SYRIA: THE WEST’S GREATEST FEAR IS A PEACEFUL RESOLUTION TO THE CRISIS

Another 20 killed in Idlib by NATO's proxy forces, 31 April 2012

 The strategy was simple, clear, tried and tested. It had been used successfully not only against Libya, but also Kosovo (in 1999), and was rapidly under way in Syria. It was to run as follows: train proxies to launch armed provocations; label the state’s response to these provocations as genocide; intimidate the UN Security Council into agreeing that “something must be done”; incinerate the entire army and any other resistance with fragmentation bombs and Hellfire missiles; and finally install a weak, compliant government to sign off new contracts and alliances drawn up in London, Paris and Washington, whilst the country tears itself apart. Result: the heart torn out of the ‘axis of resistance’ between Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, leaving Iran isolated and the West with a free hand to attack the Islamic republic without fear of regional repercussions.

This was to be Syria’s fate, drawn up years ago in the high level planning committees of US, British and French defence departments and intelligence services. But this time, unlike in Libya, it has not all gone according to plan.

First, there was Russia and China’s veto of the 'regime change' resolution at the UN Security Council in October 2011, followed by a second veto in February of this year. This meant that any NATO attack on Syria would be denied the figleaf of UN approval, and seen instead as a unilateral act of aggression - not just against Syria, but potentially against China and Russia as well. Vicious and reckless as they are, even Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama do not necessarily have the stomach for that kind of a fight. That left the burden of destroying the Syrian state to NATO’s proxy forces on the ground, the ‘Free Syria Army’ – a collection of domestic and (increasingly) foreign rival armed militias, mostly ultra-sectarian Salafi extremists, along with a smattering of defectors and Western special forces. 

However, this army was not created to actually defeat the Syrian state; that was always supposed to be NATO’s job. As in Libya, the role of the militias was simply to provoke reprisals from the state in order to justify a NATO blitzkrieg. Left to their own devices, they have no chance of gaining power militarily, as many in the opposition realise. "We don't believe the Free Syrian Army is a project that can help the Syrian revolution," said the leader of the internal peaceful Syrian resistance movement, Haytham Al-Manna, recently, "we don't have an example where an armed struggle against a dictatorial regime won." Of course, one could cite Cuba, South Vietnam, and many others; but what is certainly true is that internal armed struggle alone has never succeeded when the government is the only single party in the struggle with any significant mass support - such as in Syria. 

This reality was brutally driven home in early March, in the decisive battle for the Baba Amr district of Homs. This was supposedly one of the Free Syrian Army’s strongholds, yet they were roundly defeated, leaving them facing the prospect of similar defeats in their last few remaining territories as well. The opposition are increasingly aware that their best chance of meaningful change is not through a military fight that they will almost certainly lose – and which will get them killed in the process, along with their support and credibility – but through negotiations and participation in the reform process and dialogue which the government has offered. 

This prospect – of an end to the civil war, and a negotiated peace which brings about a reform process without destabilising the country – has led to desperation amongst the imperial powers. Despite their claims to the contrary, a stable Syrian-led process is the last thing they want, as it leaves open the possibility of Syria remaining a strong, independent, anti-imperialist state – exactly the possibility they had sought to eliminate.

Hence, within days of Kofi Annan’s peace plan gaining a positive response from both sides in late March, the imperial powers openly pledged, for the first time, millions of dollars for the Free Syrian Army: for military equipment, to provide salaries to its soldiers, and to bribe government forces to defect. In other words, terrified that the civil war is starting to die down, they are setting about institutionalising it. If violent regime change is starting to look unlikely, the hope instead is to keep the country weak and on its knees by keeping its energy sucked into civil war.

