Click on the above link to read the original article in French. Continue here to read my English translation.
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Arab Revolts, Libyan Chaos
The Snares of War
by Serge Halimi
For several months now, the Arab revolts have been reshuffling the political, diplomatic and ideological cards of the region (read “Une région en ébullition”). Libyan repression was threatening this dynamic. And the UN authorized Western war has just added to the landscape a factor with unpredictable consequences.
Even a broken watch shows the correct time twice a day. That the United States, France and the UK have taken the lead in the Security Counsel resolution authorizing the use of force against the Libyan regime is insufficient in and of itself to object to it. An unarmed movement rebelling against a regime of terror is at times reduced to calling on disreputable international police forces for aid. Focused on their own problems, they will not refuse this aid, even though it comes from who turn a deaf ear on the pleas of other victims – the Palestinians, for example. The rebellion will even forget that the international police force is better known for repression than for support.
That which logically guided the Libyan insurgents facing extreme danger is not enough to legitimize this new war by Western powers on Arab soil. The intervention of NATO member countries constitutes inadmissible means for trying to reach a desired end (the fall of Muammar Qaddafi). If these means seem obvious, a “choice” between Western bombings and the crushing of Libyan rebels, it is solely because other possibilities – the intervention of UN, Egyptian or Pan Arab forces alongside the rebel forces – were rejected.
Past results of Western armies prevent us from regarding them them as motivated by the generosity they claim today. Who believes that States, no matter which ones, consecrate their resources and armies in order to accomplish democratic objectives? Recent history is enough to remind us that if wars claiming such motivation initially achieve dazzling success, with equally dazzling media attention, what follows is more chaotic and sober. In Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting has not ceased, although Mogadiscio, Kabul and Bagdad “fell” years ago.
The Libyan rebels would have preferred toppling despotic powers on their own, as their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbors did. Franco-Anglo-American military intervention threatens to force them into a debt towards those never before concerned themselves with Libyan freedom. The responsibility of this regional emergency, however, lies with Qaddafi. Without the repressive rage of a regime that, over the space of forty years, moved from an anti-imperialist dictatorship to pro-Western despotism, without his tirades treating all opposition as “Al-Qaida agents" or "paid moles and informants working for foreigners,” the fate of the Libyan uprising would have depended solely on the Libyan people.
The 1973 Security Council Resolution authorizing the bombing of Libya will perhaps prevent crushing a revolt condemned by the poverty of the insurgents. It resembles nonetheless a dance of hypocrites. For it is not because Qaddafi is the worst or the most murderous of dictators that his troops have been bombed, but because he is also weaker than others, with no nuclear arms or powerful friends likely to protect him from a military attack or defend him in the Security Council. The intervention against him confirms that international law does not lay down clear principles, the violation of which, in every case, would lead to disciplinary measures.
The same goes for diplomatic and financial whitewashing: the moment of righteousness permits the erasing of decades of turpitude. Thus the French president has his former business partner bombed, the partner he welcomed in 2007 and while everyone knew the nature of his regime – we will be grateful to Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy for not having proposed to Mr. Qaddafi the “savoir faire of our security forces” offered last January to Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali… As for Mr. Silvio Berlusconi, the “close friend” of the Libyan Guide who made eleven visits to Rome: he is rallying the righteous coalition by dragging it by its feet.
A majority of old men contested by the democratic thrust are headquartered in the heart of an Arab league that joins the UN movement then pretends consternation when the first American missiles are fired. Russia and China held the power to veto the Security Council resolution, to amend it in order to reduce its reach and the risks of escalation. Had they done so, they would not have had to “regret” the use of force. Finally, to size up the honesty of the “international community” in this affair, it must be pointed out that the 1973 resolution reproaches Libya for “arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, tortures and summary executions,” naturally things that do not exist in Guantanamo, Chechnya or China…
The "protection of civilians” is not simply an indisputable demand; in times of armed conflict, it also imposes the bombing of military targets, that is of soldiers (often civilians obliged to wear the uniform…), mingled among the unarmed population. Control of a “no-fly zone” for them means that planes patrolling the area risk being shot down and their pilots captured, which will then justify their liberation by the ground commandos. Scrub the vocabulary as you will, war cannot be eternally euphemized.
