Immediate Reflections on News of the Fall of Tripoli in Libya

'The weekend's developments threaten to tilt the country across the line from troubled post-Arab spring democracy to outright failed state.
Egypt and Sudan are known to be watching developments closely, and last week the French president, François Hollande, said that despite the crises in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Gaza, his "biggest concern at the moment is Libya".' Guardian report August 24 2014

The fall of Tripoli an, perhaps, Libya to militant Islamists is the consequence of the foolish conviction that democracy could heal all divisions with a society long under a secular dictatorship and lead to increased oil and gas security for the Western nations.

As with Iraq, the removal of Gaddafi has led to an increased war over who is going to dominate Libya and its copious oil reserves and the stage in set for an unrelenting civil war, decivilisation and barbarity of the kind now playing itself out in Syria and Iraq.

An Islamist controlled Libya could lead to a cut off of gas and oil supplies to Italy and other European nations that receive Libyan gas at a time when Russia and Ukraine are on the potential brink of conflict. Dependence upon Russian gas could only increase as a result of events in Libya.

The attempt to sabotage and blow up gas installations in Algeria in 2013 was aided by Islamist militants from Libya. Islamists in control in Libya could use gas as a tool to threaten Western economies just as they tried to blow up gas installations in Algeria controlled by British Petroleum

The fragile economic recovery of Mediterranean countries such as Italy could be affected should the chaos or deliberate policy lead to Libyan gas being shut off as it accounts for around 15% of consumption and has been increasing due to the conflict in Eastern Ukraine.

At any rate, fuel prices would rise in Italy and other Eurozone nations as they compete for Norwegian and Dutch gas and supplies from elsewhere such as Qatar, one reason why the Western Powers, whether Britain or France or Italy, are bound to continue to support Qatar's demands that Assad in Syria must go.

Unless, it is understood that energy geopolitics determines foreign policy, then all these decisions about 'humanitarian intervention' are bound to seem inexplicable and destined to repeat the same failures because the political elites are foolish. But its European energy dependence that is the cause.

The demand for military intervention in the Middle East and Maghreb since the US withdrew from Iraq has come mostly from energy dependent European states. Unlike the US which has shale oil and gas to fall back on, energy intensive consumerist societies such as Spain and Italy and France do not.

Italy depends on Libyan oil for as much as 22 per cent of crude oil consumption. Spain for 13%. As Herman Franssen, former chief economist of the International Energy Agency put in 2011 “Europe has to choose between becoming more dependent on Russia or the Middle East, or both”.

With Russia and Ukraine at odds and Syria and Iraq being in chaos the time is way overdue for a serious condideration for energy alternatives such as nuclear power as well as trying to restructure the economy away from the heavy over reliance on oil and gas.

The alternative is the Western nations being dragged in to further wars that result in terrorist blowback and multiple evils.The alternative to making the search for alternatives to oil and gas to underpin consumer lifestyles is, quite frankly, an epoch in which European nations endure economic slumps and political instability.

Syria and Yugoslavia Compared.

A humane and thoughtful piece from Timothy Garton Ash on Syria appeared in The Guardian  with regards the way there seems to be no urgency to find a solution to the Syrian Civil War that has now claimed 70,000 lives in just two years. In Yugoslavia in the 1990s over almost a decade it was 100,000 dead.

However, he does not quite seem to understand how badly previous "responsibility to protect" notions were  manipulated cynically by the Great Powers and in practice were largely abandoned once the invasions dragged on. Garton Ash states,

So why isn't the word "Syria" on all our lips? Twenty years ago, in 1993, everyone was talking about Bosnia. Ten years ago, in 2003, everyone was talking about Iraq.

The reason is that the West is not held to directly to blame for events in Syria. So there have been no mass protests and debates in London or New York. But also there is cynicism and fatigue. The idea is that nothing can be done, especially if it means the prospect of a disastrous military intervention.

Meanwhile, we have a UN-sanctioned doctrine of the "responsibility to protect", in response to what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. If the responsibility to protect does not apply to the man-made humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, where does it apply?

The problem is that this noble concept has been abused by the Great Powers to advocate the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 ( which increased the level of ethnic cleansing ), the futile invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. There is no will nor want for any "intervention" in 2013.

