Getting Fooled on Iraq, Libya, Now Russia

A British parliamentary inquiry into the Libyan fiasco has reported what should have been apparent from the start in 2011 - and was to some of us - that the West's military intervention to "protect" civilians in Benghazi was a cover for what became another disastrous "regime change" operation.

The report from the U.K.'s Foreign Affairs Committee confirms that the U.S. and other Western governments exaggerated the human rights threat posed by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and then quickly morphed the "humanitarian" mission into a military invasion that overthrew and killed Gaddafi, leaving behind political and social chaos.

The report's significance is that it shows how little was learned from the Iraq War fiasco in which George W. Bush's administration hyped and falsified intelligence to justify invading Iraq and killing its leader, Saddam Hussein. In both cases, U.K. leaders tagged along and the West's mainstream news media mostly served as unprofessional propaganda conduits, not as diligent watchdogs for the public.

"When it comes to Putin and Russia, it's the same ole hyperbole and falsehood that so disinformed the public regarding the 'threats' from Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi."

Today, we are seeing an even more dangerous repetition of this pattern: demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, destabilizing the Russian economy and pressing for "regime change" in Moscow. Amid the latest propaganda orgy against Putin, virtually no one in the mainstream is exercising any restraint or finding any cautionary lessons from the Iraqi and Libyan examples.

Yet, with Russia, the risks are orders of magnitude greater than even the cases of Iraq and Libya - and one might toss in the messy "regime change" projects in Ukraine and Syria. The prospect of political chaos in Moscow - with extremists battling for power and control of the nuclear codes - should finally inject some sense of responsibility in the West's politicians and media, but doesn't.

When it comes to Putin and Russia, it's the same ole hyperbole and falsehood that so disinformed the public regarding the "threats" from Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Just as President George W. Bush deceptively painted Hussein's supposed WMD as a danger to Americans and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dishonestly portrayed Gaddafi as "genocidal," U.S. officials and pundits are depicting Putin as some cartoonish villain or some new Hitler.

And, just as The New York Times, Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets amplified the Iraq and Libyan propaganda to the American people - rather than questioning and challenging it - these supposedly journalistic entities are performing the same function regarding Russia. The chief difference is that now we're talking about the potential for nuclear annihilation.

According to the new U.K. report on Libya, Britain's military intervention - alongside the U.S. and France - was based on "erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding" of the reality inside Libya, which included a lack of appreciation about the role of Islamic extremists in spearheading the opposition to Gaddafi.

In other words, Gaddafi was telling the truth when he accused the rebels around Benghazi of being penetrated by Islamic terrorists. The West, including the U.S. news media, took Gaddafi's vow to wipe out this element and distorted it into a claim that he intended to slaughter the region's civilians, thus stampeding the United Nations Security Council into approving an operation to protect them.

That mandate was then twisted into an excuse to decimate Libya's army and clear the way for anti-Gaddafi rebels to seize the capital of Tripoli and eventually hunt down, torture and murder Gaddafi.

Ignored Terror Evidence

Yet, there was evidence before this "regime change" occurred regarding the extremist nature of the anti-Gaddafi rebels as well as those seeking to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria. As analysts Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman wrote in a pre-Libya-war report for West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, "the Syrian and Libyan governments share the United States' concerns about violent salafist/jihadi ideology and the violence perpetrated by its adherents."

In the report entitled "Al-Qaeda's Foreign Fighters in Iraq," Felter and Fishman also analyzed Al Qaeda's documents captured in 2007 showing personnel records of militants who flocked to Iraq for the war. The documents revealed that eastern Libya (the base of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion) was a hotbed for suicide bombers traveling to Iraq to kill American troops.

Felter and Fishman wrote that these so-called Sinjar Records disclosed that while Saudis comprised the largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq, Libyans represented the largest per-capita contingent by far. Those Libyans came overwhelmingly from towns and cities in the east.