And in a final analysis, this war belongs to those who decided it and who lead it, not to those who recommend it, dreaming that it will be short and joyous. Drawing up spotlessly clean plans for a war without hate, without “blunders," is a charming notion, but the military force to whom falls the task of executing the plans will do so according to its own inclinations, methods and requirements. It may as well be said that the corpses of Libyan soldiers machine gunned during their retreat are, as the joyful crowds of Benghazi, the result of the 1973 UN resolution.
The progressive forces of the entire world are divided on the Libyan affair, according to whether they stress their solidarity with an oppressed people or their opposition to a Western war. Both standards of judgment are necessary, but one cannot always demand simultaneous satisfaction of the two. When there has to be a choice, it remains to be determined just what an internationally obtained “anti-imperialist” stamp of approval authorizes its people to be subjected to each day.
In Mr. Qaddafi's case, the silence of several leftist Latin American governments (Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia) on the repressions ordered by him is disconcerting, just as much as the Libyan Guide's opposition to the “West” is pretense. Mr. Qaddafi denounces the “colonialist plot” against him -- after reassuring the former colonial powers that “we are all in the same fight against terrorism. Our information services work together. We have helped a great deal these past years.”
Like Hugo Chávez, Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro, the Libyan dictator claims that the explanation for the attack against him lies in the desire to “control oil.” And yet the oil is already exploited by the American company Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), the British BP and the Italian ENI (read Jean-Pierre Séréni’s article on this subject: “Le pétrole libyen de main en main”). A few weeks ago, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was hailing “Libya’s strong macro-economic performance and its progress in the reinforcement of the private sector's role." Mr. Ben Ali, Qaddafi’s friend, had received comparable compliments in November 2008, served up personally by IMF’s General Director, Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, arriving straight from... Tripoli.
Mr. Qaddafi’s antique revolutionary, anti-imperialist spin, fed in Caracas and Havana, no doubt equally escaped Mr. Anthony Giddens, a theoretician of Blair’s Third Way. He announced in 2007 that Libya would shortly become a “Norway of Northern Africa”: prosperous, egalitarian, turned towards the future.” Compared with the very eclectic list of his dupes, how is it still possible to believe that the Libyan Guide is as crazy as he is purported to be?
There are several reasons for some leftist Latin American governments' mistakes about Mr. Qaddafi. They wanted to see him as the enemy of their enemy (the United States), but that should not have been enough to make him their friend. A mediocre awareness of Northern Africa – Mr. Chavez says he informed himself about the situation in Tunisia by calling Mr. Qaddafi… – led them to position themselves opposite the “colossal campaign of lies orchestrated by the media” (according to Mr. Castro). All the more so because this campaign took them back to personal memories whose pertinence was questionable in this particular case. “I do not know why this is happening and has happened in Libya, the Venezuelan president declared to me. It reminds me of Hugo Chavez on April 11.” On April 11, 2002 a coup d’état had attempted to overthrow Chavez; the media supported it through manipulated information.
Other factors leaning towards poor analysis of the Libyan situation include: a model for reading events that was forged by decades of armed intervention and violent domination on the part of the United States in Latin America; the fact that Libya helped Venezuela gain a foothold in Africa; the role of the two States at the heart of OPEC and Africa-South America summits; the geopolitical approach of Caracas aiming to re-balance its diplomacy towards closer relations between Africa and South America.
To this one must also add the tendency of President Chavez to consider the diplomatic ties of his country as a personal, close relationship with chiefs of State: “I was a friend of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, I am a friend of King Abdallan, who was here in Caracas (…). A friend of the Emir of Qatar, a friend of the president of Syria, who also came here. A friend of Bouteflika.” When Qaddafi’s regime (“my friend for such a long time”) engaged in the repression of his people, this friendship weighed in the wrong direction. In fact, Mr. Chavez missed an opportunity: of presenting the rebellion on the African continent as the younger brothers of leftist Latin American movements he knows well.
