Posted by Mike E on August 22, 2011
by Mike Ely
It has become increasingly likely that the Gaddafi family will now be pried out of power in Libya — as their carefully-constructed apparatus of military and patronage power “attrits.” The key element in their overthrow has been the massive deployment of aerial power by major imperialist countries (including the U.S. and its European NATO allies). It destroyed the Libyan government forces, and increasingly picked off, one by one, any concentrations of military forces willing to stand and fight.
A war of craters
The ground-based opposition to Gaddafi has increasingly walked into Tripoli through the cratered remains of Libyan government forces.
A mainstream press article on the NATO role in these events (drawn from the New York Times) writes:
“Through Saturday, NATO and its allies had flown 7,459 strike missions, or sorties, attacking thousands of targets, from individual rocket launchers to major military headquarters. The cumulative effect not only destroyed Libya’s military infrastructure but also greatly diminished the ability of Colonel Qaddafi’s commanders to control forces, leaving even committed fighting units unable to move, resupply or coordinate operations.
The Boston Globe writes:“NATO jets have flown nearly 20,000 sorties in the past month, including about 7,500 strike attacks.”
It has to be said that everyone should take a moment to revisit the U.S.’s constant moral outrage over suicide bombers and IED’s — and then look at the ground-pounding destruction and death that the U.S. has brought to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Libya. It is hard to fully grasp the degree of hypocrisy that considers a hand-made roadside bomb within a warzone a “terrorist act,” yet glorifies the mass bombings of whole countries and capitals by global pirate fleets.What now confronts the people of Libya is the stark fact that such military support comes with “strings attached” — strings the size of steel cables. European states were not willing to see regime change in a strategic oil state like Libya without having their hands (and jets and advisers) firmly in the mix — “vetting” the emerging political forces, anointing those most pliant and pro-western, culling hostile political elements from the emerging political mix.
The goal (obviously) is to continue the flow of oil from Libya and to convert this part of the Arab Spring into a new structure maintaining and refining a profitable pro-western stability.
The goal has not been (as some claim) to “get” Libyan oil, since they always had it. It is not (as some claim) to establish a more friendly regime (since Gaddafi’s closeness to the major powers is a matter of record — exemplified by his ugly support for their “war on terror,” and his utterly capitalist rush to prop up Italian banking.) His was (what communist call) a bureaucrat capitalist regime — a form of capitalist social formation common in resource rich third world countries — where a combination of state power, nepotism, tight control over export and the local military, all combine to create an extremely wealthy localized capitalist state, often concentrating both power and wealth in one individual or family (Marcos in the Philippines, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Saudi family in Arabia, Assad in Syria and so on.)
Domination with a liberal multinational flavor
For those who once thought of Obama as significant or even relative “change”: We will now see (yet again!) an example of how this U.S. government’s policies are rooted in empire and capitalism. The intolerable U.S. military intervention in the internal affairs of North African people, became a “multilateral” “mission” to “protect civilians” under “UN authorization” — i.e. this conquest and this new moment of domination comes stamped with the empty and cynical justifications of liberal bullshit. Obama may not wear a flight suit when he declares “mission accomplished” — but from his bombings and raids into Pakistan, to the new domination over Libya, he will strut in public as the godfather of capitalism, as a superpower dominator. The lack of fundamental difference between Barack Obama and George Bush (for the people of the world) is on full display.
Neo-liberal western policies of the last decades have often sought to encourage direct western exploitation of Third World countries — and to move local state structures out of the way. It remains to be seen what now emerges from the West’s overthrow of Gaddafi.
But it appears to be one of those moments when one set of oppressors is removed, and another set is carefully reinserted — all to serve the masters of the whole globe, who are the inheritors of previous colonialism, the strutting lords of hi-tech military murder and the parasitic centers of modern finance. All they need now is their Libyan Karzai.
Either way, the people of Libya are not about to experience liberation (regardless of the staged and publicized celebrations of today’s victors)… they will enter into a new stage of uncertainty and domination, and face a new set of exploiters imposed by jet bombers, Predator drones, embedded military advisers, cruise missiles and the soon-to-arrive occupying army of imperialist political handlers (Iraq and Afghanistan style).