At the risk of making the Syrian National Council appear even more out of touch with ordinary Syrians than it does already, its Western backers have increased the pressure for them to fall into line with this strategy, leading to open calls from the SNC leadership for both the full scale arming of the rebellion, and for aerial bombardment from the West. This has caused huge rifts in the organisation, with three leading members defecting last month, because they did not want to be "accomplices to the massacre of the Syrian people through delaying, cheating, lies, one-upmanship and monopolisation of decision-making." The SNC, according to one of the three, Kamal al-Labwani , was "linked to foreign agendas which aim to prolong the battle while waiting ... for the country to be dragged into a civil war."

This month one of the very few SNC leaders actually based in Syria, Riad Turk, called on the opposition to accept the Annan peace plan, “stop the bloodshed” and enter dialogue with the government – a call not echoed by his fellow SNC colleagues abroad. Likewise, the main peaceful opposition grouping based within Syria – the National Co-ordinating Committee – has fallen out with the SNC over the latters’ increasingly belligerent role as a mouthpiece of foreign powers. NCC leader Haytham Al-Manna spoke out publicly against the Free Syrian Army recently, saying, "The militarization of the Syrian revolution signifies the death of the internal revolution…We know that the Turkish government plays an important role in the political decisions of the Free Syrian Army. We don't believe that an armed group can be on Turkish territory and remain independent of Turkish decisions."

So there is a growing perception, even amongst the Syrian opposition movement itself, that both the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Council are working in the interests of foreign powers to prolong a pointless civil war. 

Western policy makers are playing a dangerous game. Short of a NATO attack, their best option for the destabilisation and emasculation of Syria is to ensure that the ceasefire fails and the fighting continues. To this end, they are encouraging their proxy militias to step up their provocations; the purpose of Clinton and Juppe’s statements about “other measures” still being on the table is to keep the idea of a NATO attack alive in the heads of the rebels so that they continue to fight. Indeed, many more foreign fighters have been shipped into the country in recent weeks according to the Washington Post, and have been launching devastating bomb attacks in Damascus and Aleppo. US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford is a protégé of John Negroponte, who organised contra death squads to destabilise Nicaragua in the 1980s; he will almost certainly have been organising similar groups in Syria during his time there last year, for similar purposes. 

Nevertheless, the destabilisation agenda is not going according to plan. The internal opposition are becoming increasingly frustrated with the way things are progressing, and a clear split is emerging between those based outside the country, happy to see Syria consigned to oblivion in order to please their paymasters and further their careers, and those who actually have to live with the consequences. The reckless attacks of the armed militias are increasingly alienating even those who once had some sympathy for them, especially as their foreign membership and direction is exposed ever more clearly. Having been proven decisively unable to win and hold territory, these militias are turning to hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. But the guerrilla, as Mao put it, is like a fish, which can only survive in a sea of popular support. And that sea is rapidly drying up.           

Chomsky interview: full transcript

Professor Chomsky, it’s great to meet you. You were the first to really open my eyes to the reality of class power on a global scale and for that I’m very grateful. But I also take to heart your injunction to hold public intellectuals to account, so I hope to do a little of that today as well.

Firstly, on Libya, a few days before the NATO bombing started, you were interviewed on the BBC. You said you thought the rebellion was “wonderful”; you claimed that it was “initially non-violent” and you called the rebel takeover of Benghazi “liberation”. Now that groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch are reporting that the rebels were armed from the very first day of the uprising  and have been rounding up and executing innocent African migrants and black Libyans in droves ever since, do you feel ashamed of your public support for them in those crucial days before the NATO aggression began?