Garton Ash tends to overlook the fact that both the Balkans and Syria were part of the Ottoman Empire up until 1918, though Serbia was breaking away up to a century before. The European states found they had some basis formed on territorial jurisdiction and national loyalties.

In the southern Islamic lands of the Ottoman Empire, none of the states carved out of the collapsed imperium had any real territorial legitimacy in constrast to even the Balkan states and despite the ferocious nationalism stoked up by demagogues such as Tudjman and Milosevic..

After 1918, the lands to the south of what would become Turkey, such as Syria and Iraq had no territorial jurisdiction nor loyalties beyond religious sectarian allegiances or tribal affiliation. The supposed "nation states" became subject after WW2 by ideological politics such as Baathism.

Yet there numerous flaws in Garton Ash's liberal mandarin outlook,

In Kosovo we applied direct force, by air and land, to secure a peace based on even more far-reaching ethnic division. Thirteen years on, the still embryonic rapprochement between Serbia and Kosovo civilises that division, European style,

In fact, the CIA and US forces armed and backed the terroristic KLA under Hacim Thaci to stimulate a cycle of violence, ignoring the the more peaceful Kosovan moderates, by attacking Serbian police station and so lure Milosevic into greater repressive measures.

This is a fact that even finds expression in respected historians and journalists work, such as Tim Judah's Kosovo: War and Revenge. The Kosovan regime under Thaci has been responsible for drug smuggling, sex trafficking, and the sale of human organs.

It is curious to know whether such practices, as carried on by the Kosovan regime, are in line with contemporary "European style" or an "untidy peace" in Garton Ash's view. Or the abandonment of Serbs after 2001 to Kosovan retaliation as KFOR troops were deployed to Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Garton Ash is right: Syria has become a proxy war. The CIA are already trying to funnel arms to "the right rebels". But rejections from the outset of a diplomatically negotiated settlement by Clinton and Hague ( "Assad Must Go! ) hardened the Russian, Chinese and Iranian stance that he will stay.

The reason the US and UK is intervening is that removing Assad means a major land bridge linking Iran with Hezbollah and maintaining the balance of power in the Middle East toward the Shia governments and movements would be removed.

To remove Assad would mean Iran would be encircled by Western Power both to the west ( in Syria and, though erratically ) by a shia dominated Iraqi government and to the East in Afghanistan. The idea of all the troops leaving Afghanistan is an untruth. A strong military presence will remain.

Garton Ash almost never understands the vital role of the New Great Game and the competition for oil and gas both in the Middle East and in Central Asia. The Afghanistan War is crucially concerned with ensuring the security along the route along which the TAPI pipeline will be built.

Syria fits in to this Great Power contest because the grand plan is to throttle the Iranian government in Tehran by blocking off its oil and gas exports. By ensuring the TAPI pipeline is constructed a community of interest between central and south Asia will be created. It's regional ambitions thwarted.

Garton Ash urgently needs to realise that the future lies in resource wars. Repeatedly he has written of the West's "vital interests". Yet this Orwellian euphemism never mentions words like gas or oil. The power of facing facts seems no longer to be important for him.

The Failure to Look at the Facts of the Iraq Conflict.

With the Wikileaks it has become even clearer now the US colluded with death squads such as the 2nd battalion of the interior ministry-the Wolf Brigades-as the price of defeating the Sunni based militias opposed to the new Iraqi government and involving leaders of Shia Badr militias.

Many such as Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen and others who backed the Iraq War have remained silent on this or simply "moved on", despite having attempted to use the invasion of Iraq as a great cause with which to upgrade their reputations as stalwart defenders of the West's essential liberal values in the war against global Islamofascism and totalitarianism.

Some such as Peter Bracken still think they are fighting the good cause, almost parodying the language of Hitchens and Paul Bermann about the need for democratic or "decent leftists" to stand up for the West against barbarians who seek to destroy it. Bracken seems to have transposed the fight in Iraq against barbarians to anti-war opponents in Britain too,

,....the authentic left renounces everything the deluded left has embraced. And in embracing an illiberal perspective on world politics it has – I believe – forfeited its right to membership of the left.....this section of the left denies the mainstay of the authentic left's agenda: liberalism.

