February 28, 2016

On The NYT's Sorry Whitewash Of Clinton And Her War On Libya

The New York Times has a two part piece about the U.S. war on Libya and especially Hillary Clinton's role as the then Secretary of State in it. Adhering to the NYT's editorial line, the overall picture of Clinton is painted in sympathetic colors even when it describes the disaster she created.

Overall it is a whitewash of history based on the lies that the "humanitarian intervention" was perceived necessary because Ghaddafi was about to "kill civilians". It is not unexpected that the NYT would write such nonsense. The NYT editors had themselves endorsed the war and the paper lauded the immediate result. It is guilty of inciting the war just as much as Clinton is.

But the story of the "humanitarian intervention" for the Libyan people in March 2011 is hogwash.



Libya, Spring 2011

The attack on Libya was well prepared. Radical Islamist under Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who had once been held in a secret CIA prison, were violently attacking the Libyan state with financial and military support from Qatar. Ghaddafi acted in response to them and in a proportional manner. There never was any danger of a "massacre in Benghazi" (at least when Ghaddafi was still alive). That he reacted at all was used as pretense to launch a war that had been conceptualized earlier.

French intelligence was on the ground in Libya and coordinating the "protesters" in Benghazi in February 2011. The UK and France had prepared themselves for attacking Libya under the disguise of a military air maneuver called Southern Mistral. It was planned to start in late March 2011 but when everything was in place the maneuver was "suspended" and converted into the actual attack on Libya. This was straight out of deception 101. The maneuver scenario:

SOUTHLAND : Dictatorship responsible for an attack against France's national interests.

FRANCE : Makes the decision to show its determination to SOUTHLAND (under United Nations Security council resolution n°3003).

UNITED-KINGDOM : Allied country as determined in the bilateral agreement. The United Kingdom supports France through the deployment of its air assets.

All points lead to the conclusion that the attack on Libya had been planned long before the first protests in Libya began.

The NYT write up also misses out on the intent of the war and Clinton's push for it:

The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.

The "than anyone imagined" line is funny because just a few paragraph later the piece itself claims that there were people in the government who indeed foresaw the consequences:

Some senior intelligence officials had deep misgivings about what would happen if Colonel Qaddafi lost control. In recent years, the Libyan dictator had begun aiding the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda in North Africa. “He was a thug in a dangerous neighborhood,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. “But he was keeping order.”

Just like the U.S. military intelligence the Canadian military knew exactly what would happen after an overthrow of Ghaddafi.



Al Qaeda's flag flying above the courthouse of Benghazi, Fall 2011

Some lonely blogger warned before the "intervention" of a coming disaster in a still deeply tribal country:

The misrepresentation of this conflict in the media may well lead to military intervention by "western" forces. These would then have to fight those tribes which for whatever reason support Ghaddafi. With "western" intervention the situation on the ground would quickly deteriorate. This would cost a lot more lives than any situation in which the Libyan people fight this out by and for themselves.

Libya is now, as predicted, a failed destroyed state. Leaving failed destroyed states behind has been the consequences of ALL U.S. wars in the last 20 years. The wars on Yugoslavia left several of those. Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya all ended up destroyed. Are we to believe that its the same bug that infests every U.S. intervention? Or is it not rather more plausible that the outcome of destroyed states is the intended feature of U.S. bellicose interventions?

The war on Libya was not a "failed intervention". It was a war with the aim of creating a failed state on the geography of Libya. In the larger strategic contest Libya was the nut the U.S. needed to crack to get entrance in Africa. Ghaddafi was the most prominent person urging for African unity and preparing for a common market and a common currency. Now Africa is more divided, left without the significant Libyan economic backing and can be further chopped up piecewise.

The special forces the U.S., Uk and France now put again onto Libyan ground to fight the Islamic State" will only increase the chaos by attracting another backlash:

The Libyan officials said the presence of Western forces was not welcomed by ultraconservative Salafist factions, who are allied with Libya’s eastern army and perceive the foreign intervention as an “occupation.”

Clinton's role in inciting the war was very aggressive. She has learned nothing from the mess she created. It is no wonder that she is the darling of the neoconservatives as well as the liberal interventionists. There is no bombing she would not endorse. The way she proclaims her line “We came, we saw, he died!" (vid) ending in laughter, points to a deeply psychopathic background. Letting her be the, likely unelectable, presidential candidate would be a disaster for the Democratic Party.

Posted by b on February 28, 2016 at 17:07 UTC | Permalink

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