Did NATO's Libyan "Liberation" Blow-Up In Their Faces

During NATO's bombing campaign to dominate and destroy the Libyan revolution liberate Libya last year, I wrote that their real interests lie with intervening into the Arab Spring in such a way as to bend it towards European and American ends. The other driving motivation behind the intervention was to counter China's growing hegemony on the African continent.

For a number of years China has quietly been increasing its capital investments and trade relationships with a number of African countries. From the point of view of the African governments - more or less democratic or repressive - China's involvement has been more heartily welcome than that of Europe and North America for the simple reason that China's money, etc. comes with no (apparent) strings. No doubt this is a product of two factors. The first is that European and North American governmental policies with regards to Africa are based upon a set of vile racist and colonialist assumptions about Africa. And going along with that is a never-ending jogging for influence via proxy armies and direct interventions.

Secondly, China is the new kid on the block, or the new store on the block. And they have learned from lengthy experience that the way to break into new markets is by offering better deals than the old stores. This is the oldest trick in the export market book. Think way back to Japan's Honda cars, which were basically disposable, cheap cars way back in the 1970s. Now they are semi-luxury sedans. Ditto Hyundai from the South Koreans. And, of course, with China you can say that about everything they make. From dollar store trinkets and laughably constructed toys for kids they are now the manufacturer of choice for every high tech company in the west from Apple to HP to IBM (who sold off their PC division to China, which renamed it Lenovo and made it massively successful - oops!).

Now, transpose that method into one that is geared towards the developing world and building the influence of China as a nation that needs major raw material inputs. You begin to see their method and its success. It also makes clear the real reason why China (along with Russia) is so opposed to Syria becoming another Libya. It has nothing whatsoever to do with national self-determination and opposition to imperialism - any more than western hand-wringing and sanctions has anything to do with concern for human rights or democracy. If you don't believe me about the latter, I will only point out that the US gives $1.3 billion to the Egyptian army every year specifically to finance the security services - never mind the money and weapons that are sold or given to every dictatorship in the region. As for China's interest in self-determination - Tibet and Xinjiang provide clear and bloody refutation of any delusions in that direction.

All of that is background to the fact that NATO's intentions in Libya seem to be blowing up in their faces - a reminder that besides death and misery, the thing that war produces most of is irony. Within Libya itself, the prospective client regime is having its own difficulties living up to the hopes of NATO. Not only are elements of Gaddafi's former supporters giving it military troubles - witness the recent recapture of Bani Walid by a pro-Gaddafi militia - but even in the TNC stronghold of Benghazi there have been violent protests against the new bosses.

In the rest of Africa the knock-on effect of NATO's forceful intervention in the Libyan conflict has not been to make Africa more compliant and open to western demands. Rather, it has pushed African governments deeper into China's embrace, as evidenced by the keynote delivered at this past week's African Union summit delivered by a senior Chinese diplomat in the new AU HQ that was built with Chinese money and with the announcement that China would step into the financing void left by Gaddafi's overthrow. While this irony has a certain deliciousness to it, it also has serious and potentially bloody dangers. Europe - with its old world sense of aristocratic entitlement - and the USA - with its belligerent, cowboyish sense of entitlement - are unlikely to let the matter lie. What is more likely is that the immediate future of Africa will see an intensifications of covert and over interventions to try to regain hegemony. That, of course, is a recipe for further instability and war in Africa and greater inter-imperialist rivalry more generally.

African Union embraces generous Chinese financing - The Globe and Mail:

'via Blog this'

Libya: France Gets Oil Contracts, Arab Dictatorships Get To Back Slap

Yesterday saw the "Friends of Libya" carve-up conference in Paris where everyone sought to get in on the reconstruction and oil contract action. Besides the announcement that $15 billion in frozen Gaddafi funds would be released to the National Transition Council, there was also the spectacle of speeches by all and sundry congratulating themselves on a job well done. This sort of grandstanding is, of course, de rigeur, at such international conferences but it takes on a particular irony here. For instance, the Kuwaiti foreign minister, Sheikh Dr. Mohammed Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah, that is, a member of the al-Sabah family monarchy that rules Kuwait with an iron fist, announced without a hint of irony:

"Libya will see a new era featuring security, stability, and respect for rights, freedoms and equality," the Kuwaiti official told participants at the meeting. "I would like to seize this opportunity to pay tribute to the sons of Libya who sacrificed themselves in defense of the liberty and dignity of their homeland," he added.

No doubt Kuwait will now introduce democracy, equality for women and the large immigrant workforce that have no civil rights. And since world leaders had shown up to pile the lies on the conference floor like horseshit outside a barn, French President Nikolas Sarkozy couldn't bear to miss the opportunity to throw his own excrement on the heap:

"We have aligned with the Arab people in their aspiration for freedom."

