Though Cowards Flinch

Naadir Jeewa has written another blog post opposing a No-Fly Zone in Libya, this time partly in reply to my comment yesterday. I want to take up another three points from his argument:

1) The financial implications of an NFZ matter because it’s not the only option available to Western forces

This is true, though obviously support for a NFZ does not limit ones interest in other ideas. I was very interested in reading about how the US handled themselves with regards to Chad. But training up rebels was still an issue for the author. The US/UK/EU or whoever do not have a great deal of time to be limiting their input on training alone. One thing they obviously can do is source soviet weaponary (I read that the US could source it from Ukraine with corruption, from Poland without) and that will bypass a lot of the time training up rebels with arms the US have, but this doesn’t solve the problem of air attacks.

Even the author of the piece expressed concern that the rebellion cannot be compared to the Chad army, and they had only one pilot; how many does the rebellion have if, say, the US gave them a helicopter?

2) Do those who propose a NFZ have an endgame?

As I said regarding your point on the tribes, the onus is upon the rebellion to gather as many supporters as possible, from across the tribal landscape. Additionally, of course, it should be making some statements as to what kind of government it wants in lieu of Gaddafi’s. One reason why Sarkozy has received criticism for pledging support for the National Transition Council is because there has been no diplomatic input, and at the moment the rebels’ demands are uncertain, other than to get rid of the Colonel and promote support for a NFZ (mirrored today by leaders of the Arab League, opposed by Syria who are providing air support for Gaddafi, safe in the knowledge that their country will not rebel).

I’m not sure whether you are calling for intervening nations to have ideas, other than being against humanitarian tragedy, but it seems that much of the criticism levelled at the West intervening is predicated on the fact that in previous wars they’ve had too much of a vested interest. At this stage, the term humanitarian intervention becomes perverted, since if, say, mitigating against oil prices is the real name of the game, then the term is used as smoke and mirrors (see for example Tony Blair and Iraq).

The more the Transition Council demand, and expect intervening nations to do, the less opportunity the US will have in setting up their interests in Libya, which so far is mere conjecture (see for example Richard Seymour).

3) Surely, the NFZ is a declaration of war*

This may be a pedantic point, but if entering a country in any way equates to a declaration of war, then so be it. But since there are conditions under which a NFZ could passify Gaddafi without the aid of an all out war effort, then I’m convinced that the only grounds for war would be on the head of the Libyan leader, therefore in itself I don’t think a NFZ is a declaration of war. And certainly no more than Gaddafi’s successful efforts to engage his people in a civil war.

*Correction: The question put to me inside Naadir’s piece was: “if I make an NFZ sound too much like a war, that’s because it is an explicit declaration of war.” A NFZ is an act of war, this is accepted. But my other points stand, that the NFZ is a warning, or a gearing up militarily, to counter Gaddafi’s moves towards humanitarian crisis. Therefore I still believe that the grounds for action to be taken against Gaddafi’s air presence will be on his head. Disproportionality is unjust and this is his capital over the rebels, intervention should seek only to ratify this problem.

I want to address three points made by Naadir Jeewa in his thoughtful piece on Liberal Conspiracy today:

1) “Proponents of an NFZ must answer the basic question: what exactly we’re trying to achieve?”

Gaddafi has almost exlcusive use of the air, and though it’s disputed by Russia there have been reasonable claims that air operations have resulted in many of the +1000 death toll. To cite finances (“would anyone be satisfied with maintaining a decade-long, open-ended engagement at a cost of at least £9.5m, and maybe up to £185m per week.”) as a reason why the West shouldn’t back a NFZ seems to miss the point.

Further, if Gaddafi defeats rebels, which is likely without an intervention of sorts, this will send a rather optimistic message out to other despots in the region. Of course, a NFZ runs the risk of failing, as does any operation one engages in, but such a defeatist attitude when the rebels have disproportionate use of strategic manoeuvring is inappropriate.

One reason given to oppose all western-backed intervention is that if a NFZ helps secure victory, Arab patriots will forever pour scorn on the National Transition Council for using imperialism as a way of settling differences. Perversely, if a western-backed NFZ fails then at least that will apease those patriots, but the death toll would almost certainly have risen quite considerably by then.

2) “…there’s the internal legitimacy problem. Historian Dirk Vandewalle warns that the Libyan National Council is representative only of Cyrenaica tribal leaders.”

This may well be true, but then did you see from the reuters article the amount of support Gaddafi receives from large tribes?

