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Libya 2.0? After Sowing Chaos with 2011 Invasion, US Bombs Destabilized Nation
At least 40 reported dead following strikes on northern city of Sabratha
Feb 19, 2016
The United States on Friday conducted air strikes in Libya, a country described as having "all but collapsed" since the NATO military intervention there five years ago.
Local officials say that at least 40 people were killed from the strikes in the early morning, with others critically wounded, news agencies report. The location of the strike was a reported Islamic State training camp in the northern Libyan city of Sabratha.
The Pentagon said that it was not clear yet whether the target of the attack, Noureddine Chouchane, was among those killed.
Chouchane, a Tunisian national, has been linked to attacks in 2015 on a Tunis museum and a beach in the resort town of Sousse.
"He facilitated the movement of potential ISIL-affiliated foreign fighters from Tunisia to Libya and onward to other countries," the Associated Press reports Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook as saying.
The Guardianreports that the new
airstrike, the third by the US in Libya since June, raised questions about the US opening another front against an enemy whose strength in Libya has grown in the chaos resulting from Nato's 2011 war aiding the revolutionaries that killed dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But some officials suggested that the strike on Chouchane was a target of opportunity, rather than the inaugural shots of a long-telegraphed initiative. The two previous strikes hit an Isis base in Derna in November and an al-Qaida gathering at Ajdabiya in eastern Libya in June.
As journalist Glenn Greenwald and professor of international relations Vijay Prishad both indicated in early-morning tweets, Friday's bombing should be read as an indication of the Obama administration's failed strategy in Libya:
Last month, after speaking with his French counterpart, Gen. Pierre de Villiers, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "It's fair to say we're looking to take decisive military action against ISIL [in Libya] in conjunction with a legitimate political process."
The strikes come just days after President Obama said, "With respect to Libya, I have been clear from the outset that we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way that we went after al Qaeda wherever they appeared."
"We will continue to take actions where we've got a clear operation and a clear target in mind. And we are working with our other coalition partners to make sure that as we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them."
But this reflects an approach akin to "a game of whack-a-mole spanning multiple unstable foreign countries," argues Paul Pillar, professor at Georgetown University for security studies.
He explains:
Opening up a real military front against [ISIS in Libya] with Western armed forces might seem to be an appropriate going to where the action is, but it also would perpetuate a fundamentally flawed conception of counterterrorism as revolving around military offensives against whatever presence on the ground has been established by whatever radical group currently worries us the most.
[...]
The underlying problem in a place such as post-Gaddafi Libya is a lack of good governance or of any governance. Inadequate governance has multiple bad effects, including the sort of chaos that violent extremists exploit. Libya does not have a governance problem because ISIS is there; ISIS is there because Libya has a severe governance problem.
Yet another fallacy in common thinking about counterterrorism is that whacking the offending group is progress. It is not, if what is left after the whacking is just more of the inadequate governance that led to the group establishing its presence there in the first place.
Others similarly described the governance problem. From the Guardian earlier this week:
"Libya is becoming a scenario whereby you will have three governments," says Ludovico Carlino of IHS Jane's, a London defense analyst. "An intervention [without a unity government] will probably cause more anarchy and chaos."
The reporting adds this comment from Guma El-Gamaty, the rebel government's London envoy during the revolution: "We are now suffering the legacy of Gaddafi, the lack of institutions, no democracy, the lack of knowing how to come together."
Reuters reports: "A U.N.-backed government of national accord is trying to win support but is still awaiting parliamentary approval. It is opposed by factional hardliners and has yet to establish itself in the capital Tripoli."
Last month, in an article entitled "The U.S. Intervention in Libya Was Such a Smashing Success That a Sequel Is Coming," Greenwald wrote that since the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, the country.
so predictably -- has all but completely collapsed, spending years now drowning in instability, anarchy, fractured militia rule, sectarian conflict, and violent extremism. The execution of Saddam Hussein was no vindication of that war nor a sign of improved lives for Iraqis, and the same was true for the mob killing of Qaddafi.
[...]
the much bigger question was when (not if, but when) the instability and extremism that predictably followed the NATO bombing would be used to justify a new U.S.-led war -- also exactly as happened in Iraq.
[...]
Just as there was no al Qaeda or ISIS to attack in Iraq until the U.S. bombed its government, there was no ISIS in Libya until NATO bombed it. Now the U.S. is about to seize on the effects of its own bombing campaign in Libya to justify an entirely new bombing campaign in that same country.
