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

[Amaia Arcos]

Roving correspondent is going to have to become correspondents' overseer
soon, there is only so much one can follow! (and I appreciate your
appreciation but, going against myself, I don't think I am doing a very good
job o.O)

Have been drafting an "ad" to try and get more specialised in their region
bloggers/curators for the P2P Foundation Blog..

On 12 September 2011 11:35, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

> 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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>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> “We would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if
>> we moved continuously on foot across the surface of the earth” Bruce Chatwin
>>
>
>
>
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-- 
“We would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we
moved continuously on foot across the surface of the earth” Bruce Chatwin
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