Author: Brian Beyer

Journalist Lizzy Phelan on Her Experience in Libya 

Regular readers of Antiwar.com will not be surprised by Ms. Phelan’s account of what she saw in Libya. Just like the war in Iraq, the bombing of Libya was based on a whole lot of nonsense: inflated death tolls and exaggerated opposition against Gaddafi (although the opposition against him should not be marginalized). As US rhetoric towards Iran reaches a fever pitch similar to that in the run up to the war in Iraq, it’s truly worth pondering just how many times the American people will tolerate being lied to or bullied into war.

It is truly startling at how many self-styled ‘progressives’ are still intent on apologizing for Barack Obama’s Bushian foreign policy. Perhaps the most disturbing article that I have read by apologists for Bush-lite was Robert Creamer’s “A Great Day: Obama Ends the War in Iraq.” According to Creamer’s biography on the Huffington Post, he has been a “political organizer and strategist for four decades” who has been dedicated to “campaigns to end the war in Iraq, pass universal health care, pass Wall Street reform, change America’s budget priorities and enact comprehensive immigration reform.” He is also married to Congresswoman Joan Schakowsky from Illinois.

Perhaps it is the Illinois connection that has him doing everything he can to heap praise on Barack Obama. It is inexcusable, however, that he would have written such an article after professing to work intimately on campaigns to end the War in Iraq. Simply put, he should know his facts.

Creamer begins the piece misleadingly:

This afternoon President Obama announced that at the end of this year, America will withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq.

Obama began his campaign for president by forcefully, clearly promising to end that war. This afternoon he delivered on that promise.

President Obama did, in fact, campaign to end the war in Iraq. He was also a very outspoken critic of it during his time in the US Senate. But why did Obamareally announce a withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq (never mind that 150 will remain behind)? Surprisingly, in a rare burst of sanity, Michelle Bachmann gave the reason why: “we’re being kicked out.” The Iraqi government, despite much arm twisting by the Obama administration, refused to grant American troops immunity after the year’s end. Obama and friends, defeated and demoralized, had no other option but to leave.

But even such an important development in the war in Iraq is not solidified yet. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been in talks with the Iraqi government about what to do after “the reduction of combat presence.” Thousands of private military contractors and State Department quasi-soldiers will remain in order to ensure “stability.”

If you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does get much, much worse. Creamer then attempts to argue that Obama “fundamentally reshaped American foreign policy.” I would agree with such a sentiment, only in that Obama has been more efficient in killing innocent civilians in his Drone War on the World than Bush could have ever dreamed of.  Creamer then uses the war in Libya to demonstrate how fundamentally different Obama has been from Bush:

• The Libyans themselves overthrew a dictator;
• America spent a billion dollars — not a trillion dollars, as we have in Iraq;
• America did not lose one soldier in Libya;
• We accomplished our mission after eight months, not eight years;
• Most importantly, America worked cooperatively with our European allies, the Arab League and the Libyan people to achieve a more democratic Middle East.

The Libyans would have been utterly incapable of overthrowing the Gaddafi regime had it not been for the NATO operation. If the NATO planes of death were not busy bombing Gaddafi and his loyalists, the weapons depots would have never been looted and Gaddafi would have continued to use his endless cash to hire mercenaries from around Africa. Additionally, it was an American Predator drone strike coupled with a French missile strike that initially hit Gaddafi’s convoy allowing the anti-Gaddafi forces to ultimately capture and execute him. Last I checked, the “Libyans” had no such capabilities.

While only $1 billion has been spent so far, it remains to be seen how active the US will be in Libyan reconstruction efforts. The price could easily balloon from here on out. It is also odd that a self proclaimed progressive would rather see $1 billion spent on overthrowing an African dictator rather than feeding and educating impoverished American children.

Creamer is correct to note that there were not any American casualties, but are the lives of an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Libyans to be overlooked? The death count is by no means conclusive and will only rise once Libyans are harmed by their bombed out infrastructure much like the 500,000 Iraqis who died thanks to their decimated infrastructure.

Again, it is premature to decisively call this the end of the Libyan war as the prospect of civil war and strife remains high. Surely Creamer would not want to be caught with egg on his face like Bush was after declaring “Mission Accomplished.”

It’s also worth remembering that troops from North America, Europe, Asia, and South America took part in the mission in Iraq. Strength in numbers and consensus does not justify regime change, whether it be Saddam or Moammar.

Creamer can continue to say how different Obama has been from Bush in the realm of foreign policy, but the facts just don’t add up. They’re especially nothing for a progressive to gloat about.

