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Was This The Plan All Along?
On March 17:
The latter's National Libyan Council claims it is supported by 8,000 regular troops, including 3,000 Special Forces which are ready to die defending Benghazi.
But yesterday:
[N]ow, as they try to defeat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s armed forces and militias, they will have to rely on allied airstrikes and young men with guns because the army that rebel military leaders bragged about consists of only about 1,000 trained men.
Down from 8,000 to 1,000 in just seven days. Judging from AlJazeerah and other video sources the real number of trained soldiers on the rebel site seems to be around zero. Indeed all I have seen so far are some rather lunatic unorganized folks with small and medium arms trying to run against superior forces. Even the special forces Great Britain, France and the U.S. have certainly put on the ground by now will have huge problems to create a disciplined fighting force out of these.
The political leadership of the rebels is also a weird creation. The "new government" "finance minister" is one Ali Tarhouni.
Mr. Tarhouni, who teaches economics at the University of Washington, returned to Libya one month ago after more than 35 years in exile to advise the opposition on economic matters.
[…] This week, the rebel leadership announced its latest evolution, a government in waiting led by Mahmoud Jibril, a planning expert who defected from Colonel Qaddafi’s government.
From the slick website (which PR company payed by whom created it?) of the Interim Transitional National Council we learn about Mr Mahmood Jibril:
Holds a masters’ degree in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1980. He also obtained a Doctorate in Strategic planning and decision-making from the same university in 1984 where he worked as a professor in the same subject field for several years.
So two U.S. professor with, no legitimacy or following in the country, now prepare to be the Libyen puppets of the "west".
But they will only get the job after the "allies" put many more boots on the ground. There is no way these rebels can win without a big invasion by "western" forces. Even in the desert air power can not conquer and hold any ground.
When that happens Gaddafi will do a Saddam and tell his troops to become "civilians" and to start an insurgency against the occupation forces. Even if he would not do so tribal resistance against invading troops is a certainty.
This is all so predictible that one has to wonder if this was the plan all along.
“Was This The Plan All Along?”
Of course it was!
This is just another post-modern putsch, part of a pre-planned Spring string of “Arab Uprisings,” with western-funded professional “dissidents” trained and aided by the vast western “Democracy” apparatus (as publicly trumpeted to Congress by CFR top “Arab expert” Eliot Abrams — look it up if you don’t believe me), and abetted by Obama’s old Chicago cronies making a killing on the commodity markets driving the price of food into the stratosphere while the world starves — and all the leaders will prove to be western trained neoliberal elites (the Chalabis and Allawis of their day) who have no scruples killing what might have once been their fellow countrymen for a place at the trough — or greedy local dupes, bribed into complicity.
No one who cared about his country would so destroy it.
And for those armchair generals who see no plan (as revealed to them by the global elite through the magic of TV), or Bush-like incompetence, muck-ups are necessary if you want to hang around for a while… “We broke it, now we have to fix it…”
It is all so, so, sadly predictable already, isn’t it?
Indeed all I have seen so far are some rather lunatic unorganized folks…
That might be what you see now, but let’s not forget what you — and everyone else here — originally saw several weeks ago: A “tribal uprising” involving “the major 30 tribes and clans” — and this at the time seemed crystal-clear despite the fact that evidence supporting your assertion was rather thin gruel, at best.
Perhaps, in order to better understand what you see now, it would be instructive to step back and review just what you did see a few weeks ago.
In your original post on Libya, where you set the frame for your readership to view the conflict, your link on “Tribal Rivalries” came from the shadowy APS Diplomat, a CIA-front pseudo-News Agency for State Department personel with neither website nor authorial attribution. This speaks for itself.
The map on your original post was of ethnic groupings by preponderance, not “tribes.” Such maps are, by design divisive, as they ascribe a single entity to an area, like marking a state red or blue based upon how 23% of its inhabitants voted.
The website you cited, and linked to, in making your argument — itself an intelligence blog — enthused on the page you linked to (if anyone bothered to visit it) that “…The pendulum has been jolted off its top of the circle stability, and is in freefall. It will inevitably settle at the bottom of the circle with the people never again allowing force or finance to concentrate wealth and commit other atrocities. There are–in addition to populations finally fed (sic) with illegitimate governance, over 5,000 secessionist movements now ready to dispute the artificial political boundaries imposed at the point of a gun by the Western colonial powers supplanted by the US in the 20th Century. This will take a quarter century to play out.”
Clearly, any source which publicly advocates 25 years of global warfare on a scale the world has never seen before (5000+ conflicts!) in order to balkanize the globe into de-industrialized, cloutless, ethnically-cleansed puppet nations (as in the former Yugoslavia) is highly suspect. “We must destroy the village (or Nation-State) in order to save it…” Cleverly, it is all done in the name of redressing the injustices of Western colonialism!
