Page 1 of
2 Another
take on Libya hubris for
China By Peter Lee
Western self-regard was on full display in
a United States headline describing the Libya
Contact Group confab in Istanbul over the weekend.
It read: World leaders open Libya talks in Turkey.
[1]
Well, US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton was there. Much-diminished leaders of
19th-century world powers Britain and France - and
first millennium world power Italy - were there,
too.
But attendance from the BRICS
countries was patchy: Nobody was there from
Russia, which boycotted the talks. China declined
to send a representative. Brazil and India only
sent observers, which meant they had no vote in
the proceedings. South Africa didn't attend, and
blasted the outcome of the meeting. [2]
It
is an indication of the altogether ghastly
reporting on Libya that
there has been little effort
to determine the Libya Contact Group's
constituting authority, its decision-making
processes, or even its membership, let alone the
legitimacy of its pretensions to set international
policy on Libya.
The LCG was formed in
London on March 29 under the auspices of the
United Kingdom, at a conference attended by 40
foreign ministers and a smattering of
international organizations. Its declared mission
was be to "support and be a focal point of contact
with the Libyan people, coordinate international
policy and be a forum for discussion of
humanitarian and post-conflict support". [3]
Since then, the group has met three times
and its attendance seems to have stabilized around
a core of 20 or 30 countries, mostly drawn from
members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), conservative oil-rich states in the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC), and GCC cadets Jordan,
Lebanon and Morocco. Dutiful ally Japan has also
tagged along.
The unambiguous American
template for Libya - and the LCG - is Kosovo,
another humanitarian bombing campaign cum regime
change exercise conducted by NATO in disregard of
the United Nations.
United States Deputy
Secretary of State James Steinberg invoked the
Kosovo precedent - and a prolonged diplomatic and
sanctions campaign that grew out of a
"humanitarian military action" - in testimony
before the US Congress on Libya:
Our approach is one that has
succeeded before. In Kosovo, we built an
international coalition around a narrow civilian
protection mission. Even after Milosevic
withdrew his forces and the bombing stopped, the
political and economic pressure continued.
Within two years, Milosevic was thrown out of
office and turned over to The Hague.
[4]
NATO decision-making is a rather
fraught exercise in consensus-building, especially
when it involves political as well as military
issues. NATO's military command draws its
legitimacy in Libya from UN resolution 1973 (the
infamous no-fly + protect civilians undertaking),
which it obviously interprets as it sees fit.
Political undertakings like the LCG appear to be
adjuncts to the military operation, a state of
affairs that has not served NATO particularly well
in Afghanistan.
NATO's political policy on
Libya is in the hands of the "North Atlantic
Council" or NAC; for obvious reasons this
crusaderish piece of nomenclature is not often
invoked in the Libyan situation.
A 2003
paper by the Congressional Research Service
described the decision-making process and applied
it to the Barack Obama administration's explicit
template for bombing people into freedom, the
Kosovo air war:
The NAC achieves consensus through a
process in which no government states its
objection. A formal vote in which governments
state their position is not taken. During the
Kosovo conflict, for example, it was clear to
all governments that Greece was immensely
uncomfortable with a decision to go to war. NATO
does not require a government to vote in favor
of a conflict, but rather to object explicitly
if it opposes such a decision. Athens chose not
to object, knowing its allies wished to take
military action against Serbia. In contrast to
NATO, the EU seeks unanimity on key issues.
[5]
In other words, the dominant
powers decide the policy; then it is up to the
other guys to decide if they wish to undermine
NATO's unity, credibility and image by obstructing
the mission.
Inside NATO, it appears that
most countries choose to opt out in order to
affirm their diplomatic, doctrinal or political
concerns, but not raise a formal, explicit
objection.
For instance, when NATO took
over the Libya mission, a US State Department
official noted:
With respect to the Germans, Germans
have made from the very beginning a very clear -
a clear statement that they would not
participate militarily with their own troops in
any operation. But they've also made clear that
they would not block any activity by NATO to
move forward. [6]
Long story short:
it's likely that NATO countries vote as a bloc
when it comes to LCG matters.
GCC
decision-making is even more opaque, but it is not
unreasonable to assume that the smaller states are
voting in a bloc with lead member Saudi Arabia on
the Libya issue.
In other words, NATO and
the GCC get their ducks in a row before the LCG
meetings, which appear to be political
window-dressing to convince Western opinion, at
least, that a legitimate international process -
well, maybe not quite as legitimate as UN debate -
is going on.
China and Russia recognize
the LCG as an effort by the proponents of military
intervention in Libya to take the political bit in
their teeth as well, in order to keep any further
Libya discussions out of the UN Security Council
where China and Russia - which were spectacularly
burned by Resolution 1973 - would undoubtedly
wield their veto power to the fullest to sidetrack
the NATO/GCC-led campaign.
China has been
relatively circumspect in its criticisms of the
LCG, politely declining Turkey's invitation to
join the Istanbul meeting - and thereby adding a
further veneer of political legitimacy to the
exercise - with the statement that it would skip
the meeting "because the function and method of
operation of this contact group need further
study". [7]
The Russians have been much
more blunt. In May, Russian Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov declared that it was the LCG, and
not Muammar Gaddafi, that had a legitimacy
problem:
"The contact group is a
self-appointed organizational structure that
somehow made itself responsible for how the (UN)
resolution is carried out," Mr Lavrov said ...
"From the point of view of international
law this group has no legitimacy."