And the award goes to…Pakistan! Escalating tensions between the US and Pakistan have only been getting worse. As Pepe Escobar notes, this “row”–as it is called by the mainstream media–has the potential to deteriorate quickly into one hot mess:

Expect a festival of MQ-9 Reapers droning North Waziristan to death. What US President Barack Obama calls a tool of “unique capabilities”, for Pashtun farmers is a weapon of terror.

Expect strike after strike conducted out of a control room in Nellis air force base in Nevada.

Expect an array of strategic missile bombings with spectacular collateral damage.

Expect more Joint Special Operations Command-ordered special operations forces “kill/capture” raids.

Expect a new, humongous Joint Prioritized Effects List, just like in Afghanistan; no names, just a list of mobile or satellite phone numbers. If your mobile gets on the list by mistake, you’ll be snuffed the Hellfire way.

Expect deadly, eternal Pashtun vengeance against Americans to be as irreversible as death and taxes.

And most of all, expect a low intensity war to turn volcanic anytime.

Now, to make matters worse, the US is blaming Pakistan as the source for IED’s that plague the war effort in Afghanistan. They claim fertilizer, the main ingredient in IED’s, moves freely across the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While solutions are already being brainstormed by top military brass, two important questions remain concerning these accusations: does the United States have definitive proof, unlike the debunked claims from 2007 that Iran was supplying Iraqi fighters with weapons? And, if true, why doesn’t the US halt all aid in the form of fertilizer to Pakistan that it continues to give year after year?

As in many other places around the globe, the United States has a bad track record of propping up leaders and groups in Somalia, only to watch them crumble months or years later. Siad Barre, the ruthless military dictator of Somalia, was kept in power by the US until the Somali people rebelled in 1991. In 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) established a pseudo-government that has been credited with bringing order to Mogadishu that hadn’t been seen in years.

Beyond establishing a level of peace and security unknown to the region for more than fifteen years and winning wide support from the Somali public, the UIC had a “severe dampening effect on the activities of maritime piracy in the waters off the Somali coast,” according to a UN Monitoring Group report.

In addition to relative peace and quiet on land, the UIC was successful in reining in pirates that used Somalia as a launch pad. Piracy, especially off of the coast of Somalia, has been of huge concern to American officials because of the volume of oil passing through these waters. It is puzzling, then, that the goal of the US was to abolish the UIC that so successfully policed Somali pirates.

The Official reason for doing away with the UIC was to prevent the establishment of a terrorist safe haven for al Qaeda, al Shabaab and other such groups. There was never, however, any immediate threat of terrorism against the United States by groups in Somalia. Therein lies the source of our beloved officials cognitive dissonance: Somali piracy—a big threat to the global economic order estimated at $12 billion a year—was left nearly unchecked after the US did away with the UIC in order to annihilate a terrorist threat that hardly existed. Such behavior is indicative of paranoia rather than sensible policy making.

The UIC was ousted by American backed warlords and neighboring Ethiopia—a country fiercely hated by most Somalis. While the objective of the American proxy war was bringing stability to the East African country, it hardly did that. Jeremy Scahill explains:

Rather than working with the Somali government to address what Somalia experts considered a relatively minor threat, the United States turned to warlords like Qanyare, and went down a path that would lead to an almost unthinkable rise in the influence and power of Al Qaeda and the Shabab.

Such blowback has been experienced in Somalia before. During the humanitarian intervention in the early 1990’s, many Somalis quickly began to despise the US and UN forces thanks to what was seen as indiscriminate brutality.

By the time of the 3 October battle, literally every inhabitant of large areas of Mogadishu considered the UN and U.S. as enemies, and were ready to take up arms against them. People who ten months before had welcomed the U.S. Marines with open arms were now ready to risk death to drive them out.

American intervention has once again started in Somalia, but this time using drones and proxy forces. It is worth noting that the last Somali intervention was done towards the end of a devastating famine. Somalia is currently in the midst of one of the worst famines ever seen. It should also be remembered that Colin Powell said that the intervention was a “a paid political advertisement” for maintaining the current military budget. Perhaps the recession and growing non-interventionist sentiment in the US has sent Washington a powerful message that Somalia is too expensive to tinker with. This could explain Washington’s newfound love affair with drones instead of Black Hawks.

Africa has been thrusted into the spotlight yet again thanks to the Libyan intervention. Due to the power vacuum in Libya, weapon depots have been looted dry and weapons of all sorts from Libya have been turning up on the black market. Fear of Islamists taking charge in Tripoli has been exacerbated by near hysteria over al-Shabaab in Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Africa seems to be engulfed in crisis–nothing new here.

