THE
ROVING EYE Queen Hillary of Libya
By Pepe Escobar
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follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt,
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The current stalemate in Libya could last
weeks, if not months. In that case, balkanization
looms. Think of eastern Libya with Benghazi as
capital, oil-rich and with a United
States-installed puppet regime (a Libyan Hamid
Karzai, like the Afghan president). It would be
like a kind of northern Africa Saudi Arabia (the
House of Saud would love it).
And think of
a western Libya with Tripoli as capital,
impoverished, angry and ruled by Muammar Gaddafi
and sons. If that applies, we're back to the
1950s; Libya as the new Korea. Or, more
ominously, back to the 1960s;
Libya as the new Vietnam.
Vietnam? No
wonder a paranoid Anglo-American-French consortium
will pull all stops to take out Gaddafi. They
don't want half a spring roll; they want the whole
kebab.
The queen's speech The
new Libyan government kingmaker is actually a
queen: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Any
doubts that the US State Department is now
frantically setting up a new government peppered
with English-speaking collaborators have been
dismissed after the London conference on Libya.
The "official" Libyan opposition used to
tautologically call itself "Interim Transitional
National Council". Now it's Interim National
Council (INC). Anyone running for cover to the
sound of the acronym INC is excused; it does bring
appalling memories of the Washington-propped Iraqi
National Congress and its fabled "weapons of mass
destruction" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq
in 2003.
And what about the INC's new
military commander, Khalifa Hifter - a former
Libyan army colonel who spent nearly 20 years in
Vienna, Virginia, not far from the Central
Intelligence Agency in Langley? Progressives will
love to learn that the romantic "rebels" are now
led by a CIA asset.
At the London
conference, the INC launched in style its slick
political manifesto - "A vision of democratic
Libya" - which makes all the right noises; freedom
of expression, presidential and parliamentary
elections, and crucially, the promise of "a state
that draws strength from our strong religious
beliefs in peace, truth, justice and equality".
This is - extremely polite - code for
Islam in post-Gaddafi Libya (so not to ruff
Western feathers). Along with the impeccable
English redaction, the whole thing screams, "slick
Western PR stunt". The council swears the platform
was originally drawn up in Arabic. It definitely
doesn't feel like a Google Translate job.
So the INC says the gift to the West for
the Tomahawks, Tornados and Rafales is going to be
a secular democracy. Someone else might say a
coalition of opportunists and military defectors
climbed upon the wave of mass radicalization in
northern Africa, profited from the absence of
political leadership among the working class and
middle class, and struck a military alliance with
Western imperialism. Which is more plausible?
The INC now is being paraded for the whole
world to see as a Western puppet - totally
dependent on political and military support.
Welcome to Libya as a Pentagon-style forward
operating base (FOB) - to the benefit of the
Pentagon itself (via Africom), Western oil majors,
and all manner of shady Anglo-French-American
business interests (see There's
no business as war business Asia Times Online
March 30 ). Welcome to a new Libya hosting a US
military base and NATO exercises, and not spending
oil money in sub-Saharan African development
projects.
As major players - the BRIC
countries and Germany – had already warned, United
Nations Security Council resolution 1973 is being
twisted like a pretzel. Queen Hillary now openly
says that arming the "rebels" is legal. Another
one of the queen's women combat squad, US
ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said the US had
"not ruled out" arming the rebels - mimicking the
exact wording of President Barack Obama.
Impressed, British Foreign Secretary William Hague
agreed. So did Qatar.
Meanwhile, NATO is
taking over. Literally. Starting this Thursday,
NATO's air strikes will be conducted out of the
Combined Air Operations Center at Poggio Renatico
base in Italy, 40 kilometers north of Bologna. But
that's just the start.
Admiral James
Stavridis, NATO's supreme allied commander for
Europe, told a US senate hearing in Washington
NATO was not considering ground forces in
post-Gaddafi Libya - at least not yet. But as NATO
had installed peacekeepers in the Balkans, added
Stavridis, "the possibility of a stabilization
regime exists".
