JULY 13, 2018
The summit meeting of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military alliance that is expanding its
deployments of troops, combat and surveillance aircraft and missile ships
around Russia’s borders, took place on July 11-12 and was a farce, with Trump
behaving in his usual way, insulting individuals
and nations with characteristic vulgarity.
Before the jamboree, NATO’s
secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg (one of those selected for a Trumpian harangue),
recounted in a speech
on 21 June that “NATO has totally transformed our presence in
Afghanistan from a big combat operation with more than 100,000 to now 16,000
troops conducting training, assisting and advising.” But then he had
a bit of a rethink when he was asked a question about whether NATO had learnt
any lessons that might make it think about “intervening in the future.” To give
him his due, Stoltenberg
replied that he thought “one of the lessons we have learned from Iraq,
from Afghanistan, from Libya, is that military intervention is not always
solving all problems.”
He is absolutely right about
that, because the US-NATO military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya
have been catastrophic.
It is intriguing that NATO’s
secretary general can at last admit that military muscle doesn’t solve every
problem, but he did not expand on the subject of Libya, which unhappy country
was destroyed by US-NATO military intervention in 2011, and it is interesting
to reflect on that particular NATO debacle, because it led directly to
expansion of the Islamic State terrorist group, a prolonged civil war, a vast
number of deaths, and hideous suffering by desperate refugees trying to flee
from Libya across the Mediterranean.
Towards the end of the West’s
seven-month blitz on Libya its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was murdered by gangs
supported by US-NATO, which caused the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
to giggle “We came; we
saw; he died” in an interview on CBS, which was a good indicator of how the
peace-loving West approached its devastation of a country whose president had
plenty of flaws but whose main mistake was to threaten
to nationalize his country’s oil resources, which were in the hands of
US and European oligarchs.
Gaddafi was a despot who
persecuted his enemies quite as savagely as the Western-supported dictator
Hosni Mubarak in neighboring Egypt, but life for most Libyans was comfortable,
and the BBC had
to admit that Gaddafi’s “particular form of socialism does provide
free education, healthcare and subsidized housing and transport,” although
“wages are extremely low and the wealth of the state and profits from foreign
investments have only benefited a narrow elite” (which doesn’t happen anywhere
else, of course). The CIA World Factbook noted
that in 2010 Gaddafi’s Libya had a literacy rate of 82.6% (far better than
Egypt, India and Saudi Arabia), and a life expectancy of 77.47 years, higher than
160 of the 215 countries assessed. But the West was intent on getting rid of
Gaddafi, and managed to fudge a UN Resolution to begin the war. (Germany, under
the wise leadership of Angela Merkel, refused to have anything to do with the
long-planned carnival of rocketing and bombing.)
Gaddafi was murdered on
October 20, 2011, in particularly disgusting
circumstances, and ten days later the US-NATO alliance ended its
blitzkrieg.
The normally sane Guardian
newspaper of the UK reported
that the operation had demonstrated “a unique combination of military
power that could set a model for future warfare” while the secretary general,
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, proclaimed the end of “a successful chapter in Nato’s
history.”
The “successful chapter”
involved 9,600 airstrikes that amongst other destruction “debilitated Libya’s
water supply by targeting critical state-owned water installations, including a
water-pipe factory ... that manufactured pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes
for the Great Manmade River project, an ingenious irrigation system
transporting water from aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert to about 70%
of the population.” As the Christian Science Monitor reported
in 2010, “the Great Man-Made River, which is leader Muammar Qaddafi’s
ambitious answer to the country’s water problems, irrigates Libya’s large
desert farms. The 2,333-mile network of pipes ferry water from four major
underground aquifers in southern Libya to the northern population centers.
Wells punctuate the water’s path, allowing farmers to utilize the water network
in their fields.” Not any more, they don’t, and there is now a
critical water shortage.
One
recent observation was that “The water crisis is a powerful symbol of
state failure in a country that was once one of the wealthiest in the Middle
East but has been gripped by turmoil since a 2011 uprising unseated [sic]
Muammar Gaddafi. For Libyans the chaos has meant power cuts and crippling cash
shortages. These are often made worse by battles between armed groups vying for
control of the fractured oil-rich state and its poorly-maintained
infrastructure.” Thank you, US-NATO, for liberating Libya.
Two prominent figures involved
in the US-NATO war on Libya were Ivo Daalder, the US Representative on the NATO
Council from 2009 to 2013, and Admiral James G (‘Zorba’) Stavridis,
the US Supreme Allied Commander Europe (the military commander of NATO) in the
same period. As they ended their war, on October 31,
2011, these two ninnies had
a piece published in the New York Times in which they made the absurd
claim that “As Operation Unified Protector comes to a close, the alliance and
its partners can look back at an extraordinary job, well done. Most of all,
they can see in the gratitude of the Libyan people that the use of limited
force — precisely applied — can affect real, positive political change.”
Well, there’s no doubt that
“limited force” — if you call 9,600 airstrikes “limited” — can produce
political change, but it is difficult to see how even these two twits could
think for an instant that it would be “positive.” Then Rasmussen
lobbed in to Tripoli on 31 October and
announced that “It’s great to be in Libya, free Libya. We acted to
protect you. Together we succeeded. Libya is finally free.”
The Western mainstream media,
which was so supportive of the war, has not asked the team of Rasmussen,
Stavridis and Daalder how they feel about the current catastrophe in Libya that
they did so much to accomplish. There are few reports in western
newspapers or TV outlets about the gravity of the shambles (search, for
example, the New
York Times and the Washington
Post), but such organizations as Human Rights Watch keep the world informed
about what is going on. Its 2018 World
Report records that “Political divisions and armed strife continued to
plague Libya as two governments vied for legitimacy and control of the country,
and United Nations’ efforts to unify the feuding parties flagged . . . Armed
groups throughout the country, some of them affiliated with one or the other of
the competing governments, executed persons extra-judicially, attacked
civilians and civilian properties, abducted and disappeared people, and imposed
sieges on civilians in the eastern cities of Derna and Benghazi.”
Thank you US-NATO, and especially
thank you, President Obama and Messrs. Rasmussen, Stavridis and Daalder, and
all the brave pilots who had a wonderful blitzing shindig, and all the brave
button-pressers on US and UK Navy ships whose Tomahawk missiles blasted the
cities. The country you wrecked will take decades to recover from
your use of what you called “limited force,” and the amount of human suffering
you caused is incalculable.
NATO’S Jens Stoltenberg seems
to have learned the lesson, albeit belatedly, that military force does not solve what
NATO regards as problems. That’s to be welcomed, and what would be
even more welcome would be realization that provocation and the threat of force
don’t work, either, and therefore that it would be wise to stay out of wars and
to draw-down the confrontational US-NATO deployments along Russia’s borders.
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