The 2016 Presidential Primary Campaigns leading up to the Republican and
Democratic National Conventions this summer have set a
political-cultural tone among the people of the USA that is an
especially misleading one. It is true that among the candidates, there
are some big programmatic differences on domestic policy.
The predominantly white Christian Republican voters are increasingly
angry about their deteriorating economic conditions. Till now, however,
the Wall Street ruling class has been able to divert their frustration
and outrage into fruitless channels, i.e., safely away from making
demands on the finance capitalists of Wall Street. Mainly by pushing
the “All-American” buttons of White Supremacy and Christian religious
bigotry, the Republican Primary candidates have largely focused their
voters’ bitterness on chauvinist hatred for the first African American
U.S. president and on the Arab and Muslim peoples of the Middle East and
the USA, as well as on the more than ten million undocumented Latino
immigrants who have served as scapegoats for the U.S. monopoly
capitalists and imperialists ever since the 2008 economic crisis
erupted. This is what has made Donald Trump so effective on the campaign
trail.
Under the Obama Regime, the rich have done better than ever, while the
middle class, the working class and especially the working poor are
still mired in economic depression. Thus, the Democratic Primary voters,
like their Republican counterparts, are frustrated with the fact that
the rich in the USA have never been so much richer and more powerful
than the rest of us! The Bernie Sanders Campaign, standing on the
shoulders of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has given expression (at
long last) to the class warfare that has been waged by the U.S. Ruling
class against the working class and oppressed nationalities in the USA.
And Sanders campaign platform contains a domestic program that would
serve the class interests of the workers and the 99% and is mobilizing
some thousands around it and in opposition to Wall Street. (This is
precisely why the Revolutionary Organization of Labor (ROL-USA) has
critically participated in this campaign.) Indeed, Hillary Clinton, the
only major “Republicrat” candidate of either Republicrat party still
clearly in the running for the Presidency, has been forced to adopt most
of Sanders’ domestic platform – at least until she captures the
Democratic Party nomination at the July Convention.
Nevertheless, from Sanders on the “left” to Trump (or Cruz or Clinton)
on the “right,” there is no candidate that represents an alternative
foreign policy to the bestial Bush-Obama “Republicrat” foreign policy of
Empire, an endless war of terror against any country it chooses, and
against the international working class and the oppressed peoples of the
earth.
Many would still argue that President Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace
Prize, and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, inherited the War
in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan, from the Bush-Cheney Regime and that
these ongoing wars are therefore not their responsibility. To make it
crystal clear that Obama-Clinton have been every bit as bloodthirsty as
Bush-Cheney in their defense of Wall Street’s pursuit of maximum private
profits no matter the public cost, this article thus focuses on the
U.S. imperialist-led war against Libya, a war that is clearly Obama’s
War.
Moreover, ROL-USA opposed this vicious and brutal, unprovoked
imperialist war of plunder and terror from its very beginning. But the
thorough exposure of this Democratic Party administration’s absolute
rejection of any negotiation with the Qaddafi Regime in Libya, the Obama
Regime’s insistence on an all-out war to drive Qaddafi out of Libya and
then to murder him is documented here not by us but by a pro-U.S.
imperialist adviser, Alan J. Kuperman, an Associate Professor at the
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in
Austin! Then, when two former National Security Council (NSC) senior
advisers with some real responsibility for Obama’s Libya policy in 2011
challenge Kuperman using “plausible deniability,” Kuperman responds
with an even more scathing exposure! Kuperman provides the “smoking
gun.”
Kuperman’s think-tank article appeared in the March/April 2015 issue of
Foreign Affairs, arguably the most authoritative political magazine
representing U.S. Imperialist interests published in the USA.
Kuperman’s article is entitled, “Obama’s Libya Debacle.” But, declaring
his pro-imperialist, pro-Empire bona fides up front, the subtitle is:
“How a Well-Meaning Intervention Ended in Failure.” ( ROL emphasis) Of
course, a careful reading of Kuperman’s piece provides no evidence that
there was anything well-meaning in the criminal U.S. Intervention.
Kuperman’s goal is not to oppose the U.S. Empire but to bolster it.
In fact, Kuperman’s main aim here is to get the U.S. Government to
frankly admit that, “in retrospect, Obama’s intervention in Libya was an
abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only
failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state.
Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold.
Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did
during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for
militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and
al-Sham (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other U.S. interests
as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian
cooperation at the UN, and fueling Syria’s civil war.”
Kuperman’s article begins on March 17, 2011, when the UN Security
Council passed Resolution 73, spearheaded by President Obama,
“authorizing military intervention in Libya.” It was done in the name of
saving “the lives of peaceful pro-democracy protesters who found
themselves the target of a crackdown by Libyan dictator Muammar
al-Qaddafi.” Said Obama, “We knew if we waited one more day, Benghazi – a
city nearly the size of Charlotte – could suffer a massacre that would
have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the
world.” Kuperman observes: “Two days after the UN authorization, the
United States and other NATO countries established a no-fly zone
throughout Libya and started bombing Qaddafi’s forces. Seven months
later, in October 2011, after an extended military campaign with
sustained Western support, rebel forces conquered the country and shot
Qaddafi dead.” (Kuperman, p.66).