“No. I mean, what Amnesty International reports I am sure is correct, that there were armed elements among them, but notice they didn’t say that the rebellion was an armed rebellion; in fact the large majority were probably people like us [sic], middle class opponents of Gaddafi. It was mostly an unarmed uprising. It turned into a violent uprising and the killings you are describing indeed are going on, but it didn’t start like that. As soon as it became a civil war, that happened. In fact, right now at this moment NATO is bombing a home base of the largest tribe in Libya – Libya’s a tribal country. Benghazi is not Libya, its separate from the country, quite separate in fact, historically. Now they’re bombing the base of the largest tribe, it’s not getting reported much, but if you read the Red Cross reports they’re describing a horrifying humanitarian crisis in the city that’s under attack, with hospitals collapsing, no drugs, people dying, people fleeing on foot into the desert on foot to try to get away from it and so on. That’s happening under the NATO mandate of protecting civilians. That’s something we should think about it. And if we want to talk about Libya, we should remember that there were two interventions, not one, by NATO. One of them lasted about five minutes. That’s the one I was thinking about, the one that was taken under the UNSC resolution 1973, which actually came after that discussion, and that one called for a no fly zone over Benghazi when there was the threat of a serious massacre there, and the longer term mandate of protecting civilians, and that one lasted almost no time. Almost immediately, not NATO but the three traditional imperial powers, France, Britain and the United States carried out a second intervention which had nothing to do with protecting civilians and certainly wasn’t a no fly zone, but was participation in a rebel uprising, and that’s the one we’ve been witnessing. You can think what you like about it, but it’s almost isolated internationally. Libya’s an Adfrican country and the African countries are strongly opposed – they called for negotiations and diplomacy from the very beginning. The main independent countries – the BRICS countries – they had a major meeting right during this and again opposed the second intervention and called for efforts at negotiations and diplomacy. Even within NATO’s limited participation outside of the triumvirate, in the Arab world – almost nothing – Qatar sent a couple of planes, Egypt next door, very heavily armed, didn’t do a thing, Turkey held back for quite a while, and finally participated weakly in the triumvirate operation. So it’s a very isolated operation. They claim that it was under an Arab League request - that’s mostly fraud. First of all the AL request was extremely limited and the AL participation was a minority, mainly just Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. They issued a request for a no fly zone – actually two no fly zones – one over Libya, the other over Gaza. We don’t have to talk about what happened to that one. And after that, it kind of backed off(?)

Q2: But nevertheless it seems like you say that the attacks on black Libyans and migrant workers happened later o., but actually its been documented that50 African migrants were executed on the second day of the rebellion, February 18^th.

The rebels, the armed rebels?

Yes.

They were a part of the uprising, but they weren’t the uprising.

But nevertheless, this has been something that has really characterised a large,  significant chunk of the uprising

In the West, where it was taken over by the Western tribes – not Benghazi - there have been serious attacks against black Libyans and black migrants. That’s basically what there is of a Libyan working class. Like other oil dictatorships, there’s not much of a working class, but there was is very substantially black, and they’ve been under attack, that’s true.

But what I’m saying is that when you were doing this interview at crucial moment before NATO’s aggression, these things were already clear.

These things were absolutely not clear, and they weren’t reported, and even afterwards when they are reported, they’re not talking about the uprising, they’re talking about an element within it, which we now know is correct.

But it’s quite substantial

NOW it is.

And Jabril has given his support to the ethnic cleansing of Tawarga

Now it is, but that wasn’t

So this is not a minor sect within the rebellion

You’re talking about what happened after the civil war took place and the NATO intervention.

And on the second day of the uprising, long before the NATO intervention

Two points, which I’ll repeat. First of all, it wasn’t known and secondly it was a very small part of the uprising. The uprising was overwhelmingly middle class nonviolent opposition. We now know there was an armed element and that quickly became prominent after the civil war started. But it didn’t have to, so if that second intervention hadn’t taken place, it might not have happened.  

But surely it was clear that UNSC 1973, from the beginning when Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama were pressing for it, that it was only ever going to be a figleaf for an invasion, surely that was clear.

You’re talking about things that happened after the interview, even the resolution, and it wasn’t clear, even for those five minutes that the imperial powers accepted the resolution. It became clear a coupe of days later when they immediately started bombing in support of the rebels. And it didn’t have to happen. It could have been that world opinion, most of it – BRICS, Africa, Turkey and so on - could have prevailed.