Yet few supporters of the Iraq war to defend liberalism not their opponents bothered to look at the facts of Iraq on their own terms, waging polemical battles as part of their ideological creed wars and fitting the facts to them accordingly. Compared to what was really at stake-energy security and geopolitical hegemony-these disputes will remain a footnote in history.

Even so, what is curious about Bracken's sententious waffle about the USA's "moral authority" in invading Iraq is precisely the moral relativism of the practice of the US strategy for "pacification". It was prepared to co-opt fanatical Islamists and former Baathists to crush other insurgents. As the Guardian reported,

In Samarra, the series of log entries in 2004 and 2005 describe repeated raids by US infantry, who then handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for "further questioning". Typical entries read: "All 5 detainees were turned over to Ministry of Interior for further questioning" (from 29 November 2004) and "The detainee was then turned over to the 2nd Ministry of Interior Commando Battalion for further questioning" (30 November 2004).

The field reports chime with allegations made by New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time. He told Guardian Films : "US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing," while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said.

An interview conducted by Maass in 2005 at the improvised prison, accompanied by the Wolf Brigade's US military adviser, Col James Steele, had been interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside, he said. Steele was reportedly previously employed as an adviser to help crush an insurgency in El Salvador.

The Wolf Brigade was created and supported by the US in an attempt to re-employ elements of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, this time to terrorise insurgents. Members typically wore red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas, and drove out on raids in convoys of Toyota Landcruisers. They were accused by Iraqis of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills and sometimes executing suspects.

In the light of the hundreds of thousands killed and displaced by the invasion of Iraq back in 2003 and the cost in lives and morality amount of evidence will convince those Bracken of the sheer scale of the criminality involved in getting control of Iraq.

The stupidity of some self styled "liberal imperialists" or "humanitarian interventionists" from Hitchens to Cohen et al is that they shared the same mental vices that they accused the anti-war protesters of having: a lack of interest in the real situation in Iraq and scoring polemical points.

Obviously, those like Tariq Ali and Seumas Milne who referred to some "the Iraqi resistance" were using the term to glorify and dignify the Sunni militias and trying to impose a left wing Third World anti-colonial narrative on to a brutal sectarian and ethnic conflict where the Vietnam model failed to fit.

Yet that does not absolve those who argued the case for invading Iraq of responsibility for the that it was a catastrophically bad move, of very dubious legality and which from the outset had control of Iraqi oil as its purpose, as most of the military effort went into securing the oil infrastructure and not on nation building.

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An Exchange with Peter Bracken.

Peter Bracken responded today,

You misunderstand the term moral relativism. In a sentence, moral relativism disables discrimination between the moral behaviour of states or cultures or individuals.

On your own terms by colluding with precisely the forces that the US set out to overthrow the US mission in Iraq was very much defined by moral relativism, that morality can be defined according to the principle wholly of the means justifying the ends.

That necessarily means overlooking the behaviour of those 'on our side' simply in order to advance a political objective thought of more overriding importance than preserving precisely those universal moral injunctions enshrined in prohibitions of torture.

The irony is that even if those such as Seumas Milne only cared about Iraq is so far as to discredit the USA whilst simultaneously extolling Sunni Militias as "the resistance", the advocates of war in Iraq also overlooked atrocities committed in the name of a higher cause.

Clearly, moral relativism disabled any critical capacity from many in the left, not only some "anti-war" activists ( who at the same time rationalised ideological violence from "the resistance" ) but those who supported Iraq.There is one more flaw in this definition.

By the terms of reference set out by those who supported the invasion of Iraq to get rid of torture, the whole point is that moral relativism is not an absolute category that applies only to enemies of the USA and UK as defined for purposes of political expediency and realpolitik.

If that is the case, then logically it is essential that the moral behaviour of the USA and UK is judged according to the standards that are set up for others to follow ( e.g the universal prohibition on torture ) but which have not been followed by both powers in the light of the evidence coming from Iraq.

So instead of looking at the truth of the Wikileaks, the collusion of the US with murderous Baathists people such as yourself assured people the invasion was about removing for moral reasons, you prefer to take pot shots at the apparent self-interest of lawyers to deflect attention from the substance of the accusations of collusions in torture.

And that is known as taking the moral position.

