Breaking The Silence - Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (HQ) by John Pilger

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The Euro-US War on Libya: Official Lies and Misconceptions of Critics

Introduction

Many critics of the ongoing Euro-US wars in the Middle East and, now, North Africa, have based their arguments on clichés and generalizations devoid of fact. The most common line heard in regard to the current US-Euro war on Libya is that it’s “all about oil” – the goal is the seizure of Libya’s oil wells.

On the other hand Euro –U.S, government spokespeople defend the war by claiming it’s “all about saving civilian lives in the face of genocide”, calling it “humanitarian intervention”.

Following the lead of their imperial powers, most of what passes for the Left in the US and Europe, ranging from Social Democrats, Marxists, Trotskyists,Greens and other assorted progressives claim they see and support a revolutionary mass uprising of the Libyan people, and not a few have called for military intervention by the imperial powers, or the same thing, the UN, to help the “Libyan revolutionaries” defeat the Gaddafi dictatorship.

These arguments are without foundation and belie the true nature of US-UK-French imperial power, expansionist militarism, as evidenced in all the ongoing wars over the past decade (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.). What is much more revealing about the militarist intervention in Libya is that the major countries, which refused to engage in the War, operate via a very different form of global expansion based on economic and market forces. China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and Germany, the most dynamic capitalist countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are fundamentally opposed to the self-styled “allied” military response against the Libyan government - because Gaddafi represents no threat to their security and they already have full access to the oil and a favorable investment climate. Besides, these economically dynamic countries see no prospect for a stable, progressive or democratic Libyan government emerging from the so-called ‘rebel’ leaders, who are disparate elites competing for power and Western favor.

(1) The Six Myths about Libya: Right and Left

The principle imperial powers and their mass media mouthpieces claim they are bombing Libya for “humanitarian reasons”. Their recent past and current military interventions present a different picture: The intervention in Iraq resulted in well over a million civilian deaths, four million refugees and the systematic destruction of a complex society and its infrastructure, including its water supplies and sewage treatment, irrigation, electricity grid, factories, not to mention research centers, schools, historical archives, museums and Iraq’s extensive social welfare system.

A worse disaster followed the invasion of Afghanistan. What was trumpeted as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to liberate Afghan women and drive out the Taliban resulted in a human catastrophe for the Afghan people.

The road to imperial barbarism in Iraq began with ‘sanctions’, progressed to ‘no fly zones’, then de facto partition of the north, invasion and foreign occupation and the unleashing of sectarian warfare among the ‘liberated’ Iraqi death squads.

Equally telling, the imperial assault against Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, trotted out as the great “humanitarian war” to stop genocide, led to a 40-day aerial bombardment and destruction of Belgrade and other major cities, the imposition of a gangster terrorist regime (KLA) in Kosovo, the near-total ethnic cleansing of all non-Albanian residents from Kosovo and the construction of the largest US military base on the continent (Camp Bondsteel).

The bombing of Libya has already destroyed major civilian infrastructure, airports, roads, seaports and communication centers, as well as ‘military’ targets. The blockade of Libya and military attacks have driven out scores of multi-national corporations and led to the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Asian, Eastern European, Sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and North African skilled and unskilled immigrant workers and specialists of all types, devastating the economy and creating, virtually overnight, massive unemployment, bread-lines and critical gasoline shortages. Moreover, following the logic of previous imperial military interventions, the seemingly ‘restrained’ call to patrol the skies via “no fly zone”, has led directly to bombing civilian as well as military targets on the ground, and is pushing to overthrow the legitimate government. The current imperial warmongers leading the attack on Libya, just like their predecessors, are not engaged in anything remotely resembling a humanitarian mission: they are destroying the fundamental basis of the civilian lives they claim to be saving – or as an earlier generation of American generals would claim in Vietnam, they are ‘destroying the villages in order to save them’.

(2) War for Oil or Oil for Sale?

