Month: October 2011

When Gadhafi was killed, Libya’s new leaders in the National Transitional Council made official statements that he had been killed in the crossfire of an ongoing gun fight. That was a lie, and when videos of Gadhafi’s capture came out, showing him being severely beaten, guns pointed to his head, and then showing his stiff corpse with a bullet hole perfectly centered in his left temple, it became all too clear that it was a lie. The autopsy report subsequently concluded that his death was the result of gun shot wounds to the head. Now Jibril and the other NTC leaders are backtracking on that whole collateral damage narrative. A fine exhibition of the first official, post-Gadhafi act of the US-supported Libyan government.

But, as it turns out, Gadhafi wasn’t the only one summarily executed by NTC fighters last week:

Fifty-three people, apparent Gaddafi supporters, seem to have been executed at a hotel in Sirte last week, Human Rights Watch said today. The hotel is in an area of the city that was under the control of anti-Gaddafi fighters from Misrata before the killings took place.

Human Rights Watch called on Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) to conduct an immediate and transparent investigation into the apparent mass execution and to bring those responsible to justice.

“We found 53 decomposing bodies, apparently Gaddafi supporters, at an abandoned hotel in Sirte, and some had their hands bound behind their backs when they were shot,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, who investigated the killings.

Fifty-three people. That’s a massacre. But typically, those on the international stage who face prosecutions for terrible crimes are those that Washington doesn’t like too much. In the case of the NTC, the Obama administration and their counterparts in Britain and France have an interest in making the “revolution” (read: coup) they took part in seem as if it were for democracy and the goodness of those freedom fighters they supported. So my guess is that nobody is held accountable for these crimes. Or, for that matter, for the crimes committed pre-Gadhafi execution.

Robert Burns of the Associated Press today suggested that the “limited military intervention” style of the Libya War is going to replace the massive occupation style of Iraq, where the US has spent eight and a half years and conservatively $800 billion.

Which of course ignores the obvious option of not intervening at all. But even if we throw that away, as “experts” so often do, and assume the US is going to embark on adventures, is the “Libya method” a hope that we’ve at least found a way to do it without bankrupting ourselves?

Not really. Instead of a change in tactics Libya is really just a rebranding of the overall notion of intervention onto a more recent and not-yet-entirely-calamitous conflict in the hopes of convincing the public that America has finally found the “right way” to fight wars.

But if one recalls the Iraq War, the period around the invasion was also spun as a runaway success, and it wasn’t until the months turned into years that it became clear to the pubic that something was rotten with the plan.

The US did not invade Iraq with the plan of occupying it for eight and a half years, officials were assuring us it would be over in a matter of weeks. Libya too was supposed to be over much sooner, and officials are still looking for ways to get the US more and more involved in propping up the new regime.

Iraq as the “bad war” special case has the benefit of hindsight, with the lion’s share of its costs (at least one hopes) firmly behind us. $800+ billion and well over a million dead to replace an aging dictator with a fresh new one. It was a bad bargain, to be sure.

But let us not too hastily compare it to a fictional “good war” example in Libya, where $1.1 billion and a few months has netted us massive celebrations. Even if the Gadhafi regime is gone the Libyan War is far from over, with an ugly new civil war looking to assert itself in the ashes of the old one, and US officials chomping at the bit to escalate American involvement. Give it another eight years, and the US involvement in Libya could look far more costly.

And realistically, the Libya “strategy” is really the same as the Iraq “strategy” or the more recent Uganda “strategy,” which is to throw the military at a situation without any exit plan in place. That one already blew up in our collective faces and the others haven’t yet is no reason to believe a lesson is learned. Indeed, the fact that it is being presented as such suggests it is a lesson far from learned.

DemocracyNow!:

Guatemala has formally apologized to the family of former president Jacobo Arbenz, 57 years after the U.S.-backed coup that ousted him from office. At a ceremony on Thursday, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom asked Arbenz’s family for forgiveness. Speaking on behalf of the Arbenz family, Arbenz’s son, Juan Jacobo, called on the United States to follow suit.

Juan Jacobo Arbenz: “My family suffered a lot in exile. We suffered the consequences of an injustice that took place in 1954 when an agency from a very powerful country, the United States, acted on the interests of a powerful North American company called the United Fruit Company who were condemned in court for being a monopoly. Here started the injustice and we call on the United States to recognize their errors.”

Somehow I doubt it.

The trial of Hector Mario Lopez Fuentes, a general under the US-supported dictatorship of Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who came to power in the CIA-orchestrated coup that unseated Arbenz has been delayed yet again. He is accused of planning and ordering about 300 different massacres when he was chief of staff of the Guatemalan military between 1982 and 1983. Montt’s forces, with the help of his chief of staff Fuentes, slit the throats of women and children, beat innocent civilians and doused them in gasoline to be burned alive, tortured, and mutilated thousands of innocent indigenous peasants. The UN commission investigating the atrocities concluded it constituted acts of genocide. No inquiry into the culpability of US officials has been initiated.

For more on the US imposed regime change in Guatemala and US policy towards the country over the years, see here, here, and here.

Update: See Reason.tv’s interview with Giancarlo Ibarguen, who says “I blame the war on drugs in the United States for what is happening here in Guatemala.”

It’s good to put faces to all the unnamed Yemenis suffering under dictatorship partly because of our government: