Coalition launches attacks on Libya

[Mike Stenson (RIP)]

Benghazi - Western forces hit targets along the Libyan coast on Saturday, using strikes from air and sea to force Muammar Gaddafi's troops to cease fire and end attacks on civilians.

French planes fired the first shots in what is the biggest international military intervention in the Arab world since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, destroying tanks and armoured vehicles in the region of the rebels' eastern stronghold, Benghazi.

Hours later, British and US warships and submarines launched 110 Tomahawk missiles against air defences around the capital Tripoli and the western city of Misrata, which has been besieged by Gaddafi's forces, US military officials said.

Operation Odyssey Dawn

He said US forces and planes would take part in the five-country operation "Odyssey Dawn", along with Britain, France, Canada and Italy.

Some 25 coalition ships, including three US submarines armed with Tomahawk missiles, are stationed in the Mediterranean, a military slide showed.

Libyan state television said the "crusader enemy", a reference to Western forces, bombarded civilian areas of Tripoli and fuel storage tanks that supplied Misrata.

[Michael Alexander]

US, UK, France are all a bunch of hypocrites..... Cameron and Obama all saying this is to protect humans from being persecuted by Gadaffi.... Yea Right, pull the other leg, Bob Mugabe has being doing it for 20 years already, the Ivory coast the same..... but we don't see NATO jets bombing in these places..... Oh! Right , there's no oil in ZIM......

Er, for those of you that followed the Nostradamus discussion on this forum about 18 months ago.... ain;t this all lining up to what he foresaw?

[pam spackman]

 


Agree with you Mike......Cameron needs to sort out his own country !!!! But they all power hungry....Let Libya sort themselves out!!!Just my  lowly opinion........

[SandyB]

TOO RIGHT ON  OLD MAD BOB MUGABE ...  THERES NO OIL THERE ... SO NO INTERVENTION ....

[pam spackman]

 

Yes Sandy that was the 1st thing I said "Then what about Mugabe?"!!! A once beautiful country,which waas the Breadbasket of Africa.....and nobody stepped in to help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Henk Coetzee]

In Libya, the conflict may look like a straight black-and-white struggle between the forces of freedom and those of tyranny. To a degree it is. But, lurking beneath this Manichean struggle, there are also long-standing tribal rivalries and the age-old division between Cyrenaica in the east — where Benghazi is located — and Tripolitania in the west.

In truth, we have no idea what, when the smoke clears in these countries, the landscape will look like — whether the new rulers will be friendly or hostile to Western interests. These are all arguments for the greatest caution in interfering in the Arab countries now shaken by uprising and protest. Yet it has been right to try to stop the slaughter of civilians in Libya.

For it is also the case that, so far, civilian deaths have been far greater in Libya than elsewhere in the Arab world. The threat from Gaddafi to the great seaport of Benghazi, with nearly a million inhabitants, was one of civilian massacre and mass slaughter, reminiscent of the atrocities perpetrated in the Balkan wars of the Nineties. Gaddafi himself threatened to go house-to-house to hunt down the opposition.


But, whatever the outcome, one thing is clear — the sooner the West hands over Libya to the Arab nations as a problem for them and for the Libyan people themselves to resolve, the better.

[Michael Alexander]

I don't think we should be meddling in Libya, in essence what has happened there, is a civil war, just when the rebels seemed doomed, the west saw this as a chance of removing Gadaffi from power.....

Why are'nt we "bombing". i mean having no fly zones in :

Somalia
Zimbabwe
Gaza
Chechnya
Ivory Coast

[SandyB]

But, whatever the outcome, one thing is clear — the sooner the West hands over Libya to the Arab nations as a problem for them and for the Libyan people themselves to resolve, the better.

COULD NOT AGREE  BETTER  ON THAT POINT  HENK ...

[Henk Coetzee]

Michael, the countries you mentioned are dirt poor, with no real natural resources, and hardly any economic ties with the western world, all they do get is relief from the western world, Libya,on the other hand, is self sufficient, rich, and supports the economies of many other countries. 23 billion Dollars in Gold Reserves, they have enough currency to continue with and fund a long drawn out war, without sanctions hurting them one bit.

Remember, Libya is a key economic partner for most of the western countries bordering on the Mediterranean Sea, and their fragile economies cannot do without the Trade relationships they have with Libya.

Most important factor, when an oil producing country stubs its toe, the oil price shoots up. They need to be pampered, looked after, lulled, and cared for until the rest of the world wakes up, and finds an alternative source for oil.

