[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [ufpj-activist] In response to Juan Cole

[Morton K. Brussel]

FYI, A cogent criticism of Cole's polemic.  --mkb

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Melvin Rothenberg <mel at math.uchicago.edu>
> Date: March 28, 2011 7:16:18 PM CDT
> To: ufpj-activist <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>
> Subject: Re: [ufpj-activist] In response to Juan Cole
> 
> 
> Juan Cole's defense of western military intervention in Libya is eloquent and articulate but ultimately a liberal defense of imperialist rule throughout the world. His argument in its essence states that if you can make an a priori case that a state is going to employ significant violence against  against a section of its population, even when they are engaged in an armed uprising, that the US has the right to intervene with its overwhelming military force, liquidate the existing state, and replace it with one more to its liking. Thus the US and its allies are in fact, and justifiably so,  not only the military but also the moral and humanitarian guardians of humanity.  This is the essential moral justification of liberal imperialism.
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> In making his argument Cole distorts clear facts. The notion that the protesters were initially citizens spontaneously and peacefully demanding rights and were  shocked into rebellion by Qaddafi’s brutal response is sheer nonsense. Of course the protest organizers mobilized large sectors of the population fed up with the corrupt and dictatorial regime, but the leadership of the protests represented forces who have for many years opposed Qaddafi's rule and joined by defectors from the government,  had rebellion in mind from the beginning. They quickly seized control of Eastern Libya and its major city Benghazi , running Qaddafi's weak security forces in that traditionally anti-Qaddafi region out.  Qaddafi in turn gathered his core security and military apparatus and moved to crush the insurrection, first in his base in Tripoli, and then moving eastward to destroy  the rebel forces in Benghazi.  This is what regimes facing armed insurrections do.  Qaddafi accompanied his campaign with blood curdling threats to strangle the opposition in their beds,  characteristic of his thuggish style of rule, and gave the rebels sympathy and the imperialists cover to intervene, but it is a general rule that regimes putting down rebellions are rarely gentle with the rebels. The recent crushing of the Tamil Tiger rebellion by the Sri Lankian regime ended with a bloody massacre of ten of thousands on Tamil civilians, yet this occurred with hardly a peep from our humanitarian imperialists. 
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> I do not question the sincerity of Cole's personal "humanitarianism".  Yet the decision of western imperialism to intervene militarily in Libya used humanitarian concerns only as a cover. The true motives are cold, calculating, and geo-political.  The decision to replace Mubarak in Egypt, a long time imperialist ally and favorite  was deemed necessary to pacify mass Egyptian sentiment but was painful to US core supporters in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia and Israel. They smelled weakness and sellout. Ridding the region of Qadaffi, who had made peace with imperialism and western oil interests, but was still regarded as troublesome with his occasional anti-imperialist rhetoric and bombast, would balance the exit of Mubarak, and reassure our core allies we had not gone soft.   Further, at the early stage of the Libyan uprising it appeared that Qadaffi could be pushed out by threats, and the administration made the public declaration that he must go. When he decided to fight back, Obama's word was on the line, and when Qaddafi's  army pushed toward Benghazi, and threatened to extinguish the rebellion, the US decided it had to act to militarily to save the insurrection.  The rest was maneuver and spin, as Obama already bogged down in two unpopular wars, and facing a tough re-election campaign in 2012,  organized a very clever diplomatic cover in the UN, with NATO, the Arab League so as not to be overly exposed. One has to admire the slickness and smoothness of the operation, as well as being disgusted with the hypocrisy of the appeal to humanitarian sentiment. 
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> If Cole's humanitarian sentiment cannot be challenged his choice of language in describing the events certainly can be. To describe the military intervention as a limited UN operation if false on two obvious counts. The fact that many on the security council abstained from the vote, testify not to any genuine international outpouring of sympathy for the rebels or an international taking responsibility for a tough situation, but cynical calculation on the part of the abstainers who are free to dissociate themselves from the unsavory aspects while remaining aloof. Let the US and its allies do the dirty work, and when it turns sour they will pay the price. It is not UN soldiers which are involved but the US and its NATO allies who are providing the force and are  in command of the operation. There is no time limits to the operation and it will be only concluded when Qaddafi is removed from power. That the declared mission of the operation is to protect civilians from Qaddafi's forces, in the middle of a civil war, is bizarre. What about the civilians who support Qaddafi? Are there not any?.  Who will protect them from the wrath of the rebels?.  As the Qaddafi forces retreat, the air strikes are being used as an air force promoting rebel advance, focusing their raids on destroying  troop columns and equipment. When Qaddafi's forces stand and fight, and this will happen in cities and towns, the NATO air force will concentrate on killing as many of them as possible. There will be many civilian casualties and massive destruction as the bombs don't distinguish civilians from troops.   Reports indicate that already many towns and  homes have been destroyed in this unrelenting bombardment.
