middle-east

The dysfunctional politics produced by the 2011 NATO intervention worsened the Libya flood disaster

Rupen Savoulian Libya, middle-east ,

No-one can fail to be moved by the heart-rending pictures emerging from the flood-stricken region of eastern Libya. The flood, the product of a combination of heavy rainfall and poor dam maintenance, is yet further confirmation of the impact of human-induced climate change.

The floods killed thousands of people, with many more more deemed to be missing. The eastern Libyan town of Derna, devastated by the collapse of two dams overwhelmed by Storm Daniel, was basically swept out to sea. The failure of the two Derna dams, plus the severity of the storm, released 30 million cubic metres of water.

The Libyan authorities, woefully underprepared for anything like this, had ample warnings about the decrepit state of Derna’s dams. Meteorologists and on-the-ground workers had repeatedly warned of the devastating consequences of any breach or overflow of the dam structures. The authority in charge of that particular area of eastern Libya, led by former CIA asset General Khalifa Haftar, proved criminally incompetent in handling the tragic fallout.

Climate change driven disasters, such as increasingly severe and frequent weather events, do not constitute entirely surprising news. Storm Daniel, the tropical-like cyclone which struck Libya, had already caused flooding and associated damage in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. The trajectory and long reach of the storm across the Mediterranean, and its severity, were not unanticipated.

Why were the Libyan authorities so unprepared to handle such a serious natural disaster? There are two competing governments in Libya, each defying the other for territorial gain and resources. Why is there no central authority, and why is the nation fractured into feuding regions of warlords and banditry where social services are nonexistent?

Jonathan Cook, veteran Middle East journalist, states out loud what the corporate media does not want to say; Libya was ill-equipped to deal with the flood catastrophe because the society was demolished by the 2011 NATO intervention, spearheaded by Britain and France, backed up by the United States. Libya is a seething cauldron of warring militias, fanatical Islamist groups, and slave traders, precisely because the central authority under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was eliminated.

Protests erupted in Derna at the incompetence of Libyan government officials, and their NATO supporters, to adequately prepare for the eventuality of flooding. The house of Derna’s mayor was burnt down. The protesters read out their demands, including condemnations of the current Libyan authorities reputedly in charge of eastern Libya. Denouncing the NATO intervention of 2011, the workers in Derna demanded an end to the endemic violence, corruption and poverty that has marred the nation since 2011.

Former US President Barack Obama, took to social media exhorting his millions of followers to donate to the Libyan flood relief effort. Commendable sentiments, except for one glaring hypocrisy; his administration, along with Britain and France, did everything they could to militarily intervene in Libya, demolished what was a functional, albeit repressive, centralised state. The 2011 regime change operation, spearheaded by Paris and London, produced a chaotic society, marred by long-festering civil war, rival Islamist militias and grinding poverty.

In 2016, Obama stated that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the NATO intervention in Libya, was the biggest mistake of his presidency. First of all, a mistake is an unintended consequence of a course of action; numerous commentators, opponents of imperialist invasion, warned of the harmful consequences of any intervention in Libyan society.

Gaddafi himself had warned, just prior to his death, that any instability in Libya would provide a foothold for extremist Islamist organisations, and be a gateway for sub-Saharan African refugees into Europe. Both his predictions have come to pass. To be sure, seeking asylum is a human right; the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe is not the claimants sub-Saharan African origins, as far right politicians would have us believe. It is the destructive wars waged by European powers, breaking down the societies from where the outflow of refugees originate.

Secondly and more importantly, the illegal regime change operation in 2011, which began as a purportedly limited ‘no-fly zone’ over the skies of Libya, was never an unintentional event, but a deliberate and calculated criminal war. The politicians who orchestrated this war, including then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are guilty of killing civilians and committing war crimes.

The 2011 NATO foreign intervention, launched on the false and dubious pretext of ‘responsibility to protect’, resulted in the toppling of the Gaddafi regime. Libya had one of the highest literacy rates in Africa; Gaddafi used the oil revenues generated by the state-run company to provide free health care and electricity to Libyan citizens. All that came to a grinding halt in 2011. Gaddafi was murdered by a NATO-backed Islamist lynch mob, and the country descended into chaotic civil war and societal breakdown.

The buildup to the NATO intervention – led by France and the UK, and supported by the United States – was accompanied by a frenzied campaign of disinformation and war propaganda. Lurid stories about Gaddafi encouraging Libyan troops to mass rape rebel women by supplying them with viagra turned out to be false – atrocity propaganda. However, the effects of propaganda outlast the shooting war they are intended to encourage. Fraudulent PR can be recycled through different conflicts, with the intent to build domestic public support for military intervention.

Islamist militias and rival warlords have made a roaring trade in sub-Saharan African slave trading. Post-2011 Libya, hailed by former British prime minister David Cameron as a successful example of human rights interventionism, has seen the return of slave markets.

This gruesome trade in human lives is made possible by the racism of the Libyan militias and warlords who now dominate the country. The supporters of the 2011 NATO intervention were warned about the racist nature of the Islamist militias, yet chose to do nothing. These foot-soldiers of the regime change operation were empowered by their imperialist backers.

It is high time that the perpetrators of the 2011 injustice against Libya were held accountable for the predictable, criminal outcomes of their decisions and actions. If Trump can be impeached because of financial malfeasance and electoral misconduct, why cannot Obama be held accountable for participating in a criminal war launched on fraudulent and duplicitous pretexts?

The catastrophic blasting of Libyan society in 2011 only amplified the climate change-driven disaster in that nation this year. The horrendous legacy of the NATO intervention is never far from the surface. As Jasper Saah writes:

The destruction of the Libyan state in 2011 has had dramatic repercussions for the whole world—a key factor in the destabilization and proliferation of arms in the Sahel to the south. This in turn is intimately connected to the so-called “migrant crisis” that has shaped and molded European politics dramatically toward the right for the last decade.

