[Reader-list] More on Libya

A. Mani a.mani.cms at gmail.com
Tue Aug 23 17:43:16 IST 2011


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http://www.answercoalition.org/national/news/truth-about-situation-libya.html

The Truth About the Situation in Libya
Cutting through the government propaganda and media lies
August 22, 2011

By Brian Becker, National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition

Libya is a small country of just over 6 million people but it
possesses the largest oil reserves in all of Africa. The oil produced
there is especially coveted because of its particularly high quality.

The Air Force of the United States along with Britain and France has
carried out 7,459 bombing attacks since March 19. Britain, France and
the United States sent special operation ground forces and commando
units to direct the military operations of the so-called rebel
fighters – it is a NATO- led army in the field.

The troops may be disaffected Libyans but the operation is under the
control and direction of NATO commanders and western commando units
who serve as “advisors.” Their new weapons and billions in funds come
from the U.S. and other NATO powers that froze and seized Libya’s
assets in Western banks. Their only military successes outside of
Benghazi, in the far east of the country, have been exclusively based
on the coordinated air and ground operations of the imperialist NATO
military forces.

In military terms, Libya’s resistance to NATO is of David and Goliath
proportions. U.S. military spending alone is more than ten times
greater than Libya’s entire annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which
was $74.2 billion in 2010, according to the CIA’s World Fact Book.

In recent weeks, the NATO military operations used
surveillance-collecting drones, satellites, mounting aerial attacks
and covert commando units to decapitate Libya’s military and political
leadership and its command and control capabilities. Global economic
sanctions meant that the country was suddenly deprived of income and
secure access to goods and services needed to sustain a civilian
economy over a long period.

“The cumulative effect [of NATO’s coordinated air and ground
operation] not only destroyed Libya’s military infrastructure but also
greatly diminished Colonel Gaddafi’s commanders to control forces,
leaving even committed fighting units unable to move, resupply or
coordinate operations,“ reports the New York Times in a celebratory
article on August 22.

A False Pretext

The United States, United Kingdom, France, and Italy targeted the
Libyan government for overthrow or “regime change” not because these
governments were worried about protecting civilians or to bring about
a more democratic form of governance in Libya.

If that were the real motivation of the NATO powers, they could start
the bombing of Saudi Arabia right away. There are no elections in
Saudi Arabia. The monarchy does not even allow women to drive cars. By
law, women must be fully covered in public or they will go to prison.
Protests are rare in Saudi Arabia because any dissent is met with
imprisonment, torture and execution.

The Saudi monarchy is protected by U.S. imperialism because it is part
of an undeclared but real U.S. sphere of influence and it is the
largest producer of oil in the world. The U.S. attitude toward the
Saudi monarchy was put succinctly by Ronald Reagan in 1981, when he
said that the U.S. government “will not permit” revolution in Saudi
Arabia such as the 1979 Iranian revolution that removed the U.S.
client regime of the Shah. Reagan’s message was clear: the Pentagon
and CIA’s military forces would be used decisively to destroy any
democratic movement against the rule of the Saudi royal family.

Reagan’s explicit statement in 1981 has in fact been the policy of
every successive U.S. administration, including the current one.

Libya and Imperialism

Libya, unlike Saudi Arabia, did have a revolution against its
monarchy. As a result of the 1969 revolution led by Muammar Gaddafi,
Libya was no longer in the sphere of influence of any imperialist
country.

Libya had once been an impoverished colony of Italy living under the
boot heel of the fascist Mussolini. After the Allied victory in World
War II, control of the country was formally transferred to the United
Nations and Libya became independent in 1951 with authority vested in
the monarch King Idris.

But in actuality, Libya was controlled by the United States and
Britain until the 1969 revolution.

One of the first acts of the 1969 revolution was to eliminate the
vestiges of colonialism and foreign control. Not only were oil fields
nationalized but Gaddafi eliminated foreign military bases inside the
country.

In March of 1970, the Gaddafi government shut down two important
British military bases in Tobruk and El Adem. He then became the
Pentagon’s enemy when he evicted the U.S. Wheelus Air Force Base near
Tripoli that had been operated by the United States since 1945. Before
the British military took control in 1943, the facility was a base
operated by the Italians under Mussolini.

Wheelus had been an important Strategic Air Command (SAC) base during
the Cold War, housing B-52 bombers and other front-line Pentagon
aircrafts that targeted the Soviet Union.

Once under Libyan control, the Gaddafi government allowed Soviet
military planes to access the airfield.

In 1986, the Pentagon heavily bombed the base at the same time it
bombed downtown Tripoli in an effort to assassinate Gaddafi. That
effort failed but his 2-year-old daughter died along with scores of
other civilians.

The Character of the Gaddafi Regime

The political, social and class orientation of the Libyan regime has
gone through several stages in the last four decades. The government
and ruling establishment reflected contradictory class, social,
religious and regional antagonisms. The fact that the leadership of
the NATO-led National Transition Council is comprised of top officials
of the Gaddafi government, who broke with the regime and allied
themselves with NATO, is emblematic of the decades-long instability
within the Libyan establishment.

These inherent contradictions were exacerbated by pressures applied to
Libya from the outside. The U.S. imposed far-reaching economic
sanctions on Libya in the 1980s. The largest western corporations were
barred from doing business with Libya and the country was denied
access to credit from western banks.

In its foreign policy, Libya gave significant financial and military
support to national liberation struggles, including in Palestine,
Southern Africa, Ireland and elsewhere.

Because of Libya's economic policies, living standards for the
population had jumped dramatically after 1969. Having a small
population and substantial income from its oil production, augmented
with the Gaddafi regime’s far-reaching policy of social benefits,
created a huge advance in the social and economic status for the
population. Libya was still a class society with rich and poor, and
gaps between urban and rural living standards, but illiteracy was
basically wiped out, while education and health care were free and
extensively accessible. By 2010, the per capita income in Libya was
near the highest in Africa at $14,000 and life expectancy rose to over
77 years, according to the CIA’s World Fact Book.