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> It is revealing that Cole's interventionist instincts go back to the suppression of the Prague rebellion  in 1968 by Soviet forces.  He thinks the only reason not to have supported sending US marines into Czechoslovakia, was the danger of igniting of WW3. He welcome the change in environment which now allows such intervention.  His instinctive, almost chemical,  reaction is that the key to supporting a popular uprising is to bring in the armed might of imperialism. He has no other proposals. This is a sad, bankrupt position for someone who considers himself an anti-imperialist. 
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> The issue of mass repression and violence against their people by dictatorial and oppressive regimes is a serious one. More serious to me is the issue of violence and mass slaughter of foreign populations by imperialist powers whose own citizens are protected by traditions and rights.  The slaughter of Vietnamese or Iraqi's by the US,  in the course of military invasion and occupation, and the slaughter by the their allies around the world in the permanent struggle to repress just resistance and rebellion never some how rises to the level of war crime or atrocity that the much smaller efforts of the pariah states such as Libya engage in.   When Juan Cole advocates armed intervention against the US invasion of Iraq, then I will be prepared to take his arguments for intervention in Libya seriously.
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> Mel Rothenberg  
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> http://www.juancole.com/2011/03/an-open-letter-to-the-left-on-libya.html
> An Open Letter to the Left on Libya
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> Posted on 03/27/2011 by Juan
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> As I expected, now that Qaddafi’s advantage in armor and heavy weapons is being neutralized by the UN allies’ air campaign, the liberation movement is regaining lost territory. Liberators took back Ajdabiya and Brega (Marsa al-Burayqa), key oil towns, on Saturday into Sunday morning, and seemed set to head further West. This rapid advance is almost certainly made possible in part by the hatred of Qaddafi among the majority of the people of these cities. The Buraiqa Basin contains much of Libya’s oil wealth, and the Transitional Government in Benghazi will soon again control 80 percent of this resource, an advantage in their struggle with Qaddafi.
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> I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed. I can still remember when I was a teenager how disappointed I was that Soviet tanks were allowed to put down the Prague Spring and extirpate socialism with a human face. Our multilateral world has more spaces in it for successful change and defiance of totalitarianism than did the old bipolar world of the Cold War, where the US and the USSR often deferred to each other’s sphere of influence.
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> The United Nations-authorized intervention in Libya has pitched ethical issues of the highest importance, and has split progressives in unfortunate ways. I hope we can have a calm and civilized discussion of the rights and wrongs here.
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> On the surface, the situation in Libya a week and a half ago posed a contradiction between two key principles of Left politics: supporting the ordinary people and opposing foreign domination of them. Libya’s workers and townspeople had risen up to overthrow the dictator in city after city– Tobruk, Dirna, al-Bayda, Benghazi, Ajdabiya, Misrata, Zawiya, Zuara, Zintan. Even in the capital of Tripoli, working-class neighborhoods such as Suq al-Jumah and Tajoura had chased out the secret police. In the two weeks after February 17, there was little or no sign of the protesters being armed or engaging in violence.
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> The libel put out by the dictator, that the 570,000 people of Misrata or the 700,000 people of Benghazi were supporters of “al-Qaeda,” was without foundation. That a handful of young Libyan men from Dirna and the surrounding area had fought in Iraq is simply irrelevant. The Sunni Arab resistance in Iraq was for the most part not accurately called ‘al-Qaeda,’ which is a propaganda term in this case. All of the countries experiencing liberation movements had sympathizers with the Sunni Iraqi resistance; in fact opinion polling shows such sympathy almost universal throughout the Sunni Arab world. All of them had at least some fundamentalist movements. That was no reason to wish the Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians and others ill. The question is what kind of leadership was emerging in places like Benghazi. The answer is that it was simply the notables of the city. If there were an uprising against Silvio Berlusconi in Milan, it would likely unite businessmen and factory workers, Catholics and secularists. It would just be the people of Milan. A few old time members of the Red Brigades might even come out, and perhaps some organized crime figures. But to defame all Milan with them would be mere propaganda.
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> Then Muammar Qaddafi’s sons rallied his armored brigades and air force to bomb the civilian crowds and shoot tank shells into them. Members of the Transitional Government Council in Benghazi estimate that 8000 were killed as Qaddafi’s forces attacked and subdued Zawiya, Zuara, Ra’s Lanuf, Brega, Ajdabiya, and the working class districts of Tripoli itself, using live ammunition fired into defenseless rallies. If 8000 was an exaggeration, simply “thousands” was not, as attested by Left media such as Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! As Qaddafi’s tank brigades reached the southern districts of Benghazi, the prospect loomed of a massacre of committed rebels on a large scale.
