[Peace-discuss] We're not being told the truth on Libya

[C. G. Estabrook]

Johann Hari: We're not being told the truth on Libya

Look at two other wars our government is currently deeply involved in - because 
they show that the claims made for this bombing campaign can't be true

Friday, 8 April 2011

Most of us have a low feeling that we are not being told the real reasons for 
the war in Libya. David Cameron's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions 
was to jump on a plane and tour the palaces of the region's dictators selling 
them the most hi-tech weapons of repression available. Nicolas Sarkozy's 
instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to offer urgent aid to the 
Tunisian tyrant in crushing his people. Barack Obama's instinctive response to 
the Arab revolutions was to refuse to trim the billions in aid going to Hosni 
Mubarak and his murderous secret police, and for his Vice-President to declare: 
"I would not refer to him as a dictator."

Yet now we are told that these people have turned into the armed wing of Amnesty 
International. They are bombing Libya because they can't bear for innocent 
people to be tyrannised, by the tyrants they were arming and funding for years. 
As Obama put it: "Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in 
other countries. The United States of America is different". There was a time, a 
decade ago, when I took this rhetoric at face value. But I can't now. The best 
guide through this confusion is to look at two other wars our government is 
currently deeply involved in – because they show that the claims made for this 
bombing campaign can't be true.

Imagine a distant leader killed more than 2,000 innocent people, and his 
military commanders responded to evidence that they were civilians by joking 
that the victims "were not the local men's glee club". Imagine one of the 
innocent survivors appeared on television, amid the body parts of his son and 
brother, and pleaded: "Please. We are human beings. Help us. Don't let them do 
this." Imagine that polling from the attacked country showed that 90 per cent of 
the people there said civilians were the main victims and they desperately 
wanted it to stop. Imagine there was then a huge natural flood, and the leader 
responded by ramping up the attacks. Imagine the country's most respected 
democratic and liberal voices were warning that these attacks seriously risked 
causing the transfer of nuclear material to jihadi groups.

Surely, if we meant what we say about Libya, we would be doing anything to stop 
such behaviour? Wouldn't we be imposing a no-fly zone, or even invading?

Yet, in this instance, we would have to be imposing a no-fly zone on our own 
governments. Since 2004, the US – with European support – has been sending 
unmanned robot-planes into Pakistan to illegally bomb its territory in precisely 
this way. Barack Obama has massively intensified this policy.

His administration claims they are killing al-Qa'ida. But there are several 
flaws in this argument. The intelligence guiding their bombs about who is 
actually a jihadi is so poor that, for six months, Nato held top-level 
negotiations with a man who claimed to be the head of the Taliban – only for him 
to later admit he was a random Pakistani grocer who knew nothing about the 
organisation. He just wanted some baksheesh. The US's own former senior military 
advisers admit that even when the intel is accurate, for every one jihadi they 
kill, as many as 50 innocent people die. And almost everyone in Pakistan 
believes these attacks are actually increasing the number of jihadis, by making 
young men so angry at the killing of their families they queue to sign up.

The country's leading nuclear scientist, Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, warns me it 
is even more dangerous still. He says there is a significant danger that these 
attacks are spreading so much rage and hatred through the country that it 
materially increases the chances of the people guarding the country’s nuclear 
weapons smuggling fissile material out to jihadi groups.

So one of the country's best writers, Fatima Bhutto, tells me: "In Pakistan, 
when we hear Obama's rhetoric on Libya, we can only laugh. If he was worried 
about the pointless massacre of innocent civilians, there would be an easy first 
step for him: stop doing it yourself, in my country."

The war in the Congo is the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across 
Europe. When I reported on it, I saw the worst things I could have ever 
conceived of: armies of drugged and mutilated children, women who had been 
gang-raped and shot in the vagina. Over five million people have been killed so 
far – and the trail of blood runs directly to your mobile phone and mine.

The major UN investigation into the war explained how it happened. They said 
bluntly and factually that "armies of business" had invaded Congo to pillage its 
resources and sell them to the knowing West. The most valuable loot is coltan, 
which is used to make the metal in our mobile phones and games consoles and 
laptops. The "armies of business" fought and killed to control the mines and 
send it to us. The UN listed some of the major Western corporations fuelling 
this trade, and said if they were stopped, it would largely end the war.

