Libya notes

Robert Dreyfuss, Nation - What do you call it when the full force of a US/NATO aerial bombardment is coupled with political support for a ragtag rebel group that, when victorious, promises to hand over its oil resources to its Western backers? A war for oil.

Don’t believe for one moment that the US backing for Libya’s opposition was about freedom.

Was the US/NATO campaign closely coordinated with each advance by the rebels? In an article in today’s Washington Post, headlined, “Allies guided rebels’ ‘pincer’ assault on capital,” we learn that every inch of the rebels’ advance was facilitated by pinpoint military attacks by NATO. It quotes a Pentagon spokesman: “We have a good operational picture of where forces are arrayed on the battlefield.” Some revolution!

And listen to this. In the New York Times, in a piece headlined, “The Scramble for Access to Libya’s Oil Wealth Begins,” the rebel leader who heads the opposition Libyan oil company, which was formed with support from the Arab Gulf kleptocrats, says that Libya’s new leaders, a combination of wealthy defectors, tribal chieftains, and Islamists, plan to favor their NATO backers when handing out access to Libya’s oil.

Amy Davidson, New Yorker - The Obama Administration has, for a couple of months now, been arguing that our country is not even involved in “hostilities” in Libya. That is plainly untrue. We have been conducting military activities that aim to overthrow a government; our troops are flying and dropping bombs that kill people—and just because they may be bad people does not make this operation something it isn’t. The Obama Administration persisted in its strange non-definition because it just really, really didn’t want to go to Congress about this, as the War Powers Resolution required him to do after sixty days, or, if really necessary, ninety. One can be very glad to see Qaddafi fall, and even proud that our country played a role, and still be unhappy that Obama dodged the law.

Ivan Eland, Anti-War - Worst of all, we don’t really know what will come next in Libya. In retrospect, Gadhafi may look much better if radical anti-U.S. Islamists eventually take over the country. The U.S. has seemed to be so worried about this outcome in Syria that, up until recently, it was reluctant to call for the ouster of the equally brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The same worry should have applied to Libya. The problem with wars, even ones with laudable goals, is that the unintended consequences are usually severe. Recalling that U.S. support of Islamist rebels in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union morphed into the worst foreign threat to American soil since the War of 1812 should have given the United States some pause in getting involved in the Libyan conflict. It didn’t.

Justin Raimondo, Anti-War - No doubt the Libyans will go through the sham of “democratic” elections, although you can bet there’ll be no Green Party on the ballot. In reality, however, the outcome is being decided in advance. After all, why bother having elections to a legislative body if the laws have already been written?

The resemblance of all this to what happened in Iraq is eerie: the first public face of the Iraqi opposition was Ahmad Chalabi, the trickster-embezzler and “hero-in-error,” who funneled fake “intelligence” to the Bush White House and was paid to lie us into war. Chalabi never talked religion, but only about “democracy” and “liberty.” Chalabi’s group, the Iraqi National Congress, was swept aside in the elections, in which the Islamist parties divided up the vast majority of votes. Chalabi made his peace with them and was appointed to high office: today Iraq is Iran’s best friend in the region, and is making sympathetic noises at poor beleaguered Bashar al-Assad of Syria, an Iranian ally, while Washington demands his ouster.

Can we expect a repeat in Libya, where – as in Iraq – a secular “socialist” authoritarian regime is overthrown, and the ostensibly secular elements of the opposition quickly go over to the Islamists? Such a question must surely have occurred to our all-wise policymakers in Washington: no doubt it was quickly brushed aside in order to facilitate the Obama administration’s harebrained scheme to hijack the “Arab Spring” and turn it into the engine of Western imperialism in the region.

As many have noted, we are facing yet another “Mission Accomplished!” moment, with a “victory” hailed, this time, by the more rabid Obama-ites. War fever blows particularly hot over at MSNBC, whose full-throated cheerleading is surely a major embarrassment for “progressives” who still cling to their anti-interventionist principles. Rachel Maddow declaring that war skeptics have been “proven wrong” by the apparent taking of Tripoli is like Jonah Goldberg hailing Iraqis “dancing for joy” at the “liberation” of their country by the US.