humanitarian interventions' of the 1990s left the US in a stronger position, both geopolitically and ideologically. I'm not convinced that this will be the result of the bombing of Libya. In fact, if there was any idea that the US could offer an alternative model of development for the populations of the Middle East, it now lies in ruins. It is more than unfortunate that Libya had to be reduced to ruins for this to become apparent.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', cruise missile liberals, liberal imperialism, libya, NATO, obama, US imperialism