The ‘critical’ Left’s favorite cliché is that the imperial invasion is all about “seizing control of Libya’s oil and turning it over to their multi-nationals”. This is despite the fact that US, French and British multinationals (as well as their Asian competitors) had already “taken over” millions of acres of Libyan oil fields without dropping a single bomb. For the past decade, “Big Oil” had been pumping and exporting Libyan oil and gas and reaping huge profits. Gaddafi welcomed the biggest MNC’s to exploit the oil wealth of Libya from the early 1990’s to the present day. There are more major oil companies doing business in Libya than in most oil producing regions in the world. These include: British Petroleum, with a seven-year contract on two concessions and over $1 billion dollars in planned investments. Each BP concession exploits huge geographic areas of Libya, one the size of Kuwait and the other the size of Belgium (Libyonline.com). In addition, five Japanese major corporations, including Mitsubishi and Nippon Petroleum, Italy’s Eni Gas, British Gas and the US giant Exxon Mobil signed new exploration and exploitation contracts in October 2010. The most recent oil concession signed in January 2010 mainly benefited US oil companies, especially Occidental Petroleum. Other multi-nationals operating in Libya include Royal Dutch Shell, Total (France), Oil India, CNBC (China), Indonesia’s Pertamina and Norway’s Norsk Hydro (BBC News, 10/03/2005).

Despite the economic sanctions against Libya, imposed by US President Reagan in 1986, US multinational giant, Halliburton, had secured multi-billion dollar gas and oil projects since the 1980’s. During his tenure as CEO of Halliburton, former Defense Secretary Cheney led the fight against these sanctions stating, “as a nation (there is) enormous value having American businesses engaged around the world” (Halliburtonwatch.com). Officially, sanctions against Libya were only lifted under Bush in 2004. Clearly, with all the European and US imperial countries already exploiting Libya oil on a massive scale, the mantra that the “war is about oil” doesn’t hold water or oil!

(3) Gaddafi is a Terrorist

In the run-up to the current military assault on Tripoli,the US Treasury Department’s (and Israel’s special agent) Stuart Levey, authored a sanctions policy freezing $30 billion dollars in Libyan assets on the pretext that Gaddafi was a murderous tyrant (Washington Post, 3/24/11). However, seven years earlier, Cheney, Bush and Condoleezza Rice had taken Libya off the list of terrorist regimes and ordered Levey and his minions to lift the Reagan-era sanctions. Every major European power quickly followed suite: Gaddafi was welcomed in European capitals, prime ministers visited Tripoli and Gaddafi reciprocated by unilaterally dismantling his nuclear and chemical weapons programs (BBC, 9/5/2008). Gaddafi became Washington’s partner in its campaign against a broad array of groups, political movements and individuals arbitrarily placed on the US’ “terror list”, arresting, torturing and killing Al Qaeda suspects, expelling Palestinian militants and openly criticizing Hezbollah, Hamas and other opponents of Israel. The United Nations Human Rights Commission gave the Gaddafi regime a clean bill of health in 2010. In the end Gaddafi’s political ‘turnabout’, however much celebrated by the Western elite, did not save him from this massive military assault. The imposition of neo-liberal ‘reforms’, his political ‘apostasy’ and cooperation in the ‘War on Terror’ and the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, only weakened the regime. Libya became vulnerable to attack and isolated from any consequential anti-imperialist allies. Gaddafi’s much ballyhooed concessions to the West set his regime up as an easy target for the militarists of Washington, London and Paris, eager for a quick ‘victory’.

(4) The Myth of the Revolutionary Masses

The Left, including the mainly electoral social democrat, green and even left-socialist parties of Europe and the US swallowed the entire mass media propaganda package demonizing the Gaddafi regime while lauding the ‘rebels’. Parroting their imperial mentors, the ‘Left’ justified their support for imperial military intervention in the name of the “revolutionary Libyan people”, the “peace-loving” masses “fighting tyranny” and organizing peoples’ militias to “liberate their country”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The center of the armed uprising is Benghazi, longtime monarchist hotbed of tribal supporters and clients of the deposed King Idris and his family. Idris, until he was overthrown by the young firebrand Col. Gaddafi, had ruled Libya with an iron fist over a semi-feudal backwater and was popular with Washington, having given the US its largest air base (Wheeler) in the Mediterranean. Among the feuding leaders of the “transitional council” in Benghazi (who purport to lead but have few organized followers) one finds neo-liberal expats, who first promoted the Euro-US military invasion envisioning their ride to power on the back of Western missiles .They openly favor dismantling the Libyan state oil companies currently engaged in joint ventures with foreign MNCs. Independent observers have commented on the lack of any clear reformist tendencies, let alone revolutionary organizations or democratic popular movements among the ‘rebels’.

