[P2P-F] Fwd: More on the Libyan Revolution: Lessons and False Lessons

[Michel Bauwens]

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From: Tikkun/NSP (NETWORK OF SPIRITUAL PROGRESSIVES) <
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Date: Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 7:49 AM
Subject: More on the Libyan Revolution: Lessons and False Lessons
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*Lessons and False Lessons From Libya*
Tuesday 30 August 2011
by: Stephen Zunes, Truthout | News Analysis

 Rebels celebrate outside Col. Moammar Qaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound in
Tripoli, Libya, August 29, 2011. Residents returning to their homes have
found that many have been heavily damaged by gunfire after they were used as
fighting positions during the rebellion. (Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York
Times)
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to http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/stephen-zunes-on-lessons-from-the-libyan-revolution<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ii8XMuoAPsLOvdzzSplLj%2FT1UjZ716PL>

   The downfall of Muammar Qaddafi's regime is very good news, particularly
for the people of Libya. However, it is critically important that the world
not learn the wrong lessons from the dictator's overthrow.

 It is certainly true that NATO played a critical role in disrupting the
heavy weapons capability of the repressive Libyan regime and blocking its
fuel and ammunition supplies through massive airstrikes and providing
armaments and logistical support for the rebels. However, both the
militaristic triumphalism of the pro-intervention hawks and the more cynical
conspiracy mongering of some on the left ignore that this was indeed a
popular revolution, which may have been able to succeed without NATO,
particularly if the opposition had not focused primarily on the military
strategy. Engaging in an armed struggle against the heavily armed despot
essentially took on Qaddafi where he was strongest rather than taking
greater advantage of where he was weakest - his lack of popular support.

 There has been little attention paid to the fact that the reason the
anti-Qaddafi rebels were able to unexpectedly march into Tripoli last
weekend with so little resistance appears to have been a result of a massive
and largely unarmed, civil insurrection which had erupted in neighborhoods
throughout the city. Indeed, much of the city had already been liberated by
the time the rebel columns entered and began mopping up the remaining
pockets of pro-regime forces.

 As Juan Cole noted in an August 22 interview on Democracy Now!, "the city
had already overthrown the regime" by the time the rebels arrived. The
University of Michigan professor observed how, "Beginning Saturday night,
working-class districts rose up, in the hundreds of thousands and just threw
off the regime." Similarly, Khaled Darwish's August 24 article in The New
York Times describes how unarmed Tripolitanians rushed into the streets
prior to the rebels entering the capital, blocked suspected snipers from
apartment rooftops and sang and chanted over loudspeakers to mobilize the
population against Qaddafi's regime

 Though NATO helped direct the final pincer movement of the rebels as they
approached the Libyan capital and continued to bomb government targets,
Qaddafi's final collapse appears to have more closely resembled that of
Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali than that of Saddam Hussein.

 It should also be noted that the initial uprising against Qaddafi in
February was overwhelmingly nonviolent. In less than a week, this unarmed
insurrection had resulted in pro-democracy forces taking over most of the
cities in the eastern part of the country, a number of key cities in the
west and even some neighborhoods in Tripoli. It was also during this period
when most of the resignations of cabinet members and other important aides
of Qaddafi, Libyan ambassadors in foreign capitals and top military officers
took place. Thousands of soldiers defected or refused to fire on crowds,
despite threats of execution. It was only when the rebellion took a more
violent turn, however, that the revolution's progress was dramatically
reversed and Qaddafi gave his infamous February 22 speech threatening
massacres in rebel strongholds, which in turn, led to the United States and
its NATO allies to enter the war.

 Indeed, it was only a week or so before Qaddafi's collapse that the armed
rebels had succeeded in recapturing most of the territory that had
originally been liberated by their unarmed counterparts six months earlier.

 It can certainly be argued that, once the revolutionaries shifted to armed
struggle, NATO air support proved critical in severely weakening Qaddafi's
ability to counterattack and that Western arms and advisers were important
in enabling rebel forces to make crucial gains in the northwestern part of
the country prior to the final assault on Tripoli. At the same time, there
is little question that foreign intervention in a country with a history of
brutal foreign conquest, domination and subversion was successfully
manipulated by Qaddafi to rally far more support to his side in his final
months than would have been the case had he been faced with a largely
nonviolent indigenous, civil insurrection. It isn't certain that the
destruction of his military capabilities by the NATO strikes was more
significant than the ways in which such Western intervention in the civil
war enabled the besieged dictator to shore up what had been rapidly
deteriorating support in Tripoli and other areas under government control.
I could achieve an outcome I desired in an interpersonal dispute by punching
someone in the nose, but that doesn't mean that it, therefore, proved that
my action was the only way to accomplish my goal. It's no secret that
overbearing military force can eventually wear down an autocratic
militarized regime, but - as the ouster of oppressive regimes in Egypt,
Tunisia, the Philippines, Poland, Chile, Serbia, and scores of other
countries through mass nonviolent action in recent years has indicated -
there are ways of undermining a regime's pillars of support to the extent
that it collapses under its own weight. Ultimately, a despot's power comes
not from the armed forces under his command, but the willingness of a people
to recognize his authority and obey his orders.

