journal-neo
More than
three years after the US and its NATO allies unleashed an “intervention”
and regime change in Libya, the US establishment admits they maybe have
“got it wrong.” Naturally, there were many of us who were demonized
endlessly for speaking out against that war, and against all those
politicians, analysts, and “activists” on the left and right, who
championed the “humanitarianism” of waging war on Libya. We were
attacked as “soft on dictators,” “conspiracy theorists,” and
“anti-Americans.” And yet, today it is our voices that still proclaim
loudly the immorality and illegality of that war. Thankfully, it seems
the establishment is beginning to hear us.
One of the
most highly regarded politico-academic institutions in the US – the
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University – has issued a
report
which undermines the established narrative of the war in Libya, laying
bare the cold, hard reality of what Libya was at the outset of the war,
what really happened in the early days, and what Libya has become today.
Of course, responsibility for the tragic and lasting effects of that
war should be laid at the feet of Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, and the other
participants, in addition to those media outlets and NGOs that
deliberately spread lies about the reality on the ground in Libya. All
must be held accountable.
Finally Seeing the Light?
The recent
report, which is actually almost a year old, was written by Dr. Alan
Kuperman, Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of
Texas, Austin. Dr. Kuperman attempts to shed light on some of the key
aspects of disinformation before and during the war in Libya. These
important findings contradict every single justification for that war,
from the lies and distortions of Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Hillary
Clinton, to the deluge of propaganda from so-called NGOs such as Human
rights Watch and Amnesty International. By examining the obfuscations
and outright lies told by these individuals and organs of soft power,
Dr. Kuperman makes it quite clear that, just as with Iraq, the people of
the United States (and much of the world) have been lied into yet
another war.
One of the
principal lies told about Libya and Gaddafi was the totally
unsubstantiated claim of “massacres” by Gaddafi forces in Benghazi and a
few other cities. This claim, perpetrated by Human Rights Watch among
others, was repeated ad nauseam by every major media outlet. As Dr.
Kuperman writes:
Contrary
to Western media reports, Qaddafi did not initiate Libya’s violence by
targeting peaceful protesters. The United Nations and Amnesty
International have documented that in all four Libyan cities initially
consumed by civil conflict in mid-February 2011—Benghazi, Al Bayda,
Tripoli, and Misurata—violence was actually initiated by the protesters.
The government responded to the rebels militarily but never
intentionally targeted civilians or resorted to “indiscriminate” force,
as Western media clai med. Early press accounts exaggerated the death
toll by a factor of ten, citing “more than 2,000 deaths” in Benghazi
during the initial days of the uprising, whereas Human Rights Watch
(HRW) later documented only 233 deaths across all of Libya in that
period.
These are
indeed significant facts that merit further examination as they
completely contradict the standard narrative of the war in Libya and,
most importantly, the justifications for it. First and foremost is the
question of who initiated violence. The talking points in Western media
all through early 2011 held that Gaddafi was “murdering his own people,”
and that this justified a humanitarian intervention, to “help the
people of Benghazi.” However, the hitherto suppressed truth is that it
was the violent “protesters” (who should rightly be referred to as
terrorists within the protests) who actually initiated the violence,
using protesters as human shields.
Secondly,
the notion that Gaddafi’s forces intentionally targeted civilians has
been thoroughly debunked. Quite the contrary, the evidence now shows
that Gaddafi went to great lengths to make sure that no civilians were
harmed in the counter-terrorism operation as can be evidenced by the
fact that “Qaddafi avoided targeting civilians…HRW reports that of the
949 people wounded [in Misrata] in the rebellion’s initial seven weeks,
only 30 were women or children, meaning that Qaddafi’s forces focused
narrowly on combatants.” Rather than ordering the wanton killing of
civilians, Gaddafi attempted to maintain discipline among his forces
such that they could stamp out insurgency with as little collateral
damage as possible.