There you have it - the
whole package; a Western puppet regime, Western
boots on the ground, a squalid Western
protectorate. Goodbye to Libya's sovereignty. And
this only a few hours after Obama passionately
told the world this was just a humanitarian
mission.
It requires major suspension of
disbelief that an Obama administration that keeps
unleashing drones and air strikes over civilians
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and - now and then
- Somalia is now deeply concerned with protecting
Libyan civilians. "Democratic" Israel may bomb
1,500 Lebanese civilians in 2006 or kill nearly
1,500 civilians in the winter of 2008/2009 in Gaza
- and no way there will be a UN resolution, or
Tomahawks flying, or righteous humanitarian
imperialists invoking R2P (“responsibility to
protect”) en masse.
In 1999, NATO almost
destroyed Belgrade to "protect civilians" in
Kosovo. Kosovo subsequently became an infinitely
corrupt protectorate ruled by a drug mafia. Cue to
echoes of neo-cons arguing that the real reason
for Washington to invade Iraq was to "protect"
Iraqis from the evil dictator Saddam by bringing
democracy (by shock and awe).
The stark
fact is that Washington - now with Anglo-French
help - is bombing yet another Muslim/Arab capital.
Miraculously - if one believes the Pentagon - with
zero "collateral damage".
And what
about the Ivory Coast? A true genocide is
about to happen in the Ivory Coast. There are
already one million internal refugees. The
"international community" - which now seems to
consist of the US, Britain, France, a few NATO
countries and a few Arab autocracies, with Qatar
as the superstar - has not emitted a peep.
Laurent Gbagbo lost a presidential
election in the Ivory Coast but has refused to
concede. He controls a huge militia armed to their
teeth - and they're going all guns blazing to
snatch elected opposition figures, intellectuals
and civil society leaders. Anyone who has
supported the winner of the election, Alassane
Ouattara, is fair game.
Shades of Gaddafi,
anyone? Better yet; shades of Rwanda in 1994,
Uganda in 2008 and Congo during the 1990s. Not a
few thousand dead civilians but hundreds of
thousands of dead civilians (and in the case of
Congo, perhaps as many as four million). Not a R2P
(responsibility to protect) squeak from the
"international community".
If the
Anglo-French-American consortium really wanted to
stop the violence in Libya the sensible solution
would have been to dispatch an UN fact-finding
commission to really analyze the facts on the
ground. No one really knows how many civilians
Gaddafi forces killed, or how many air strikes his
regime conducted. No one really knows how many
black Africans have been raped or murdered by the
“rebels”, who assumed they were Gaddafi
mercenaries.
Gaddafi himself agreed to an
independent UN commission. The first measure of
R2P is not to exercise the Tomahawk option; it is
to mediate, call for a ceasefire and start
negotiations.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan is correct when he says this
"humanitarian" war is fast becoming a "second
Iraq" or "another Afghanistan". He also said
Turkey is talking to both Gaddafi and the INC.
Sensibly - and as part of NATO - Turkey is about
to take over the harbor and the airport in
Benghazi to speed up humanitarian aid. If there is
a ceasefire the credit must go to Turkey - which
is working hard to establish a humanitarian
corridor, with support from Italy. Neo-Napoleonic
Arab liberator French President Nicolas Sarkozy
won't be amused.
Turkey is also linking up
with the African Union (AU) - which has been
totally marginalized by the Anglo-French-American
consortium. France and Britain may be paranoid
about the upcoming immigration waves from Africa,
now that Libya - which was the cop on the beat for
the Europeans - is not playing that role anymore.
Italy - already coping with waves and waves of new
arrivals at the isle of Lampedusa - at least is
trying to work in the humanitarian front alongside
Turkey.
There's no guarantee Turkey's
mediation efforts will work. The
Pentagon/Africom/NATO foreign intervention in
Libya - "legitimized" by a dodgy UN cover - is
shaping up as a counter-revolutionary master coup.
Make no mistake as to what is the ultimate target;
to squash the great 2011 Arab revolt momentum, to
show who's boss, and to present neo-colonialism
with a facelift. To see how it develops, one just
has to focus on Queen Hillary's speech.
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