Interestingly, this is the same language as Eliot Abrams in his address to Congress, and of the so-called “Democracy promoting” groups, which seem to grow and spread these days like a cancer on 24/7 gamma radiation.
In many ways, the unstated interests of one’s sources determines, at the very least, the direction of thrust of their argument. Without understanding this, a little knowledge becomes a very dangerous weapon. When I saw your posters uncritically citing the glossy Georgetown/State Department website, Jadaliyaa, it also brought this thought home. I myself used to receive the monthly magazine, ReVista, published by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, a similar “leftist” publication concerned with that other tragic nexus of “tribal warfare,” Central America.
Your Orientalist fantasy of “tribal uprising” employed the same method of misdirection as the despicable Juan Cole, a type of deceptive critical examination I call “Juan Coleism”: As with Iraq, we are all invited to become amateur armchair anthropologists, assiduously analyzing Libyan society: ficticiously envisioned to be organized as groupings of pure endogamous lineages — from tribe, through clan and sib — in search of either real or perceived “grievance” — so that as anthropological ostriches we may better keep our heads in the sand about who supplied the fuel, who provided the accelerator, who taught the art of “fire-making” and who lit the match to the current conflagration.
This viewpoint is both patronizing in the extreme, and dangerously divisive, providing no toehold for the type of coalition-building and compromise needed to better the lives of real people.
We, as First-World amateur armchair anthropologists are never meant to question — but blindly accept — why our “tribal” conflicts never lead to war, but, among the uncivilized natives, “tribal” conflicts always seem to. In this manner, the real arsonists always manage to escape scot-free.
In all of Juan Cole’s blather about the differences between the Sunnis and the Shia in Iraq, and in all the hot air wasted by the liberal blogosphere about how “Bush the Barbarian” didn’t even know there was a difference, and so was prosecuting the war (never invasion) incompetently, Raed Jarrar’s astute comment that there had been a 40% intermarriage rate between Sunni and Shia at the time of the invasion passed as unnoticed as the wafting of a single grain of pollen in the vast blossoming of spring. 40%! Imagine that. If that had become better known, the First-World amateur armchair anthropologists would soon be out of business, and the arson squad would have to be called in. Well, we certainly couldn’t have had that!
And so we were forced to succumb to Edward Said’s bogeyman: Orientalism and blind martial tribalism: those ignorant tribes who can never seem to stop killing each other. As Said tragically lamented, “Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”
Sadly, apparently none of your astute readers noticed the obvious disparity between the maps of ethnic groups and talk of “tribes” in your post, or bothered to follow your links to their sources and thought critically about them.
And so, the frame of acceptable discourse was set — what Chomsky terms “the bounds of the permissible” — and your readers could now prattle on about “who to support,” or analyze war strategy from the comforts of their armchairs.
Now, as in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the frame reveals a picture that is infinitely uglier than originally believed to be. And the original Orientalist framing which enabled the conflagration is washed down the memory hole without a trace: the perfect crime.
Anyone who dissented from the party-line of acceptable framing of the conflict was subjected to calumny by the party regulars and eventually banned from the site. Sad. There has been near zero engagement with the arguments presented by those who attempted to dissent from the official lens of viewing this conflict. Sadder still.
This is all reminiscent of the treatment I was accorded when I (along with others like Paul Street and Webster Tarpley) made the case (since proven correct) that Obama would be far more destructive than Bush, both internationally and domestically. In that case, the hurt feelings of western liberals was deemed to be more important than the truth, which if widely known might have saved some very real lives outside the bloated bloviating beltway of the “Washington Consensus.”
Understandably, people become attached to the way they choose to view the world. The Cult of Obamaism has fostered a type of magical thinking among the “Left” worldwide whereby people see the world, and the forces operating therein, as they wish it to be rather than how it really is. Magical thinking… The world as we wish it was.
Fortunately, now that we have an exciting military conflict to pontificate over, the dreary subterranean forces that brought this conflict into being can be happily dismissed.
The good hearts and noble intentions of both Arab students and protestors and Western liberals are being cynically exploited in yet another round of destabilization. Despite the West paying lip-service to Democracy (albeit through a welter of lies and incongruencies), the type of global governace structures being put into place, one area at a time, give rights to the investors who own the world over the people who inhabit it. Spreading balkanization, as we are seeing throughout the Arab world (Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, and so it goes…) is designed to prevent the emergence of Nation-States strong enough to challenge the privatization of services, and the economic race to the bottom that our very own nations’ are suffering from.
This is not my personal opinion. If one wanted to know the truth and took the time to read websites like those of the CFR, one could read these plans from the horses mouth instead of opinionizing.
Clearly, with 5,000 plus potential fires worldwide still to stoke we can expect to see more good hearts and noble intentions cynically exploited in the mad thrust forward to centralize the ownership and control of the world. When the net worth of a very few people — perhaps the number of people whose names we know in our own lives — exceeds the net worth of half the world, we must be very careful about what is put before our eyes, the images we see, the agenda we are told to think about and the choices we are presented with.