Though even if you’re assessment holds true, this simply requires pressure from inside the council to reach out to those tribes which are broadly and unambigiously against Gaddafi. The Warfalla tribe for example, the largest in Libya, announced early on they were turning against Gaddafi, not to mention the Magarha and Zuwayyah tribes. Further, despite having military personnel among their numbers, the Tarhuna and Zentan tribes in the west of the country declared early support for protests.

3) “An NFZ will not be an invisible, skies-only operation. Sec. Gates has stated that the presence of large stocks of Surface-to-Air-Missiles dictates the need to bomb Libya’s air defences, in contrast to Iraq, where most of the air defences had already been destroyed as a consequence of the Gulf War.”

This is akin to the argument that it looks too much like war. There are rules attached to the NFZ and if Gaddafi breaks those rules then we know what will happen (though we don’t want another Downing of Scott O’ Grady). Gaddafi’s army will only be made culpable if they break the resolution (should the block by Russia or China be overturned) and thus the onus is upon them.

The extent to which I would hope the NFZ is not skies-only, is in equipping the rebel forces with amunition, basic accessories should they be needed, and at a push strategic assistance. No ground troops! The rebels have been clear and foreign intervention should recognise who is in charge here.

Naadir has produced a thoughtful rebuttal of the NFZ which, unlike many attempts by others, does not appeal to absurd logic, or mere epithets. Though in spite of his efforts, I disagree with his conclusions and look forward to his response.

In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann on December 13, 1870, on the subject of the combination of civil war with revolutionary wars, Karl Marx opined that socialists should embrace giving “the proletariat practice in arms.”

141 years later, capitalist governments such as the US have been given permission by the UN to arm rebels in Libya.

Today, also, Tory backbencher Mark Pritchard said the “international community should allow rebels access to arms”.

And what have the UK’s Marxist representatives said? Simon Assaf for the Socialist Worker has said:

It may seem callous to oppose intervention in the face of such harrowing repression. But any Western intervention will come at a heavy price.

Since arming the revolution would count as “Western intervention” I guess that’s out of the question.

The world has turned upside down.

(H/T @libyansunite cf here and here)

In March last year the question on everybody’s lips was: Did Hague know about Lord Ashcroft’s tax status? He said not. Then later he admitted he did, and we waited for the statement of his sacking. Nothing. Overlooked by Cameron whose compassionate conservativism begins and ends in his own cabinet.

Michael Spencer was appointed by Cameron as Tory treasurer to incentivise more small donations of £50,000, and shed the party of Ashcroft’s influence. It didn’t help. It was revealed, unsurprisingly that 50% of the Tory’s funds came from the city; £4m from David “Spotty” Rowland, £1.9m from Stanley Fink, £485,000 from George Magan. So much for small donations.

But Hague could sleep at night, Ashcroft had gone.

But now he is in the doghouse yet again.

First he made the government look foolish by repeating the unsubstantiable claim that Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela.

Then amid all the media attention on Cameron’s trip to the Middle East with arms dealers, and the Mirror story that the wife of an ex-Middle East arms dealer, old chum of Jonathan Aitken, had donated £300,000 to the Tories, David Cameron has to get up and apologise for the delays to the Government’s efforts to rescue British nationals stranded in Libya.

James Forsyth for the Mail has today said the “Government has resembled little more than a budget airline”.

Perhaps EasyJet?

WalesOnline wondered recently:

… whether [Hague's] unlucky or whether there is some flaw in that superbly functioning mental apparatus of his when it has to connect with the real world?

And that’s the clincher. When people are angry, you can cover your head for a while until everyone stops noticing. But when people feel sorry for you, that’s when you’re in trouble.

William Hague should be sacked.

Gaddafi has always been something of a challenge for socialists. While it was his charisma and strong rhetoric that suited those keenly supportive of Pan-Arabism and socialism in the seventies, later it would be his malleability and weakness that allowed the West to turn a blind eye to him, or even conduct deals with him in the supposed interest of both parties.

A British source once said of Gaddafi: “We thought he was a bit left-wing, but not too bad, and that we could deal with him.”

In 1950s Libya, King Idriss failed to tip his hat to the winds of change sweeping the Arab world. While the sound of Pan-Arabism played out, Libya was still at the behest of the US and UK, that was until 1 September 1969, when Idriss was receiving medical treatment in Turkey, that a successful coup plot installed into office a group Libyan army officers led by Gaddafi, overthrowing the Monarchy and pre-empting Idris’ abdication.

