USA Africa Dialogue Series - Libyan War And Control Of The Mediterranean

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Libyan War And Control Of The Mediterranean

Rick Rozoff 

March 30, 2011 19:25

http://www.spectrezine.org/libyan-war-and-control-mediterranean

A year after assuming the post of president of the French

Republic in 2007, and while his nation held the rotating

European Union presidency, Nicholas Sarkozy invited the

heads of state of the EU's twenty-seven members and those

of seventeen non-EU Mediterranean countries to attend a

conference in Paris to launch a Mediterranean Union.

In the words of Britain's Daily Telegraph regarding the

subsequent summit held for the purpose on July 13, 2008,

"Sarkozy's big idea is to use imperial Rome's centre of

the world as a unifying factor linking 44 countries that

are home to 800 million people."

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, however, announced that his

nation would boycott the gathering, denouncing the

initiative as one aimed at dividing both Africa and the

Arab world, and stating:

"We shall have another Roman empire and imperialist

design. There are imperialist maps and designs that we

have already rolled up. We should not have them again."

[1]

The unprecedented summit was held with the intention of

"shift[ing] Europe's strategic focus towards the Middle

East, North Africa and the Balkans." [2]

Less than three years later Sarkozy's Mirage and Rafale

warplanes were bombing Libyan government targets,

initiating an ongoing war being waged by France, the

United States, Britain and what the world news media refer

to as an international coalition - twelve members of the

North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the emirate of

Qatar - to overthrow the Gaddafi government and implant a

more pliant replacement.

The Mediterranean Sea is the main battle front in the

world currently, superseding the Afghanistan- Pakistan war

theatre, and the empire of the new third millennium - that

of the US, the world's sole military superpower in the

words of President Barack Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize

acceptance speech, and its NATO partners - is completing

the transformation of the Mediterranean into its mare

nostrum.

The attack on Libya followed by slightly more than three

weeks a move in the parliament of the Eastern

Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus to drag that state

into NATO's Partnership for Peace program [3], which if

ultimately successful would leave only three of twenty

nations (excluding microstate Monaco) on or in the

Mediterranean Sea not full members of NATO or beholden to

it through partnership entanglements, including those of

the Mediterranean Dialogue (Algeria, Egypt, Israel,

Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia): Libya, Lebanon

and Syria.

NATO membership and partnerships obligate the affected

governments to open their countries to the US military.

For example, less than a year after becoming independent

Montenegro had already joined the Partnership for Peace

and was visited by then-commander of U.S. Naval Forces

Europe Admiral Harry Ulrich and the submarine tender Emory

S. Land in an effort "to provide training and assistance

for the Montenegrin Navy and to strengthen the

relationship between the two navies." [4]. The next month

four NATO warships, including the USS Roosevelt guided

missile destroyer, docked in Montenegro's Tivat harbour.

If the current Libyan model is duplicated in Syria as

increasingly seems to be the case, and with Lebanon

already blockaded by warships from NATO nations since 2006

in what is the prototype for what NATO will soon replicate

off the coast of Libya, the Mediterranean Sea will be

entirely under the control of NATO and its leading member,

the U.S.

Cyprus in the only European Union member and indeed the

only European nation (except for microstates) that is -

for the time being - not a NATO member or partner, and

Libya is the only African nation bordering the

Mediterranean not a member of NATO's Mediterranean

Dialogue partnership program.

Libya is also one of only five of Africa's 54 countries

that have not been integrated into, which is to say

subordinated to, the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

The others are:

Sudan, which is being balkanized as Libya may also soon

be.

Ivory Coast, now embroiled in what is for all intents a

civil war with the West backing the armed groups of

Alassane Ouattara against standing president Laurent

Gbagbo and under the threat of foreign military

intervention, likely by the AFRICOM- and NATO-supported

West African Standby Force and possibly with direct

Western involvement. [5]

Eritrea, which borders Djibouti where some 5,000 U.S. and

French troops are based and which was involved in an armed

border conflict with its neighbour three years ago in

which French military forces intervened on behalf of

Djibouti.

Zimbabwe, which is among likely candidates for the next

U.S.-NATO Operation Odyssey Dawn-type military

intervention.

The Mediterranean has been history's most strategically

important sea and is the only one whose waves lap the

shores of three continents.

Control of the sea has been fought over by the Persian,

Alexandrian, Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman,

Spanish, British and Napoleonic empires, in part or in

whole, and by Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany.

Since the end of World War Two the major military power in

the sea has been the U.S. In 1946 Washington established

Naval Forces Mediterranean, which in 1950 became the U.S.

Sixth Fleet and has its headquarters in the Mediterranean

port city of Naples.

