[Peace-discuss] More on Achcar, there is a lot on him, as he attempts to "repackage himself"

[Karen Aram]

The ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Who Got Libya Wrong Serves Up The Same Failed Analysis on Syria

Paris Match: Many people say the solution lies in your departure. Do you believe that your departure is the solution?

Syrian president Assad: What was the result (of NATO policy when they attacked Gaddafi)? Chaos ensued after Gaddafi’s departure. So, was the departure the solution? Have things improved, and has Libya become a democracy? [1]

Updated January 23, 2016
Originally posted December 24, 2015

By Stephen Gowans

For a professed socialist and anti-imperialist, Gilbert Achcar is surprisingly mainstream, in fact, so much so that he could be appointed to a key position in the US State Department and fit in quite comfortably. He replicated the basic understanding of the nature of the conflict in Libya in 2011, as presented by the US government, in his own analysis, and dissents in no significant way from Washington on how to end the conflict in Syria (Achcar and the US president, and, for that matter, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, all agree that Assad must go.)

In 2011, he supported the overthrow of Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi, arguing wrongly, it turns out, that a post-Gaddafi Libya, whatever its faults, would be an improvement on what preceded it, which indeed it is, if chaos, societal breakdown, and various fanatical Islamist armies, including ISIS, vying for control of the country by arms, counts as an improvement. Said Achcar on March 24, 2011: “And if there is no clarity about what a post-Gaddafi Libya might look like….it can’t be worse than Gaddafi’s regime.” [2] It’s difficult to imagine he could have been more wrong. But then he’s in good company. NATO leaders—the architects of the debacle—said the same.

Achcar’s assurance that Gaddafi was an unparalleled evil, thus justifying his extermination without regard to the consequences, paralleled a similarly stunningly wrong prediction offered by supporters of the US-British war on Iraq. That argument held that elimination of the Iraqi leader couldn’t help but improve Iraq’s humanitarian situation—and it relied on a technique Achcar liberally uses of demonizing secular Arab nationalist leaders. Of course, it was not the expunction of Saddam Hussein that promised to ameliorate the humanitarian situation in Iraq but the abandonment by Western powers of their policy of murdering countless Iraqis through economic and conventional warfare in order to eliminate an impediment to their hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East. It is curious that the last remaining leaders of the principal obstacle to Washington’s hegemonic designs in the Arab world, namely, the secular Arab nationalist governments of Libya and Syria, should fall squarely within the sites of both Achcar and Washington; curious because Washington is clearly imperialist, and Achcar says he’s an anti-imperialist. So how is it that the anti-imperialist Achcar and the imperialist US foreign policy establishment see eye-to-eye on so much?

On Libya, Achcar had cast doubt, in error it turns out, on the idea that the uprising had a substantial Sunni Islamist component, dismissing this as a canard originated by Gaddafi to mobilize US support. Gaddafi’s implicating Al-Qaeda in the uprising “was his way of trying to get the support of the West,” Achcar said. [3] We know now that the uprising was, as Gaddafi averred, largely Islamist.

Similarly, Achcar blundered in declaring as preposterous the idea that “Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests.” [4] As it turns out, Western powers did indeed view Gaddafi’s “resource nationalism” and efforts to “Libyanize” the economy as hostile to the economic interests of Western investors, a group that exercises considerable, if not decisive, influence over Western foreign policy. [5]

One year after then US secretary of state Hilary Clinton declared in connection with Gaddafi’s overthrow that “we came, we saw, he died,” The Wall Street Journal revealed evidence that the Achcar-supported NATO military intervention in Libya was rooted in objections to the Gaddafi government’s economic policies. According to the newspaper, private oil companies were incensed at the pro-Libyan oil deals the Gaddafi government was negotiating and “hoped regime change in Libya…would bring relief in some of the tough terms they had agreed to in partnership deals” with Libya’s national oil company. [6] Cont. on google…..
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