[Bob Molloy]

Two of my favourite blogs are Whatreallyhappened dot com, where I can pick up the news of the day in a different way, and the other is Counterpunch. As its name implies it allows a forum for alternative views to those in authority.
Here is William Blum's take on the Libyan war, recently posted on Counterpunch.


THE WORDS THEY FIND DIFFICULT TO SAY: "CIVIL WAR".

Libya is engaged in a civil war. The United States and the European Union and NATO — The Holy Triumvirate — are intervening, bloodily, in a civil war. To overthrow Moammar Gaddafi. First The Holy Triumvirate spoke only of imposing a no-fly zone. After getting support from international bodies on that understanding they immediately began to wage war against Libyan military forces, and whoever was nearby, on a daily basis. In the world of commerce this is called "bait and switch".

Gaddafi's crime? He was never respectful enough of The Holy Triumvirate, which recognizes no higher power, and maneuvers the United Nations for its own purposes, depending on China and Russia to be as spineless and hypocritical as Barack Obama. The man the Triumvirate allows to replace Gaddafi will be more respectful.

So who are the good guys? The Libyan rebels, we're told. The ones who go around murdering and raping African blacks on the supposition that they're all mercenaries for Gaddafi. One or more of the victims may indeed have been members of a Libyan government military battalion; or may not have been. During the 1990s, in the name of pan-African unity, Gaddafi opened the borders to tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans to live and work in Libya. That, along with his earlier pan-Arab vision, did not win him points with The Holy Triumvirate. Corporate bosses have the same problem about their employees forming unions. Oh, and did I mention that Gaddafi is strongly anti-Zionist?

Does anyone know what kind of government the rebels would create? The Triumvirate has no idea. To what extent will the new government embody an Islamic influence as opposed to the present secular government? What jihadi forces might they unleash? (And these forces do indeed exist in eastern Libya, where the rebels are concentrated.) Will they do away with much of the welfare state that Gaddafi used his oil money to create? Will the state-dominated economy be privatized? Who will wind up owning Libya's oil? Will the new regime continue to invest Libyan oil revenues in sub-Saharan African development projects? Will they allow a US military base and NATO exercises? Will we find out before long that the "rebels" were instigated and armed by Holy Triumvirate intelligence services?

In the 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia was guilty of "crimes" similar to Gaddafi's. His country was commonly referred to as "the last communists of Europe". The Holy Triumvirate bombed him, arrested him, and let him die in prison. The Libyan government, it should be noted, refers to itself as the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. American foreign policy is never far removed from the Cold War.

We must look closely at the no-fly zone set up for Iraq by the US and the UK (falsely claimed by them as being authorized by the United Nations) beginning in the early 1990s and lasting more than a decade. It was in actuality a license for very frequent bombing and killing of Iraqi citizens; softening up the country for the coming invasion. The no-fly zone-cum invasion force in Libya is killing people every day with no end in sight, softening up the country for regime change. Who in the universe can stand up to The Holy Triumvirate? Has the entire history of the world ever seen such power and such arrogance?

And by the way, for the 10th time, Gaddafi did not carry out the bombing of PanAm Flight 103 (the Lockerbie bombing) in 1988.1 Please enlighten your favorite progressive writers on this.

Barack "I'd kill for a peace prize" Obama

Is anyone keeping count?

I am. Libya makes six.

Six countries that Barack H. Obama has waged war against in his 26 months in office. (To anyone who disputes that dropping bombs on a populated land is an act of war, I would ask what they think of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.)

America's first black president now invades Africa.

Is there anyone left who still thinks that Barack Obama is some kind of improvement over George W. Bush?

Probably two types still think so. 1) Those to whom color matters a lot; 2) Those who are very impressed by the ability to put together grammatically correct sentences.

It certainly can't have much otherwise to do with intellect or intelligence. Obama has said numerous things, which if uttered by Bush would have inspired lots of rolled eyeballs, snickers, and chuckling reports in the columns and broadcasts of mainstream media. Like the one the president has repeated on a number of occasions when pressed to investigate Bush and Cheney for war crimes, along the lines of "I prefer to look forward rather than backwards". Picture a defendant before a judge asking to be found innocent on such grounds. It simply makes laws, law enforcement, crime, justice, and facts irrelevant.

There's also the excuse given by Obama to not prosecute those engaged in torture: because they were following orders.  Has this "educated" man never heard of the Nuremberg Trials, where this defense was summarily rejected? Forever, it was assumed.

Just 18 days before the Gulf oil spill Obama said: "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced." (Washington Post, May 27, 2010) Picture George W. having said this, and the later reaction.