42 years later and Gaddafi is still leader of the country, and is himself now irresponsive to the winds of change sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, like the leader before him. But moreover, Gaddafi’s defensive is set to be far more heavy-handed than most of the regions, to the extent that he may face a war criminal indictment over the way in which he has responded to protests.

He has been explicit: “when I [order use of force] everything will burn […] I’ll die here as a martyr”.

Gaddafi’s socialist supporters

His authoritarian dictatorship of the last forty years should spell out everything the left needs to know that support for him is misguided, but in spite of the fact he has incited a major civil war against protesters left wing leaders in Latin America have been positively supportive.

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez enjoys good relations with Gaddafi, awarding the dictator the Orden del Libertador Simón Bolívar – something usually reserved for people offering outstanding services to the country. Recently he sent a tweet from his official twitter account saying: “Long live Libya and its independence! Kadhafi faces a civil war!”

Fidel Castro, too, has stated publicly that: “NATO is planning to take over Libya and its oil”, while President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua said he has phoned Libyan Gaddafi to express his solidarity.

Is Gaddafi socialist or a lackey of imperialism?

Chavez’ uncritical support for Gaddafi has once again caused embarrassment for the Venezuelan leader’s UK supporters. The closest tie is between Chavez and the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), who in 2009 made efforts to distance themselves from the support he gave to Ahmadinejad during the latter’s reelection. Alan Woods, one of the leading members of the Tendency, has written a piece for the IMT website condemning the use of force by Gaddafi, while explaining that rather than being a socialist he is actually responsible for “privatizations [which] encouraged foreign companies to open up shops in Benghazi and Tripoli”. He goes on to say: “As recently as last November The Economist published a glowing report about Libya, which it compared with Dubai.”

Andy Newman at Socialist Unity has noted that events taking place in the Middle East in 2003 made it wholly undesirable for regimes to present themselves as avowedly anti-American and Gaddafi’s Libya was one case in point. Gadaffi has always described himself as anti-imperialist, however he has never posed too much of a threat to the US (that is until the Lockerbie bombing – context and debates of which are too long to discuss in any detail here).

Even in spite of the well-documented meetings between Gadaffi, Berlusconi, Blair and others, the former should not be looked at primarily as a lackey of imperialism. However nor can he be viewed as a socialist. His ideology is not based upon the concerns of the people (which explains the large contingent rising up against him in Benghazi and other places) but upon a Nationalism that seeks to safeguard a ruling elite through whatever means possible. It’s durability is questionable; when Benghazi was lost Gaddafi ordered naval ships to attack it, however reports suggest there was major deliberation by the crew on what to do. As Woods, mentioned above, suggests, this shows early signs of a military in doubt over their leader.

The violent force planning to be used by Gaddafi is proof – if any more were needed – that he is in trouble. His regime is weakening, marred by resignations; he is flogging a dead horse. But if his last ditch attempt to flatten dissent works, some serious discussion needs to take place over what the rest of the world watching those scenes can do about it.

Conclusion

Unlike the South American leftist leaders, I don’t think Washington as a whole will be rubbing their hands together hoping for another war. If anything, Gadaffi himself by waging civil war and threatening to blow up oil terminals is rubbing the US up the wrong way. There is no doubt of his seriousness when he evokes crimes to humanity. Many hard right Neo-conservatives and left-leaning Liberals in the US senate have agreed that sanctions are the appropriate use of power for now, but they are not a long-term solution, and can often have undesirable effects to the people they are meant to help.

A no fly zone is only an option if there’s a foreign military presence in the country anyway, and an all-out military intervention like the one in Iraq ought to be avoided at all costs. This leaves options slim on the ground for the UN, whose only other option is to do nothing.

Debates on arms sales are tricky; of course small countries have the right to be armed against neighbouring oppressive nations, but the sort of monitoring which David Cameron spoke of recently on countries like Libya arming themselves against dissenters is pure fantasy, nor is it in the profit-driven interests of arms dealers anyway.

The Libyan situation poses many difficult questions, but let’s be clear: Gadaffi’s anti-imperialism doesn’t necessarily make him a friend of the left (this is what confuses Chavez et al); his desire to kill people on a large scale will force us all to think long and hard about the possible use of interventions – which may include forces and nations dubbed imperialist.

Activists have said: “We don’t need foreign forces to oust Gaddafi“. Let’s hope they’re correct.