Aligned with the Arab people? Really? Sarkozy and the French government were loyal to the Tunisian dictator Ben Ali right up until the end. And, like the Americans, they denied that the Egyptians wanted to overthrow their own dictator - or, in the case of the US vice president, denied that Mubarak was even a dictator.

Then there is the great Arabian memory hole known as Bahrain and Yemen. It is as though the democracy movements in those countries don't exist - even as the Bahraini monarchy continues persecuting the Shia majority, arresting activists, and  killing children. In fact, there were major demonstrations and street battles with the Bahrain police force going on at the same time as the conference, which was attended by representatives of the Bahraini monarchy. The king even paid tribute "to the Libyan people":

"Our stance stems from Bahrain's commitment to Libya's independence, territorial integrity, regional security in addition to ensuring the security of its people so that it could assume its role as an active member of the international community and its Arab and regional environment," he said.

At least he didn't have the audacity to use words like freedom and liberty, unlike the Kuwaiti foreign minister. However, not a single world leader, including the leaders of the Libyan provisional government, the NTC, drew a connection between Libya and Bahrain. Perhaps that has something to do with the agreements and meetings that have already taken place between the NTC and the Gulf monarchies.

And Yemen only makes it on the radar of the US media these days when the US military celebrates another unmanned drone attack on "al Qaeda" rebels in the desert. In case you had any doubts about the reason for this blood-soaked hypocrisy, you just have to follow the money.

Hours before the Paris bash, French daily Liberation published on its website a letter written only 17 days after UN Resolution 1973. In the letter, the TNC ratifies an agreement ceding no less than 35% of Libya's total crude oil production to France in exchange of Sarko's "humanitarian" support.
The letter is addressed to the office of the emir of Qatar (the go-between for the TNC and France from the beginning) - with a copy to then-Arab League secretary general, Amr Moussa. The letterhead is supplied by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Libya.

On one level this isn't too surprising. The NTC has used bribery pretty much from the start to win military backing for the rebellion, stating that countries which supported them would win contracts. Those that didn't - not so much. Sorry, China, Russia and Africa.

Of course one hopes that the true aspirations of the Libyan people to overthrow an extremely repressive dictator are realized. But there is a difference between hope and delusion and attempts to paint political differences between the NTC and, for instance, the rebel commanders in Tripoli have proven to be empty. Evidence for this couldn't be clearer from the fluff piece in today's New York Times about the military commander of Tripoli, Abdulhekim Belhaj. Belhaj is a longstanding Islamist who led the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and spent time in Gaddafi's jail - after being sent back to Libya under the USA's extraordinary rendition program. Here he suffered torture for years before finally signing a recantation. Belhaj is quoted as claiming that he never had any association with al Qaeda.

“We focused on Libya and Libya only,” he said. “Our goal was to help our people. We didn’t participate in or support any action outside of Libya. We never had any link with Al Qaeda, and that could never be. We had a different agenda; global fighting was not our goal.”

Except that his statements don't appear to square with the history of LIFG and his own role within it:

After the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1996, the LIFG kept two training camps in Afghanistan; one of them, 30 kilometers north of Kabul - run by Abu Yahya - was strictly for al-Qaeda-linked jihadis. After 9/11, Belhaj moved to Pakistan and also to Iraq, where he befriended none other than ultra-nasty Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ...
Crucially, still in 2007, then al-Qaeda's number two, Zawahiri, officially announced the merger between the LIFG and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM). So, for all practical purposes, since then, LIFG/AQIM have been one and the same - and Belhaj was/is its emir. In 2007, LIFG was calling for a jihad against Gaddafi but also against the US and assorted Western "infidels".

What's interesting about this isn't so much that Belhaj was an Islamist - a lot of government opponents in the Middle East and North Africa, fighting against secular nationalist regimes, were Islamist guerillas. What is interesting is the attempt to cover up his history, assert his fidelity to western-approved goals - "Now this man... is a grateful ally of the United States and NATO." - and to downplay his importance in the storming of Tripoli - "“He was nothing, nothing. He arrived at the last moment..." - even though he was elected by the rebel fighters themselves as the commander of Tripoli. Not likely if he just wandered into town the day before last.