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> The United Nations Security Council authorization for UN member states to intervene to forestall this massacre thus pitched the question. If the Left opposed intervention, it de facto acquiesced in Qaddafi’s destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya’s workers and poor, along with large numbers of white collar middle class people. Qaddafi would have reestablished himself, with the liberation movement squashed like a bug and the country put back under secret police rule. The implications of a resurgent, angry and wounded Mad Dog, his coffers filled with oil billions, for the democracy movements on either side of Libya, in Egypt and Tunisia, could well have been pernicious.
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> The arguments against international intervention are not trivial, but they all did have the implication that it was all right with the world community if Qaddafi deployed tanks against innocent civilian crowds just exercising their right to peaceful assembly and to petition their government. (It simply is not true that very many of the protesters took up arms early on, though some were later forced into it by Qaddafi’s aggressive military campaign against them. There still are no trained troops to speak of on the rebel side).
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> Some have charged that the Libya action has a Neoconservative political odor. But the Neoconservatives hate the United Nations and wanted to destroy it. They went to war on Iraq despite the lack of UNSC authorization, in a way that clearly contravened the UN Charter. Their spokesman and briefly the ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, actually at one point denied that the         United Nations even existed. The Neoconservatives loved deploying American muscle unilaterally, and rubbing it in everyone’s face. Those who would not go along were subjected to petty harassment. France, then deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz pledged, would be “punished” for declining to fall on Iraq at Washington’s whim. The Libya action, in contrast, observes all the norms of international law and multilateral consultation that the Neoconservatives despise. There is no pettiness. Germany is not ‘punished’ for not going along. Moreover, the Neoconservatives wanted to exercise primarily Anglo-American military might in the service of harming the public sector and enforced ‘shock therapy’ privatization so as to open the conquered country to Western corporate penetration. All this social engineering required boots on the ground, a land invasion and occupation. Mere limited aerial bombardment cannot effect the sort of extreme-capitalist revolution they seek. Libya 2011 is not like Iraq 2003 in any way.
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> Allowing the Neoconservatives to brand humanitarian intervention as always their sort of project does a grave disservice to international law and institutions, and gives them credit that they do not deserve, for things in which they do not actually believe.
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> The intervention in Libya was done in a legal way. It was provoked by a vote of the Arab League, including the newly liberated Egyptian and Tunisian governments. It was urged by a United Nations Security Council resolution, the gold standard for military intervention. (Contrary to what some alleged, the abstentions of Russia and China do not deprive the resolution of legitimacy or the force of law; only a veto could have done that. You can be arrested today on a law passed in the US Congress on which some members abstained from voting.)
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> Among reasons given by critics for rejecting the intervention are:
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> 1. Absolute pacifism (the use of force is always wrong)
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> 2. Absolute anti-imperialism (all interventions in world affairs by outsiders are wrong).
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> 3. Anti-military pragmatism: a belief that no social problems can ever usefully be resolved by use of military force.
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> Absolute pacifists are rare, and I will just acknowledge them and move on. I personally favor an option for peace in world policy-making, where it should be the default initial position. But the peace option is trumped in my mind by the opportunity to stop a major war crime.
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> Leftists are not always isolationists. In the US, progressive people actually went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, forming the Lincoln Brigade. That was a foreign intervention. Leftists were happy about Churchill’s and then Roosevelt’s intervention against the Axis. To make ‘anti-imperialism’ trump all other values in a mindless way leads to frankly absurd positions. I can’t tell you how annoyed I am by the fringe left adulation for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the grounds that he is ‘anti-imperialist,’ and with an assumption that he is somehow on the Left. As the pillar of a repressive Theocratic order that puts down workers, he is a man of the far Right, and that he doesn’t like the US and Western Europe doesn’t ennoble him.
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> The proposition that social problems can never be resolved by military force alone may be true. But there are some problems that can’t be solved unless there is a military intervention first, since its absence would allow the destruction of the progressive forces. Those arguing that “Libyans” should settle the issue themselves are willfully ignoring the overwhelming repressive advantage given Qaddafi by his jets, helicopter gunships, and tanks; the ‘Libyans’ were being crushed inexorably. Such crushing can be effective for decades thereafter.
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> Assuming that NATO’s UN-authorized mission in Libya really is limited ( it is hoping for 90 days), and that a foreign military occupation is avoided, the intervention is probably a good thing on the whole, however distasteful it is to have Nicolas Sarkozy grandstanding. Of course he is not to be trusted by progressives, but he is to his dismay increasingly boxed in by international institutions, which limits the damage he could do as the bombing campaign comes to an end (Qaddafi only had 2000 tanks, many of them broken down, and it won’t be long before he has so few, and and the rebels have captured enough to level the playing field, that little further can be accomplished from the air).