"The vast majority of Libyan fighters that included their hometown in the Sinjar Records resided in the country's Northeast, particularly the coastal cities of Darnah 60.2% (53) and Benghazi 23.9% (21)," Felter and Fishman wrote, adding:

"Both Darnah and Benghazi have long been associated with Islamic militancy in Libya, in particular for an uprising by Islamist organizations in the mid?1990s. ... One group -- the Libyan Fighting Group ... -- claimed to have Afghan veterans in its ranks," a reference to mujahedeen who took part in the CIA-backed anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as did Al Qaeda founder, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi.

"The Libyan uprisings [in the 1990s] became extraordinarily violent," Felter and Fishman wrote. "Qadhafi used helicopter gunships in Benghazi, cut telephone, electricity, and water supplies to Darnah and famously claimed that the militants 'deserve to die without trial, like dogs,'"

Some important Al Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan's tribal regions also were believed to have come from Libya. For instance, "Atiyah," who was guiding the anti-U.S. war strategy in Iraq, was identified as a Libyan named Atiyah Abd al-Rahman.

It was Atiyah who urged a strategy of creating a quagmire for U.S. forces in Iraq, buying time for Al Qaeda's headquarters to rebuild its strength in Pakistan. "Prolonging the war [in Iraq] is in our interest," Atiyah said in a letter that upbraided Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for his hasty and reckless actions in Iraq.

The Atiyah letter was discovered by the U.S. military after Zarqawi was killed by an airstrike in June 2006. [To view the "prolonging the war" excerpt in a translation published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, click here. To read the entire letter, click here.]

Hidden Motives

This reality was known by U.S. officials prior to the West's military intervention in Libya in 2011, yet opportunistic politicians, including Secretary of State Clinton, saw Libya as a stage to play out their desires to create muscular foreign policy legacies or achieve other aims.

Some of Clinton's now-public emails show that France's President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared to be more interested in protecting France's financial dominance of its former African colonies as well as getting a bigger stake in Libya's oil wealth than in the well-being of the Libyan people.

"For Clinton, a prime motive for pushing the Libyan 'regime change' was to demonstrate her mastery of what she and her advisers called 'smart power,' i.e., the use of U.S. aerial bombing and other coercive means, such as economic and legal sanctions, to impose U.S. dictates on other nations."

An April 2, 2011 emailfrom Clinton's personal adviser Sidney Blumenthal explained that Gaddafi had plans to use his stockpile of gold "to establish a pan-African currency" and thus "to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc."

Blumenthal added, "French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya." Another key factor, according to the email, was Sarkozy's "desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production."

For Clinton, a prime motive for pushing the Libyan "regime change" was to demonstrate her mastery of what she and her advisers called "smart power," i.e., the use of U.S. aerial bombing and other coercive means, such as economic and legal sanctions, to impose U.S. dictates on other nations.

Her State Department email exchanges revealed that her aides saw the Libyan war as a chance to pronounce a "Clinton doctrine," but that plan fell through when President Obama seized the spotlight after Gaddafi's government fell in August 2011.

But Clinton didn't miss a second chance to take credit on Oct. 20, 2011, after militants captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him. Appearing on a TV interview, Clinton celebrated Gaddafi's demise with the quip, "we came; we saw; he died."

Clinton's euphoria was not long-lasting, however, as chaos enveloped Libya. With Gaddafi and his largely secular regime out of the way, Islamic militants expanded their power over the country. Some were terrorists, just as Gaddafi and the West Point analysts had warned.

One Islamic terror group attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American personnel, an incident that Clinton called the worst moment of her four-year tenure as Secretary of State.

"Western nations have little credibility left inside Libya."

As the violence spread, the United States and other Western countries abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. Once prosperous with many social services, Libya descended into the category of failed state with rival militias battling over oil and territory while the Islamic State took advantage of the power vacuum to establish a foothold around Sirte.

Though Clinton prefers to describe Libya as a "work in progress," rather than another "regime change failure," U.S. and U.N. efforts to impose a new "unity government" on Libya have met with staunch resistance from many Libyan factions. Since April, the so-called Government of National Accord has maintained only a fragile presence in Tripoli, in Libya's west, and has been rejected by Libya's House of Representatives (HOR), which functions from the eastern city of Tobruk.