While the US, British and French are firing missiles, loaded with depleted uranium, at the Libyan military and key civilian installations, their ‘allies’ the armed militias in Benghazi, rather than go to battle against the regime’s armed forces, are busy rounding up, arresting and often executing any suspected members of Gaddafi’s “revolutionary committees”, arbitrarily labeling these civilians as “fifth columnists”. The top leaders of these “revolutionary” masses in Benghazi include two recent defectors from what the ‘Left’ dubs Gaddafi’s “murderous regime”: Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former Justice minister, who prosecuted dissenters up to the day before the armed uprising, Mahmoud Jebri, who was prominent in inviting multi-nationals to take over the oil fields (FT, March 23, 2011, p. 7), and Gaddafi’s former ambassador to India, Ali Aziz al-Eisawa, who jumped ship as soon as it looked like the uprising appeared to be succeeding. These self-appointed ‘leaders’ of the rebels who now staunchly support the Euro-US military intervention, were long-time supporters of the Gaddafi’s dictatorship and promoters of MNC takeovers of oil and gas fields. The heads of the “rebels” military council is Omar Hariri and General Abdul Fattah Younis, former head of the Ministry of Interior. Both men have long histories (since 1969) of repressing democratic movements within Libya. Given their unsavory background, it is not surprising that these top level military defectors to the ‘rebel’ cause have been unable to arouse their troops, mostly conscripts, to engage the loyalist forces backing Gaddafi. They too will have to take ride into Tripoli on the coattails of the Anglo-US-French armed forces.

The anti-Gaddafi force’s lack of any democratic credentials and mass support is evident in their reliance on foreign imperial armed forces to bring them to power and their subservience to imperial demands. Their abuse and persecution of immigrant workers from Asia, Turkey and especially sub-Sahara Africa, as well as black Libyan citizens, is well documented in the international press. Their brutal treatment of black Libyans, falsely accused of being Gaddafi’s “mercenaries” , includes torture, mutilation and horrific executions, does not auger well for the advent of a new democratic order, or even the revival of an economy, which has been dependent on immigrant labor, let alone a unified country with national institutions and a national economy.

The self-declared leadership of the “National Transitional Council” is not democratic, nationalist or even capable of uniting the country. These are not credible leaders capable of restoring the economy and creating jobs lost as a result of their armed power grab. No one seriously envisions these ‘exiles’, tribalists, monarchists and Islamists maintaining the paternalistic social welfare and employment programs created by the Gaddafi government and which gave Libyans the highest per-capita income in Africa.

(5) Al Qaeda

The greatest geographical concentration of suspected terrorists with links to Al Qaeda just happens to be in the areas dominated by the “rebels” (see Alexander Cockburn: Counterpunch, March 24, 2011). For over a decade Gaddafi has been in the forefront of the fight against Al Qaeda, following his embrace of the Bush-Obama ‘War on Terror’ doctrine. These jihadist Libyans, having honed their skills in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, are now among the ranks of the “rebels” fighting the much more secular Libyan government. Likewise, the tribal chiefs, fundamentalist clerics and monarchists in the East have been active in a “holy war” against Gaddafi welcoming arms and air support from the Anglo-French-US “crusaders” - just like the mullahs and tribal chiefs welcomed the arms and training from the Carter-Reagan White House to overthrow a secular regime in Afghanistan. Once again, imperial intervention is based on ‘alliances’ with the most retrograde forces. The composition of the future regime (or regimes, if Libya is divided) is a big question and the prospects of a return to political stability for Big Oil to profitably exploit Libya’s resources are dubious.

(6) “Genocide” or Armed Civil War

Unlike all ongoing mass popular Arab uprisings, the Libyan conflict began as an armed insurrection, directed at seizing power by force. Unlike the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Tunisia, Gaddafi has secured a mass regional base among a substantial sector of the Libyan population. This support is based on the fact that almost two generations of Libyans have benefited from Gaddafi’s petroleum-financed welfare, educational, employment and housing programs, none of which existed under America’s favorite, King Idris. Since violence is inherent in any armed uprising, once one picks up the gun to seize power, they lose their claim on ‘civil rights’. In armed civil conflicts, civil rights are violated on all sides. Regardless of the Western media’s lurid portrayal of Gaddafi’s “African mercenary forces” and its more muted approval of ‘revolutionary justice’ against Gaddafi supporters and government soldiers captured in the rebel strongholds, the rules of warfare should have come into play, including the protection of non-combatants-civilians (including government supporters and officials), as well as protection of Libyan prisoners of war in the areas under NATO-rebel control.