It is odd indeed that of the entire cosmos of democracy-promoting cancers that have seemingly sprouted up overnight with the emergence of Obamaism (internationally, once called humanitarian intervention), all of them employ the Alinsky/Sharp model which dictates that the ends justify the means; in other words, do whatever you have to as long as you don’t shoot a gun or drop a bomb (others will do that for you) to get what you want. Shorter Gene Sharp: be ruthless, be in their face, don’t even let them breathe until you get what you want.
It is the Democracy of a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum.
And yet in the inner city where I live, troubled kids are taught a very different brand of democracy: Learning to listen to others, to communicate one’s feeling calmly without feeling impelled to take rash action, to respond rather than react, to compromise, to turn the other cheek instead of taking grievance, to live and let live, to reconcile, to find common needs and work together.
They are taught to understand the myth of Orientalism deconstructed: that tribes don’t kill other tribes without someone else setting the fire.
This is something to think deeply about. Especially when we opine about others.
Perhaps, there is a pastor or a social worker that I might know here in my small town who could do more for the world, than all the Obamas, NATOs, UNs, and Democracy promoting organizations in the entire world.
But what do I know? I don’t have a degree from Fletcher, after all.
If we in the so-called “First World” can’t first control our own destiny and welfare, if we cannot stop the juggernaut — and we clearly can’t at this point, Wisconsin in the balance — how do we hope to improve the lives of others? Certainly not through Orientalism, or interventionism, neo-liberalism, or even the very watered down flavor of procedural democracyism (better called corporate cronyism or legalized bribery) we are taught to accept.
In a time of rampant de-industrialization, perhaps the only well paying field left to liberals is in the burgeoning area of “Democracy promotion,” and filling out ranks of the endless “civil society NGOs” that are necessary to pacify populations after the liberalization/privatization of their economies. Despite their liberal veneer and their caring affect, these golems of empire who fill these positions chill the heart more than any public utility executive ever did. (The head of TEPCO cried.) I was stunned to hear the daughter of a friend of mine — a delightful 19 year-old, lithe, blonde-haired sylph — who has never held down a job in her life — tell me that she was getting a degree from a reputable Vermont College in just such a field, and that she would then be going off to a Bantustan like South Sudan to teach “competancy” — I assume on the ingeniously novel premise that the Statelet was mapped out and created by the more incompetant bureaurocrats of the world. What could one say to such a beautiful bundle of self-assured ignorance? We both blinked and looked at the other as if they were crazy. My fate is slow death from economic slavery and a lack of adequate health care; her’s is quite likely much worse.
A little knowledge being a dangerous thing. Indeed.
annie’s unchallenged comment that “democracy promotion” had nothing to do with the government was astounding in its ignorance. And that it passed by unchallenged here was quite simply breathtaking.
Left leaders function to split and disempower the left, just as right leaders do to the right. It is sad to see whatever resistance might exist to the forces of globalization so factionalized, and so confused that they are, more often than not these days, working for their avowed enemy. The only solution I can see is a deeper examination of cause and effect.
I wrote several long posts — full of authoritative links — not the sort of idle speculation so rampant here — but never posted them, as your readership seems to feel that they have a better way to understand the world, and largely seems disinclined to examine any material that would challenge their views, and engage them on their merits.
And yet, I would advise your readers to shut off their TVs for a few days a week and instead read publications like Foreign Policy in Focus, the house organ of the CFR, or perhaps sample the fare at the Brookings Institute, for instance. Read everything you can get your hands on from such globalist think tanks. Read everything you can about global governance structures: IMF, World Bank, NATO, and the EU, for instance. Read about “Democracy Promotion,” and the work of liberal foundations, starting with Michael Barker’s 73 piece (yawn… where’s the action today?) series at Swans, and continuing on to Gene Sharp’s website and publications, movements.org, and the State Department and the gaggle of “democracy-promoting” think tanks, foundations and organizations of the US, and whatever country you might be a resident of. Study the history of false flag, and covert destabilization activities.
Learn how they think and operate, not how you think they think and operate. Defuse magical thinking.
Only after one has undertaken such a study, and factored in the immense organizational and financial resources behind such hidden forces, could one properly contextualize events as those in Libya. Examine the creeping realization that what you thought you saw is not now what you think you see — to pronounce such events as “Tribal Warfare” is to say you saw a small wave on the surface of the ocean, when beneath the surface lay a powerful tsunami. And we all know how destructive those can be.
Good luck to all the long-timers here. I have little to add to the argument, especially as it seems I disagree with most of the implicit premises, and I have not been writing for a long time anyway. If I ever do begin writing, I will let someone know.
And, b, sorry to come down so hard on you — you really do run a great blog. Criticism is a sign of respect; one goes very gently on the hopeless.
Posted by: Malooga | Mar 24 2011 22:33 utc | 29
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