"All the forces that we're seeing at work in Egypt are forces that naturally should be aligned with us, should be aligned with Israel," Obama said in early March.2 Imagine if Bush had implied this — that the Arab protesters in Egypt against a man receiving billions in US aid including the means to repress and torture them, should "naturally" be aligned with the United States and — God help us — Israel.

A week later, on March 10, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told a forum in Cambridge, Mass. that Wikileaks hero Bradley Manning's treatment by the Defense Department in a Marine prison was "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid." The next day our "brainy" president was asked about Crowley's comment. Replied the Great Black Hope: "I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are."

Right, George. I mean Barack. Bush should have asked Donald Rumsfeld whether anyone in US custody was being tortured anywhere in the world. He could then have held a news conference like Obama did to announce the happy news — "No torture by America!" We would still be chortling at that one.

Obama closed his remark with: "I can't go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Pvt. Manning's safety as well." 3

Ah yes, of course, Manning is being tortured for his own good. Someone please remind me — Did Georgieboy ever stoop to using that particular absurdity to excuse prisoner hell at Guantanamo?

Is it that Barack Obama is not bothered by the insult to Bradley Manning's human rights, the daily wearing away of this brave young man's mental stability?

The answer to the question is No. The president is not bothered by these things.

How do I know? Because Barack Obama is not bothered by anything as long as he can exult in being the president of the United States, eat his hamburgers, and play his basketball. Let me repeat once again what I first wrote in May 2009:

The problem, I'm increasingly afraid, is that the man doesn't really believe strongly in anything, certainly not in controversial areas. He learned a long time ago how to take positions that avoid controversy, how to express opinions without clearly taking sides, how to talk eloquently without actually saying anything, how to leave his listeners' heads filled with stirring clichés, platitudes, and slogans. And it worked. Oh how it worked! What could happen now, having reached the presidency of the United States, to induce him to change his style?

Remember that in his own book, "The Audacity of Hope", Obama wrote: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."

Obama is a product of marketing. He is the prime example of the product "As seen on TV".

Writer Sam Smith recently wrote that Obama is the most conservative Democratic president we've ever had. "In an earlier time, there would have been a name for him: Republican."

Indeed, if John McCain had won the 2008 election, and then done everything that Obama has done in exactly the same way, liberals would be raging about such awful policies.

I believe that Barack Obama is one of the worst things that has ever happened to the American left. The millions of young people who jubilantly supported him in 2008, and numerous older supporters, will need a long recovery period before they're ready to once again offer their idealism and their passion on the altar of political activism.

If you don't like how things have turned out, next time find out exactly what your candidate means when he talks of "change".

____________________

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.

[Michael Alexander]

Obama appeared to be the "right guy " when he was elected, about three months into his term, he then seemed to be influenced away from his previous sphere of thinking ..... I think that the "guys" that actually run the US must put the screws on him...... or "flipped" him, as one Tony Soprano would have said....

For what it's worth, I don't agree with the Libya war, never have and never will.... Yes, Gadaffi is a nutter..... but what is happening in Libya is indeed a civil war..... the west had no right to interfere..... as Obama said recently, the US will do whatever it takes to protect it's interests in LIBYA.....

Russia and China could not use their VETO, as the Russians have the Chechnya, Georgia problem and the CHinese supress and censor their own folk....

Just my 2 cents...

Oh! and by the way, if they topple the Gadaffi mob, the next lot will be a lot worse, in fact they will be a split violent gov.....

[Bob Molloy]

Alexander Claud Cockburn is an American political journalist. Cockburn was brought up in Ireland but has lived and worked in the United States since 1972. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair he edits the political newsletter CounterPunch. Cockburn also writes the "Beat the Devil" column for The Nation and a weekly syndicated column for the Los Angeles Times as well as for The First Post, which is syndicated by Creators Syndicate.

