This is a cross-post from The Strong Horse
Apologies to my limited readership for my inactivity, the pesky demands of real life (here read final year dissertation) have taken a grievous toll on my budding blogging career. I thought I’d break my blogging fast by deconstructing a disgraceful and shoddy piece of work I saw on the Stop the War Coalition website today:
10 Reasons to say no to western intervention in Libya
Stop the War Coalition are reliably consistent in their consistent deployment of every factually incorrect, inconsistent and irrelevant argument in the anti-war playbook. They really have turned throwing shit at the wall and hoping some of it sticks into an art form. Let’s see if we can’t scape all this facile excreta from the important pages of UN Resolution 1973, and leave it where it belongs: stinging the noses of the people who would rather see Benghazi burned to the ground by Gaddafi’s thugs than allow the international community to give the Libyan people any meaningful help.
1. Intervention will violate Libya’s sovereignty. This is not just a legalistic point – although the importance of observing international law should not be discounted if the big powers in the world are not to be given the green light run amok. As soon as NATO starts to intervene, the Libyan people will start to lose control of their own country and future.
Yes, the imposition of a no-fly zone and tactical strikes will be a violation of Libya’s sovereignty. Sensible people, however, have come to the conclusion that a state can surrender its sovereignty when it commits gross human rights violations, as Gaddafi undoubtedly has. This was taken into account in UN Resolution 1973, and it was determined that the atrocities Gaddafi has committed mean it is legitimate to breach Libya’s sovereignty in order to protect Libyan civilians from his onslaught.
The last sentence, is a fair point, but is something for the international community and the Libyans to bear in mind, it is not a killer argument against intervention. There some risk of this Libyan revolution being taken over by outside powers, and we should do everything we can to make sure this is a Libyan affair, as much as possible. But what is almost absolutely guaranteed to leave the Libyan people without a say in their future is doing nothing and allowing Gaddafi to crush Benghazi and reassert control over the entire country again.
The call to respect Libya’s sovereignty is a call to respect Gadaffi’s “right” to butcher his own people with impunity.
2. Intervention can only prolong, not end the civil war. “No-fly zones” will not be able to halt the conflict and will lead to more bloodshed, not less.
This point is absolutely nonsensical and simply not grounded in reality. The military might of the international community, won’t be able to roll back Gadaffi’s offensive? It can’t ensure a rebel victory if used properly? Yeah ok… I guess we should just take the word of the military experts at the StWC, rather than simply using common sense.
This war might get messy, with or without intervention, but if I’m a civilian in Libya opposed to the regime, I sure as hell like my chances a lot better with international help, rather than just being watched from afar by idiots wringing their hands about “imperialism”.
3. Intervention will lead to escalation. Because the measures being advocated today cannot bring an end to the civil war, the next demand will be for a full-scale armed presence in Libya, as in Iraq – and meeting the same continuing resistance. That way lies decades of conflict.
Possibly. There’s a small chance of that happening. War is a messy and uncertain business. There’s a much better chance of a decent outcome with intervention than without though. They haven’t proved that a no-fly zone and targeted strikes can’t bring an end to the civil war and a rebel victory though (I think there’s a good chance it could), so the leap to occupation is obvious logically flawed. It is right to raise concerns about where this could lead, but jumping straight onto the scare-tactic of “there’s going to be a demand for an occupation, and it’s going to be Iraq all over again” is hilarious hypocrisy, especially for a group which continually rails against the hyperbole and scare tactics of the “neo-cons” and “warmongers.”
4. This is not Spain in 1936, when non-intervention meant helping the fascist side which, if victorious in the conflict, would only encourage the instigators of a wider war – as it did. Here, the powers clamouring for military action are the ones already fighting a wider war across the Middle East and looking to preserve their power even as they lose their autocratic allies. Respecting Libya’s sovereignty is the cause of peace, not is enemy.
This point is very interesting. Because their reasoning in sentences 2 and 3 make absolutely no sense if we apply them consistently, the only thing to take away from this point is their admission that non-intervention in conflicts means “helping the fascist side”. StWC and their supporters get really, really defensive if pro-interventionist people say they are “helping the Taliban”, “helping Al Qaeda“, “helping Saddam” and so on. They say that they simply don’t want to start a new war with more bloodshed. But here we have them admitting that non-intervention can mean actively helping the bad guys. We can see the inconsistency of applying this to Spain in Civil War (in which we should have intervened to save the Republic no doubt), but not to other places in the very next paragraph:
5. It is more like Iraq in the 1990s, after the First Gulf War. Then, the US, Britain and France imposed no-fly zones which did not lead to peace – the two parties in protected Iraqi Kurdistan fought a bitter civil war under the protection of the no-fly zone – and did prepare the ground for the invasion of 2003. Intervention may partition Libya and institutionalise conflict for decades.
Of course, this line of argument wouldn’t entail “helping Saddam” commit a further genocide on the Kurds in the aftermath of the First Gulf War would it? No siree. See, we should have intervened in Spain in the Civil War because fascists are bad and letting them win will lead to further war, but we shouldn’t have intervened in Iraq to save the Kurds, even though not protecting them would quite possibly led to a genocidal massacre.
Their further defense of rank inconsistency in point 4 is that the Western powers are waging wars across the Middle East now at the moment. Well, what the hell were the Western powers doing in the late 1930s? The British Empire, the French Empire, the United States, these powers weren’t waging wars all over the world, and weren’t trying to solidify their control over their colonies and dominions?