I wanted to touch on an article you wrote, published on 4^th April. In the past you’ve been very critical of intellectuals who have used their platform to focus on the real or alleged crimes of official enemies rather than on the crimes of their own government. But in this article, you focussed mainly on the alleged crime of Gaddafi in the nineties, that’s how it opened, when this a few weeks into the aggression when NATO had already killed thousands, possibly tens of thousands…

You remember how the article started?

Yeah

How did it start?

By talking about Gaddafi’s alleged involvement in Sierra Leone.

No, it didn’t start like that. It started talking about US and British support for Gaddafi’s crimes, practically up to the moment of the invasion. It talked about an article which appeared in the London Times about the Sierra Leone tribunal – that’s how it started – right at the time of this article, the prosecution had rested in the Sierra Leone tribunal and a London Times reporter had interviewed the prosecution lawyers, an American Law Professor and an English barrister – and they complained bitterly, they said that they had wanted to prosecute Gaddafi because of his training and arming of Taylor forces that they’d charged with killing about a million people, but Britain and the US according to them threatened to defund the tribunal if they went after Gaddafi and when the American law professor was asked by the reporter why, he said “welcome to the world of oil”. That was the opening of the article, then it went on to talk about the involvement of the Harvard Business School in support for Gaddafi – writing the dissertation for his son, which led to the (lawsuit, early) retirement and so on. And he did commit – he was a terrible person in my view, he committed plenty of crimes, and some of the worst of them were supported by the US and Britain right up to the moment when they decided they could do better by turning against him. That’s what the article was about and I think it’s right to write about that.

Surely, at the moment of this NATO colonial aggression, surely focussing – albeit on US and British support for Gaddafi’s crimes – focussing primarily on the evils of the Gaddafi regime is to a certain extent playing into hands of – even manufacturing consent for – the aggression.

Supporting – pointing out the – I don’t describe it the way you do, so don’t accept your description so I won’t comment on it – but criticising the imperial triumvirate for having supported the worst crimes, I think is exactly the point. And the crimes are real, there’s no reason not to describe them. Look, I’ve written about Gaddafi plenty of times before. I wrote very harshly criticising the Reagan bombing in 1986, which incidentally is extremely interesting in ways that have never been acknowledged by the media, I don’t know if you followed that much, but that bombing was the first in history that was timed specifically for prime time television and it was carried off effectively. Kind of an important fact, and there’s a lot more to say about that; nevertheless I would never question his crimes, they’re terrible.

You said that Libya was used as a punch bag to deflect from domestic problems.

Yeah, it was. But that doesn’t mean that it was a nice place.

But do you not accept the possibility that your helping to demonise, I would say, the Libyan government and whitewashing the rebels may have helped facilitate the invasion?

Of course I didn’t whitewash the rebels, I said almost nothing about them. But it couldn’t facilitate the invasion a month after the invasion took place.

But the interview four days before.

The interview was before any of this – it was in the period when a decision had to be made about whether even to introduce a UN resolution to call for a no fly zone – and incidentally I said after that was passed that I think a case could be made for it, and I would still say that.

So what would you say in general terms should be the role of intellectuals during the period before NATO or Western aggression starts, the period of demonization, the period of manufacturing consent?

First of all, I don’t accept your description –

Which description?

I wouldn’t call it NATO aggression, it’s more complex that that. The initial step – first intervention, the five minute one – I think was justifiable. There was a chance – a significant chance – of a very serious massacre in Benghazi. Gaddafi had a horrible record of slaughtering people, and that should be known – but at that point, I think the proper reaction should have been to tell the truth about what’s happening. In that interview, if I had known about the US-UK blocking of the prosecution of Gaddafi, I would have brought that up too. I happened to find it out a couple of weeks later.

Many thanks for your time, and great to meet you.