Third is
the simple fact that all death tolls reported by the media leading up to
the war were not only inaccurate, but wildly exaggerated beyond the
parameters of “margin of error.” In fact, by overestimating the death
toll by a factor of ten, Human Rights Watch consciously played the part
of public relations clearinghouse for US-NATO. Of course, Human Rights
Watch, long since understood to be very cozy with the State Department,
Pentagon and CIA, has become
increasingly discredited
in the eyes of serious human rights investigators and activists. The
role of HRW in Libya exposed the organization in ways it had never been
exposed before – as an organ of US soft power projection, working
tirelessly to justify on humanitarian grounds what is undoubtedly a
nakedly imperialist war.
Dr.
Kuperman also points out another key aspect of the Western narrative
which is a complete fiction, namely that US-NATO’s goal in waging the
war was not regime change, but the protecting of civilians. As Kuperman
writes:
The
conventional wisdom is also wrong in asserting that NATO’s main goal in
Libya was to protect civilians. Evidence reveals that NATO’s primary aim
was to overthrow Qaddafi’s regime, even at the expense of increasing
the harm to Libyans. NATO attacked Libyan forces indiscriminately,
including some in retreat and others in Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte,
where they posed no threat to civilians. Moreover, NATO continued to aid
the rebels even when they repeatedly rejected government cease-fire
offers that could have ended the violence and spared civilians. Such
military assistance included weapons, training, and covert deployment of
hundreds of troops from Qatar, eventually enabling the rebels to
capture and summarily execute Qaddafi and seize power in October 2011.
Indeed, the US and its allies abandoned the “protection of civilians” justification almost as soon as
UNSC Resolution 1973
was passed, authorizing merely a No Fly Zone in Libya which the NATO
forces took as a de facto authorization for total war. As Dr. Kuperman
describes, NATO forces were clearly engaged in an air war to destroy the
military and political institutions of the Gaddafi government, rather
than simply protecting civilians and providing support to rebels.
Indeed, the NATO forces became the primary driver of the campaign
against Gaddafi, allowing the rebels to take territory and, I might add,
carry out their
massacres of civilians.
Even
Human Rights Watch, which vigorously suppressed the truth about ethnic
cleansing carried out against black Libyans while it was happening, was
forced to admit crimes against humanity in Libya, specifically the
forced displacement of the Tawergha
ethnic group. Naturally, these revelations came much too late to save
the many innocent black Libyans, particularly in the Fezzan province,
who were slaughtered by the rebels backed by US-NATO.
Kuperman’s
report also highlights a number of other disastrous effects of the
US-NATO war on Libya, including the civil war in Mali, the proliferation
of weapons to terrorist groups throughout North Africa, and the general
chaos and breakdown of all political, economic, and social institutions
in Libya. Additionally, Kuperman notes that the US-NATO war prolonged
significantly the war. He writes:
When
NATO intervened in mid-March 2011, Qaddafi already had regained control
of most of Libya, while the rebels were retreating rapidly toward Egypt.
Thus, the conflict was about to end, barely six weeks after it started,
at a toll of about 1,000 dead, including soldiers, rebels, and
civilians caught in the crossfire. By intervening, NATO enabled the
rebels to resume their attack, which prolonged the war for another seven
months and caused at least 7,000 more deaths.
This is a
critical point to highlight. Even by the western investigation number of
7,000 – a gross underestimation in my view, the death toll is likely
much higher – the US-NATO war led directly to at least 6,000 additional
deaths in Libya. Far from “protecting civilians,” it seems US-NATO was
too busy killing them.
While
noting some of the critical points, Kuperman’s report also leaves out a
number of other shameful outcomes of the war including the deliberate
destruction of critical infrastructure (including the Great Man Made
River Project), the oppression of women whose rights were protected
under Gaddafi, the displacement of many black Libyans and Africans from
other neighboring countries who had taken refuge and found employment in
Gaddafi’s Libya, and many other deeply troubling developments.
Who Should Pay?
Because
the entire narrative of the Libya war has been shown to be a fabrication
of the State Department, CIA, International Criminal Court, NGOs and
other appendages of US hard and soft power, the question of guilt and
culpability comes into play. The United States, along with its allies,
has been howling for Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, held illegally by the Zintan
militia since 2011, to be taken to the International Criminal Court to
be tried for war crimes. Now that both mainstream and non-mainstream,
western and non-western sources have emerged to challenge this
narrative, it’s time we start asking who in the West should be held to
account.
