SC286-1

https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/17/humanitarian-imperialism-created-the-libyan-nightmare/

Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan Nightmare

 

NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe.  

“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die.  Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias. 

The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel —  the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing. 

“The fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.

Taalas told reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.”

Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya – as it did Iraq – as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist. 

Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.

Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S.  Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media.

There is no official tally of the casualties in Libya that have resulted directly and indirectly from the violence in Libya over the last 12 years. This is exacerbated by the fact that NATO failed to investigate casualties resulting from its seven month bombardment of the country in 2011. But the total figure of those killed and injured is likely in the tens of thousands. Action on Armed Violence recorded “8,518 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Libya” from 2011 to 2020,  6,027 of which were civilian casualties.

In 2020, a statement published by seven U.N. agencies reported that “Close to 400,000 Libyans have been displaced since the start of the conflict nine years ago — around half of them within the past year, since the attack on the capital, Tripoli, [by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar’s forces] started.”

“The Libyan economy has been battered by the [civil war], the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the World Bank reported in April of this year. “The country’s fragility is having far-reaching economic and social impact. GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,” the report says. “This suggests that Libya’s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict. Economic growth in 2022 remained low and volatile due to conflict-related disruptions in oil production.”

Amnesty International’s 2022 Libya report also makes for grim reading. “Militias, armed groups and security forces continued to arbitrarily detain thousands of people,” it says. “Scores of protesters, lawyers, journalists, critics and activists were rounded up and subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and forced ‘confessions’ on camera.” Amnesty describes a country where militias operate with impunity, human rights abuses, including kidnappings and sexual violence, are widespread. It adds that “EU-backed Libyan coastguards and the Stability Support Authority militia intercepted thousands of refugees and migrants at sea and forcibly returned them to detention in Libya. Detained migrants and refugees were subjected to torture, unlawful killings, sexual violence and forced labour.”

Reports by the U.N. Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) are no less dire.

Stockpiles of weapons and ammunition — estimated to be between 150,000 and 200,000 tons — were looted from Libya with many being trafficked to neighboring states. In Mali, weapons from Libya fuelled a dormant insurgency by the Tuareg, destabilizing the country. It ultimately led to a military coup and a jihadist insurgency which supplanted the Tuareg, as well as a protracted war between the Malian government and jihadists.  This triggered another French military intervention and led to 400,000 people being displaced. Weapons and ammunition from Libya also made their way into other parts of the Sahel including Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso. 

The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights. 

The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes. 

Gaddafi — who I interviewed for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 — and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.

Hillary Clinton’s emails, obtained via a freedom of information request and published by WikiLeaks, also expose France’s concerns about Gaddafi’s efforts to “provide Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French Fran (CFA).” Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported on his conversations with French intelligence officers about the motivations of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the chief architect of the attack on Libya. Blumenthal writes that the French president seeks “a greater share of Libyan oil”, increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power and an end to Gaddafi’s attempts to supplant French influence in “Francophone Africa.”

Sarkozy, who has been convicted on two separate cases of corruption and breach of campaign finance laws, faces a historic trial in 2025 for allegedly receiving millions of euros in secret illegal campaign contributions from Gadaffi, to assist with his successful 2007 presidential bid.            

These were the real “crimes” in Libya. But the real crimes always remain hidden, papered over by florid rhetoric about democracy and human rights. 

The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.  The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues. 

The nightmares we orchestrated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are minimized or ignored by the press while the benefits are exaggerated or fabricated. And since the U.S. does not recognize the International Criminal Court, there is no chance of any American leader being held accountable for their crimes.

Human rights advocates have become a vital cog in the imperial project. The extension of U.S. power, they argue, is a force for good. This is the thesis of Samantha Power’s book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” They champion the R2P doctrine, unanimously adopted in 2005 at the U.N. World Summit. Under this doctrine, states are required to respect the human rights of their citizens. When these rights are violated, then sovereignty is nullified. Outside forces are permitted to intervene. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, warned in 2009 that R2P could be misused “to justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.” 

“Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world’s leading economic and military powers, above all, the United States, in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks,” writes Jean Bricmont in “Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War.”  “Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, [a] large part of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention, discovering new ‘Hitlers’ as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.” 

The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to “worthy” victims while “unworthy” victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yeminis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are  Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

Utopian social engineering is always catastrophic. It creates power vacuums that augment the suffering of those the utopianists claim to protect. The moral bankruptcy of the liberal class, which I chronicle in “Death of the Liberal Class,” is complete. Liberals have prostituted their supposed values to the Empire. Incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict, they clamor for more destruction and death to save the world. 

....

https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/09/16/war-money-and-americas-future/

War, Money, and America’s Future

When Richard Nixon lost the election to John F. Kennedy, Nixon told supporters, “I know Jack Kennedy. He’s a patriot.” Nixon knew that the nation would be safe in President Kennedy’s hands.

Most Americans do not have the same confidence in President Biden. In April 2023, fewer than four in ten U.S. adults (37 percent) said they approved of Joe Biden’s job performance as president, with six in ten saying they disapproved. By a 2-to-1 margin, American voters now believe controlling the U.S. border is more important than helping Ukraine fight Russia. For the first time in 30 years, the U.S. Government’s interest payments on the sovereign debt equal defense spending. 