Gaddafi’s political orientation explicitly rejected communism and
capitalism. He created an ideology called the “Third International
Theory,” which was an eclectic mix of Islamic, Arab nationalist and
socialist ideas and programs. In 1977, Libya was renamed the Great
Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. A great deal of industry,
including oil, was nationalized and the government provided an
expansive social insurance program or what is called a welfare state
policy akin to some features prevalent in the Soviet Union and some
West European capitalist countries.

But Libya was not a workers’ state or a “socialist government” to use
the popular if not scientific use of the term “socialist.” The
revolution was not a workers and peasant rebellion against the
capitalist class per se. Libya remained a class society although class
differentiation may have been somewhat obscured beneath the existence
of revolutionary committees and the radical, populist rhetoric that
emanated from the regime.

As in many developing, formerly colonized countries, state ownership
of property was not “socialist” but rather a necessary fortification
of an under-developed capitalist class. State property in Iraq, Libya
and other such post-colonial regimes was designed to facilitate the
social and economic growth of a new capitalist ruling class that was
initially too weak, too deprived of capital and too cut off from
international credit to compete on its own terms with the dominant
sectors of world monopoly capitalism. The nascent capitalist classes
in such developing economies promoted state-owned property, under
their control, in order to intersect with Western banks and
transnational corporations and create more favorable terms for global
trade and investment.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the “socialist bloc” governments
of central and Eastern Europe in 1989-91 deprived Libya of an economic
and military counter-weight to the United States, and the Libyan
government’s domestic economic and foreign policy shifted towards
accommodation with the West.

In the 1990s some sectors of the Libyan economic establishment and the
Gaddafi-led government favored privatization, cutting back on social
programs and subsidies and integration into western European markets.

The earlier populism of the regime incrementally gave way to the
adoption of neo-liberal policies. This was, however, a long process.

In 2004, the George W. Bush administration ended sanctions on Libya.
Western oil companies and banks and other corporations initiated huge
direct investments in Libya and trade with Libyan enterprises.

There was also a growth of unemployment in Libya and in cutbacks in
social spending, leading to further inequality between rich and poor
and class polarization.

But Gaddafi himself was still considered a thorn in the side of the
imperialist powers. They want absolute puppets, not simply partners,
in their plans for exploitation. The Wikileaks release of State
Department cables between 2007 and 2010 show that the United states
and western oil companies were condemning Gaddafi for what they called
“resource nationalism.” Gaddafi even threatened to re-nationalize
western oil companies’ property unless Libya was granted a larger
share of the revenue for their projects.

As an article in today’s New York Times Business section said
honestly: “"Colonel Qaddafi proved to be a problematic partner for the
international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and
making other demands. A new government with close ties to NATO may be
an easier partner for Western nations to deal with."

Even the most recent CIA Fact Book publication on Libya, written
before the armed revolt championed by NATO, complained of the measured
tempo of pro-market reforms in Libya: “Libya faces a long road ahead
in liberalizing the socialist-oriented economy, but initial steps—
including applying for WTO membership, reducing some subsidies, and
announcing plans for privatization—are laying the groundwork for a
transition to a more market-based economy.” (CIA World Fact Book)

The beginning of the armed revolt on February 23 by disaffected
members of the Libyan military and political establishment provided
the opportunity for the U.S. imperialists, in league with their French
and British counterparts, to militarily overthrow the Libyan
government and replace it with a client or stooge regime.

Of course, in the revolt were workers and young people who had many
legitimate grievances against the Libyan government. But what is
critical in an armed struggle for state power is not the composition
of the rank-and-file soldiers, but the class character and political
orientation of the leadership.

Character of the National Transition Council

The National Transitional Council (NTC) constituted itself as the
leadership of the uprising in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city.
The central leader is Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, who was Libya’s Minister of
Justice until his defection at the start of the uprising. He was one
of a significant number of Western-oriented and neoliberal officials
from Libya’s government, diplomatic corps and military ranks who
joined the opposition in the days immediately after the start of the
revolt.

As soon as it was established, the NTC began issuing calls for
imperialist intervention. These appeals became increasing panicky as
it became clear that, contrary to early predictions that the
Gaddafi-led government would collapse in a matter of days, it was the
“rebels” who faced imminent defeat in the civil war. In fact, it was
only due to the U.S./NATO bombing campaign, initiated with great hurry
on March 19 that the rebellion did not collapse.

The last five months of war have erased any doubt about the
pro-imperialist character of the NTC. One striking episode took place
on April 22, when Senator John McCain made a “surprise” trip to
Benghazi. A huge banner was unveiled to greet him with an American
flag printed on it and the words: “United States of America – You have
a new ally in North Africa.”

Similar to the military relationship between the NATO and Libyan
“rebel” armed forces, the NTC is entirely dependent on and
subordinated to the U.S., French, British and Italian imperialist
governments.

If the Pentagon, CIA, and Wall Street succeed in installing a client
regime in Tripoli it will accelerate and embolden the imperialist
threats and intervention against other independent governments such as
Syria and Venezuela. In each case we will see a similar process
unfold, including the demonization of the leadership of the targeted
countries so as to silence or mute a militant anti-war response to the
aggression of the war-makers.

We in the ANSWER Coalition invite all those who share this perspective
to join with us, to mobilize, and to unmask the colonial agenda that
hides under the slogan of “humanitarian intervention.”




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Best

A. Mani




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A. Mani
CU, ASL, CLC,  AMS, CMS
http://www.logicamani.co.cc


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