{"id":11142,"date":"2011-03-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-27T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=11142"},"modified":"2011-03-27T23:46:56","modified_gmt":"2011-03-27T21:46:56","slug":"libya-the-war-is-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/03\/libya-the-war-is-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Libya: The War Is On"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Washington<\/em><\/p>\n

Indeed.\u00a0 A physician who heals only friends, not foes, is no physician but party to a war.\u00a0 An organization that protects only our side civilians not the other side is not humanitarian but belligerent.\u00a0 We are far from the Hippocratic Oath in world affairs.\u00a0 Thus, there is nothing historical about the March 17 Security Council Resolution 1973.<\/p>\n

Historical would have been a resolution protecting possible foes and restraining friends of the Anglo-American-French trio dominating the UN Security Council, putting their NATO at the UN disposal as a world cop.\u00a0 The NATO that made headlines the same day exactly for killing civilians, a daily routine it seems, in Afghanistan.\u00a0 Historical would have been R2P, a no-fly zone over Gaza, over Bahrain, over Pakistan, Afghanistan; against themselves.\u00a0 What happens now is intervention supporting one side against the other.\u00a0 It is normally called war.<\/p>\n

True, President Obama became more multilateral than Bush.\u00a0 But that is a formalistic perspective.\u00a0 The problem is not who and how many decide but what they decide.\u00a0 Also true, the resolution excluded the Fidel Castro prediction of 21 February that NATO will occupy Libya: “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory”.\u00a0 But it included the US rider: “by all necessary measures”.\u00a0 There may be more UNSC resolutions.<\/p>\n

Then a closer look, starting with the vote.\u00a0 The majority 10\/15 and no veto is clear.\u00a0 But the Western trio represents less than half a billion whereas the 5 abstainers, BRIC + Germany, are close to half of humanity.\u00a0 To abstain, regardless of political motivation, may be something beyond voting against: a No accepts the discourse but is against, Abstain rejects the whole approach.<\/p>\n

The German abstention withdrew the biggest European NATO member digging a hole as it is supposed to be based on consensus.<\/p>\n

More important among the abstainers are the two pillars of SCO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, one observer, India, and the biggest country in Latin America.\u00a0 By and large the West against the Rest and articulation of NATO vs. the SCO opposition.\u00a0 And they all talk about a vague alternative, ceasefire, mediation.\u00a0 Hopefully they will translate that rhetoric into action, and soon.<\/p>\n

The third power is Islam; but whereas NATO-SCO use state terrorism some elements in Islam specialized in terrorism.\u00a0 Who gets Islam on their side will rule the world, and NATO is now at war with 4 and has a Secretary General with solid anti-Islamic credentials.<\/p>\n

That the USA wants to recede into the background is easily explained.\u00a0 They have all reasons not to front the empire, leaving that job to the allies.\u00a0 The USA is bankrupt, and wants to share economic, military and above all political risks.\u00a0 There are noises in Congress about the constitution; moreover, we cannot afford it, this could become a deeper quagmire than Afghanistan.\u00a0 The NATO action has confirmed all the predictions about the colonizers of Africa–UK-France-Italy.\u00a0 He can now try a second revolution.\u00a0 He may not win, but may not lose either; for that NATO ground troops could be needed.\u00a0 And 20 years of war and occupation.<\/p>\n

Of course nobody should just watch a regime brutalizing its own people as would happen if-when Gadhafi turns rhetoric into reality.\u00a0 All other measures should have been used, including hitting his planes by sea-born missiles. But, as someone on National Public Radio quipped, “President Obama has fired more cruise missiles than all other Nobel Peace Prize winners combined”, and they have hit all kinds of targets, flying, driving, walking, being.\u00a0 What is next<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Well, what does this remind us of?\u00a0 The NATO action against Serbia, of course, as Michel Collon points out in Salon<\/a>.\u00a0 They did not have a UNSC mandate; but used “all necessary measures”.<\/p>\n

Like for Libya, for Serbia-Kosovo the West made its usual propaganda.\u00a0 There is that reduction of the enemy to one person, to be hated, using faithfully the Orwell recipe in 1984.\u00a0 Milosevic, Hussein, Osama bin Laden, now Gadhafi.\u00a0 That groundwork has been done for Castro-Ch\u00e1vez, but with no UNSC 1973 follow-up, so far.\u00a0 Strange that the West that produced the idea of a social contract that the people could revise, Rousseau against Hobbes, is focused on only one person and so little on the people, and only on the bad, nothing good that could explain why so many are on his side. And so ignorant of history in spite of its high education.<\/p>\n

But the goals in Serbia were clear: bombing state enterprises not the privatized ones, opening for transnational to get hold of natural resources, getting that huge military base Camp Bondsteel, supporting a liberation army (UCK) with a track record of horrors. The weapons used included cluster bombs, graphite bombs to hit electricity, depleted uranium with well known consequences.<\/p>\n

We do not know that this will apply to the Libyan exercise, with the threat to flatten Tripoli.\u00a0 Who the rebels are is not clear; no doubt many, most, all, are strongly and rightly against Gadhafi’s dictatorship.\u00a0 But what are they for, their goals?\u00a0 Educated guess: they will accommodate direct foreign investment, in oil, and a base or two; out of gratitude and to solidify the victory.\u00a0 And the USA has what it has tried for a long time: a NATO base in Africa; and the more so the less peace.\u00a0 Withdraw the foreign presence in Bosnia and Kosovo and the order imposed by the West may unravel, even quickly.\u00a0 From a US to a Western empire?<\/p>\n

In Libya there may be millions who dislike the man but like much of what he stood for.\u00a0 The West may become an easy victim of its own one-country-one-person doctrine. And we are in for one more long-lasting, tragic, crime against humanity. With no exit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As someone on National Public Radio quipped, “President Obama has fired more cruise missiles than all other Nobel Peace Prize winners combined”, and they have hit all kinds of targets: flying, driving, walking, being. What is next?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}