And in a statement Friday, Prashad said, "The U.S. Air Force should have named this current bombing run in Libya 'Operation Deja Vu.' It is the third such strike at ISIS. What is not clear is the strategy being followed by the U.S. Occasional bombing runs have not stopped ISIS from fully taking Sirte and now expanding along the edge of the Gulf of Sidra."
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In Retrospect: A Year of Sharpening Contradictions
Dec 30, 2015
Note: The horrific murder of 12 persons and the wounding of 11 in the attack on the staff of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo by terrorists on January 7 this year was followed on the evening of 13 November by six coordinated attacks, killing 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan theater.
The first of these sanguinary attacks was inspired by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. Until November, this group was the most determined and successful in attacking and getting up attacks on the West, including the underwear bomber of 2009 over Detroit. It was also AQAP literature that helped convince the San Bernadino killers to shoot up their workplace. The latter were also seeking to contact al-Qaeda in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra or the Nusra Front).
The Saudi-led war on the Zaidi Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen has unleashed AQAP, which has al-Mukalla but also now the city of Zinjibar in Abyan province. The Houthis aren't dangerous to the US or Europe, but AQAP is a proven menace. The Saudis & allies have apparently invested almost nothing in curbing Yemen's al-Qaeda compared to their massive bombing campaigns and troop intervention against the Houthis.
As for the Nusra Front or al-Qaeda in Syria, it is a formal ally of the Saudi-backed Army of Conquest. Some of the 30 CIA-vetted Syrian rebel groups to whom the Saudis are used to provide T.O.W. anti-tank rockets, by now mostly hard line Salafis or Muslim Brotherhood, have occasionally had tactical field alliances with al-Qaeda. It wouldn't be fair to say that the US is supporting al-Qaeda in Syria (again, it is implicated in radicalizing the San Bernadino two). But let us say that it is allied with allies of al-Qaeda, making the same mistake as in the 1980s, when it supported Salafi Mujahidin allied with Arab al-Qaeda against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Despite the hype about Daesh, other al-Qaeda offshoots remain very dangerous, but AQAP and the Nusra Front are being ignored, or in the case of the latter, even indirectly supported by the US and its allies.
The Nov. 13 Paris attacks appear to have been inspired by Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), though the shadowy, tiny networks of radicals in the Brussels and Paris slums likely did not actually need much encouragement to attack the French capital. France has been a significant player against the radical groups in West and North Africa, and had been bombing Daesh in Iraq alongside the US. It had intelligence of a Daesh assault on France last summer and so started bombing al-Raqqa, the Daesh capital in northeastern Syria, in September, in hopes of disrupting the planning process. They were too late.
As horrid as the Paris attacks were, they were the work of a tiny, tiny group of European Muslims. Almost all European Muslims oppose such violence (3/5s of French Muslims are secular-minded and not religious). European Muslims until 2015 were responsible for relatively little terrorism in Europe compared to separatist groups or the white supremacist far right. In 2011 Anders Breivik, a far right Islamophobe, killed 77 people in Norway, far outstripping the per capita toll taken by the Nov. 13 gang in Paris.
Part of the backlash to the two big Paris strikes, by AQAP and Daesh, in 2015 was the rise of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, which demonizes Muslims in general, speaking of excluding them from the United States and closing mosques. Trump and his followers are falling for the trick of "sharpening contradictions," a key technique of insurgencies, as I explained after Charlie Hebdo:
[These attacks] were in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public.
The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.
Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.
This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl Popper of how he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he was auditing classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in disgust when he discovered that they were attempting to use false flag operations to provoke militant confrontations. In one of them police killed 8 socialist youth at Horlgasse on 15 June 1919. For the unscrupulous among Bolsheviks-who would later be Stalinists- the fact that most students and workers don't want to overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to some of them to "sharpen the contradictions" between labor and capital.
The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram term deriving from wordplay involving scrambling of letters). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim.
Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, deployed this sort of polarization strategy successfully in Iraq, constantly attacking Shiites and their holy symbols, and provoking the ethnic cleansing of a million Sunnis from Baghdad. The polarization proceeded, with the help of various incarnations of Daesh (Arabic for ISIL or ISIS, which descends from al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia). And in the end, the brutal and genocidal strategy worked, such that Daesh was able to encompass all of Sunni Arab Iraq, which had suffered so many Shiite reprisals that they sought the umbrella of the very group that had deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.
"Sharpening the contradictions" is the strategy of sociopaths and totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance and preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted purposes of a self-styled great leader.