Kuperman
asserts that, “Despite what defenders of the mission claim, there was a
better policy available — not intervening at all, because peaceful
Libyan citizens were not actually being targeted.” (ibid. p. 66, ROL
emphasis)
Without explicitly pointing to Obama, Kuperman exposes
“the big lie” that Obama used to perpetrate the war against Libya’s
sovereign government. Kuperman goes on to document that “striving to
minimize civilian casualties, Qaddafi’s forces had refrained from
indiscriminate violence.” (p. 70) To this end, Kuperman provides exact
statistics drawn from the fighting in Misurata, Libya’s third largest
city, where there were very few women and children casualties, “which
indicates that Qaddafi’s forces had narrowly targeted combatants, who
were virtually all male.” “The same pattern of restraint was evident in
Tripoli ... These statistics refute the notion that Qaddafi’s forces
fired indiscriminately at peaceful civilians.” (p.70)
Especially
contemptible about the Obama Regime’s assertion at the UN on March 17,
2011 (in order to obtain authorization for military intervention in
Libya) that Qaddafi was about to commit a bloodbath in Benghazi is that,
according to Kuperman, “From March 5 to March 15, 2011, [Qaddafi]
government forces recaptured all but one of the major rebel-held cities,
and in none did they kill civilians in revenge, let alone commit a
bloodbath. Indeed, as his forces approached Benghazi, Qaddafi issued
public reassurances that they would harm neither civilians nor rebels
who disarmed. On March 17, he directly addressed the rebels of Benghazi
...” “Two days later, however, the NATO air campaign halted
Qaddafi’s offensive ... Benghazi did not return to government control,
the rebels did not flee, and the war did not end. ... All told, the
intervention extended Libya’s civil war from less than six weeks to more
than eight months.” (p.71)
“Moreover,” continues Kuperman,
“unlike Qaddafi’s forces in 2011, the militias fighting in Libya today
do use force indiscriminately ... This grim math leads to a depressing
but unavoidable conclusion. Before NATO’s intervention, Libya’s civil
war was on the verge of ending, at the cost of barely 1,000 lives. Since
then, however, Libya has suffered at least 10,000 additional deaths
from conflict. In other words, NATO’s intervention appears to have
increased the violent death toll
more than tenfold.” (p 72)
Kuperman
also cites real “war crimes” being committed by the victorious,
imperialist-backed rebels still vying with each other for power.
There
are many other important points made by Kuperman in this Foreign
Affairs article, including the fact that “the intervention in Libya may
also have fostered violence in Syria. In March 2011, Syria’s uprising
was still largely nonviolent, and the Assad government’s response ...
was relatively circumscribed. After NATO gave Libya’s rebels the upper
hand, however, Syria’s revolutionaries (sic) turned to violence in the
summer of 2011, perhaps expecting to attract a similar intervention. ...
The result was a massive escalation of the Syrian conflict, leading to
at least 1,500 deaths per week by early 2013, a 15-fold increase.”
(p.75) “NATO’s mission in Libya also hindered peacemaking efforts in
Syria by greatly antagonizing Russia. With Moscow’s acquiescence, the UN
Security Council had approved the establishment of a no-fly zone in
Libya and other measures to protect civilians. But NATO exceeded that
mandate to pursue regime change.” Explained Russian foreign minister
Lavrov, “... as a result, in Syria, Russia ‘would never allow the
Security Council to authorize anything similar to what happened in
Libya.’”
Kuperman also documents that Mummar Qaddafi was laying
the groundwork for transition to his son Saif and his reformist agenda
after the elder Qadaffi had sacked his more hard-line son Mutassim in
2010. According to Kuperman, the imperialist adviser, “The prudent path
is to promote peaceful reform of the type that Qaddafi’s son Saif was
pursuing.”
Kuperman concludes the article by criticizing Obama
for having drawn the exact wrong lesson from his Libyan debacle. He
quotes Obama as viciously telling New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman in August 2014, “I think we underestimated … the need to come
in full force.” Kuperman states: “The error in Libya was not an
inadequate post-intervention effort; it was the decision to intervene in
the first place.”
* * *
In the next issue of
Foreign Affairs (May/June 2015), Derek Chollet and Ben Fishman, who had
been Obama’s Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Director of
North Africa and Jordan respectively on the National Security Council
staff in 2011, took sharp issue with Professor Kuperman’s position (pp
154-157). Their response was entitled, “Who Lost Libya? - Obama’s
Intervention in Retrospect.” And there was a brief “Kuperman Replies,”
(pp 158-159) as well.