Libya and the manufacture of consent – an interview with Noam Chomsky

This is a difficult interview for me. It was Noam Chomsky who first opened my eyes to the basic neo-colonial structure of the world, and to the role of the corporate media in both disguising and legitimising this structure. Chomsky has consistently demonstrated how, ever since the end of the Second World War, military regimes have been imposed on the third world by the US and its European allies with an ascribed role to keep wages low (and thus investment opportunities high) by wiping out communists, trade unionists, and anyone else deemed a potential threat to Empire. He has been at the forefront of exposing the lies and real motives behind the aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Serbia in recent years, and against Central America and South East Asia before that. But on Libya, in my opinion, he has been terrible. 

Don’t get me wrong; now the conquest is nearly over, Chomsky can be quite forthright in his denunciation of it, as he makes clear during the interview: “right now at this moment NATO is bombing a home base of the largest tribe in Libya” he tells me, “It’s not getting reported much, but if you read the Red Cross reports they’re describing a horrifying humanitarian crisis in the city that’s under attack, with hospitals collapsing, no drugs, people dying, people fleeing on foot into the desert to try to get away from it and so on. That’s happening under the NATO mandate of protecting civilians.” What bothers me is that this was precisely the mandate that Chomsky supported.

Wesley Clark, NATO commander during the bombing of Serbia, revealed on US television seven years ago that the Pentagon had drawn up a ‘hitlist’ in 2001 of seven states they wanted to “take out” within five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Thanks to the Iraqi and Afghan resistance, the plan has been delayed – but clearly not abandoned. We should, therefore, have been fully expecting the invasion of Libya. Given Bush’s cack-handedness over winning global support for the war on Iraq, and Obama’s declared commitment to multilateralism and ‘soft power’, we should have been expecting this invasion to have been meticulously planned in order to give it a veneer of legitimacy. Given the CIA’s growing fondness for instigating ‘colour revolutions’ to cause headaches for governments it dislikes, we should have been expecting something similar as part of the build-up to the invasion in Libya. And given Obama’s close working relationship with the Clintons, we might have expected this invasion to follow the highly successful pattern established by Bill Clinton in Kosovo: cajoling rebel movements on the ground into making violent provocations against the state, and then screaming genocide at the state’s response in order to terrorise world opinion into supporting intervention. 

In other words, we should have seen it coming, and prominent and widely respected intellectuals such as Chomsky should have used their platform to publicise Wesley Clark’s revelations, to warn of the coming aggression, and to draw attention to the racist and sectarian nature of the ‘rebel movements’ the US and British governments have traditionally employed to topple non-compliant governments. Chomsky certainly did not need reminding of the unhinged atrocities of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Nicaraguan Contras, or the Afghan Northern Alliance. Indeed, it was he who helped alert the world to many of them. 

But Chomsky did not use his platform to make these points. Instead, in an interview with the BBC one month into the rebellion – and, crucially, just four days before the passing of UN Security Council 1973 and the beginning of the NATO blitzkrieg – he chose to characterise the rebellion as “wonderful”. Elsewhere he referred to Benghazi’s takeover by racist gangs as “liberation” and to the rebellion as “initially non-violent”. In an interview with the BBC, he even claimed that “Libya is the one place [in North Africa] where there was a very violent state reaction repressing the popular uprisings”, a claim so divorced from the truth it is hard to know where to begin; Mubarak is currently being prosecuted for the murder of 850 protesters, whereas, according to Amnesty International, only 110 deaths could be confirmed in Benghazi before NATO operations began – and this included pro-government people killed by rebel militia. What really makes Libya exceptional in the North African ‘Arab Spring’ is that it was the only country in which the rebellion was armed, violent, and openly aimed at facilitating a foreign invasion. 

Now that Amnesty have confirmed that rebels have been using violence since the very start, and have been rounding up and executing innocent black Libyans and African migrants in droves ever since, I begin by asking him whether he now regrets at his initial public support for them. 

He shrugs: “No. I’m sure what Amnesty International reports is correct - that there were armed elements among them, but notice they didn’t say that the rebellion was an armed rebellion; in fact the large majority were probably people like us [sic], middle class opponents of Gaddafi. It was mostly an unarmed uprising. It turned into a violent uprising and the killings you are describing indeed are going on, but it didn’t start like that. As soon as it became a civil war, that happened.” 