The only effective response to this manipulative strategy (as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is to resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a few and to refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals.
For those who require unrelated people to take responsibility for those who claim to be their co-religionists (not a demand ever made of Christians), the al-Azhar Seminary, seat of Sunni Muslim learning and fatwas, condemned the attack, as did the Arab League that comprises 22 Muslim-majority states.
We have a model for response to terrorist provocation and attempts at sharpening the contradictions. It is Norway after Anders Behring Breivik committed mass murder of Norwegian leftists for being soft on Islam. The Norwegian government launched no war on terror. They tried Breivik in court as a common criminal. They remained committed to their admirable modern Norwegian values.
Most of France will also remain committed to French values of the Rights of Man, which they invented. But an insular and hateful minority will take advantage of this deliberately polarizing atrocity to push their own agenda. Europe's future depends on whether the Marine LePens are allowed to become mainstream. Extremism thrives on other people's extremism, and is inexorably defeated by tolerance.
Let me conclude by offering my profound condolences to the families, friends and fans of our murdered colleagues at Charlie Hebdo, including Stephane Charbonnier, Bernard Maris, and cartoonists Georges Wolinski Jean Cabut, aka Cabu, and Berbard Verlhac (Tignous)- and all the others. As Charbonnier, known as Charb, said, "I prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.".
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Iraq: A Nation Destroyed by American Contempt
Jun 16, 2015
Iraq's dismal health situation is testimony to the invasion of the country by foreign forces, including now the takeover of important parts of its territory by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The Iraqi people have been the subject of mass executions, rape, torture and, in addition, the destruction of the country's infrastructure. The international community has been mostly deaf to the needs of Iraqis, who have undergone difficulties much greater than during the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Dr. Margaret Chan, the World Health Organization Director-General stated recently, "The situation is bad, really bad, and rapidly getting worse," as she launched a new humanitarian plan for Iraq. If they don't receive appropriate support, 84% of all health projects and centers run the risk of closure before the end of June.
It is estimated that since January 2014, 2.9 million people have fled their homes, 6.9 million Iraqis need immediate access to essential health services, and 7.1 million need easier access to water, sanitation and hygiene assistance. Presently, 8.2 million people in Iraq need immediate humanitarian support.
Women and children have not been spared the brutal consequences of the war. Survivors of gender-based violence and rape experience trauma and depression, and suicides among women and girls have risen markedly in recent years. Children's health status has deteriorated markedly in the last 12 years. In addition, they have been used as suicide bombers and human shields and have been killed by crucifixion or buried alive.
Iraqis health status is a reflection of the deterioration of the country's health system. Medical facilities, which in the 1980s were among the best in the Middle East, have deteriorated significantly after the 2003 invasion. It is estimated that during the war 12 percent of hospitals and the country's two main public health laboratories were destroyed.
Sanitary conditions in hospitals remain unsatisfactory, and medications and trained personnel are in short supply. Even basic health care is unavailable in regions of the country under armed conflict. As a result of the collapsed sanitation infrastructure, the incidence of cholera, dysentery and typhoid fever has increased. Malnutrition among children and other childhood diseases have also increased.
Doctors in the thousands have been leaving the country and those that remain are under constant threat to their personal safety. As Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) stated, "Until now, it is extremely difficult to find Iraqi doctors willing to work in certain areas because they fear for their security."
Despite some government aid and reconstruction plans, several remote areas are excluded from state reconstruction and development efforts, leaving thousands of Iraqis without access to essential health care up to this day. As a result, thousands of Iraqis are obliged to sell their homes and possessions to seek health care abroad.
The widespread environmental damage caused by the war, including the degradation of forests and wetlands, destruction of wildlife, and increased air pollution, will have long-term impacts on people's health. In addition, medical researchers have expressed their concern about people's health being seriously affected by the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium by American and British forces.
The continuing conflict has exacted a heavy toll on all Iraqis' mental health and quality of life. "Many Iraqis have been pushed to their absolute limit as decades of conflict and instability has wreaked devastation. Mentally exhausted by their experiences, many struggle to understand what is happening to them. The feelings of isolation and hopelessness are compounded by the taboo associated with mental health issues and the lack of mental healthcare services that people can turn to for help," said Helen O'Neill, MSF's head of mission in Iraq.
We are facing nothing less than the almost total destruction of a country by an ill-advised invasion whose consequences are still being felt. Some day, somebody will have to respond for it.
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