Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Why the U.S. and Western Countries Could Be Bluffing About Military
Intervention in Syria
________________________________________
Why the U.S. and Western Countries Could Be Bluffing About Military
Intervention in Syria
By Vijay Prashad [1] / AlterNet [2]
October 26, 2016
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Five years ago, a high-octane media campaign pushed for war on Libya. Voices
in the Gulf Arab press, in particular, cried out for blood. Al-Arabiya, the
media conglomerate owned by the Saudi kingdom, led the way. It suggested
that genocide was on the horizon in Libyas eastern cities. The forces of
Muammar Qaddafi, it said, had moved swiftly against the rebellion. Qaddafis
legions would not only crush the rebellion, it suggested, but it would kill
a great number of civilians.
The Western press echoed al-Arabiya, with far less understanding of the
dynamics that involved Qaddafi and the Gulf Arab sheikhs. After all, in
2009, at the Arab League summit in Doha (Qatar), Qaddafi looked directly at
the King of Saudi Arabia and said, You are propelled by fibs towards the
grave. You were made by the British and protected by the United States.
King Abdullah, furious, said to Qaddafi, the grave is before you. Personal
animosity from the Gulf Arab emirs should not be underestimated. Only
someone with little understanding of the Arabic media would have given
al-Arabiya any credibility.
It was shocking then to have the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon say that
he was getting his information on Libya through press reports. What press
was the UN secretariat reading? Was it the Arabic language press, with
al-Arabiya in the lead, or was it reading the Western press, which was
largely mimicking the coverage in the Gulf Arab media?
Derek Chollet of the US National Security Council said, four years after the
destruction of Libya, We, the US, did not have a particularly good handle
on what was going on inside Libya.
From the battlefield, David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times wrote, The
rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming
nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a
key cities days after it fell to Qaddafis forces and making vastly inflated
claims of [Qaddafis] barbaric behavior.
The United Nations, the Western capitals and the Western media admitted -
in different ways that they had no good sense of what was going on inside
Libya. And yet, they went to the UN Security Council eager to conduct a
regime change operation in Libya. Their ignorance of events inside Libya did
not stay the hand of their zealotry.
Last week, the UK Parliaments Foreign Affairs Committee released an
important report on the lead-up to the NATO intervention in Libya and its
aftermath. It made a number of important concessions regarding the lead-up
to the war. Three of them, in particular, are significant.
Exaggerations of the violence
At the time, in February 2011, a great deal of noise was made about the
genocide or potential genocide in Libya. The shadow of the Bosnian war
over the town of Srebrenica hung over Benghazi. Would the forces of
Qaddafi massacre thousands of people, as had been killed in the former
Yugoslavia in 1995? US President Barack Obamas advisor Dennis Ross said
that Benghazi would be Srebrenica on steroids. The UKs report says that
Qaddafis forces did not take violent retribution against civilians in
towns and cities on the road to Benghazi. It notes that in town after town
the Libyan army entered, fought the rebels and offered an olive branch to
the tribal leaders. Casualty rates showed that there were disproportionate
male casualties, which suggest that the regime forces targeted male
combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians. An
Amnesty International report from June 2011 shows that there is no evidence
of mass human rights violations.
Certainly, Qaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam used fierce and violent
rhetoric against the rebels. This was certainly chilling, but also clichéd.
It was the kind of rhetoric that Qaddafi had often used, but rarely acted
upon. What should have been equally alarming was the rhetoric being used by
the rebels and the émigrés. There was fear-mongering that Qaddafi would
unleash African mercenaries on the uprising. Between Misrata and Tawergha,
rebels proudly declared themselves as the brigade for purging slaves, black
skin. The ethnic cleansing in Tawergha was the outcome of this racism. This
was known during NATOs bombing, but nothing was said of it not by the
NATO commanders to the émigré leadership in Benghazi. It was rhetoric, with
consequences, that did not stir the West.