In fact the genesis of the US Navy was the Naval Act of

1794, passed in response to the capture of American

merchant vessels off the coast of North Africa. The

Mediterranean Squadron (also Station) was created in

reaction to the first Barbary War of 1801-1805, also known

as the Tripolitan War after what is now northwestern

Libya. The US fought its first naval battle outside the

Western Hemisphere against Tripolitania in 1801.

US Naval Forces Europe-Africa, also based in Naples, is

assigned to the Sixth Fleet and provides forces for both

U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command. Its

commander is Admiral Samuel Locklear III, who is also

commander of NATO's Allied Joint Force Command Naples.

He has been coordinating US and NATO air and missile

strikes against Libya from USS Mount Whitney, the flagship

of the Sixth Fleet, as commander of Joint Task Force

Odyssey Dawn, the US Africa Command operation in charge of

US guided missile destroyers, submarines and stealth

bombers conducting attacks inside Libya.

Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations (the

highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Navy), recently stated

that the permanent U.S. military presence in the

Mediterranean allowed the Pentagon, which "already was

positioned for operations over Libya," to launch Odyssey

Dawn on March 19. "The need, for example in the opening

rounds, for the Tomahawk strikes, the shooters were

already in place. They were already loaded, and that went

off as we expected it would."

"That's what you get when you have a global Navy that's

forward all the time....We're there, and when the guns go

off, we're ready to conduct combat operations.. .." [6]

On March 22 General Carter Ham, the new chief of U.S.

Africa Command, visited the U.S. air base in Ramstein,

Germany and met with British, French and Italian air force

leaders to evaluate the bombing campaign in Libya. He

praised cooperation with NATO partners before the war

began, stating, "You can't bring 14 different nations

together without ever having prepared for this before."

[7]

As the AFRICOM commander was in Germany, Defence Secretary

Robert Gates was in Egypt to meet with Field Marshal

Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, commander in chief of the

Egyptian armed forces and chairman of the Supreme Council

of the Armed Forces, to coordinate the campaign against

Libya.

The Pentagon's website reported on March 23 that forces

attached to AFRICOM's Task Force Odyssey Dawn had flown

336 air sorties, 108 of them launching strikes and 212

conducted by the U.S. The operations included 162 Tomahawk

cruise missile attacks.

Admiral Roughead stated that he envisioned "no problem in

keeping operations going," as the Tomahawks will be

replaced from the existing inventory of 3,200. Enough to

level Libya and still have plenty left over for the next

war. [8]

The defeat and conquest, directly or by proxy, of Libya

would secure a key outpost for the Pentagon and NATO on

the Mediterranean Sea. The consolidation of U.S. control

over North Africa would have more than just regional

repercussions, important as they are.

Shortly after the inauguration of U.S. Africa Command, Lin

Zhiyuan, deputy director of the Chinese People's

Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences, wrote the

following:

"By building a dozen forward bases or establishments in

Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and other African nations, the

U.S. will gradually establish a network of military bases

to cover the entire continent and make essential

preparations for docking an aircraft carrier fleet in the

region.

"The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with the

U.S. at the head had [in 2006] carried out a large-scale

military exercise in Cape Verde, a western African island

nation, with the sole purpose of controlling the sea and

air corridors of crude oil extracting zones and monitoring

how the situation is with oil pipelines operating there.

"[A]frica Command represents a vital, crucial link for the

US adjustment of its global military deployment. At

present, it is moving the gravity of its forces in Europe

eastward and opening new bases in Eastern Europe.

"The present US global military redeployment centers

mainly on an 'arc of instability' from the Caucasus,

Central and Southern Asia down to the Korean Peninsula,

and so the African continent is taken as a strong point to

prop up the US global strategy.

"Therefore, AFRICOM facilitates the United States

advancing on the African continent, taking control of the

Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the

entire globe." [9]

Far more is at stake in the war with Libya than control of

Africa's largest proven oil reserves and subjugating the

last North African nation not yet under the thumb of the

US and NATO. Even more than domination of the

Mediterranean Sea region.

1) Daily Telegraph, July 10, 2008

2) Daily Telegraph, July 14, 2008

3) 'Cyprus: U.S. To Dominate All Europe, Mediterranean

Through NATO', Stop NATO, March 3, 2011

4) United States European Command, May 24, 2007

5)' Ivory Coast: Testing Ground For U.S.-Backed African

Standby Force', Stop NATO, January 23, 2011 

6) U.S. Department of Defense, March 23, 2011

7) U.S. Air Forces in Europe, March 23, 2011

8) U.S. Department of Defense, March 23, 2011

9) People's Daily, February 26, 2007,

Rock Rozoff is editor of Stop NATO, where this article

first appeared. The photo is by BRQ Network.