[P2P-F] Understanding the Libyan Revolution: Aug. 24

[Michel Bauwens]

he's a bit to prolific for me to follow him, that's why I'm so happy to have
a roving correspondent <g>

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:14 PM, Amaia Arcos <amaia.arcos at googlemail.com>wrote:

> I amen-ed Juan's article when he published it and even sent him a message
> of appreciation and gratitude. When I was in university studying Middle
> Eastern History we (students and lecturers) used to refer to him with
> respect. It is not easy being an American inside the US and be critical of
> your own country's policies, especially when there is so much censorship and
> propaganda going on. At the same time, it is unreal he has got so much flack
> for saying it like it is in the case of Libya.
>
> The man knows his history and knows how to interpret current events. I
> would definitely recommend his blog to anyone who is interested in Middle
> Eastern affairs and hearing it like is. Ie, no propagandistic agenda
> defending either side, just facts, whether we like them or not.
>
>
> On 12 September 2011 08:07, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Tikkun <rabbilerner at tikkun.org>
>> Date: Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 11:53 PM
>> Subject: Understanding the Libyan Revolution: Aug. 24
>> To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com
>>
>>
>>     Tikkun<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=rp%2FTUVSJJfHHih1ZuwrckPuwBifuSKB2>
>>   to heal, repair and transform the world       *A note from Rabbi
>> Michael Lerner** * Join or Donate Now!<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=BhV%2F9sitNBUPkGNYmQAOtcHRxXqZTX4s>
>>
>> Editor's note: *While Juan Cole's article may be a bit too quick to
>> declare that the Libyan revolution has succeeded, it does provide us with
>> a very useful analysis as well as a critique of those in the liberal or
>> progressive world who dismissed the whole struggle as nothing but another
>> example of Western imperialism. Sometimes even the Western powers can do
>> good things, and a sophisticated spiritual progressive always seeks to
>> understand the complexities rather than embracing one dimensional analyses.
>> And this one could be wrong also! That's how we have to approach the
>> world--with open heart, genuine caring about the well-being for others, and
>> modesty about how much we know about the details of any given situation and
>> how best to be helpful. That's why, in calling for the overthrow of another
>> dictator, Asad of Syria, I placed that call within the framework of a
>> commitment to non-violence, hoping that there could be in Syria a less
>> violent resolution to the conflict than has happened so far in Libya, and
>> Libya is not over yet!** --Rabbi Michael Lerner*
>>
>> Top Ten Myths About the Libya War
>>
>> by Juan Cole
>> Posted on 08/22/2011
>> http://www.juancole.com/2011/08/top-ten-myths-about-the-libya-war.html
>>
>> The Libyan Revolution has largely succeeded, and this is
>> a moment of celebration, not only for Libyans but for a
>> youth generation in the Arab world that has pursued a
>> political opening across the region. The secret of the
>> uprising's final days of success lay in a popular revolt
>> in the working-class districts of the capital, which did
>> most of the hard work of throwing off the rule of secret
>> police and military cliques. It succeeded so well that
>> when revolutionary brigades entered the city from the
>> west, many encountered little or no resistance, and they
>> walked right into the center of the capital. Muammar
>> Qaddafi was in hiding as I went to press, and three of
>> his sons were in custody. Saif al-Islam Qaddafi had
>> apparently been the de facto ruler of the country in
>> recent years, so his capture signaled a checkmate.
>> (Checkmate is a corruption of the Persian "shah maat,"
>> the "king is confounded," since chess came west from
>> India via Iran). Checkmate.
>>
>> The end game, wherein the people of Tripoli overthrew
>> the Qaddafis and joined the opposition Transitional
>> National Council, is the best case scenario that I had
>> suggested was the most likely denouement for the
>> revolution. I have been making this argument for some
>> time, and it evoked a certain amount of incredulity when
>> I said it in a lecture in the Netherlands in mid-June,
>> but it has all along been my best guess that things
>> would end the way they have. I got it right where others
>> did not because my premises turned out to be sounder,
>> i.e., that Qaddafi had lost popular support across the
>> board and was in power only through main force. Once
>> enough of his heavy weapons capability was disrupted,
>> and his fuel and ammunition supplies blocked, the
>> underlying hostility of the common people to the regime
>> could again manifest itself, as it had in February. I
>> was moreover convinced that the generality of Libyans
>> were attracted by the revolution and by the idea of a
>> political opening, and that there was no great danger to
>> national unity here.