Political options set aside
The UN Security Council passed resolution 1973 to provide cover for NATOs
war in Libya. The resolution urged the powers to try various political
options before using armed action in Libya. The UK Parliamentary inquiry
noted, Political options were available if the UK Government had adhered to
the spirit of Resolution 1973, implemented its original campaign plan and
influenced its coalition allies to pause military action when Benghazi was
secured in March 2011. Furthermore, political engagement might have
delivered civilian protection, regime change and reform at lesser cost to
the UK and to Libya.
The African Union met in Noakchoutt, Mauritania, on March 19, 2011, and
hoped to fly to Tripoli the next day. They wanted to open a channel to
Qaddafi and the émigré leadership in the hope of preventing a war. The
President of Mauritania Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz offered an aircraft for
the team. Before they could go on their mission, the West began to bomb
Libya. The US and the UN told the African Union that they could not
guarantee the security of the team. The African Union was sidelined. So were
others who sought to create a table for negotiations. War became the first
option. It is what the UK Parliaments report now underlines.
Extremists in the ranks of the rebels
In early 2011, when those of us who pointed out that the rebel ranks were
filled with veterans of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, al-Qaeda and
other extremist outfits, we were mocked and dismissed. That people such as
Abdelhakim Belhaj emerged as the leadership of the troops was not considered
to be a serious issue. When Lord Richards former Chief of the Defense
Staff of the UK armed forces told the UK Parliamentary committee that a
quorum of respectable Libyans were assuring the Foreign Office that these
extremists would not be the beneficiaries of the rebellion and the NATO war.
This, he said, with the benefit of hindsight was wishful thinking. The
UK Parliamentary report dismissed the retreat into hindsight. The
possibility that militant extremist groups would attempt to benefit from the
rebellion should have not been the preserve of hindsight, the authors
wrote. Libyan connections with transnational militant extremist groups were
known before 2011, because many Libyans had participated in the Iraq
insurgency and in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda.
But this view was precisely debunked in the manufactured fog of war. It was
set aside.
Syrias Libyan Lessons
The disaster of Libya has meant that the West is now deeply reticent to act
in Syria against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Those who call for a No
Fly Zone in Syria are deluded if they assume that the West is going to
provide such an instrument. There will be neither UN backing for such a
policy nor will the Western governments themselves risk such an adventure.
US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton might make these gestures in her
speeches, but she well knows that her own military would oppose such an
action. It is easy for her to call for a No Fly Zone, and then claim that it
is only the Russians and the Chinese who are against this policy. In fact,
the Western governments burned by the Libyan adventure as much as the Iraq
one no longer have the stomach for such a policy. The call for a No Fly
Zone emboldens the rebels in Syria to refuse to come to talks in Geneva.
Rather than an avenue towards peace, the No Fly Zone rhetoric is merely a
prolongation of war.
The Syrian government, meanwhile, has seen the tide shift in its favor.
Turkey has largely abandoned its proxies in East Aleppo. This has provided
the Syrian government and its allies the opportunity to try and seize East
Aleppo from the rebels. Damascus has a short timetable. They want to finish
this campaign before President Hillary Clinton comes to power. The brutal
nature of the conflict is a measure of their haste. It is largely inevitable
that at great cost Aleppo will come back into government hands. Calls
for negotiation are appropriate but largely inconsequential. It was the
withdrawal of Turkish support rather than any Western action that ended
the rebel hold on East Aleppo. The withdrawal of the rebels from East Aleppo
would be a humane action. In Mosul, the ISIS leadership now speaks of
inhiyaz or temporary retreat. If the rebels left East Aleppo, they would
prevent the inevitable bloodshed. But they are not going to do so. This is
the tragedy of that great cosmopolitan city.