Bear that in mind when listening to the hypocritical concerns for the Libyan situation expressed by the corporate media.

The September 11 attacks and the forever war on terror – cumulative vengeance and imperial expansion wrapped in a mantle of righteous victimhood

Rupen Savoulian Libya, middle-east , ,

Anniversaries provide us with an opportunity to examine the trajectory of political and economic policies, and evaluate their impacts. No doubt the commemorative activities marking the 22nd anniversary of the horrific 9/11 attacks were emotionally powerful and poignant. However, the practice of ‘never forget’ should not blind us to the fact that the American self-declared ‘war on terror’ is actually an imperial overreach of an economic empire hellbent on expansion.

Indeed, the millions of victims of America’s overseas wars, rationalised as cumulative vengeance, have perpetuated the kind of extrajudicial and extralegal violence that the rulers of the US claim to oppose.

While denouncing the antidemocratic values and socially regressive ideology (allegedly) motivating the Islamist militias who carried out the 9/11 attacks, the American military-industrial complex has implemented the kind of terrorist violence on a global scale it purports to oppose. It has enacted legislation that infringes on the individual liberties and freedoms which are theoretically sacrosanct in a capitalist-based democracy, freedoms which, we are repeatedly told, raise the ire of terrorist organisations.

The way we view migrants from the Middle East, particularly those from Muslim majority nations, shifted in the wake of 9/11. Rather than individuals trying for a better life, we view them as foot soldiers in a collectively radicalised partisan internal column for Islamism. The United States (and Anglophone nations generally), already moving towards surveillance capitalism, implemented intrusive over surveillance and intimidatory policing which targets the Islamic community.

The authorities who inform us that terrorist groups ‘hate our freedoms’ have done their utmost to legislate heavy restrictions on those liberties. Surveillance capitalism has done more to undermine democracy than any putative Islamist conspiracy.

Saudi complicity

The families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks have persisted in asking pointedly relevant questions about the degree of Saudi Arabian complicity in those terrible attacks. This is not to engage in deranged and paranoid conspiracist thinking, but simply to seek answers for the lingering questions regarding culpability for the terrorist atrocity.

Writing in The Intercept magazine, journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, examine the intimate connections between the team of hijackers and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence fraternity. Add to that the ongoing and fruitful cooperation between Saudi intelligence and the American intelligence apparatus, and the questions cut deeper and closer to home.

It is no secret that Osama Bin Laden, hailing from a wealthy family, was tied up with Islamist groups intimately involved with Al Qaeda’s militant activity. While Bin Laden himself was not directly involved in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks, he praised the attackers and promoted their extremist ideology as a fellow co-thinker. Bin Laden provided funding for the perpetrators of the attack, and identified with the aims of the hijackers.

The Bush family have close business and political connections with the Saudi monarchy and its financial class. George W Bush, president at the time of the attacks, downplayed evidence of Saudi culpability. In fact, Afghanistan, then under the rule of the Taliban, repeatedly offered to hand over Bin Laden – a request routinely refused by Washington. The Bush-Cheney administration wanted to have their quick, little war in Afghanistan, and make a loud demonstration of American power.

That little war lasted twenty years, and ended with the humiliating retreat of US forces from Kabul in 2021.

While copious evidence of Saudi complicity comes to light, nothing is being done to uncover the potentially embarrassing links between Washington and Riyadh in the aftermath of the 9/11 bombings. Class action lawsuits brought by the victims’ families have kept the issue of Saudi involvement close to the surface, but Washington insiders cannot face the prospect of being complicit in such a devastating atrocity.

Not in the name of the 9/11 victims

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, then President Bush gave a speech upholding the example of Abraham Zelmanowitz. The latter, a victim of 9/11, stayed in the collapsing buildings, rather than escape, sacrificing his life to protect his quadriplegic friend. Bush seized on this episode to proclaim its poignancy as demonstrative of the American national character,

Matthew Lasar, Zelmanovitz’s nephew, responded to President Bush’s words in the following way. Lasar is worth quoting at length:

I mourn the death of my uncle, and I want his murderers brought to justice. But I am not making this statement to demand bloody vengeance. . . . Afghanistan has more than a million homeless refugees. A U. S. military intervention could result in the starvation of tens of thousands of people. What I see coming are actions and policies that will cost many more innocent lives, and breed more terrorism, not less. I do not feel that my uncle’s compassionate, heroic sacrifice will be honored by what the U. S. appears poised to do.

Note the prescience of Lasar’s views. His perspective is reflected by the families of the 9/11 victims, whose purpose is to fully uncover Saudi-US intelligence community complicity in these attacks. The families of 9/11 oppose the imperial wars, drone and missile strikes, which have only resulted in innocent casualties and the forcible displacement of millions of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and other nations around the world.

Scholars at Brown University, as part of the Cost of Wars project, have found that the US post-9/11 wars have killed 4.5 million people and displaced at least 38 million across Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, and numerous other nations. When societies are unable to provide conditions of living for their people, malnutrition and child-suffering inevitably follow. The harmful health and economic consequences of conflicts long outlast the actual shooting war.

Let’s listen to the wishes of the 9/11 families, who have denounced the war on terror for producing precisely the outcomes they sought to avoid. Increased mass surveillance, horrifying wars overseas resulting in the destruction of societies and the outflow of refugees, illegal wars of conquest, drone strikes, draconian laws and indefinite detention – the war on terror is based on the values the Anglo-American alliance claims to oppose. It is time to hold accountable the American and British politicians who made such devastating and destructive domestic and foreign policy outcomes – all perversely carried out in the name of the 9/11 families.