The unsubstantiated Euro-US claim of “genocide” amplified by the mass media and parroted by “left” spokespersons is contradicted by the daily reports of single and double digit deaths and injuries, resulting from urban violence on both sides, as control of cities and towns shifts between the two sides.

Truth is the first casualty of war, and especially of civil war. Both sides have resorted to monstrous fabrications of victories, casualties, monsters and victims.

Demons and angels aside, this conflict began as a civil war between two sets of Libyan elites: An established paternalistic, now burgeoning neo-liberal, autocracy with substantial popular backing versus a western imperialist financed and trained elite, backed by an amorphous group of regional, tribal and clerical chiefs, monarchists and neo-liberal professionals devoid of democratic and nationalist credentials – and lacking broad-based mass support.

Conclusion

If not to prevent genocide, grab the oil or promote democracy (via Patriot missiles), what then is the driving force behind the Euro-US imperial intervention?

A clue is in the selectivity of Western military intervention: In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Qatar and Oman ruling autocrats, allied with and backed by Euro-US imperial states go about arresting, torturing and murdering unarmed urban protestors with total impunity. In Egypt and Tunisia, the US is backing a conservative junta of self-appointed civil-military elites in order to block the profound democratic and nationalist transformation of society demanded by the protesters. The ‘junta’ aims to push through neo-liberal economic “reforms” through carefully-vetted pro-Western ‘elected’ officials. While liberal critics may accuse the West of “hypocrisy” and “double standards” in bombing Gaddafi but not the Gulf butchers, in reality the imperial rulers consistently apply the same standards in each region: They defend strategic autocratic client regimes, which have allowed imperial states to build strategic air force and naval bases, run regional intelligence operations and set up logistical platforms for their ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their future planned conflict with Iran. They attack Gaddafi’s Libya precisely because Gaddafi had refused to actively contribute to Western military operations in Africa and the Middle East.

The key point is that while Libya allows the biggest US-European multi-nationals to plunder its oil wealth, it did not become a strategic geo-political-military asset of the empire. As we have written in many previous essays the driving force of US empire-building is military - and not economic. This is why billions of dollars of Western economic interests and contracts had been sacrificed in the setting up of sanctions against Iraq and Iran – with the costly result that the invasion and occupation of Iraq shut down most oil exploitation for over a decade.

The Washington-led assault on Libya, with the majority of air sorties and missiles strikes being carried out by the Obama regime, is part of a more general counter-attack in response to the most recent Arab popular pro-democracy movements. The West is backing the suppression of these pro-democracy movements throughout the Gulf; it finances the pro-imperial, pro-Israel junta in Egypt and it is intervening in Tunisia to ensure that any new regime is “correctly aligned”. It supports a despotic regime in Algeria as well as Israel’s daily assaults on Gaza. In line with this policy, the West backs the uprising of ex-Gaddafites and right-wing monarchists, confident that the ‘liberated’ Libya will once again provide military bases for the US-European military empire-builders.

In contrast, the emerging market-driven global and regional powers have refused to support this conflict, which jeopardizes their access to oil and threatens the current large-scale oil exploration contracts signed with Gaddafi. The growing economies of Germany, China, Russia, Turkey, India and Brazil rely on exploiting new markets and natural resources all over Africa and the Middle East, while the US, Britain and France spend billions pursuing wars that de-stabilize these markets, destroy infrastructure and foment long-term wars of resistance. The growing market powers recognize that the Libyan “rebels” cannot secure a quick victory or ensure a stable environment for long-term trade and investments. The “rebels”, once in power, will be political clients of their militarist imperial mentors. Clearly, imperial military intervention on behalf of regional separatists seriously threatens these emerging market economies: The US supports ethno-religious rebels in China’s Tibetan province and as well as the Uyghur separatists; Washington and London have long backed the Chechen separatists in the Russian Caucuses. India is wary of the US military support for Pakistan, which claims Kashmir. Turkey is facing Kurdish separatists who receive arms and safe haven from their US-supplied Iraqi Kurdish counterparts.