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring,
Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of
the Global South (Verso, 2013) and The Death of a Nation and the Future of
the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016). His columns
appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/syrias-libyan-lessons
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/vijay-prashad
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Why the U.S. and Western
Countries Could Be Bluffing About Military Intervention in Syria
[4] http://www.alternet.org/
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Why the U.S. and Western Countries Could Be Bluffing About Military
Intervention in Syria
Why the U.S. and Western Countries Could Be Bluffing About Military
Intervention in Syria
By Vijay Prashad [1] / AlterNet [2]
October 26, 2016
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to Google+Share to MoreShare to Email
Five years ago, a high-octane media campaign pushed for war on Libya. Voices
in the Gulf Arab press, in particular, cried out for blood. Al-Arabiya, the
media conglomerate owned by the Saudi kingdom, led the way. It suggested
that genocide was on the horizon in Libyas eastern cities. The forces of
Muammar Qaddafi, it said, had moved swiftly against the rebellion. Qaddafis
legions would not only crush the rebellion, it suggested, but it would kill
a great number of civilians.
The Western press echoed al-Arabiya, with far less understanding of the
dynamics that involved Qaddafi and the Gulf Arab sheikhs. After all, in
2009, at the Arab League summit in Doha (Qatar), Qaddafi looked directly at
the King of Saudi Arabia and said, You are propelled by fibs towards the
grave. You were made by the British and protected by the United States.
King Abdullah, furious, said to Qaddafi, the grave is before you. Personal
animosity from the Gulf Arab emirs should not be underestimated. Only
someone with little understanding of the Arabic media would have given
al-Arabiya any credibility.
It was shocking then to have the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon say that
he was getting his information on Libya through press reports. What press
was the UN secretariat reading? Was it the Arabic language press, with
al-Arabiya in the lead, or was it reading the Western press, which was
largely mimicking the coverage in the Gulf Arab media?
Derek Chollet of the US National Security Council said, four years after the
destruction of Libya, We, the US, did not have a particularly good handle
on what was going on inside Libya.
From the battlefield, David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times wrote, The
rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming
nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a
key cities days after it fell to Qaddafis forces and making vastly inflated
claims of [Qaddafis] barbaric behavior.
The United Nations, the Western capitals and the Western media admitted - in
different ways that they had no good sense of what was going on inside
Libya. And yet, they went to the UN Security Council eager to conduct a
regime change operation in Libya. Their ignorance of events inside Libya did
not stay the hand of their zealotry.
Last week, the UK Parliaments Foreign Affairs Committee released an
important report on the lead-up to the NATO intervention in Libya and its
aftermath. It made a number of important concessions regarding the lead-up
to the war. Three of them, in particular, are significant.
Exaggerations of the violence
At the time, in February 2011, a great deal of noise was made about the
genocide or potential genocide in Libya. The shadow of the Bosnian war
over the town of Srebrenica hung over Benghazi. Would the forces of
Qaddafi massacre thousands of people, as had been killed in the former
Yugoslavia in 1995? US President Barack Obamas advisor Dennis Ross said
that Benghazi would be Srebrenica on steroids. The UKs report says that
Qaddafis forces did not take violent retribution against civilians in
towns and cities on the road to Benghazi. It notes that in town after town
the Libyan army entered, fought the rebels and offered an olive branch to
the tribal leaders. Casualty rates showed that there were disproportionate
male casualties, which suggest that the regime forces targeted male
combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians. An
Amnesty International report from June 2011 shows that there is no evidence
of mass human rights violations.
Certainly, Qaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam used fierce and violent
rhetoric against the rebels. This was certainly chilling, but also clichéd.
It was the kind of rhetoric that Qaddafi had often used, but rarely acted
upon. What should have been equally alarming was the rhetoric being used by
the rebels and the émigrés. There was fear-mongering that Qaddafi would
unleash African mercenaries on the uprising. Between Misrata and Tawergha,
rebels proudly declared themselves as the brigade for purging slaves, black
skin. The ethnic cleansing in Tawergha was the outcome of this racism. This
was known during NATOs bombing, but nothing was said of it not by the
NATO commanders to the émigré leadership in Benghazi. It was rhetoric, with
consequences, that did not stir the West.