First
among the criminals must be high-ranking officials in the Obama
administration, including former Secretary of State Hillary “We Came, We
Saw, He Died” Clinton, and President Obama himself. Not only have they,
and their subordinates, blatantly fabricated intelligence leading to an
aggressive war (a crime against peace, the most serious of the
Nuremburg charges), they deliberately misled the world as to the nature
of their operation in Libya. Russia and China certainly feel betrayed by
the US and its lies in the UN Security Council. But this is merely the
tip of the iceberg.
What price
should be paid by media organizations and NGOs deliberately spreading
misinformation? Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International should face
serious investigations into
criminal negligence,
or at least gross misconduct, in terms of their dissemination of lies –
lies which were used as the prime justification for the war in terms of
how it was sold to the people. Is it a crime to inflate by 1000%
casualty figures, the end result of which is a justification for war? If
not, it should be, as without such propaganda, the war could never have
been sold to the public.
Media
organizations, especially some ostensibly on the Left, should also be
held to account for their misinformation and disinformation. Democracy
Now is at the top of the list of guilty organizations. As Bruce Dixon,
Managing Editor of Black Agenda Report, wrote at the height of the war:
So
like every other Western reporter, Anjali Kamat [Democracy Now’s Libya
correspondent] never saw any “mercenaries,” just their oversized
bullets. She never saw any mass graves of the hundreds or thousands
allegedly killed by Khadaffi’s “heavy machine gun fire” either, or that
would be on Democracy Now too. It’s not. Nobody’s located the thousands
of wounded survivors either, that must have been the result of shooting
into crowds killing hundreds of people, and none of this has stopped
Democracy Now from carrying the story just like Fox News or CNN or
MSNBC…Something is really wrong with this picture. We have to wonder
whether, at least as far as the war in Libya goes, whether Democracy Now
is simply feeding us the line of corporate media, the Pentagon and the
State Department rather than fulfilling the role of unembedded,
independent journalists.
As Dixon
points out, Democracy Now exhibited at the very least poor journalistic
practice, and at worst, served as the left flank of the imperial
propaganda machine. By faithfully reporting the “facts”, which have now
been utterly discredited, Kamat and Democracy Now primed the pump of
left progressive support for “humanitarian” war.
Of course,
Democracy Now is not the only outlet that should be held responsible.
All major media in the US obviously toed the US line on Libya. So too
did Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned news outlet which gained notoriety
during the Bush years as a news outlet hostile to US policy in Iraq.
However, by the time of the war in Libya, Al Jazeera had purged its
staff of anyone truly critical of US foreign policy, particularly as it
pertained to the “Arab Spring” narrative. In fact, insiders have told me
that a
wave of resignations,
forced resignations, and firings at Al Jazeera coincided with the
refusal by some of the more principled journalists to suppress the truth
of what was happening in Libya. It would seem then that, rather than
reporting the news, Al Jazeera, like its western counterparts, was more
interested in serving power than challenging it.
In fact,
Al Jazeera was the first news organization to report, and repeat ad
nauseam, the lie that Gaddafi’s soldiers were systematically raping
women in Benghazi, and that they had been issued Viagra by their
commanding officers. This claim, repeated by Hillary Clinton, Susan
Rice, UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay, and many others has
since been debunked, with absolutely zero evidence ever surfacing to
substantiate the allegation. And yet, it was one of the principal claims
used to justify the indictment issued by Luis Moreno-Ocampo as head of
the International Criminal Court. This fact, among many others, shows
how the irresponsibility of Al Jazeera, and nearly every other
journalistic and human rights organization, led directly to the war in
Libya.
Sadly, it
is unlikely that any of the parties responsible for the criminal and
shameful war on Libya will ever be held to account for their crimes in a
courtroom. However, they can be held to account in the court of public
opinion. Their institutions must be discredited. Their names and faces
must be known and repeated the world over. They all share responsibility
for the misery inflicted on the innocent people of Libya. And we who
have stood against this war from the beginning, we have been vindicated.
Unfortunately, there is no solace to be found in a Libyan graveyard.
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