The North African precedent of an imperial invasion of Libya on behalf of its separatist clients worries the emerging market-powers. It is also an ongoing threat to the mass-based popular Arab freedom movements. And the invasion sounds the death knell for the US economy and its fragile ‘recovery’: three ongoing, endless wars will break the budget much sooner than later. Most tragic of all, the West’s ‘humanitarian’ invasion has fatally undermined genuine efforts by Libya’s civilian democrats, socialists and nationalists to free their country from both a dictatorship and from imperial-backed reactionaries.

By James Petras and Robin E. Abaya

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/03/30/the-euro-us-war-on-libya-official-lies-a#more17133

You Lie, Mr. President

About Libya, and much else

I couldn’t bear to watch the President’s why-we’re-in-Libya speech as it was broadcast: it’s Spring, after all, and my garden needs planting. Priorities, priorities, priorities: so important, in politics and in life.

We all have our priorities: I have mine, and the President of the United States has his. As an indication of the latter, I note that Obama waited a whole week after deploying US forces before deigning to explain his actions to the American people. He has yet to go to Congress for authorization, although he made sure he cleared it with our pushy allies and the UN Security Council. Having received this double-dispensation, Congress is for him but an afterthought. This is the true meaning of “multilateralism”: world opinion matters, American opinion – not so much.

When he finally did come before us to justify this latest episode of world-saving, he didn’t address Congress, but “the most servile audience he could find,” as James Bovard so trenchantly put it, “uniformed military officers at the National Defense University. The room will be full of people who are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the government. The officers have spent their lives working for Uncle Sam, and they know that a single ill-time hoot during Obama’s talk could end their careers.”

There would be no “You lie!” moment in this setting. Such safeguards were not for nothing, because practically every other word out of his mouth was either a lie or a truth so veiled in ambiguity that it merges into untruth on closer inspection.

He started out with a half-truth, paying tribute to the “courage, professionalism, and patriotism” of “our men and women in uniform,” lauding them for helping the Japanese in their hour of need. No American could disagree with that: in the rest of the world, however, there is a less worshipful attitude toward the behavior of US troops stationed abroad. We may be inured to evidence of US atrocities, but those photos of US centurions posing next to the corpses of the civilians they slaughtered in Afghanistan were published the day before the President praised the “professionalism” of the US military.

I’ll leave it to others to sort out whether this qualifies as an outright lie, or a mere fib-by-omission. Obama is an expert at crafting the plausible untruth: not since FDR lied us into war – and much else – in the 1930s have we seen such a master of duplicity in the Oval Office. Inserted into this ode to the military was, indeed, one outright lie: “Because of them and our dedicated diplomats, a coalition has been forged and countless lives have been saved.”

The lives we “saved” are countless only because they don’t exist: we intervened to prevent a holocaust that never happened – and there’s no way of knowing (although plenty of reason to doubt) whether it would have happened without Western intervention. This is the kind of lie that Americans like to hear: he’s telling us we’re heroes, not Ugly Americans.

Quite literally every other word in his Libya peroration is a lie. Take this paragraph:

“For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and advocate for human freedom. Mindful of the risks and costs of military action, we are naturally reluctant to use force to solve the world’s many challenges. But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act. That is what happened in Libya over the course of these last six weeks.”

America has played a role that is neither unique in world history nor notable for its benefit to the cause of human freedom. The British, and the Romans before them – and before them, Alexander – thought they could bring order out of the world chaos, and we are merely the latest pretenders to the throne. As for being mindful of the risks and costs of intervention, an audience other than the notables of the National Defense University would be sorely tempted to let loose with a loud guffaw. The really stunning lie that stands out from the crowd, however, is the assertion that “we are naturally reluctant to use force to solve the world’s many challenges.” After our long and ongoing post-9/11 rampage across the face of the Middle East, it will be many years before any US President can say this without being laughed at. Force, including the threat of it, is the main instrument of US foreign policy, a necessity inherent in the nature of any and all empires, and especially one such as ours, with global pretensions.

“When our interests and our values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act.” What interests, whose values – and what’s the difference, anyway? The President devotes the rest of his speech to deftly dancing around these three vital questions.

Obama stumbles, though, when he gives us a little geography lesson, in that gently condescending professorial tone he affects when directly addressing us ordinary folk: “Libya sits directly between Tunisia and Egypt,” we are told, “two nations that inspired the world when their people rose up to take control of their own destiny.” Well, yes, Libya does indeed sit “directly” between Tunisia and Egypt, but even more directly it squats squarely between Algeria and Egypt – and the omission is telling.