Does anyone actually think that StWC would actually be pro-intervention if the Spanish Civil War were being raged now? Like hell would they. They would sit back and let the Spanish Revolution be burned to the ground by the Falange forces, and they would sit there and watch, doing everything in their power to stop the “imperialist powers” from “hi-jacking” the Spanish Revolution.
StWC are NOT a progressive, left-wing, pro-democracy movement who only want to see an end to conflict. They are a thoroughly reactionary, anti-democratic organization with a monistic fixation on “Western Imperialism”. They believe in a zero-sum view of politics: if the Western powers are for something, they are against it, even if that means allowing brutal dictators to rape, torture and murder “their own” citizens by the thousands.
6. Or it is more like the situation in Kosovo and Bosnia. NATO interference has not lead to peace, reconciliation or genuine freedom in the Balkans, just to endless corrupt occupations.
See? Things would be much better today if only we’d left Milošević’s rape squads and ethnic cleansers finish their sordid business in Kosovo and Bosnia…
7. Yes, it is about oil. Why the talk of intervening in Libya, but not the Congo, for example? Ask BP.
Most of the pressure to intervene has come from ordinary Libyans, and ordinary people in the West, not oil companies eager to gobble up the reserves of Libya. Weren’t StWC critical of the sweetheart deals done between the Brits, BP and Gaddafi? You can’t have it both ways. BP can’t simultaneously be propping up Gaddafi for oil deals, AND pressuring the government to overthrow him for oil deals. (Edit: Harry’s Place noted this same contradiction a few days ago also)
But hey, these arguments almost never make any sense. You only have to mention the dread O-word, and they think they have just made a killer point against intervention.
The issue of the Congo is complicated, and there are many reasons for it. Maybe we should be doing more to help end the conflict there, but I think the one of the biggest reasons we don’t do more to stop it is the fact that it is incredibly complex and it would be almost impossible to stop even if we tried. Libya, though not simple, is much more straightforward than the Congo – there is a reasonable plan on the table now, and a fairly clear idea about what we can do to help, and how we can do it. Not all the details are clear so far, but they are much more clear than the Congo.
They would be better off asking why we chose to intervene in Kosovo and Bosnia instead, places not exactly know for their huge natural resources ready to pilfer…
8. It is also about pressure on Egyptian revolution – the biggest threat to imperial interests in the region. A NATO garrison next door would be a base for pressure at least, and intervention at worst, if Egyptian freedom flowers to the point where it challenges western interests in the region.
This is just conspiracy-minded poo-flinging, which is barely even worth responding to. I have no idea why NATO would specifically need Libya as a base for intervention in Egypt if they wanted to do that, considering there are already bases in Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, and so on, all within striking distance of Egypt, not to mention the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. This point is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
9. The hypocrisy gives the game away. When the people of Bahrain rose against their US-backed monarchy and were cut down in the streets, there was no talk of action, even though the US sixth fleet is based there and could doubtless have imposed a solution in short order. As top US republican Senator Lindsey Graham observed last month “there are regimes we want to change, and those we don’t”. NATO will only ever intervene to strangle genuine social revolution, never to support it.
Bahrain is an absurd comparison. There may come a point where tricky questions are raised about US allies shooting down civilians protesting, but there is no comparison between the full-scale civil war in Libya right now, and the low level atrocities in Bahrain and elsewhere. No one would be calling for intervention in Libya if the atrocities were on the scale of Bahrain, so it is a completely false point to make (although, like I say, there will be some important questions to ask if violence does spiral out of control in Bahrain, Yemen, or Saudi Arabia).
10. Military aggression in Libya – to give it the right name – will be used to revive the blood-soaked policy of ‘liberal interventionism’. That beast cannot be allowed to rise from the graves of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ignoring the hyperbolic and rhetorical childishness of the “military aggression” jibe, they simply do not understand what “liberal interventionism” is, and when it has been used. Good examples of liberal interventionism are Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone.
Afghanistan was NOT a liberal intervention. It was a war of defense after 9/11 with the aim of destroying the organization which attacked the United States, denying them safe havens, and toppling the Taliban “state” which gave them a safe haven and tried to protect them after the attacks. It has been subsequently argued for in terms of liberal interventionism (human rights, democracy, women’s rights and so on), as it should in my opinion, but Afghanistan was and is, primarily a war of defense and a war of national interest for America and the West in general.
Iraq is a similar story. Plenty of liberal interventionist themes have inevitably come up, but Iraq was primarily sold as a war of necessity by the Bush administration (think of the reasoning what you will). It was not primarily sold on helping protect the Kurds or Iraqi civilians, it was primarily sold on the issue of WMD and Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda. Think of the war and how it was sold however you want, Iraq was not primarily a “liberal intervention” to protect human rights.
The tactic of comparing Iraq to every single act of military intervention by the West around the world is an old tactic by now, and it is a very good sign that such demagoguery is not persuading huge numbers of people to adopt the narrow, feeble-minded isolationism of StWC and their so-called progressive supporters. The people of Benghazi seem to agree with me:
Sidenote: this post is not meant to denigrate all those who oppose intervention in Libya for their own reasons, some of them sensible and some of them not so sensible. This is merely meant as a riposte to the quoted article, and the general arguments which the group routinely employs.