Last year, after a decade, the US finally passed legislation that was – in 
theory, at least – supposed to deal with this. As I explain in the forthcoming 
BBC Radio 4 programme 4Thought, it outlined an entirely voluntary system to 
trace who was buying coltan and other conflict minerals from the mass murderers, 
and so driving the war. (There are plenty of other places we can get coltan 
from, although it's slightly more expensive.) The State Department was asked to 
draw up some kind of punishment for transgressors, and given 140 days to do it.

Now the deadline has passed. What's the punishment? It turns out the State 
Department didn't have the time or inclination to draft anything. Maybe it was 
too busy preparing to bomb Libya, because – obviously – it can't tolerate the 
killing of innocent people. (Britain and other European countries have been 
exactly the same.) Here was a chance to stop the worst violence against 
civilians in the world that didn't require any bombs, or violence of our own. If 
the rhetoric about Libya was sincere, this was a no-brainer. It would only cost 
a few corporations some money – and they refuse to do it. So the worst war since 
1945 goes on.

This all went unreported. By contrast, when the Congolese government recently 
nationalized a mine belonging to US and British corporations, there was a 
fire-burst of fury in the press. You can kill five million people and we'll 
politely look away; but take away the property of rich people, and we get really 
angry.

Doesn't this cast a different light on the Libya debate? We are pushed every day 
by the media to look at the (usually very real) abuses by our country's enemies 
and ask: "What can we do?" We are almost never prompted to look at the equally 
real and equally huge abuses by our own country, its allies and its corporations 
– which we have much more control over – and ask the same question.

So the good and decent impulse of ordinary people - to protect their fellow 
human beings - is manipulated. If you are interested in human rights only when 
it tells you a comforting story about your nation's power, then you are not 
really interested in human rights at all.

David Cameron says "just because we can't intervene everywhere, doesn't mean we 
shouldn't intervene somewhere." But this misses the point. While "we" are 
intervening to cause horrific harm to civilians in much of the world, it's 
plainly false to claim to be driven by a desire to prevent other people behaving 
very like us.

You could argue that our governments are clearly not driven by humanitarian 
concerns, but their intervention in Libya did stop a massacre in Ben Gazhi, so 
we should support it anyway. I understand this argument, which some people I 
admire have made, and I wrestled with it. It is an argument that you should, in 
effect, ride the beast of NATO power if it slays other beasts that were about to 
eat innocent people. This was the argument I made in 2003 about Iraq – that the 
Bush administration had malign motives, but it would have the positive effect of 
toppling a horrific dictator, so we should support it. I think almost everyone 
can see now why this was a disastrous - and, in the end, shameful - argument.

Why? Because any coincidental humanitarian gain in the short term will be 
eclipsed as soon as the local population clash with the real reason for the war. 
Then our governments will back their renewed vicious repression - just as the US 
and Britain did in Iraq, with a policy of effectively sanctioning the resumption 
of torture when the population became uppity and objected to the occupation.

So why are our governments really bombing Libya? We won't know for sure until 
the declassified documents come out many years from now. But Bill Richardson, 
the former US energy secretary who served as US ambassador to the UN, is 
probably right when he says: "There's another interest, and that's energy... 
Libya is among the 10 top oil producers in the world. You can almost say that 
the gas prices in the US going up have probably happened because of a stoppage 
of Libyan oil production... So this is not an insignificant country, and I think 
our involvement is justified."

For the first time in more than 60 years, Western control over the world's 
biggest pots of oil was being rocked by a series of revolutions our governments 
couldn't control. The most plausible explanation is that this is a way of 
asserting raw Western power, and trying to arrange the fallout in our favour. 
But if you are still convinced our governments are acting for humanitarian 
reasons, I've got a round-trip plane ticket for you to some rubble in Pakistan 
and Congo. The people there would love to hear your argument.

j.hari at independent.co.uk; www.twitter.com/johannhari101