In fact, it did start like that. The true colours of the rebels were made clear on the second day of the rebellion, February 18^th, when they rounded up and executed a group of fifty African migrant workers in Bayda. A week later, a terrified eyewitness told the BBC of another seventy or eighty migrant workers chopped to pieces in front of his eyes by rebel forces. These incidents – and many others like them - had made clear the racist character of the rebel militias well before his BBC interview on March 15^th. But Chomsky rejects this: “These things were absolutely not clear, and they weren’t reported, and even afterwards when they are reported, they’re not talking about the uprising, they’re talking about an element within it.” 

This may be how Chomsky sees it, but both incidents I mentioned were carried by mainstream media outlets like the BBC, the NPR and the Guardian at the time. Admittedly, they were hidden away behind reams of anti-Gaddafi bile and justified with the usual pretext of the migrants being “suspected mercenaries” - but that’s nothing that someone with Chomsky’s expertise in analysing media could not have seen through. Moreover, the forcing out last month of the entire population of the black Libyan town of Tawarga - by Misrata militias with names like “the brigade for purging black skins” - was recently given the official blessing of NTC President Mahmoud Jibril. To present these widespread racial crimes as some kind of insignificant element seems wilfully disingenuous. But Chomsky continues to stick to his guns: 

“You’re talking about what happened after the civil war took place and the NATO intervention. [I’m not]. Two points, which I’ll repeat. First of all, it wasn’t known and secondly it was a very small part of the uprising. The uprising was overwhelmingly middle class nonviolent opposition. We now know there was an armed element and that quickly became prominent after the civil war started. But it didn’t have to, so if that second intervention hadn’t taken place, it might not have turned out that way.” 

Chomsky characterises the NATO intervention as having two parts. The initial intervention, authorised by the UN Security Council to prevent a massacre in Benghazi he argues, was legitimate - but the ‘second’ intervention – where the ‘imperial triumvirate’ of US, Britain and France acted as an airforce for the militias of Misrata and Benghazi in their conquest of the rest of the country – was wrong and illegal: “We should remember that there were two interventions, not one, by NATO. One of them lasted about five minutes. That’s the one that was taken under the UNSC resolution 1973, that called for a no fly zone over Benghazi when there was the threat of a serious massacre there, along with a longer term mandate of protecting civilians, and that one lasted almost no time. Almost immediately, not NATO but the three traditional imperial powers, France, Britain and the United States carried out a second intervention which had nothing to do with protecting civilians and certainly wasn’t a no fly zone, but was participation in a rebel uprising, and that’s the one we’ve been witnessing. It’s almost isolated internationally. The African countries are strongly opposed – they called for negotiations and diplomacy from the very beginning. The main independent countries – the BRICS countries – also opposed the second intervention and called for efforts at negotiations and diplomacy. Even within NATO’s limited participation outside of the triumvirate, in the Arab world, there was almost nothing; Qatar sent a couple of planes, and Egypt next door - very heavily armed - didn’t do a thing, Turkey held back for quite a while, and finally participated weakly in the triumvirate operation. So it’s a very isolated operation. They claim that it was under an Arab League request, but that’s mostly fraud. First of all the Arab League request was extremely limited and only a minority participated - just Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. They actually issued a request for two no fly zones – one over Libya, the other over Gaza. We don’t have to talk about what happened to that one.” 

On most of this we agree. My argument, however, is that it was painfully clear that UNSC 1973 was intended (by the ‘imperial triumvirate’) as a figleaf for precisely the “second intervention” he decries. 

“It wasn’t clear, even for those five minutes that the imperial powers accepted the resolution. It became clear a couple of days later when they immediately started bombing in support of the rebels. And it didn’t have to happen. It could have been that world opinion, most of it – BRICS, Africa, Turkey and so on - could have prevailed.” 