These revelations would shake the confidence of any White House, but there is much more for Washington and its NATO Allies to consider. Alleged efforts by the Department of State to freeze the conflict in Ukraine are dismissed out of hand in Moscow by every knowledgeable observer of the Russian government. In the absence of a freeze, Washington has no idea how to end the 600-day conflict. 

Meanwhile, the Biden Administration’s sanctions continue to seriously weaken the collective West. European economies are sliding toward recession. Germany’s economy, the largest in the Eurozone, is stagnating for the third quarter in a row. In 2022, German automakers produced nearly 40 percent fewer vehicles than they did 10 years ago. In the words of one of Germany’s leading industrialists, Germany’s deindustrialization has begun. 

However, it is Washington’s proxy war with Moscow and the war’s battlefield impact, combined with the economic consequences, that are shifting the balance of power in Moscow’s favor. According to open-source intelligence, Ukrainian losses suggest that Ukrainian soldiers are being killed at a rate comparable to or greater than the World War I experience, when an estimated 1.7 million soldiers in the Russian Army died from all causes in three years of fighting.

The art of war is always subject to the impact of technology and Ukraine’s war with Russia is no exception. Ukrainian soldiers are courageous, but Ukrainian forces, like U.S. and Allied NATO forces, are still organized to refight a version of World War II. This condition is a recipe for defeat against a Russian military establishment organized for 21^st century warfare.  

Today, Russian strike weapons——linked to persistent, overhead surveillance within dense, integrated air and missile defenses create battlefield conditions like those the German army experienced in the last year of World War II. From the moment the U.S. and British-Canadian armies landed in Normandy, 5,000 U.S. and British fighter aircraft in the air over Western Europe made it impossible for German ground forces to maneuver. The entire German air force was defending German cities against U.S. and British bombers. Without tactical air cover or support, German formations could move only at night, and never in daylight. 

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky puts on a fine show of confidence, but he makes no secret of the lagging popular support in Europe and the United States for Washington’s proxy war. He knows NATO is in trouble. Frankly, the alliance was never designed to wage offensive warfare against anyone. Events in the Balkans during the 1990s began the awkward evolution that tried to transform NATO into an offensive instrument of U.S. national security strategy. Yet NATO’s forces are not prepared for high-end conventional warfare.

Predictably, voters in NATO’s thirty-two member states are questioning the wisdom of outsourcing their national security and economic health to their own and Washington’s globalist elites. Still, Europeans must soon decide whether to sacrifice what little remains of their respective national sovereignty and economic health in the name of NATO or suspend aid to the Zelensky regime and negotiate directly with Moscow. Total European contributions to the proxy war of about $167 billion are greater than Washington’s contribution.

Confronted with a weak economy, higher yields and lower prices for Treasury bonds, the Biden administration and its partner on Capitol Hill, the Washington “uniparty,” really have two choices: First, cut U.S. and Allied losses in Ukraine, reduce discretionary spending, and focus on domestic emergencies at the Southern Border and in America’s largest cities. Or second, the Administration and the uniparty can escalate the conflict with Moscow. 

The White House’s announced intention to ship Army Tactical Missile Systems with a 300-kilometer range along with German Taurus cruise missiles and other strike weapons to Ukraine would seem to indicate Washington’s preference for escalation. But no one weapon system can fundamentally alter the truth that Ukrainian forces grow weaker with each passing day. 

Nowhere is the potential for confrontation with Russian military power greater than in the Black Sea. Yet between September 11 and 15, Romanian, British, French, and Turkish forces together with U.S. maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft Poseidon, diver-engineers with boats and specialized equipment, will conduct Operation Sea Breeze 23.3 near the Danube Delta. Since commercial vessels are sailing from the Black Sea into the Danube River without Russian interference it is unclear why the exercise in the Danube Delta is necessary. 

Sadly, pushing dangerous conditions to the brink of conflict is nothing new in the conduct of U.S. foreign and defense policy. After Desert Storm in 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, American power and influence grew exponentially. Washington’s appetite for filling allegedly “ungoverned spaces” with American military power was insatiable. Washington was free for 30 years to intervene with American military power when and where it liked establishing new “frontiers of insecurity” in the Balkans, Southwest Asia, the Middle East, or North Africa. 

The Washington uniparty (corporate oligarchs, public health officials, mainstream media, social media, deep state agencies, academia, Hollywood, and an assortment of dubious international agencies like the UN/WHO/WEF) swiftly invested trillions to advance globalization with U.S. military power. Whenever the armed forces were committed to action, a series of administrations were always ready to defer to ineffective, even failed, military commanders. 

Wasteful defense spending, excessive redundancy in capability, and resistance to badly needed change in force design and modernization are now revealing that the U.S. Armed Forces are ill-suited to modern high-end conventional warfare. The fighting in Ukraine demonstrates that Washington can no longer ignore the influence of geography, culture, and economics, all of which operate as constraints on the use of American military power. 

The age of abundant wealth and unconstrained defense spending is nearing its end. How Washington reacts to these realities will determine America’s future.