Over the past few days, military forces loyal to Gen. Khalifa Hafter, who is associated with HOR in the east, seized control of several oil facilities despite angry protests from Western nations, including the U.S., U.K., and France. But Western nations have little credibility left inside Libya, which not only faced colonization in the past but has watched as the U.S.-U.K.-French military intervention in 2011 has led to widespread poverty, suffering and death.

Inept Intervention

The U.K. report only underscores how deceptive and inept that intervention was. As described by the U.K. Guardian newspaper, then-Prime Minister "David Cameron's intervention in Libya was carried out with no proper intelligence analysis, drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change and shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, according to a scathing report by the foreign affairs select committee.

"Though Blair and Cameron have at least faced personal disgrace over their roles in these two failed 'regime change' invasions, there has been less accountability in the United States."

"The failures led to the country becoming a failed state on the verge of all-out civil war, the report adds. The report, the product of a parliamentary equivalent of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, closely echoes the criticisms widely made of [then-Prime Minister] Tony Blair's intervention in Iraq, and may yet come to be as damaging to Cameron's foreign policy legacy."

Earlier this year, Cameron stepped down as prime minister following the approval of the "Brexit" referendum calling on the U.K. to leave the European Union, a position that Cameron opposed. This week, Cameron also resigned his seat in Parliament.

Though Blair and Cameron have at least faced personal disgrace over their roles in these two failed "regime change" invasions, there has been less accountability in the United States, where there were no comprehensive examinations of the policy failures that led to the wars in Iraq and Libya (although studies were undertaken regarding Bush's false claims about Iraq's WMD and the Obama administration's failure to adequately protect the U.S. consulate in Benghazi).

There has been even less accountability in the mainstream U.S. news media, where, for instance, The Washington Post's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who repeatedly reported Iraq's non-existent WMD as flat fact remains in the same job today pushing similar over-the-top propaganda regarding Russia.

A New Cold War

As with the fiascos in Iraq and Libya, U.S. policymakers continue to ignore or sideline American intelligence analysts who possess information that would cast doubt on the escalation of hostilities with Russia.

Even as the Obama administration has charted this new Cold War with Russia over the past two years - a prospect that could cost U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars and carries the risk of thermonuclear war - there has been no National Intelligence Estimate getting a consensus judgment from America's 16 intelligence agencies about how real the Russian threat is, according to intelligence sources.

One source said a key reason why an NIE had not been done was that U.S. policymakers wanted a more alarmist report than the intelligence analysts were willing to produce. "They call [the alarm about Russia] political, not factual," the source said. "They weren't going to do one, period. They can't lie."

The source added that the analysts would have to acknowledge how helpful Putin has been in a number of sensitive and strategic areas, such as securing Syria's agreement to surrender its chemical weapons and convincing Iran to accept tight limits on its nuclear program.

" Israel has nuclear weapons and a crazy leader," the source said about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "If not for Putin, the guy may have used it [a nuclear bomb] in Iran. He [Putin] calmed things down in Syria. They [CIA analysts] aren't that stupid. To tell the truth, you have to say he [Putin] saved the Middle East a lot of trouble."

U.S. intelligence analysts also might have had to include their assessments regarding whether Syrian rebels - not Assad's military - deployed sarin gas outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, and whether an element of the Ukrainian military - not ethnic Russian rebels - shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

Those two propaganda themes blaming Syria and Russia, respectively, were promoted heavily by mainstream Western media and various Internet-based information warriors. The two themes have been central to the Western-backed "regime change" project in Syria and to the new Cold War with Russia. If U.S. intelligence analysts knocked down those themes in an NIE, valuable propaganda assets would be exposed and discredited.

Also, in the wake of the two British government reports undermining the propaganda that was used to justify "regime change" in Iraq and Libya, the blow to Western "credibility" if there were similar admissions about falsehoods regarding Syria and Russia could be devastating.

Instead, the hope of Official Washington is that the American public won't catch on to the pattern of deception and that the people will continue to ignore the famous warning that President George W. Bush infamously garbled: "fool me once, shame on ... shame on you; fool me - you can't get fooled again."