Algeria, under the self-proclaimed “socialist” dictator turned Western ally Abdelaziz Bouteflika, is also experiencing anti-government protests, which are being met with brutal force. Later on in his speech, Obama notes the disruption an exodus from Libya would have on neighboring countries, which hints at the administration’s real fear: that an influx of revolution-minded Libyans into Algeria would further destabilize the Bouteflika regime.

“Last month,” continued Obama, Gadhafi’s grip of fear appeared to give way to the promise of freedom. In cities and towns across the country, Libyans took to the streets to claim their basic human rights. As one Libyan said, ‘For the first time we finally have hope that our nightmare of 40 years will soon be over.’”

Another half-truth. Libyans did indeed take to the streets, but was it really to “claim their basic human rights”? At this point, the demands of the rebels seem to be limited to “Gadhafi must go!” What comes after Gadhafi is as much a mystery after Western intervention as it was before. Gadhafi has slimed the rebels as agents of al-Qaeda, which, oddly, puts him in the same camp as some extreme neocons, who see the Muslim world as inherently and incorrigibly authoritarian, and some opponents of US intervention, such as Alexander Cockburn, who give credence to some allegedly “secret documents” dug up by US intelligence which point to Libya as a focal point in al-Qaeda’s recruiting efforts. All this because some self-appointed “commander” of the rebel forces once fought against the Americans in Iraq. Rather than handing power over to bin Laden, the rebels will more likely want to restore the monarchy and install the heir of King Idris I (there are two to choose from).

In any case, the alleged goodness of the opposition is a difficult case to make, and so the President plays his trump card, the indisputable evil of Gadhafi:

“Faced with this opposition, Gadhafi began attacking his people. … In the face of the world’s condemnation, Gadhafi chose to escalate his attacks, launching a military campaign against the Libyan people. Innocent people were targeted for killing. Hospitals and ambulances were attacked. Journalists were arrested, sexually assaulted, and killed. Supplies of food and fuel were choked off. The water for hundreds of thousands of people in Misratah was shut off. Cities and towns were shelled, mosques destroyed, and apartment buildings reduced to rubble. Military jets and helicopter gunships were unleashed upon people who had no means to defend themselves against assault from the air.”

If, during the Civil War, Confederate newspapers reported that Lincoln had begun “attacking his people,” well, then they weren’t exactly wrong about that. The bald statement of this fact, however, leaves out a certain context. Innocent people are targeted in every war, including those conducted by the United States: take the hit on the Serbian state television station during the Kosovo war, a conflict this intervention is often compared to. The Israelis targeted water supplies in Lebanon, along with churches and factories, and yet we heard not a peep out of any party politician above the rank of dog catcher – and certainly not aspiring politician Obama at the time – on that one.

As for the fate of journalists in war zones: the same Al Jazeera that has been singled out by Gadhafi was singled out by the US in Iraq. Journalists are being killed by government-connected death squads in US-occupied Iraq today. As for journalists being sexually assaulted: it happened in Tahrir Square, too, you’ll recall, but somehow this failed to spur US intervention.

I could wade through this miasma of murky logic and dubious doubletalk all day and all night, and still not hone in on the central affront to reason contained therein, and so let me get to that without further ado. After giving us a hair-raising build-up to the climax of his narrative, the President gets down to the nitty-gritty:

“At this point, the United States and the world faced a choice. Gadhafi declared that he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we had seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now, we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city. We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi – a city nearly the size of Charlotte – could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.

“It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen. And so nine days ago, after consulting the bipartisan leadership of Congress, I authorized military action to stop the killing….”

Gadhafi never said he would “show ‘no mercy’ to his own people,” but rather that he would show no mercy to the organizers of the rebellion – presumably, the interim “council” that now rules Benghazi, including his own former Interior Minister. These are the “rats” he referred to – defectors from his own government, who deserted what they perhaps rightly regard as a sinking ship.

Contrary to the President’s assertion that a massacre was imminent, there is no credible evidence Gadhafi was preparing any such action. Not a shred. Indeed, common sense, and military necessity, would argue against it: after all, having taken Benghazi, the Libyan despot would still have to rule it. It’s easy to demonize Gadhafi as a putative madman, yet he didn’t survive all these years for nothing. Indeed, he does have substantial support within the country, centered in the west, around Tripoli, as well as the southern oases of the Fezzan.