>>
>> I do not mean to underestimate the challenges that still
>> lie ahead- mopping up operations against regime
>> loyalists, reestablishing law and order in cities that
>> have seen popular revolutions, reconstituting police and
>> the national army, moving the Transitional National
>> Council to Tripoli, founding political parties, and
>> building a new, parliamentary regime. Even in much more
>> institutionalized and less clan-based societies such as
>> Tunisia and Egypt, these tasks have proved anything but
>> easy. But it would be wrong, in this moment of triumph
>> for the Libyan Second Republic, to dwell on the
>> difficulties to come. Libyans deserve a moment of
>> exultation.
>>
>> I have taken a lot of heat for my support of the
>> revolution and of the United Nations-authorized
>> intervention by the Arab League and NATO that kept it
>> from being crushed. I haven't taken nearly as much heat
>> as the youth of Misrata who fought off Qaddafi's tank
>> barrages, though, so it is OK. I hate war, having
>> actually lived through one in Lebanon, and I hate the
>> idea of people being killed. My critics who imagined me
>> thrilling at NATO bombing raids were just being cruel.
>> But here I agree with President Obama and his citation
>> of Reinhold Niebuhr. You can't protect all victims of
>> mass murder everywhere all the time. But where you can
>> do some good, you should do it, even if you cannot do
>> all good. I mourn the deaths of all the people who died
>> in this revolution, especially since many of the Qaddafi
>> brigades were clearly coerced (they deserted in large
>> numbers as soon as they felt it safe). But it was clear
>> to me that Qaddafi was not a man to compromise, and that
>> his military machine would mow down the revolutionaries
>> if it were allowed to.
>>
>> Moreover, those who question whether there were US
>> interests in Libya seem to me a little blind. The US has
>> an interest in there not being massacres of people for
>> merely exercising their right to free assembly. The US
>> has an interest in a lawful world order, and therefore
>> in the United Nations Security Council resolution
>> demanding that Libyans be protected from their murderous
>> government. The US has an interest in its NATO alliance,
>> and NATO allies France and Britain felt strongly about
>> this intervention. The US has a deep interest in the
>> fate of Egypt, and what happened in Libya would have
>> affected Egypt (Qaddafi allegedly had high Egyptian
>> officials on his payroll).
>>
>> Given the controversies about the revolution, it is
>> worthwhile reviewing the myths about the Libyan
>> Revolution that led so many observers to make so many
>> fantastic or just mistaken assertions about it.
>>
>> 1. Qaddafi was a progressive in his domestic policies.
>> While back in the 1970s, Qaddafi was probably more
>> generous in sharing around the oil wealth with the
>> population, buying tractors for farmers, etc., in the
>> past couple of decades that policy changed. He became
>> vindictive against tribes in the east and in the
>> southwest that had crossed him politically, depriving
>> them of their fair share in the country's resources. And
>> in the past decade and a half, extreme corruption and
>> the rise of post-Soviet-style oligarchs, including
>> Qaddafi and his sons, have discouraged investment and
>> blighted the economy. Workers were strictly controlled
>> and unable to collectively bargain for improvements in
>> their conditions. There was much more poverty and poor
>> infrastructure in Libya than there should have been in
>> an oil state.
>>
>> 2. Qaddafi was a progressive in his foreign policy.
>> Again, he traded for decades on positions, or postures,
>> he took in the 1970s. In contrast, in recent years he
>> played a sinister role in Africa, bankrolling brutal
>> dictators and helping foment ruinous wars. In 1996 the
>> supposed champion of the Palestinian cause expelled
>> 30,000 stateless Palestinians from the country. After he
>> came in from the cold, ending European and US sanctions,
>> he began buddying around with George W. Bush, Silvio
>> Berlusconi and other right wing figures. Berlusconi has
>> even said that he considered resigning as Italian prime
>> minister once NATO began its intervention, given his
>> close personal relationship to Qaddafi. Such a
>> progressive.
>>
>> 3. It was only natural that Qaddafi sent his military
>> against the protesters and revolutionaries; any country
>> would have done the same. No, it wouldn't, and this is
>> the argument of a moral cretin. In fact, the Tunisian
>> officer corps refused to fire on Tunisian crowds for
>> dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and the Egyptian
>> officer corps refused to fire on Egyptian crowds for
>> Hosni Mubarak. The willingness of the Libyan officer
>> corps to visit macabre violence on protesting crowds
>> derived from the centrality of the Qaddafi sons and
>> cronies at the top of the military hierarchy and from
>> the lack of connection between the people and the
>> professional soldiers and mercenaries. Deploying the
>> military against non-combatants was a war crime, and
>> doing so in a widespread and systematic way was a crime
>> against humanity. Qaddafi and his sons will be tried for
>> this crime, which is not "perfectly natural."
