and undermining the democratic movement
Seumas Milne
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 March 2011 22.00 GMT
It's as if the bloodbaths of Iraq and Afghanistan had been a bad
dream. The liberal interventionists are back. As insurrection and
repression has split Libya in two and the death toll has mounted, the
old Bush-and-Blair battle-cries have returned to haunt us.
The same western leaders who happily armed and did business with the
Gaddafi regime until a fortnight ago have now slapped sanctions on the
discarded autocrat and blithely referred him to the international
criminal court the United States won't recognise.
While American and British politicians have ramped up talk of a no-fly
zone, US warships have been sent to the Mediterranean, a stockpile of
chemical weapons has been duly discovered, special forces have been in
action, Italy has ditched a non-aggression treaty with Tripoli and a
full-scale western military intervention in yet another Arab country
is suddenly a serious prospect.
Egged on by his neoconservative lieutenants, David Cameron went
furthest. Fresh from his tour selling arms to Gulf despots, the
British prime minister talked excitedly about arming Libyan rebels,
and only staged a hasty retreat when he found himself running ahead of
the US administration.
But neither American caution nor UN security council opposition should
obscure the fact that there is now a serious danger of western armed
action in Libya. Unlike in the rest of the region, we are no longer
talking mainly about the security forces confronting demonstrators but
a split in the heart of the regime and the military, with large areas
of the country in the hands of an armed opposition.
With Colonel Gaddafi and his loyalists showing every sign of digging
in, the likelihood must be of intensified conflict – with all the
heightened pretexts that would offer for outside interference, from
humanitarian crises to threats to oil supplies.
But any such intervention would risk disaster and be a knife at the
heart of the revolutionary process now sweeping the Arab world.
Military action is needed, US and British politicians claim, because
Gaddafi is "killing his own people". Hundreds have certainly died, but
that's hard to take seriously as the principle motivation.
When more than 300 people were killed by Hosni Mubarak's security
forces in a couple of weeks, Washington initially called for
"restraint on both sides". In Iraq, 50,000 US occupation troops
protect a government which last Friday killed 29 peaceful
demonstrators demanding reform. In Bahrain, home of the US fifth
fleet, the regime has been shooting and gassing protesters with
British-supplied equipment for weeks.
The "responsibility to protect" invoked by those demanding
intervention in Libya is applied so selectively that the word
hypocrisy doesn't do it justice. And the idea that states which are
themselves responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in
illegal wars, occupations and interventions in the last decade, along
with mass imprisonment without trial, torture and kidnapping, should
be authorised by international institutions to prevent killings in
other countries is simply preposterous. The barefaced cheek of William
Hague's insistence that there would be a "day of reckoning" for the
Libyan regime if it committed crimes or atrocities took some beating.
The reality is that the western powers which have backed authoritarian
kleptocrats across the Middle East for decades now face a loss of
power in the most strategically sensitive region of the world as a
result of the Arab uprisings and the prospect of representative
governments. They are evidently determined to appropriate the
revolutionary process wherever possible, limiting it to cosmetic
change that allows continued control of the region.
In Libya, the disintegration of the regime offers a crucial opening.
Even more important, unlike Tunisia and Egypt, it has the strategic
prize of the largest oil reserves in Africa. Of course the Gaddafi
regime has moved a long way from the days when it took over the
country's oil, kicked out foreign bases and funded the African
National Congress at a time when the US and Britain branded Nelson
Mandela a terrorist.
Along with repression, corruption and a failure to deliver to ordinary
Libyans, the regime has long since bent the knee to western power, as
Tony Blair and his friends were so keen to celebrate, ditching old
allies and nuclear ambitions while offering privatised pickings and
contracts to western banks, arms and oil corporations such as BP.
Now the prospect of the regime's fall offers the chance for much
closer involvement – western intelligence has had its fingers in parts
of the Libyan opposition for years – when other states seem in danger
of spinning out of the imperial orbit.
But Libya has a compelling history of foreign occupation and
resistance. Up to a third of the population are estimated to have died
under Italian colonial rule. Those calling for western military action
in Libya seem brazenly untroubled by the fact that throughout the Arab
world, foreign intervention, occupation and support for dictatorship
is regarded as central to the problems of the region. Inextricably
tied up with the demand for democratic freedoms is a profound desire
for independence and self-determination.
That is clear in reaction on the ground in Libya to the threat of
outside intervention. As one of the rebel military leaders in
Benghazi, General Ahmad Gatroni, said this week, the US should "take
care of its own people, we can look after ourselves".
No-fly zones, backed by some other opposition figures, would involve a
military attack on Libya's air defences and, judging from the Iraqi
experience, be highly unlikely to halt regime helicopter or ground
operations. They would risk expanding military conflict and
strengthening Gaddafi's hand by allowing the regime to burnish its
anti-imperialist credentials. Military intervention wouldn't just be a
threat to Libya and its people, but to the ownership of what has been
until now an entirely organic, homegrown democratic movement across
the region.
The embattled US-backed Yemeni president Ali Abdallah Saleh claimed on
Tuesday that the region-wide protest movement was "managed by Tel Aviv
and under the supervision of Washington". That is easily dismissed as
a hallucinogenic fantasy now. It would seem less so if the US and
Britain were arming the Libyan opposition. The Arab revolution will be
made by Arabs, or it won't be a revolution at all.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011
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