It seems bizarrely naïve for a man of Chomsky’s insight to feign surprise when the imperial powers used UNSC 1973 for their own purposes to topple one of the governments on their hitlist. What else would they have used it for? It is somewhat exasperating; if it was anyone else I was talking to, I’d tell them to go and read some Chomsky. He would tell you that the imperial powers don’t act out of humanitarian but totalitarian impulses – to defend and extend their dominance of the world and its resources. He would tell you – I would have thought – not to expect them to implement measures designed to save civilians, because they would only take advantage and do the opposite. But apparently not. 

I try again: Does Chomsky accept that his whitewashing of the rebels, and demonising of Gaddafi, in the days and weeks before the invasion was launched, may have helped to facilitate it? 

“Of course I didn’t whitewash the rebels, I said almost nothing about them. The interview was before any of this – it was in the period when a decision had to be made about whether even to introduce a UN resolution to call for a no fly zone – and incidentally I said after that was passed that I think a case could be made for it, and I would still say that.” 

Even after British, French and US aggression had become abundantly clear, however – on April 5^th – Chomsky published another article on Libya. By this time thousands - if not tens of thousands - of Libyans had been killed by NATO bombs. This time his piece did open by criticising the British and American governments – not for their blitzkrieg, however – but for their alleged support for Gaddafi ‘and his crimes’. Does this not all feed into the demonisation that justifies and perpetuates NATO’s aggression? 

“First of all, I don’t accept your description – I wouldn’t call it NATO aggression, it’s more complex that that. The initial step – the first intervention, the five minute one – I think was justifiable. There was a chance – a significant chance – of a very serious massacre in Benghazi. Gaddafi had a horrible record of slaughtering people, and that should be known – but at that point, I think the proper reaction should have been to tell the truth about what’s happening.” 

I can’t help wondering why the responsibility to “tell the truth about what’s happening” only applies to Libya. Should we not also tell the truth about what is happening in the West? About its unquenchable thirst for diminishing oil and gas reserves, about its fear of an independent Africa, about its long track record of supporting and arming the most brutal gangsters against governments it wants removed – and god knows, Chomsky is familiar enough with the examples – and most importantly, about the crisis and chaos currently enveloping the entire Western economic system and leading its elites increasingly to rely on fascistic warmongering to maintain their crumbling world dominance? Isn’t all this actually a lot more pertinent to the war on Libya than recounting alleged ‘crimes’ of Gaddafi from twenty years ago?

Chomsky had an argument with James Petras in 2003 over Chomsky’s public condemnation of Cuba’s arrest of several dozen paid US agents and execution of three hijackers. Petras argued then that “Intellectuals have a responsibility to distinguish between the defensive measures taken by countries and peoples under imperial attack and the offensive methods of imperial powers bent on conquest. It is the height of cant and hypocrisy to engage in moral equivalences between the violence and repression of imperial countries bent on conquest with that of Third World countries under military and terrorist attacks.” But Chomsky has done worse than this – far from painting moral equivalences, for a long time he simply airbrushed out of the picture ALL crimes of NATO’s Libyan allies, whilst amplifying and distorting the defensive measures taken by Libya’s government in dealing with an armed US-backed rebellion. 

I remind Chomsky of his comment some years back that Libya was used as a punchbag by US politicians to deflect public attention away from domestic problems: “Yeah, it was. But that doesn’t mean that it was a nice place.” 

It’s a lot less “nice” now.

This article first appeared in Al Ahram Weekly. 

Timing of planned Franco-British war games suggests Libyan war has been long planned.