Peter Bracken

..what's interesting about the Wikileaks is how few atrocities have been committed.

Collusion with that there is a just measure of atrocity that is acceptable. How that calculus can be arrived at is curious. What's interesting is that the US worked with the Baathists who were depicted as the enemy even after 2003.

Moreover, the Frago 242 order to the US miltary to ignore detainee abuse by Iraqi authorities is illegal in international law.

Supporters of the Iraq War cannot have it both ways. To maintain that the war was fought to prevent humanitarian abuses but that the success can only be achieved by systemic collusion with torture is exactly what the hero of the supposedly "decent left", George Orwell, called doublethink.

..all you ever do is highlight the self-interest of states - it's all about oil.

Well, its necessary to do so, though it becomes claustrophobic to have to re-iterate the damned obvious. But contrary to this, I emphasise oil and its role in geopolitics and the balance of power and not the standard obsession with the USA as though it were a vampiric power drinking oil like blood.

Nor that wars for energy security are about sinister waxen faxed silver haired plutocrats loving the thrill of war for profit, the sort of tripe that comes from anti-war activists of the kind who seem intent on emulating the cliched radicals of something from the 1980s anti-terrorist film Who Dares Wins.

Clearly losing the argument Peter Bracken snarls,

You are hamstrung by your contortions. One doesn't have to be a saint to apply moral judgements. That's the point of the anti-relativist stance

No, but clearly you think there is a God given right somehow for the USA and UK not to be held accountable for colluding with torture when the ostensible point of the invasion was supposed to be to remove Saddam and hence torture.

So no contortions but simply the plain obvious truth. It's clear to any sane person that the actual conduct of the war as well as the bogus pretexts used to justify it in the first place failed to be in any sense ethical or moral at all.

Unless morality is subordinated to the ultimate victory of the politically correct creed. In which case, those justifying Iraq ( as you still are ) are paradoxically coming very close to the rationalisations people made for Stalin's USSR in the 1930s.

Bracken on collusion with torture through Frago 242 retorted then,

Nonsense, and you know it to be. By your reckoning one case of abuse would be enough to condemn the military and its government.

The point is that the collusion with torture was systemic, a consequence of the Frago 242 which provided a licence to torture. That decision meant that "abuses" such as torture were not a series of unfortunate one off but implicit in the very way in which the US decided to conduct the war.

As Nick Davies wrote in the Guardian,

A frago is a "fragmentary order" which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, "only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ".

Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.

The systematic viciousness of the old dictatorship when Saddam Hussein's security agencies enforced order without any regard for law continues, reinforced by the chaotic savagery of the new criminal, political and sectarian groups which have emerged since the invasion in 2003 and which have infiltrated some police and army units, using Iraq's detention cells for their private vendettas.

This should not be so difficult to grasp. The continuities with the old Baathist regime are clear here. It could be maintained, ruthlessly of course, that such collusion in barbarism was necessary to defeat barbarians but that reduces the moral case for the Iraq War to dust.

Today Peter Beaumont writes on Iraq,

...when things sometimes became too embarrassing – too obvious – a local police chief implicated in killings might be removed or officials at the ministry re-organised. But the murder continued.There was a new excuse: the police had been infiltrated by Shia extremists. Which was true, up to a point. Except it wasn't really infiltration, more of an alliance in many places: a coincidence of sectarian interest.

So the "liberal interventionist" case for Iraq has been disproved by the facts: the systemic collusion in torture represented by Frago 242 by which US troops were to allow Iraqi militias such as the Wolf Brigades to torture their enemies and ethnic cleansing tacitly permitted as the price of controlling Iraqi oil for which the war was fought.

Peter Bracken responded robotically,

Iraq is no longer under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam. The innocent life that has been lost since the occupation is due almost entirely to the campaign waged by Iraqi insurgents.

It is your suggestion (read the quote) that coalition forces are equivalent to Saddam's murderous regime that is the sad, despicable feature of this Wikileaks episode.

There are no "Iraqi insurgents" as such. They were Sunni or Shia insurgents as Iraq from the start of its creation was never more than an artificial state held together by the Baathists.

With the evidence that the US colluded with Shia militias infilitrating the police and partaking in Wolf Brigade practices of torture alongside Baathists, that means that relevant comparisons between before and after the invasion can me made.