>>
>> 4. There was a long stalemate in the fighting between
>> the revolutionaries and the Qaddafi military. There was
>> not. This idea was fostered by the vantage point of many
>> Western observers, in Benghazi. It is true that there
>> was a long stalemate at Brega, which ended yesterday
>> when the pro-Qaddafi troops there surrendered. But the
>> two most active fronts in the war were Misrata and its
>> environs, and the Western Mountain region. Misrata
>> fought an epic, Stalingrad-style, struggle of self-
>> defense against attacking Qaddafi armor and troops,
>> finally proving victorious with NATO help, and then they
>> gradually fought to the west toward Tripoli. The most
>> dramatic battles and advances were in the largely Berber
>> Western Mountain region, where, again, Qaddafi armored
>> units relentlessly shelled small towns and villages but
>> were fought off (with less help from NATO initially,
>> which I think did not recognize the importance of this
>> theater). It was the revolutionary volunteers from this
>> region who eventually took Zawiya, with the help of the
>> people of Zawiya, last Friday and who thereby cut
>> Tripoli off from fuel and ammunition coming from Tunisia
>> and made the fall of the capital possible. Any close
>> observer of the war since April has seen constant
>> movement, first at Misrata and then in the Western
>> Mountains, and there was never an over-all stalemate.
>>
>> 5. The Libyan Revolution was a civil war. It was not, if
>> by that is meant a fight between two big groups within
>> the body politic. There was nothing like the vicious
>> sectarian civilian-on-civilian fighting in Baghdad in
>> 2006. The revolution began as peaceful public protests,
>> and only when the urban crowds were subjected to
>> artillery, tank, mortar and cluster bomb barrages did
>> the revolutionaries begin arming themselves. When
>> fighting began, it was volunteer combatants representing
>> their city quarters taking on trained regular army
>> troops and mercenaries. That is a revolution, not a
>> civil war. Only in a few small pockets of territory,
>> such as Sirte and its environs, did pro-Qaddafi
>> civilians oppose the revolutionaries, but it would be
>> wrong to magnify a handful of skirmishes of that sort
>> into a civil war. Qaddafi's support was too limited, too
>> thin, and too centered in the professional military, to
>> allow us to speak of a civil war.
>>
>> 6. Libya is not a real country and could have been
>> partitioned between east and west.
>> Alexander Cockburn wrote,
>>
>>     "It requites no great prescience to see that this
>>     will all end up badly. Qaddafi's failure to
>>     collapse on schedule is prompting increasing
>>     pressure to start a ground war, since the NATO
>>     operation is, in terms of prestige, like the banks
>>     Obama has bailed out, Too Big to Fail. Libya will
>>     probably be balkanized."
>>
>> I don't understand the propensity of Western analysts to
>> keep pronouncing nations in the global south
>> "artificial" and on the verge of splitting up. It is a
>> kind of Orientalism. All nations are artificial.
>> Benedict Anderson dates the nation-state to the late
>> 1700s, and even if it were a bit earlier, it is a new
>> thing in history. Moreover, most nation-states are
>> multi-ethnic, and many long-established ones have sub-
>> nationalisms that threaten their unity. Thus, the
>> Catalans and Basque are uneasy inside Spain, the
>> Scottish may bolt Britain any moment, etc., etc. In
>> contrast, Libya does not have any well-organized,
>> popular separatist movements. It does have tribal
>> divisions, but these are not the basis for nationalist
>> separatism, and tribal alliances and fissures are more
>> fluid than ethnicity (which is itself less fixed than
>> people assume). Everyone speaks Arabic, though for
>> Berbers it is the public language; Berbers were among
>> the central Libyan heroes of the revolution, and will be
>> rewarded with a more pluralist Libya. This generation of
>> young Libyans, who waged the revolution, have mostly
>> been through state schools and have a strong allegiance
>> to the idea of Libya. Throughout the revolution, the
>> people of Benghazi insisted that Tripoli was and would
>> remain the capital. Westerners looking for break-ups
>> after dictatorships are fixated on the Balkan events
>> after 1989, but there most often isn't an exact analogue
>> to those in the contemporary Arab world.
