THE
ROVING EYE Libyans and Bahrainis sheikh,
rattle and roll By Pepe Escobar
To follow Pepe's articles on the Great
Arab Revolt, please click here.
The "enlightened" West has just sent a
message to the rebelling Libyan people; Muammar
Gaddafi's forces will have to dissolve you into a
sea of blood before we decide to do anything. And
even if we do, it may be too late. Sorry.
As for the African king of kings, he just
had to slightly step on the gas to overtake those
stone pillars of bureaucratic inertia - the United
Nations, the European Union, the Arab League; now
he's on a roll, after Ajdabiya has practically
fallen, only 150 kilometers away from Benghazi
along a virtually empty desert road. Liberated
eastern Libya is sheikh, rattled and rolled.
Gaddafi called the West's bluff - and he's
winning. He laughed on
the abject Anglo-French
failure to impose a no-fly zone (not that he
cared; he prefers to use heavy artillery and
tanks). He saw the White House's inertia as the
House of Saud savagely preempted last Friday's
"Day of Rage." He registered the White House
silence as Saudi Arabia invaded Bahrain on Monday.
He noticed how, for Washington, regime
change is unthinkable in both Bahrain and Saudi
Arabia. And as much as the West wants regime
change in Libya, he concluded, they won't risk
anything to accomplish it. He might have glanced
at the Economist Intelligence Unit democracy index
and noticed that Libya ranks 158th, and Saudi
Arabia 160th. We're equals - he must have thought;
we both have oil; and we won't go down.
In
both Libya and Bahrain the great 2011 Arab revolt
seems to have reached the red line. Regime change
stops here - with the House of Saud ranked at the
top of the Arab dictatorial pyramid, followed by
its minions, the Gulf kingdoms and sheikhdoms.
The cherry in the hypocrisy cake is that
last week Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) foreign
ministers declared that Gaddafi's regime had
become "illegitimate". They called on the Arab
League to "shoulder its responsibilities in taking
necessary measures to stop the bloodshed" - even
as Bahrain's repression machine had already shot
unarmed civilians and Saudi Arabia's had
threatened to do the same.
And don't
expect Qatar's al-Jazeera to the rescue; it is
favorably covering the Saudi invasion of Bahrain,
after largely ignoring weeks of protests. Call it
the GCC's esprit de corps. Bahrain's King
Hamad al-Khalifa has declared a three-month state
of emergency - which apologists insist is not
martial law - and authorized the head of his armed
forces to do whatever it takes to quell the
protests, as in killing his own people.
Watch the red lines Gaddafi's
military officers also saw which way the
repressive desert winds would continue to blow;
heavy bombing and heavy shelling would take them
to the (recaptured) promised land. For his part,
top rebel military commander General Abdel Fattah
Younis, Gaddafi's former interior minister who now
has a $4 million bounty on his head, had betted
the farm on his sapper teams locating Gaddafi's
tank and artillery positions, and then going for
sabotage. It didn't work. He drew the red line in
Adjabiya; the line fell in just one day. He's only
left with desperate street-by-street fighting -
but Gaddafi won't commit troops; his strategy is
bombing and shelling to kingdom come.
The
Battle of Benghazi will be the rebels' last stand.
As the seaside road splits at Ajdabiya, the
Gaddafi machine will bypass Benghazi, seize towns
to the east, near the Egyptian border, and then
lay siege to Benghazi from both sides. Appalling
bloodshed looms.
History may soon prove
that the White House actually barred the
Anglo-French double bill - explicitly - from doing
anything about Libya. Gaddafi was a "terrorist",
then "our bastard", now a "thug", but he is a thug
Washington knows. Since the beginning Washington
feared an Islamist-tinged post-Gaddafi. It's
irrelevant that the Benghazi provisional
government has revealed itself to be tribal and
nationalist. Gaddafi cannily insisted on an
al-Qaeda-conducted rebellion because he knew that
would stick - as it did.
And the West
won't even get the oil in the end. Gaddafi has
just told German TV that Western corporations -
unless they are German (because the country was
against a no-fly zone) - can kiss goodbye to
Libya's energy bonanza; "We do not trust their
firms, they have conspired against us ... Our oil
contracts are going to Russian, Chinese and Indian
firms." In other words: BRICS members.
In
fairness, US President Barack Obama could not but
act as a mummy. After the preemptive, unilateral,
Bush/neo-cons hegemonic orgy, he could not afford
another imperialist US invasion of a Muslim
nation. Especially as the White House must have
noticed how the US's moral capital in the Arab
world is virtually zero.
Moreover, the
White House knew China - not to mention fellow
BRICS members - was and remains against any
intervention. China holds enormous interests in
Africa and does not want to rock the boat. And to
top it off, with a trillion-dollar deficit, you
can't exactly afford to splurge on no-fly zones;
your cash-strapped voters believe they should the
object of humanitarian rescue, not distant
Libyans.
The outlook is grim. There won't
be regime change. Instead, there will be a tsunami
of blood. The US cavalry won't come to the rescue.
And we will all duly watch it on al-Jazeera like
silent sheep.
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