THE ROVING
EYE Mr Blowback rising
in Benghazi By Pepe Escobar
"Daddy, what is blowback?"
Here's
a fable to tell our children, by the fire, in a
not so-distant post-apocalyptic, dystopian future.
Once upon a time, during George "Dubya"
Bush's "war on terra", the Forces of Good in
Afghanistan captured - and duly tortured - one
evil terrorist, Abu Yahya al-Libi.
Abu
Yahya al-Libi was, of course, Libyan. He slaved
three years in the bowels of Bagram prison near
Kabul, but somehow managed to escape that
supposedly impregnable fortress in July 2005.
At the time, the Forces of Good were
merrily in bed with Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi in Libya
- whose intelligence services, to the delight of
the Bush administration, were doing their nastiest
to exterminate or at least isolate al-Qaeda-style
Salafi-jihadis of the al-Libi kind.
But,
then, in 2011, the Forces of Good, under new
administration, decided it was time to bury the oh
so passe "war on terra" and dance to a new, more
popular groove; humanitarian intervention, also
characterized as "kinetic military action".
So al-Libi was back from the dead - now
fighting side by side with the Forces of Good to
topple (and eventually snuff out) "evil" Col
Gaddafi. Al-Libi had become a "freedom fighter" -
even though he was openly calling for Libya to
become an Islamic Emirate.
The honeymoon
didn't last long.
In September 2012, for
the first time in three months, al-Qaeda leader
Ayman al-Zawahiri, aka The Surgeon, released a
42-minute video special to "celebrate" the 11th
anniversary of 9/11, finally admitting the
snuffing out of his number two.
His number
two was none other than Abu Yahya al-Libi -
targeted by one of US President Barack Obama's
cherished drones in Waziristan on June 4.
An immediate effect of al-Zawahiri's video
was that an angry armed mob, led by Islamist
outfit Ansar al Sharia, set fire to the US
consulate in Benghazi. The US ambassador to Libya,
Christopher Stevens, was killed. It didn't matter
that Stevens happened to be a hero of the "NATO
rebels" who had "liberated" Libya - notoriously
sprinkled with Salafi-jihadis of the al-Libi kind.
Stevens was rewarded by Washington with
the ambassadorial post only after "evil" Gaddafi
was finally sodomized, lynched and killed by, what
else, an angry mob.
So finally the
blowback serpent was able to bite its own tail.
Terra, terra, terra What
happened in Benghazi may have been just an
out-of-control protest against a crude, amateur,
made-in-California movie produced and directed by
an Israeli-American real estate developer and
certified Islamophobe (an identity now being
reported as a guise), financed with US$5 million
from unidentified Jewish donors, depicting Islam
"as a cancer" and Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer,
a pedophile and most of all, a fraud. The movie
was duly promoted by wacko Florida pastor and
Koran-burning freak Terry Jones.
Yet the
killing of the US ambassador in Libya is just an
hors d'oeuvre to what may happen in Syria - where
scores of "freedom fighters" supported by the CIA,
the Turks and the House of Saud are
al-Qaeda-linked, either via the supposedly
reformist Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) or
acronym-infested subcontracting gangs such as
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) or
al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM).
So how
will Washington "bring the perpetrators to
justice" in Libya? After all this is the same gang
that was hailed as "heroes" when they sodomized,
lynched and snuffed out "evil" Gaddafi.
Asia Times Online has been warning for
over a year about blowback in Libya - and
potentially in Syria, where medieval Saudi sheikhs
frantically issue fatwas legitimating a widespread
massacre of "infidel" Alawites. This is all a
rerun of the same old 1980s' Afghan jihad movie;
first you call them "freedom fighters", but when
they attack us they revert to being "terrorists".
Now we have NATO-armed Salafi-jihadis in
Libya, and House of Saud-financed and Turkey-based
Salafi-jihadis in Syria - deploying "terra" antics
such as suicide bombers to bring down the Assad
regime - all wired up and ready to roll. It
certainly adds a new meaning to Obama's "kinetic
action" gig.
Blowback - as in Afghanistan
- might have taken years. This time Mr Blowback
reared its ugly head in only a few months. And
that's just the beginning.
So what now?
Who're you gonna bomb? Who're you gonna drone to
death? What about bombing Benghazi a year after
condemning Gaddafi to death because he might have
threatened to ... bomb Benghazi?
Ask US
Secretary of State Hillary "We came, he saw, he
died" Clinton, who claims to talk on behalf of the
"Libyan people". Maybe she will come up with a
policy of retroactively aligning the US with
Gaddafi.
And since this is an electoral
year, why not ask invisible former president Bush
himself? After all, he proclaimed on September 20,
2001 that "either you are with us, or you are with
the terra-rists."
Well, Mr Blowback would
say, beware of what you get when you are in bed
with the terra-rists.
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