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arhalvaztrirjournalhttps://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2019-02-18/obamas-libya-debacle
^Is entirely and directly connected to what did and didn't happen in Libya in 2011. Back when George Bush geared up the United States to his senseless regime change adventure in Iraq, crowds thronged the world. London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and other societies as well as in the USA witnessed some of the largest protests in the history of the antiwar movement. These protests were entirely right, given that Bush's rationale for the war was a cheap regime change that went off the rails into something far more ambitious, the point where US imperialism's unilateral hand died in the looting of Baghdad and the rise of the war in Anbar Province.
It may be too much to expect American antiwar activists of the present to emulate the past version that protested JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford with equal fervor. It did not protest the Long War in Iraq from 1993-2000, when Clinton was in office, and it made no serious protestations about the humanitarian crisis imposed by the use of mass starvation as a 'soft' version of regime change (when that's considered 'soft' power the concept of hard and soft power may need a bit of a rewrite). The global crowds that protested all those decades ago and were conspicuous in their silence are the ones that still puzzle me. Surely the lives of Libyans are worth as much as the lives of Iraqis? Or at least Libyan oilfields if not their lives? And yet somehow, surprisingly, and yet not at all so they were not and are not.
Of course it's worth emphasizing that the Libyan War fits squarely into the reality of American involvement in the Muslim world and the ongoing seven wars here, including the resumed war in Somalia. The United States has taken upon itself to indulge in wholesale regime change of a sort matched only by the oscillating totalitarian movements of fascism and communism in the first half of the 20th Century, deeming rulers to rise and fall on the sake of nothing more than its whim and how and in what ways it chooses to deploy its power and how brutally likewise.
This decision was and is one of the greatest follies the United States has indulged in in recent memory. It hasn't paid a steep price in lives, but it is squandering its wealth to increasingly unsustainable degrees. The Muslim world in turn is paying the real price in lives and in hatreds and animosities stirred up the world over, and in the hydra of reactionary dogmatism that regularly gets strengthened by the USA pumping money into two of the three main sponsors and devastating the enemies of the third.
So why then is it that only the Iraq case in 2003 saw those massive protests of it? Was that a one-off, or did it serve a particular partisan purpose and when that purpose failed, did whatever passed for conviction on the part of the true believers of that movement go with that failure?
Why is the Iraq War treated as a moral crisis to end all crises, but the Libyan War is seen only in the faux GOP scandal of Benghazi? Surely Libya should be one of the all time record US disasters on par with Beirut, if seen by a more truthful analysis? Personally I would say it fits into the same chronic pattern where history exists selectively in the eyes in the USA, at least, of its progressives. Republicans in 1968 affect 2019, 2011 under a Democratic President does not.
^Is entirely and directly connected to what did and didn't happen in Libya in 2011. Back when George Bush geared up the United States to his senseless regime change adventure in Iraq, crowds thronged the world. London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and other societies as well as in the USA witnessed some of the largest protests in the history of the antiwar movement. These protests were entirely right, given that Bush's rationale for the war was a cheap regime change that went off the rails into something far more ambitious, the point where US imperialism's unilateral hand died in the looting of Baghdad and the rise of the war in Anbar Province.
It may be too much to expect American antiwar activists of the present to emulate the past version that protested JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford with equal fervor. It did not protest the Long War in Iraq from 1993-2000, when Clinton was in office, and it made no serious protestations about the humanitarian crisis imposed by the use of mass starvation as a 'soft' version of regime change (when that's considered 'soft' power the concept of hard and soft power may need a bit of a rewrite). The global crowds that protested all those decades ago and were conspicuous in their silence are the ones that still puzzle me. Surely the lives of Libyans are worth as much as the lives of Iraqis? Or at least Libyan oilfields if not their lives? And yet somehow, surprisingly, and yet not at all so they were not and are not.
Of course it's worth emphasizing that the Libyan War fits squarely into the reality of American involvement in the Muslim world and the ongoing seven wars here, including the resumed war in Somalia. The United States has taken upon itself to indulge in wholesale regime change of a sort matched only by the oscillating totalitarian movements of fascism and communism in the first half of the 20th Century, deeming rulers to rise and fall on the sake of nothing more than its whim and how and in what ways it chooses to deploy its power and how brutally likewise.
This decision was and is one of the greatest follies the United States has indulged in in recent memory. It hasn't paid a steep price in lives, but it is squandering its wealth to increasingly unsustainable degrees. The Muslim world in turn is paying the real price in lives and in hatreds and animosities stirred up the world over, and in the hydra of reactionary dogmatism that regularly gets strengthened by the USA pumping money into two of the three main sponsors and devastating the enemies of the third.
So why then is it that only the Iraq case in 2003 saw those massive protests of it? Was that a one-off, or did it serve a particular partisan purpose and when that purpose failed, did whatever passed for conviction on the part of the true believers of that movement go with that failure?
Why is the Iraq War treated as a moral crisis to end all crises, but the Libyan War is seen only in the faux GOP scandal of Benghazi? Surely Libya should be one of the all time record US disasters on par with Beirut, if seen by a more truthful analysis? Personally I would say it fits into the same chronic pattern where history exists selectively in the eyes in the USA, at least, of its progressives. Republicans in 1968 affect 2019, 2011 under a Democratic President does not.