It is enlightening to read the bankrupt
patter of these two corrupt functionaries, seeking to defend their
criminal roles in Libya, in response to Kuperman’s facts. First, they
try to besmirch Qaddafi’s record, painting him as the worst kind of
despot in the world. However, Kuperman has already provided ample
documentation of Qaddafi’s concern to avoid civilian casualties even in
the midst of the civil war. And he has pointed out that, “the recent
privation represents a stark descent for a country (Libya) that the UN’s
Human Development Index traditionally had ranked as having the highest
standard of living in all of Africa.” (p. 69) (ROL emphasis)
Chollet/Fishman
also hide behind the idea that the “world saw a slaughter in the
making.” According to Kuperman, “that’s simply not true. The world’s top
two human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch, never warned of an impending massacre in Libya.” (p. 158)
Kuperman also points to his own reporting in USA Today in March 2011:
“Despite ubiquitous cellphone cameras, there are no images of genocidal
violence, a claim that smacks of rebel propaganda.” Kuperman concludes
that “Given that experts in the intelligence, human rights, and
scholarly communities expressed strong doubts at the time about the
rebel warnings of an impending bloodbath, it is the Obama administration
that must accept responsibility for spearheading a disastrous
intervention on phony grounds.” (p. 158)
Regarding
Chollet/Fishman’s allegation that it was Qaddafi who was responsible for
failing to negotiate a different outcome, Kuperman exposes “The facts
show otherwise. Just three days into the bombing campaign, it was the
Obama Administration that unilaterally terminated peace negotiations
between U.S. Africa Command and the Qaddafi regime.” Kuperman cites
Charles Kubic, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, who brokered the
negotiations. Kubic recounted that “Qaddafi was willing to step down
and permit a transition government” under two conditions: that his inner
circle receive free passage out of the country and that Libya’s
military retain sufficient force to fight radical Islamists.” Said rear
admiral Kubic, in looking back: “If their goal was to get Qaddafi out of
power, then why not give a 72-hour truce a try?” Kubic concluded: “it
wasn’t enough to get him out of power; they wanted him dead.” (p. 158)
Kuperman
continues: “Unaware, Qaddafi continued to pursue peace talks in vain.”
And Kuperman cites an April 10th African Union proposal and a May 26th
proposal by the Qaddafi government rejected by the rebels with the
backing of the U.S. Government. “The rebels declared they would reject
any cease-fire until Qaddafi had left power, and the Obama
administration backed this intransigent position.”
One issue not
remarked upon by Kuperman is that, in their response to his article,
Chollet/Fishman’s repeated “proof” of Qaddafi’s alleged unwillingness to
negotiate is that he would not negotiate his own exit. This is a
dangerous reflection of the Hitlerian character of Obama’s order to
Qaddafi that he leave his own country and its Hitlerian impact on these
two corrupt functionaries! How many Libyans elected Obama to give that
order?! How could Chollet/Fishman now some five years removed from the
situation still be so blind to their own and Obama’s imperial
arrogance?!*
*Chollet/Fishman are in the tradition of fascist
political functionaries. They blame the lame Libyan puppets, installed
in power by U.S. bombs and armaments, for the inability of the U.S.-led
imperialist powers to make post Qaddafi Libya “a success.” And they say,
in the most cynical and sinister fashion, “... there was never a
realistic option for establishing an international peacekeeping or
post-conflict security mechanism, because the Libyans did not want it.
And no viable candidates from the West or the region stepped up to lead
or compose such a force, because no one wanted to participate in an
enterprise that might appear neocolonial.” (ROL emphasis)
Nonetheless,
Kuperman is clear on who is responsible for this brutal war in Libya.
He states: “The Obama administration had insisted on regime change from
the very start. On March 3, 2011, two weeks before NATO intervened,
Obama declared that Qaddafi ‘must step down from power and leave.’ That
explains why the State Department ordered U.S. Africa Command to halt
peace talks on March 22, and why NATO kept bombing even after the rebels
repeatedly rejected negotiations.” (p. 159)
And he is indignant
that Chollet/Fishman try to blame Qaddafi for his own murder. “Not so,”
says Kuperman. “Instead it was the result of the Obama administration’s
serial errors [crimes-ROL]: starting a war of choice based on a faulty
premise, exceeding the UN’s mandate to protect civilians, rejecting
Qaddafi’s peace offers, insisting on regime change, and supporting an
opposition composed of radical Islamists and fractious militias.”
The
tragic destruction of Libya and the tragic blow to the people of the
African continent struck by U.S.-led Western imperialism is an important
part of the legacy of Barack Obama, the first African-American U.S.
President, and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
But let
us give the last word to Professor Kuperman, the imperialist adviser
who began with his characterization of a “well-intentioned” intervention
in Libya, as he quite correctly ties together the Bush/Cheney and
Obama/Clinton “Republicrat” rulers:
“After Qadaffi’s death was
confirmed in October 2011, a gloating Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
declared to a television reporter, ‘We came, we saw, he died!’ She was
justified in claiming credit on behalf of the Obama administration for
the outcome in Libya, including Qaddafi’s brutal murder. Back then,
however, she and her colleagues believed their intervention was a
success. Now that it has turned into a dismal failure, it is too late to
shed responsibility. As President George W. Bush learned the hard way,
‘mission accomplished’ can be declared, but subsequent events may haunt
you.”
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