 This is not to say that the largely nonviolent struggle launched in
February would have achieved a quick and easy victory had they not turned to
armed struggle with foreign support. The weakness of Libyan civil society,
combined with the movement's questionable tactical decision to engage
primarily in demonstrations rather than diversifying their methods of civil
resistance, made them particularly vulnerable to the brutality of Qaddafi's
foreign mercenaries and other forces. In addition, unlike the
well-coordinated nonviolent anti-Mubarak campaign in Egypt, the Libyan
opposition's campaign was largely spontaneous. However, insisting that the
Libyan opposition "tried nonviolence and it didn't work" because peaceful
protesters were killed and it did not succeed in toppling the regime after a
few days of public demonstrations makes little sense, particularly since the
armed struggle took more than six months. And it does not mean there were no
other alternatives but to launch a civil war.

 The estimated 13,000 additional deaths since the launching of the armed
struggle and the widespread destruction of key segments of the country's
infrastructure are not the only problems related to resorting to military
means to oust Qaddafi.

 One problem with an armed overthrow of a dictator, as opposed to a largely
nonviolent overthrow of a dictator, is that you have lots of armed
individuals who are now convinced that power comes from guns. The martial
values and the strict military hierarchy inherent in armed struggle can
become accepted as the norm, particularly if the military leaders of the
rebellion become the political leaders of the nation, as is usually the
case. Indeed, history has shown that countries in which dictatorships are
overthrown by force of arms are far more likely to suffer from instability
and/or slide into another dictatorship. By contrast, dictatorships
overthrown in largely nonviolent insurrections almost always evolve into
democracies within a few years.

 Despite the large-scale NATO intervention in support of the anti-Qaddafi
uprising, this has been a widely supported popular revolution from a broad
cross section of society. Qaddafi's brutal and arbitrary 42-year rule had
alienated the overwhelming majority of the Libyan people and his overthrow
is understandably a cause of celebration throughout the country. Though the
breadth of the opposition makes a democratic transition more likely than in
some violent overthrows of other dictatorships, the risk that an
undemocratic faction may force its way into power is still a real
possibility. And given that the United States, France and Britain have
proved themselves quite willing to continue supporting dictatorships
elsewhere in the Arab world, there is no guarantee that the NATO powers
would find such a scenario objectionable as long as a new dictatorship was
seen as friendly to the West.

 Another problem with the way Qaddafi was overthrown is the way in which
NATO so blatantly went beyond the mandate provided by the United Nations
Security Council to simply protect the civilian population through the
establishment of a no-fly zone. Instead, NATO became an active participant
in a civil war, providing arms, intelligence, advisers and conducting over
7,500 air and missile strikes against military and government facilities.
Such abuse of the UN system will create even more skepticism regarding the
implementation of the responsibility to protect should there really be an
incipient genocide somewhere where foreign intervention may indeed be the
only realistic option.

 Furthermore, while it is certainly possible that Qaddafi would have
continued to refuse to step down in any case, the NATO intervention
emboldened the rebels to refuse offers by the regime for a provisional
cease-fire and direct negotiations, thereby eliminating even the possibility
of ending the bloodshed months earlier.
Indeed, there is good reason to question whether NATO's role in Qaddafi's
removal was motivated by humanitarian concerns in the first place. For
example, NATO intervention was initiated during the height of the savage
repression of the nonviolent pro-democracy struggle in the Western-backed
kingdom of Bahrain, yet US and British support for that autocratic Arab
monarchy has continued as the hope for bringing freedom to that island
nation was brutally crushed. And given the overwhelming bipartisan support
in the United States for Israeli military campaigns in 2006 and 2008-09
which, while only lasting a few weeks, succeeded in slaughtering more than
1,500 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, Washington's humanitarian claims
for the Libyan intervention ring particularly hollow.
It's true that some of the leftist critiques of the NATO campaign were
rather specious. For example, this was not simply a war for oil. Qaddafi had
long ago opened his oil fields to the West, with Occidental, BP and ENI
among the biggest beneficiaries. Relations between Big Oil and the Libyan
regime were doing just fine and the NATO-backed war was highly disruptive to
their interests.

 Similarly, Libya under Qaddafi was hardly a progressive alternative to the
right-wing Arab rulers favored by the West. Despite some impressive
socialist initiatives early in Qaddafi's reign, which led Libya to
impressive gains in health care, education, housing, and other needs, the
past two decades had witnessed increased corruption, regional and tribal
favoritism, capricious investment policies, an increasingly predatory
bureaucracy and a degree of poverty and inadequate infrastructure
inexcusable for a country of such vast potential wealth.

 However, given the strong role of NATO in the uprising and the close ties
developed with the military leaders of the revolution, it would be naïve to
assume that the United States and other countries in the coalition won't try
to assert their influence in the direction of post-Qaddafi Libya. One of the
problems of armed revolutionary struggle compared to unarmed revolutionary
struggle is the dependence upon foreign supporters, which can then be
leveraged after victory. Given the debt and ongoing dependency some of the
rebel leaders have developed with NATO countries in recent months, it would
similarly be naïve to think that some of them wouldn't be willing to let
this happen.

 In summary, while Qaddafi's ouster is cause for celebration, it is critical
that it not be interpreted as a vindication of Western military
interventionism. Not only will the military side of the victory likely leave
a problematic legacy, we should not deny agency to the many thousands of
Libyans across regions, tribes and ideologies, who ultimately made victory
possible through their refusal to continue their cooperation with an
oppressive and illegitimate regime. It is ultimately a victory of the Libyan
people. And they alone should determine their country's future.
 Stephen Zunes is a contributing editor to Tikkun Magazine and professor of
political science at University of San Francisco.

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