November 2010 War Games: "Southern Mistral" Air Attack against Dictatorship in a Fictitious Country called "Southland" by Rep. Dennis J Kucinich
Global Research, April 15, 2011
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On November 2, 2010 France and Great Britain signed a mutual defence treaty, which included joint participation in "Southern Mistral" (www.southern-mistral.cdaoa.fr), a series of war games outlined in the bilateral agreement. Southern Mistral involved a long-range conventional air attack, called Southern Storm, against a dictatorship in a fictitious southern country called Southland. The joint military air strike was authorised by a pretend United Nations Security Council Resolution. The "Composite Air Operations" were planned for the period of 21-25 March, 2011. On 20 March, 2011, the United States joined France and Great Britain in an air attack against Gaddafi's Libya, pursuant to UN Security Council resolution 1973. Have the scheduled war games simply been postponed, or are they actually under way after months of planning, under the name of Operation Odyssey Dawn? Were opposition forces in Libya informed by the US, the UK or France about the existence of Southern Mistral/Southern Storm, which may have encouraged them to violence leading to greater repression and a humanitarian crisis? In short was this war against Gaddafi's Libya planned or a spontaneous response to the great suffering which Gaddafi was visiting upon his opposition? Members of the United States Congress are wondering how much planning time it took for our own government, in concert with the UK and France, to line up 10 votes in the Security Council and gain the support of the Arab League and Nato, and then launch an attack on Libya without observing the constitutional requirement of congressional authorisation. Libya was attacked, we have been told, because Gaddafi allegedly had killed 6,000 of his own people. But is this true? It should be remembered that in 2006, a full 18 years after the Lockerbie bombing, the US lifted sanctions against Libya, which was welcomed back into the international fold. Now, as Gaddafi faces armed internal opposition backed by a UN Security Council resolution and faces powerful external opposition backed by the military of the US, the UK and France, he is told he must give up power. But to whom? What is the end game? The US has been dancing around the regime change issue, (since that is not sanctioned by the UNSC Resolution) but as in most cases one has to watch where the bombs are falling to determine whether or not regime change is the policy. The newest argument for regime change is that if he is not ousted Gaddafi can be expected to attempt Lockerbie-type retaliation against the west in response to the attacks seeking to oust him. This bloody enterprise is beginning to sound a lot like Iraq: "Saddam was killing his own people, will kill his people, or will kill us if we don"t get him first." So did the Bush Administration pump up the fears of the American people that we were next, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and had the intention and capability of attacking the United States. The Iraq war begins its ninth year at a long term cost to US taxpayers of in excess of $3 trillion.The intelligence making the case for the war was "sexed up". President Bush and Vice President Cheney made a false case for war. An expensive lie. In the name of saving the people of Iraq, we bombed the country, invaded, changed the regime and it is still a carnival of death. In the end it was China, not involved in the war, which received a multi-billion oil deal. The war in Afghanistan, with no end in sight, has already run a decade and will inevitably cost trillions. The war against Libya will cost the US $1 billion for the first week. But we in America are being assured that since Nato is taking over, our role will change. In addition to funding the Libyan war from our own Pentagon resources, the US provides 25% of the funding of Nato, the UK 9.1%, France 8.72%. For all intents and purposes the coalition is handing control of the war over – to itself. As the funding switches to Nato, we in the US will get the Libyan war at a 75% discount, and our allies in the UK and France will have to pay considerable sums from their own treasuries for a war which is sure to cost billions. Of the 28 members of Nato, I think of Iceland which provides 0.0450 of Nato's military budget. If member nations are assessed accordingly, poor Iceland, whose economy has imploded, will pay $45m for each billion spent on the war in Libya. Expensive membership dues. This sleight-of-hand-over to NATO is an attempt to quell popular dissent to the war by making it appear that no one nation is taking up the burden of saving Libya. But it will beg more questions such as who or what is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and how did they work their way from the North Atlantic to the Gulf of Sidra, not to mention in Afghanistan on the Chinese border? This war is wrong on so many fronts. The initial stated purpose, protecting Libyan civilians, will soon evaporate as it becomes clear that the war has accelerated casualties and enlarged a humanitarian crisis. Debates over the morality of intervention will give way to a desperate search for answers as to how and when do we get out, and how and why did we get in. Dennis Kucinich is a Democrat congressman and former presidential candidate
Dennis J Kucinich is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Dennis J Kucinich