BATTLING THE BEAST

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Libya has dislodged from the headlines a nuclear catastrophe in Japan, on top of a seismic one, that's one of the epic dramas of the past half-century and what's doubly weird is that the actual fighting in Libya is a series of tiny skirmishes. The muscle-bound adjectives and nouns used to describe the military engagements – if they even deserve that word – in press reports remind me of a Chihuahua trying to mount a Newfoundland.  Ambition far outstrips reality, which is in this case is a nervous rabble motley insurgents – maybe 1,500 or so at most, posing for television crews and then fleeing back down the road to the next village ("strategic stronghold") at the first whiff of trouble.
By my count, the mighty armies contending along the highway west of Benghazi would melt into the bleachers at a college baseball game. News stories suggest mobile warfare on the scale of the epic dramas of the Kursk salient in World War Two. But most of the action revolves around one tank. I've seen it in hundreds of video feeds. Like the tooth passed from witch to witch in Greek myththis tank performs many functions and to judge from the graffiti on its turret, it's always the same vehicle. Maybe that's why there's endless bickering about whether the U.N. resolution covers the supply of arms and heavy equipment. The war's PR men want to freshen up the visuals.
The "no-fly zone" prompted, just as it did in Iraq, endless US sorties aimed at destroying antennas  that might be picking up data useful to Libya's anti-aircraft defenses, which scarcely exist.   As with any bombing, civilians died. A team of Russian doctors wrote to the president of the Russian Federation, the oleaginous Dmitry Medvedev, as follows (as cited on the Global Research site on March 28):
"Today, 24 March 2011, NATO aircraft and the U.S. all night and all morning bombed a suburb of Tripoli - Tajhura (where, in particular, is Libya's Nuclear Research Center). Air Defense and Air Force facilities in Tajhura were destroyed back in the first 2 days of strikes and more active military facilities in the city remained, but today the object of bombing are barracks of the Libyan army, around which are densely populated residential areas, and next to it - the largest of Libya's Heart Centers. Civilians and the doctors could not assume that common residential quarters will be about to become destroyed, so none of the residents or hospital patients was evacuated.
"Bombs and rockets struck residential houses and fell near the hospital. The glass of the Cardiac Center building was broken, and in the building of the maternity ward for pregnant women with heart disease a wall collapsed and part of the roof. This resulted in ten miscarriages whereby babies died, the women are in intensive care, doctors are fighting for their lives. Our colleagues and we are working seven days a week, to save people. This is a direct consequence of falling bombs and missiles in residential buildings resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries, which are operated and reviewed now by our doctors. Such a large number of wounded and killed, as during today, did not occur during the total of all the riots in Libya. And this is called 'protecting the civilian population?"
NATO planes fly thither and yon looking for targets. There was a rumor that George Monbiot had handcuffed himself to the Libyan nuclear research center to show solidarity with  Qaddafi's alleged commitment to research into nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, but the word from Monbiot HQ was that that the silliest man in Great Britain is planning a symbolic flyover of Chernobyl as a monument to the safety of nuclear power, before inaugurating a "nuke camp" next to Daiichi 2 at Fukushima. 
Everything is out of proportion. Qaddafi is scarcely the acme of monstrosity conjured up by Obama or Mrs. Clinton or Sarkozy. In four decades, Libyans have gone from being among the most wretched in Africa, to considerable elevation in terms of social amenities. President Obama's hands are stained with more blood and suffering than those of the man who has given the world endless diversion through two generations. In terms of evil deeds, is Qaddafi a Mobutu, a Bokassa, a Saddam, or any U.S.  president? Surely not.
Obama's speech this week, belatedly seeking to rationalize his latest war, was ludicrously disproportionate too: pompous and offensive treacle about America's special role as savior of the afflicted ladled over one more plateful of folly in the nation's downward slide.
These "humanitarian interventions" follow a familiar script: demonization, hand in hand with romantic effusions about the demon's opponents, whether the Mujahiddeen in Afghanistan reinvented as Robin Hoods of the Hindukush  or the Albanian mafiosi tarted up as freedom-loving Kossovars.
The U.S.-led war on Iraq in 1991 included a propaganda campaign contracted by the government of Kuwait with the pr firm Burson Marsteller, which produced such triumphs as the babies allegedly hurled by Saddam's troops from their respirators in a Kuwait hospital – a fraud I think I can claim to have been the first to expose. In this connection, one does have to wonder, at least for a moment, about that woman bursting into the journalist's hotel in Tripoli, claiming to have been raped by some of Qaddafi's troops, though if the intent was to rally liberals in America to the cause of intervention, allegations planted by Burson-Marsteller or some kindred outfit of a "hate crime" against gay Libyans, or a negative attitude to gay marriage on the part of Qaddafi might have been more effective.