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> Many are crying hypocrisy, citing other places an intervention could be staged or worrying that Libya sets a precedent. I don’t find those arguments persuasive. Military intervention is always selective, depending on a constellation of political will, military ability, international legitimacy and practical constraints. The humanitarian situation in Libya was fairly unique. You had a set of tank brigades willing to attack dissidents, and responsible for thousands of casualties and with the prospect of more thousands to come, where aerial intervention by the world community could make a quick and         effective difference.
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> This situation did not obtain in the Sudan’s Darfur, where the terrain and the conflict were such that aerial intervention alone would have have been useless and only boots on the ground could have had a hope of being effective. But a whole US occupation of Iraq could not prevent Sunni-Shiite urban faction-fighting that killed tens of thousands, so even boots on the ground in Darfur’s vast expanse might have failed.
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> The other Arab Spring demonstrations are not comparable to Libya, because in none of them has the scale loss of life been replicated, nor has the role of armored brigades been as central, nor have the dissidents asked for intervention, nor has the Arab League. For the UN, out of the blue, to order the bombing of Deraa in Syria at the moment would accomplish nothing and would probably outrage all concerned. Bombing the tank brigades heading for Benghazi made all the difference.
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> That is, in Libya intervention was demanded by the people being massacred as well as by the regional powers, was authorized by the UNSC, and could practically attain its humanitarian aim of forestalling a massacre through aerial bombardment of murderous armored brigades. And, the intervention could be a limited one and still accomplish its goal.
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> I also don’t understand the worry about the setting of precedents. The UN Security Council is not a court, and does not function by precedent. It is a political body, and works by political will. Its members are not constrained to do elsewhere what they are doing in Libya unless they so please, and the veto of the five permanent members ensures that a resolution like 1973 will be rare. But if a precedent is indeed being set that if you rule a country and send tank brigades to murder large numbers of civilian dissidents, you will see your armor bombed to smithereens, I can’t see what is wrong with that.
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> Another argument is that the no-fly zone (and the no-drive zone) aimed at overthrowing Qaddafi not to protect his people from him but to open the way for US, British and French dominance of Libya’s oil wealth. This argument is bizarre. The US declined to do oil business with Libya in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, when it could have, because it had placed the country under boycott. It didn’t want access to that oil market, which was repeatedly proffered to Washington by Qaddafi then. After Qaddafi came back in from the cold in the late 1990s (for the European Union) and after 2003 (for the US), sanctions were lifted and Western oil companies flocked into the country. US companies were well represented, along with BP and the Italian firm ENI. BP signed an expensive exploration contract with Qaddafi and cannot possibly have wanted its validity put into doubt by a revolution. There is no advantage to the oil sector of removing Qaddafi. Indeed, a new government may be more difficult to deal with and may not honor Qaddafi’s commitments. There is no prospect of Western companies being allowed to own Libyan petroleum fields, which were nationalized long ago. Finally, it is not always in the interests of Big Oil to have more petroleum on the market, since that reduces the price and, potentially, company profits. A war on Libya to get more and better contracts so as to lower the world price of petroleum makes no sense in a world where the bids were already being freely let, and where high prices were producing record profits. I haven’t seen the war-for-oil argument made for Libya in a manner that makes any sense at all.
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> I would like to urge the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time. It is possible to reason our way through, on a case-by-case basis, to an ethical progressive position that supports the ordinary folk in their travails in places like Libya. If we just don’t care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren’t people of the Left. We should avoid making ‘foreign intervention’ an absolute taboo the way the Right makes abortion an absolute taboo if doing so makes us heartless (inflexible a priori positions often lead to heartlessness). It is now easy to forget that Winston Churchill held absolutely odious positions from a Left point of view and was an insufferable colonialist who opposed letting India go in 1947. His writings are full of racial stereotypes that are deeply offensive when read today. Some of his interventions were nevertheless noble and were almost universally supported by the Left of his day. The UN allies now rolling back Qaddafi are doing a good thing, whatever you think of some of their individual leaders.
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> On 3/28/11 2:23 PM, Robert Naiman wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> My response to Juan Cole. 
>> 
>> In brief: the Administration's decision to embark on a new war without Congressional authorization represents a long-term threat to the U.S. peace movement, because Congress is a key arena in which the peace movement tries to affect U.S. policy in the direction of less war. Taking away Congressional war powers is to the peace movement as taking away collective bargaining is to the labor movement: a direct threat to our ability to move our agenda in the interests of our constituents.
>> 
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/an-open-letter-to-liberal_b_841505.html
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Robert Naiman
>> Policy Director
>> Just Foreign Policy
>> www.justforeignpolicy.org
>> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
>> 
>> 
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