>>
>> 7. There had to be NATO infantry brigades on the ground
>> for the revolution to succeed. Everyone from Cockburn to
>> Max Boot (scary when those two agree) put forward this
>> idea. But there are not any foreign infantry brigades in
>> Libya, and there are unlikely to be any. Libyans are
>> very nationalistic and they made this clear from the
>> beginning. Likewise the Arab League. NATO had some
>> intelligence assets on the ground, but they were small
>> in number, were requested behind the scenes for liaison
>> and spotting by the revolutionaries, and did not amount
>> to an invasion force. The Libyan people never needed
>> foreign ground brigades to succeed in their revolution.
>>
>> 8. The United States led the charge to war. There is no
>> evidence for this allegation whatsoever. When I asked
>> Glenn Greenwald whether a US refusal to join France and
>> Britain in a NATO united front might not have destroyed
>> NATO, he replied that NATO would never have gone forward
>> unless the US had plumped for the intervention in the
>> first place. I fear that answer was less fact-based and
>> more doctrinaire than we are accustomed to hearing from
>> Mr. Greenwald, whose research and analysis on domestic
>> issues is generally first-rate. As someone not a
>> stranger to diplomatic history, and who has actually
>> heard briefings in Europe from foreign ministries and
>> officers of NATO members, I'm offended at the glibness
>> of an answer given with no more substantiation than an
>> idee fixe. The excellent McClatchy wire service reported
>> on the reasons for which then Secretary of Defense
>> Robert Gates, the Pentagon, and Obama himself were
>> extremely reluctant to become involved in yet another
>> war in the Muslim world. It is obvious that the French
>> and the British led the charge on this intervention,
>> likely because they believed that a protracted struggle
>> over years between the opposition and Qaddafi in Libya
>> would radicalize it and give an opening to al-Qaeda and
>> so pose various threats to Europe. French President
>> Nicolas Sarkozy had been politically mauled, as well, by
>> the offer of his defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie,
>> to send French troops to assist Ben Ali in Tunisia
>> (Alliot-Marie had been Ben Ali's guest on fancy
>> vacations), and may have wanted to restore traditional
>> French cachet in the Arab world as well as to look
>> decisive to his electorate. Whatever Western Europe's
>> motivations, they were the decisive ones, and the Obama
>> administration clearly came along as a junior partner
>> (something Sen. John McCain is complaining bitterly
>> about).
>>
>> 9. Qaddafi would not have killed or imprisoned large
>> numbers of dissidents in Benghazi, Derna, al-Bayda and
>> Tobruk if he had been allowed to pursue his March
>> Blitzkrieg toward the eastern cities that had defied
>> him. But we have real-world examples of how he would
>> have behaved, in Zawiya, Tawargha, Misrata and
>> elsewhere. His indiscriminate shelling of Misrata had
>> already killed between 1000 and 2000 by last April,, and
>> it continued all summer. At least one Qaddafi mass grave
>> with 150 bodies in it has been discovered. And the full
>> story of the horrors in Zawiya and elsewhere in the west
>> has yet to emerge, but it will not be pretty. The
>> opposition claims Qaddafi's forces killed tens of
>> thousands. Public health studies may eventually settle
>> this issue, but we know definitively what Qaddafi was
>> capable of.
>>
>> 10. This was a war for Libya's oil. That is daft. Libya
>> was already integrated into the international oil
>> markets, and had done billions of deals with BP, ENI,
>> etc., etc. None of those companies would have wanted to
>> endanger their contracts by getting rid of the ruler who
>> had signed them. They had often already had the trauma
>> of having to compete for post-war Iraqi contracts, a
>> process in which many did less well than they would have
>> liked. ENI's profits were hurt by the Libyan revolution,
>> as were those of Total SA. and Repsol. Moreover, taking
>> Libyan oil off the market through a NATO military
>> intervention could have been foreseen to put up oil
>> prices, which no Western elected leader would have
>> wanted to see, especially Barack Obama, with the danger
>> that a spike in energy prices could prolong the economic
>> doldrums. An economic argument for imperialism is fine
>> if it makes sense, but this one does not, and there is
>> no good evidence for it (that Qaddafi was erratic is not
>> enough), and is therefore just a conspiracy theory.
>>
>> Tikkun is grateful to Portside.org for giving us a sweeping permission to
>> reprint the articles it prints.
>> Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
>> on the left that will help them to interpret the world
>> and to change it.
>>   ------------------------------
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>
>
> --
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> we moved continuously on foot across the surface of the earth” Bruce Chatwin
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