The fragmentation of the Iraqi state and sectarian war as a consequence of the invasion was predictable before the invasion of 2003. Therefore the responsibility for the deaths is attributable to that invasion.

No invasion, then not hundreds of thousands of deaths. No collusion in torture by the US. And no collusion with the very Baathist operatives that sustained Saddam's brutal dictatorship.

Moreover, the loss of innocent life created by the Shia militias as well as the Baathists both before and after the "liberation" , including the murder of civilians, was rewarded by the US by co-opting them to serve the new regime.

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All of the evidence coming from US war records now has failed to dissuade Peter Bracken, Nick Cohen or Christopher Hitchens who still bang on about Iraq as though it was a struggle for civilisation. Or as Hitchens put it in an interview rather feebly in an interview in May 2010

"Do I ask myself do I think our civilisation is superior to theirs? Yes, I do. Do I think it's worth fighting for? Most certainly."

Even if It Wasn't True it Ought to Have Been.

Nick Cohen tries to re-establish his radical credentials by commenting on the greed of society, comparing the fuss of Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney's demand for an increase in pay to city fat cats who give themselves colossal salary rises and the morality of such people,

The rumour in Manchester is that Coleen Rooney wanted an audience with the Pope to ask what she should do about Wayne. It's one of those stories that journalists don't like to check too strenuously because even if it isn't true, it ought to be.

A bit like the idea that the invasion of Iraq was about a "humanitarian intervention" then. As far as Rooney is concerned he's an overpaid oaf and football long ceased to be a merely entertaining game but a crashingly boring form of bread and circuses for the masses.

The destruction of the game by greed and too much money is fairly obvious, rather like the greed for oil that motivated the invasion of Iraq and the debt fuelled financial crash of 2008 that has compounded the decline of the USA and Britain as their colossal deficits expanded.

Just to remember how misjudged Cohen's support for the Iraq War was, it needs to remembered what he wrote in The Times ( The Left betrays the Iraqi people by opposing war, Jan 14 2003 ).

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi dissidents are an embarrassment to the Left. After enduring misery few of us can imagine, they have discovered that, without foreign intervention, their country won't be freed from a tyrant who matches Stalin in his success in liquidating domestic opponents. Only America can intervene. Therefore an American invasion offers the possibility of salvation.

The first prediction that only the US offered salvation looks perverse now in the light of the Wikileak evidence about the scale of US collusion with the torture imposed by Iraqi state authorities and the napalming of Fallujah in 2004.

The second prediction was the complete reverse of what actually happened.

The Iraqi opposition had a right to expect support. The alternative it offers to Saddam's secular tyranny is not Islamic theocracy. The INC and the London conference of exiles both want a democratic Iraq that gives a voice to the suppressed Shia; a federal Iraq that allows autonomy for the Kurdish minority; and a secular Iraq that can contain the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam.

It seems that much of Cohen's support for Iraq was a faux Orwell stance to establish his credibility as some "decent left" writer who wanted to 'rub the cat's fur backwards' as Orwell did with the pro-Soviet supporting left in the 1930s.

If so, he failed pitifully.

I hear that the peoples of Iraq will slaughter each other if Saddam goes; that any US-sponsored replacement will be worse. They may be right, although the second prediction will be hard to meet. What is repulsive is the sneaking feeling that they want the war to be long and a post-Saddam Iraq to be a bloody disaster. They would rather see millions suffer than be forced to reconsider their prejudices.

It was idiocy for Cohen to project on to all those who opposed the war in Iraq the mental vices of some cranks and trendy poseurs in the anti-war movement, even if it's true that some reflexively opposed the war simply through disliking the USA.

Yet when supporting a war on the scale of Iraq, it was incumbent upon those like Cohen to provide authoritative evidence that the war was being fought for the humanitarian reasons posited and whether it had a realistic chance of a stable outcome.

Cohen did not. One has the sneaking feeling Cohen did not give a fig about millions of Iraqis either but in scoring polemical points over his opponents and who expected to attach himself to the success of the US war to portray them as spineless and craven.

For few really take the Socialist Workers Party seriously. They latched on to the anti-war protests in order to channel them into permanent agitation and created RESPECT which failed to mobilise opinion on any long term basis.