Political options set aside
The UN Security Council passed resolution 1973 to provide cover for NATOs
war in Libya. The resolution urged the powers to try various political
options before using armed action in Libya. The UK Parliamentary inquiry
noted, Political options were available if the UK Government had adhered to
the spirit of Resolution 1973, implemented its original campaign plan and
influenced its coalition allies to pause military action when Benghazi was
secured in March 2011. Furthermore, political engagement might have
delivered civilian protection, regime change and reform at lesser cost to
the UK and to Libya.
The African Union met in Noakchoutt, Mauritania, on March 19, 2011, and
hoped to fly to Tripoli the next day. They wanted to open a channel to
Qaddafi and the émigré leadership in the hope of preventing a war. The
President of Mauritania Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz offered an aircraft for
the team. Before they could go on their mission, the West began to bomb
Libya. The US and the UN told the African Union that they could not
guarantee the security of the team. The African Union was sidelined. So were
others who sought to create a table for negotiations. War became the first
option. It is what the UK Parliaments report now underlines.
Extremists in the ranks of the rebels
In early 2011, when those of us who pointed out that the rebel ranks were
filled with veterans of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, al-Qaeda and
other extremist outfits, we were mocked and dismissed. That people such as
Abdelhakim Belhaj emerged as the leadership of the troops was not considered
to be a serious issue. When Lord Richards former Chief of the Defense
Staff of the UK armed forces told the UK Parliamentary committee that a
quorum of respectable Libyans were assuring the Foreign Office that these
extremists would not be the beneficiaries of the rebellion and the NATO war.
This, he said, with the benefit of hindsight was wishful thinking. The
UK Parliamentary report dismissed the retreat into hindsight. The
possibility that militant extremist groups would attempt to benefit from the
rebellion should have not been the preserve of hindsight, the authors
wrote. Libyan connections with transnational militant extremist groups were
known before 2011, because many Libyans had participated in the Iraq
insurgency and in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda.
But this view was precisely debunked in the manufactured fog of war. It was
set aside.
Syrias Libyan Lessons
The disaster of Libya has meant that the West is now deeply reticent to act
in Syria against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Those who call for a No
Fly Zone in Syria are deluded if they assume that the West is going to
provide such an instrument. There will be neither UN backing for such a
policy nor will the Western governments themselves risk such an adventure.
US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton might make these gestures in her
speeches, but she well knows that her own military would oppose such an
action. It is easy for her to call for a No Fly Zone, and then claim that it
is only the Russians and the Chinese who are against this policy. In fact,
the Western governments burned by the Libyan adventure as much as the Iraq
one no longer have the stomach for such a policy. The call for a No Fly
Zone emboldens the rebels in Syria to refuse to come to talks in Geneva.
Rather than an avenue towards peace, the No Fly Zone rhetoric is merely a
prolongation of war.
The Syrian government, meanwhile, has seen the tide shift in its favor.
Turkey has largely abandoned its proxies in East Aleppo. This has provided
the Syrian government and its allies the opportunity to try and seize East
Aleppo from the rebels. Damascus has a short timetable. They want to finish
this campaign before President Hillary Clinton comes to power. The brutal
nature of the conflict is a measure of their haste. It is largely inevitable
that at great cost Aleppo will come back into government hands. Calls
for negotiation are appropriate but largely inconsequential. It was the
withdrawal of Turkish support rather than any Western action that ended
the rebel hold on East Aleppo. The withdrawal of the rebels from East Aleppo
would be a humane action. In Mosul, the ISIS leadership now speaks of
inhiyaz or temporary retreat. If the rebels left East Aleppo, they would
prevent the inevitable bloodshed. But they are not going to do so. This is
the tragedy of that great cosmopolitan city.
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring,
Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of
the Global South (Verso, 2013) and The Death of a Nation and the Future of
the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016). His columns
appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/syrias-libyan-lessons ;
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/vijay-prashad
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Why the U.S. and Western
Countries Could Be Bluffing About Military Intervention in Syria
[4] http://www.alternet.org/
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