Besides demonstrating the levels of dishonesty in the NTC, in the service of the propaganda needs of their NATO backers, it also suggests that even rank and file leaders like Belhaj accept the general program of the NTC. That doesn't necessarily mean there won't be resistance to the neo-liberal program of the NTC that is emerging - or to the fact that no elections for the presidency are planned for 20 months, with elections to a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution in eight months. But when pre-eminent rebel leaders like Belhaj are saying that their intention is to dissolve their rebel militas as soon as possible and submit to the command of the NTC, this begs the question of what mechanisms will exist to organize and mobilize any opposition.

Goodbye Gaddafi, Hello NATO

There will be much celebrating across Libya over the next several days even as the mop-up operations get under way. Of course, there's no guarantee that this will be over for a while. It's hard to know what kind of resistance to the rebel victory will remain - amongst regime elements and Libyan tribes that weren't allied with the rebels. But for the moment there seems to be euphoria and you can't really begrudge Libyans that excitement - their dictator has just been overthrown.

But who will replace him? That is the question that now burns in Libya. All indications are that the National Transition Council led by Mahmoud Jabril - a CIA man - will have the support of NATO in consolidating a new Libya regime. As a pre-condition to winning the military support of NATO and political recognition by NATO countries and their allies, the TNC has already agreed to maintain the central policies that had previously endeared Gaddafi to the US and Europe. Oil contracts will all be respected (though I wonder about those of China and, to a lesser extent Russia), as will treaties that make Libya the immigration gendarme of northern Africa, keeping Africans from fleeing poverty and war.

Some will want to turn the enthusiasm for the deposing of Gaddafi into a picture of revolution and liberation - a further deepening of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. But this is to miss some fundamentally different dynamics. Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt were supported by imperialism until the end. Now, of course, the US is in favour of democracy in Egypt - or rather, supports the Egyptian military council that runs the country in the name of future democracy (while jailing pro-democracy activists, trade unionists, and others). In Libya, a section of the ruling class - ironically, the one most aligned with Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam - broke from the regime early. No doubt this was rooted in the more fractious and regionalized Libyan context, whereas in Egypt tribalism plays almost no part in politics. But it mean that before the revolution could establish independent organizations the initiative was seized by opportunists, Gaddafi insiders and, ultimately, CIA/NATO bagmen.

The independent initiative of the early days was snuffed out as the revolution was subordinated to the command structures of the TNC and, in the west, those of Misurata. Even here some on the left have tried to suggest that the rivalry between Tripolitania-based Misurata and Cyrenaica-based Benghazi has some political basis, that perhaps the Misurata leadership have asserted their independence from the TNC based upon some principled opposition to imperialism or cronyism. But this is without any evidence. It is more likely part of the emerging dynamic of regional and tribal power-brokering. Certainly, the leadership in Misurata were happy to accept NATO advisors and air support. There were no complaints about the conditions imposed by NATO.

All of this means that the likely course of action now will be that a NATO-brokered agreement, using the carrot of frozen Gaddafi funds and market access along with the stick of being excluded, will establish a unified state under the control of a national unity government of various groups. If they don't fall out - as has already been happening to a certain extent, evidenced by the assassination of rebel military commander Younis - they will turn their attention to disarming the irregular militias or incorporating them into the military command structure. The norms of daily life will be resumed as quickly as possible and the state structure - minus some of the authoritarian police apparatus, which is not an insignificant thing - will remain largely intact. The TNC will continue the program of privatizations that Gaddafi had already started and will probably move to implement a more even distribution of resources across the country (Cyrenaica suffered discrimination in this regard under Gaddafi). I expect that the US military will quietly move their African Command (Africom) from West Germany to Libya now that they have a regime that is in their debt. That is an advance for imperialism. It will also increase tensions with China on the continent where it was making gains at the expense of the USA and NATO countries. I imagine that this will impact the ways in which China engages with African governments, encouraging them to strengthen the military component to counter any temptation by the west to displace China through proxies.

Will there be deeper changes - a truly free press, trade union rights, freedom of assembly and the right to form political parties? Some concessions will be expected by the population, for certain. But all of the political training and experience of the TNC & Misurata council has been in the authoritarian practices of the old Libyan regime (or of the CIA). The only guarantee will be if the Libyan people's enthusiasm for the overthrow of Gaddafi finds expression in independent organizations and mobilizations - little evidence of which presently exists. In Iraq the overthrow of Hussein has not won many of the democratic rights noted above - protesters are shot and killed, independent trade unions are outlawed, there are secret police and political prisoners aplenty. It would be naive to think that the Libyan ruling class is any nicer or that NATO has changed its stripes.

Of course, one hopes that the revolutionary councils and initiative of the early days re-emerges. But NATO and the TNC will be doing everything in their power to ensure that this doesn't happen - and they now have the initiative.

Pockets of resistance as rebels claim Tripoli - Africa - Al Jazeera English