“America is different,” says the President. That’s why we intervened, because we can’t just stand by while atrocities are being committed – except when we’re the ones committing them, that is. Then we not only stand by, we call it “liberation.”

Every intervention in the post-cold war world has some significance as a precedent, establishing a new principle governing the ever more expansive definition of US “interests.” This one sets a new standard by positing a potential “humanitarian disaster” as a tripwire that sends American troops into battle. A version of it was utilized in the run-up to the Iraq war, with the President and his advisers invoking that ever-present “mushroom cloud” as the rationale for war. This time it was a purported madman about to commit mass murder on his own people. Next time – oh, just use your imagination. Any number of possible scenarios, based on factoids of dubious provenance, come to mind – along with a great number of possible targets.

Given the routine misery and oppression the governments of the world inflict on their subjects as a matter of course, the opportunity for fresh interventions by the Forces of Goodness & Light is effectively unlimited. In cheerleading Obama’s Libyan adventure, the President’s supporters are signing on to a future of perpetual warfare.

To be sure, the righteous tone of the President’s speech was ameliorated by protestations that the action was “limited,” and assurances that we’d soon be handing the effort off to NATO, and that there wouldn’t be any troops on the ground. This last, by the way, is yet another brazen lie: if we don’t have CIA over there already, aiding the rebels and coordinating air strikes with rebel actions on the ground, then somebody is not doing their job.

We are already half way down the slippery slope of Libya’s internal turmoil, and we’re in so deep at this point that I cannot see our way out for quite some time. The President is reported to have told congressional leaders that the intervention should last “days, not weeks,” and this is the biggest lie of all, a lie the President is apparently telling himself as well as us. We now own Libya’s insurrection: its fate belongs to us, and we’ll be wearing that albatross around our necks for quite some time to come.

by Justin Raimondo

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/03/29/you-lie-mr-president/

The Ways in Which America Still “Leads’ the World

Tracking Our Downward Spiral

According to Yes Magazine, amongst 20 of the world’s wealthiest countries, America now has:

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;

• the greatest inequality of incomes;

• the smallest amount of government spending (as a percentage of GDP) on social programs for the disadvantaged;

• the lowest number of paid holidays, annual leave days and maternity leave days;

• the lowest score on the UN’s index of material well-being of children;

• the worst score on the UN’s gender inequality index;

• the lowest social mobility (i.e. in America, more members of the lower and middle class remain stuck in that class than ever before);

• the highest public and private expenditure on health care (as a portion of GDP), and yet accompanied by:

- the highest infant mortality rate

- the greatest prevalence of mental health problems

- the highest obesity rate

- the largest percentage of people going without health care due to cost

- the greatest number of low birth weight children per capita

- the greatest consumption of anti-depressants per capita

- the shortest life expectancy at birth (except for Portugal);

- the largest amount of carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;

- the lowest score on the World Economic Forums Environmental Performance Index and the largest Ecological Footprint per capita (except for Belgium);

- the highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;

- the lowest amount of spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of GDP;

- the largest amount of military spending as a portion of GDP;

- the largest amount of international arms sales;

- the largest negative balance of payments (except New Zealand, Spain and Portugal);

- the lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal and Italy) (and far down from the top in both science and reading);

- the highest high school drop out rate (except for Spain);

And now, to top it off, America is leading all other industrialized democracies by bringing back debtors’ prisons!

Millions of folks around the good ol’ USA have been screwed over by predatory lenders and fine-print credit card contracts, and now, partly because of that, many of them are swimming in debt. And now, some of these people are actually being thrown in prison for going into debt. That’s right, America in the 21st century is bringing back debtors’ prisons! People who can’t pay off their credit cards can now be thrown in jail in a third of the states in our nation — and since the start of 2010, over 5,000 arrest warrants have been issued against people who owe as little as $1,000 to massively profitable corporations like Capital One. (Source: Thom Hartmann’s emailed newsletter)

So let me get this straight. A few years after the financial crisis, where massive fraud was perpetrated by Wall Street, not one bankster is in jail, but 5,000 lower- or middle-class Americans, who were screwed over by these banksters, were sent to debtors’ prison??!

Republicans have set our country back more than 100 years — to the 1800′s — when the Robber Barons ruled and our politics were corrupted to the core.

Be proud, Americans. Be very proud.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27785.htm

Kashmir- Led-Zeppelin