Beyond this error, diplomacy is no doubt the domain that best reveals, in every country, the flaws of exercising a solitary power made up of opaque decisions, no parliamentary control and no popular deliberation. Moreover, when diplomacy pretends to defend democracy through war, as in the Security Council, the contrast is necessarily striking.
After having exploited, and not without success, the geopolitical, anti-Occident recourse and the progressive argument of the defense of natural resources, the Libyan director did not long resist the temptation to play the ultimate card of religious confrontation. “The big Christian powers,” he explained last March 20, "have engaged in a second Crusade against the Muslim people, with the Libyans at their head. Their objective is to wipe Islam [off the map].” Thirteen days earlier, Mr. Qaddafi had nonetheless compared his work of repression to the repression suffered by one thousand four hundred Palestinians.” “Even the Israelis in Gaza had to resort to tanks to combat such extremists. It is the same for us.” That must not have increased the Guide’s popularity in the Arab world.
At least this last about-face has one virtue. It recalls the political noxiousness of the approach that reproduces, by inverting it, the neoconservative thematic of crusades and empires. The Arab uprisings, because they mixed the religious and secular – and because the religious and secular were opposed therein – may announce the death of a self-proclaimed anti-imperialist discourse that is nothing more than anti-Western. In its hatred of the “West,” it confounds what is the worst in it – gunboat diplomacy, the disdain of “indigenous” people, wars of religion – with what is best in it, from the Enlightenment philosophy to social security.
Barely two years after the Iranian revolution in 1979, the radical Syrian thinker Sadik Jalal Al-Azm scrutinized, in order to refute them, the characteristics of a “backwards orientalism,” that, refusing the path of secular nationalism and revolutionary communism, was calling for a fight against the West through a return to religious authenticity. The main postulates of this "culturalist" analysis, summarized then submitted to criticism by Gilbert Achcar, stipulated that “the degree of emancipation of the Orient must not and may not be measured by the yardstick of Western values and criteria, such as democracy, secularism and the liberation of women; that the Eastern Muslim cannot be understood through the epistemological instruments of Western science; that the factor that moves the Muslim masses is cultural, that is to say, religious, and that its importance surpasses that of economic and social factors that condition Western political dynamics; that the only path of Muslim countries towards rebirth is through Islam; and finally, that the movements brandishing the standard of a “return to Islam" are not reactionary or regressive, as perceived by the Western eye, but rather progressive, in that they resist Western cultural domination.”
Such a fundamentalist approach to politics has perhaps not had its last say. But, ever since the shock wave that began in Tunisia, one senses that the relevance of such an approach has been shaken by the Arab people who do not want to position themselves “against the West, nor in its service ." They prove this by sometimes targeting an ally of the United States (Egypt), and sometimes one of their adversaries (Syria). Far from fearing the defense of individual freedoms, freedom of conscience, political democracy, unionism, feminism as constituting as many “Western” priorities dressed up as emancipating universalism, the Arab people take hold of these things to mark their refusal of authoritarianism, social injustices and police states that treat their people like children, all the more spontaneously since they are lead by old men. And all this – recalling other great revolutionary upsurges, that day after day make social and democratic gains being lost elsewhere – is undertaken energetically, at precisely the moment when the “West” seems split between its fear of decline and its lassitude in the face of a dead and stagnant political system. A UN resolution as much for the struggles of Western peoples…
Nothing says that this Arabic energy and courage are going to continue to score points. But they are already revealing unexplored possibilities. Article 20 of the Security Council’s 1973 resolution, for example, stipulates that the Security Council “declares itself resolved to insure that (Libyan) holdings frozen (by a previous resolution) are at a later date, as soon as possible, made available to and used for the people of Arab Libyan Jamahiriya.” It would therefore be possible to freeze financial holdings and return them to the citizens of a country! Let us wager that this lesson will be remembered: States have the power to satisfy the people. For some months now, the Arab world has been reminding us of another lesson, just as universal: the people have the power to constrain States.
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