But substantial slabs of what passes for the left in America are ecstatic at the intervention – a "good one" at last --  and excitedly  pass from hand to hand the vacuous "letter to the left"  by Professor Juan Cole, replicated on  almost every progressive website. You can tell Cole is a liberal academic by his disdain for any discussion of the fact that aside from other considerations  the war launched  by Obama and his secretary of state is an outrage to the U.S. Constitution, for which he merits impeachment, as pursued by Rep Dennis Kucinich.  Liberal academics have not the slightest interest in the Constitution, since the document doesn't address issues of tenure and preferment. They evince similar loathing for the jury, putting their faith in "good judges".
Cole's role is somewhat akin to that of Todd Gitlin, another liberal academic now pensioned out to rich pasture at Columbia. Their credential, beloved by the press, is as fearless tribunes of the truth, bravely wagging their fingers at the cowardly left. Back in 2005 Cole was counseling the heightened use in Iraq of "special forces and air power."
Two weeks ago I outlined some of the evidence that the freedom fighters of Benghazi might have close connections to al-Qaida, and since then it's become matter of some embarrassment to the NATO coalition. A senior Pentagon commander says yes, there are intelligence reports suggesting an al-Qaida connection. The Daily Beast this week had a very loosely sourced story about Libyans fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan – some 200 – packing up and heading home to carry the torch of Islamic fundamentalism against Qaddafi and presumably the Great Satan shortly thereafter. In The First Post, Robin Fox cites reports relayed to the Pope by Franciscan monks in eastern Libyan about these same al-Qaida connections. The Pope was concerned enough to dispatch a special Vatican envoy to the London conference.
Shaukat Qadir, formely a brigadier in Pakistan's army and with excellent intelligence connections, instructively deployed in his reports for CounterPunch, emailed me Wednesday night from Lahore that  "Every single Muslim majority country has its share of Muslim extremists; it should be no surprise that Libya has some too. However, I would like the fellow who authored the Beast piece to tell me which individual in the Haqqani group the Beast's source has contacts with? To my knowledge, Libyans in Afghanistan/Pakistan are less than 20 and, while some might have left, I have not heard of an exodus. I do not know if the Beast piece is a U.S. government plant for justification, but it is a carefully woven piece mixing little fact with lots of fiction."
It requites no great prescience to see that this will all end up badly. Qaddafi's failure to collapse on schedule is prompting increasing pressure to start a ground war, since the NATO operation is, in terms of prestige, like the banks Obama has bailed out, Too Big to Fail. Libya will probably be balkanized. The CIA, on some accounts,  had already some time ago sent back its supposed asset, an ex-Colonel of the Libyan army, Khalifa Heftir who has been living in Virginia, not far from Langley to command the motley forces mentioned above. Vijay Prashad described yesterday how
"the Benghazi council chose as its leader the colorless former justice minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil. Jalil's brain is Mahmoud Jibril, a former head of the National Economic Development Board (NEDB). A U. S. embassy cable from May 11, 2009 (09TRIPOLI386) describes Jibril as keen on a close relationship with the U. S. and eager 'to create a strategic partnership between private companies and the government.' Jibril's NEBD had collaborated with Ernst & Young and the Oxford Group to make the Libyan state more 'efficient.' Jibril told the ambassador that 'American companies and universities are welcome to join him' in the creation of new sectors outside hydrocarbons and that 'we should take him up on his offer.'"
The "allies" will stab each other in the back, seeking advantage. It's all reminiscent of Charles Dickens' great description at the start of the Tale of Two Cities: "The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey."
On the intervention and on Obama I yield the floor to Bill Blum who gave us an acrid Philippic, on this site last week:
"So who are the good guys? The Libyan rebels, we're told. The ones who go around murdering and raping African blacks on the supposition that they're all mercenaries for Gaddafi. ...During the 1990s, in the name of pan-African unity, Gaddafi opened the borders to tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans to live and work in Libya. That, along with his earlier pan-Arab vision, did not win him points with The Holy Triumvirate. Oh, and did I mention that Gaddafi is strongly anti-Zionist?
"Does anyone know what kind of government the rebels would create? ... Will they do away with much of the welfare state that Gaddafi used his oil money to create? Will the state-dominated economy be privatized? Who will wind up owning Libya's oil? Will the new regime continue to invest Libyan oil revenues in sub-Saharan African development projects? Will they allow a US military base and NATO exercises? Will we find out before long that the "rebels" were instigated and armed by Holy Triumvirate intelligence services?...
"If John McCain had won the 2008 election, and then done everything that Obama has done in exactly the same way, liberals would be raging about such awful policies. I believe that Barack Obama is one of the worst things that has ever happened to the American left. The millions of young people who jubilantly supported him in 2008, and numerous older supporters, will need a long recovery period before they're ready to once again offer their idealism and their passion on the altar of political activism."
I wouldn't have put that last paragraph as politely as Bill. There was plenty of evidence available in 2008, much of it amassed by CounterPunch, allowing conscientious enquirers  to conclude that Obama was very bad news, in the pockets of the banks and big corporations. How about the words "dumb" and "credulous", right next to "idealism and passion"?