[8]
In rejecting the Turkish
invitation to join the meeting in Istanbul, the
Russian Foreign Ministry reiterated its
objections:
[W]e were called upon many times to
join this Group by our other partners through
various channels ... At the same time, the
Russian approach to this issue has not changed.
We are not a member of the Group and do not
participate in its work. This applies to the
upcoming meeting in Istanbul as well.
[9]
In the most unflattering
construction, therefore, the LCG is not a united
effort by "the leaders of the world"; it is an
effort to circumvent the UN Security Council,
largely coordinated by Atlantic ex-colonial powers
and anxious Arab autocrats who are most deeply
committed to the bombing campaign against Gaddafi.
That effort is not going particularly
well. NATO has strayed well beyond its "protect
civilians" UN mandate - or, at the very least,
creatively interpreted the mandate so as to render
its intent and limitations meaningless - to
conduct air operations against Gaddafi's forces
for the past four months.
Nevertheless,
the Libyan rebels have been unable to drive
Gaddafi from power and thereby demonstrate the
potency of Western arms and self-righteous
bluster, even when exercised at safe distance and
through enthusiastic proxies against an isolated
Third World potentate.
At Counterpunch,
Alexander Coburn excoriated the rebels, the media
and Western delusions that this would be a quick
and politically advantageous war: He wrote:
In a hilarious inside account of the
NATO debacle, Vincent Jauvert of Le Nouvel
Observateur has recently disclosed that French
intelligence services assured [President
Nicolas] Sarkozy and foreign minister [Alain]
Juppe "from the first [air] strike, thousands of
soldiers would defect from Gaddafi". They also
predicted that the rebels would move quickly to
Sirte, the hometown of the Qaddafi and force him
to flee the country. This was triumphantly and
erroneously trumpeted by the NATO powers which
even proclaimed that he had flown to Venezuela.
By all means opt for the Big Lie as a propaganda
ploy, but not if it is inevitably going to be
discredited 24 hours later.
"We
underestimated al-Gaddafi," one French officer
told Jauvert. "He was preparing for forty-one
years for an invasion. We did not imagine he
would adapt as quickly. No one expects, for
example, to transport its troops and missile
batteries, Gaddafi will go out and buy hundreds
of Toyota pick-up in Niger and Mali. It is a
stroke of genius: the trucks are identical to
those used by the rebels. NATO is paralyzed. It
delays its strikes. Before bombing the vehicles,
drivers need to be sure they are whose forces
are Gaddafi's. ‘We asked the rebels to a
particular signal on the roof of their pickup
truck, said a soldier, but we were never sure.
They are so disorganized ...' "
[10]
In fact, it appears that an
important purpose of the Istanbul meeting was to
jumpstart the ineffectual efforts by the Libyan
rebels and, in particular, deal with calls by
Turkey and the Organization of the Islamic
Conference (OIC) for a ceasefire during the Muslim
holy month of Ramadan (approximately August 1 to
August 29 this year).
Ramadan is
traditionally a time of fasting and peaceful
reflection. In Libya, it would also undoubtedly be
an opportunity for Gaddafi to regroup his forces
and engage with the myriad interlocutors and
negotiators - in addition to African Union, France
and Italy were also reportedly meeting with
Gaddafi's representatives - who were trying to end
the embarrassing mess.
Both Turkey and the
OIC - as well as otherwise disengaged Islamic
power Indonesia - have warned NATO that continuing
the bombing campaign during Ramadan would be a
dangerous political miscue.
Therefore, to
guard against the dread prospect of peace breaking
out in unwelcome ways post Ramadan - and Gaddafi
remaining in Tripoli without having received the
necessary chastisement by the righteous democratic
powers - the LCG made two important decisions:
First, it recognized the Transitional
National Council (TNC) headquartered in Benghazi
as the legitimate government of Libya, declared
that Gaddafi's regime had lost its legitimacy,
thereby pre-emptively taking Gaddafi's political
survival off the table.
This was despite
the fact that the TNC probably controls less than
half of Libya's sparse population and vast
territory while Gaddafi is still in firm control
of the western half of the country, most of the
population, and the capital.
Foreign
Policy's Joshua Keating noted that, before Libya,
only twice has the United States declined to
acknowledge the legitimacy of a nation's ruling
power.
First, in 1913, president Woodrow
Wilson, who objected to the unsavory (and
suspected anti-US business) tendencies of Mexico's
strongman of the moment, Vicotriano Huerta, and
refused to recognize his government until it
collapsed, courtesy of Pancho Villa and the US
occupation of Veracruz.
The second was
China; the United States quixotically not only
refused to recognize the communist conquest of the
mainland for 50 years; it also countenanced Chiang
Kai-shek's pretensions to rule all of China, even
as he exercised sway over only the formerly
marginal province of Taiwan. [11]
The
recognition of the TNC supposedly served the
purpose of unlocking the frozen-asset goodie room
for the Benghazi forces, which were officially
blessed as freedom-loving, not riddled with
al-Qaeda sympathizers, and committed to the
honoring of previous foreign contracts in Libya,
thereby reducing the cash-strapped Western forces'
financial exposure to the Libyan imbroglio in
general and the TNC in particular.
It is a
rather amusing sidelight to the conflict that the
Western powers, laboring through recessions,
cutbacks in government services, and overall
political disgruntlement, have taken certain steps
to minimize the stated cost of the Libya
intervention.
Brad Sherman, a US
Congressman from California - and an accountant -
pointed out that the US has decided to count only
marginal expenditures as costs of the Libyan
conflict: that means direct costs such as
munitions and fuel consumed and combat pay
disbursed, giving a misleading idea of how much it
costs to pound even a third-rate power into
submission.
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