Terrorism of any kind, no matter how irrelevant to the US or its interests is now seen as a greater threat than the Red Scare. The United States, of course, must and will act. Or so says AFRICOM commander General Carter Ham. General Ham considers al-Shabaab and Boko Haram, terrorist groups with mostly domestic grievances, to be very similar to AQIM, a group with a distinctly international flavor.

“Each of those three independently, I think, presents a significant threat not only in the nations in which they primarily operate but regionally and … to the United States,” Ham told defense reporters on Wednesday. “Those three organizations have very explicitly and publicly voiced an intent to target Westerners and the U.S. specifically.”

Ham’s assessment of Boko Haram and al-Shabaab’s targets is extremely misguided. Al-Shabaab has only once attacked outside of Somalia, which was in Uganda in response to the country’s peacekeeping operations in Somalia. As Jeremy Scahill noted, American policy was counterproductive in that it radicalized many Somalis:

Rather than working with the Somali government to address what Somalia experts considered a relatively minor threat, the United States turned to warlords like Qanyare, and went down a path that would lead to an almost unthinkable rise in the influence and power of Al Qaeda and the Shabab.

Additionally, Boko Haram attacked its first international target just three weeks ago, the UN mission in Abuja. Even this attack, though directed at Westerners and a western organization–Boko Haram’s ideology stems from complete opposition to western education–was within Nigerian borders. While the precision, efficacy, and hardware used in the bombing was certainly characteristic of al-Qaeda, the links between the two organizations is still very difficult to connect. Despite the lack of hard evidence, Ham is ready to act:

“The Africans are better at addressing this [terrorism] than we are. In some cases they need some assistance and where we can provide that, we seek to do so,” he said, citing the example of Mali, where the United States has provided training and equipment to help them counter AQIM.

The effort in Mali was done under the guise of the Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI), an effort to combat terrorism and secure borders in Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad, signed into law by the Bush administration in November 2002. In reality, the initiative focused on training and equipping American compliant armies as “[k]ey aspects of the training include basic marksmanship, planning, communications, land navigation, patrolling and medical care. This foreign internal defense training, officials said, will help the countries involved better protect their own borders and regions.” The PSI was a relatively small effort of $7 million, but laid the essential framework of which a much larger and more important counterterrorism initiative would be based: the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (TSCTP).

The TSCTP was established during the Bush administration as a 5 year, $500 million project and is now under the authority of the fledgling AFRICOM, which is a mere 4 years old and is currently headed by General Carter Ham (the Department of Defense, USAID, the FBI, and Department of the Treasury also assist in the effort, as does the African Union and the Union of West African States). The goals of TSCTP are not surprising considering how terrorism of all kinds, even that unrelated to the United States, is looked upon in a paranoid fashion:

The Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (TSCTP) is a multi-faceted, multi-year U.S. Government (USG) program aimed at defeating terrorist organizations by:

• strengthening regional counterterrorism capabilities,

• enhancing and institutionalizing cooperation among the region’s security forces,

• promoting democratic governance,

• discrediting terrorist ideology, and

• reinforcing bilateral military ties with the United States.

As this laundry list of objectives indicates, it appears that the US is approaching terrorism in Africa from many different perspectives. Mirroring America’s foreign policy, however, the TSCTP places too much emphasis on hard rather than soft power. An American diplomat from Senegal explains:

The current TSCTP program focuses too much on military and security assistance… [W]e believe that in Senegal the bulk of our TSCTP activities should be these &soft8 programs rather than military ones… In Senegal, the objective is to prevent terrorist attacks.  We are not at the stage yet where we need to find, fix and destroy terrorists.

The diplomat’s assessment is spot on: what sense does it make to approach terrorism militarily when the threat of terrorism against the United States by African groups is next to nonexistent? It’s also worth questioning why America even cares one iota about terrorism in Senegal or Burkina Faso. Neither country has ever experienced a terrorist attack, nor is either predisposed to terrorism.

The military component of the program is very troublesome. Known as “Operation Enduring Freedom Trans Sahara” (OEF-TS), this little known military initiative is said to reinforce bilateral military ties among its ten members: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Morocco, Tunisia, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal.

Given the past actions of the US, which has shown complete willingness to exert control over militaries and security agencies all over the globe, this is hardly surprising.

OEF-TS explicitly states that its role is advisory, emphasis mine: “OEF-TS fosters collaboration and communication among participating countries. Furthermore, OEF-TS strengthens counterterrorism and border security, promotes democratic governance,reinforces bilateral military ties, and enhances development and institution building.”

Likewise, the TSCTP site makes clear that the US is participating from the sidelines, “The overall goals are to enhance the indigenous capacities of governments in the Pan-Sahel…to confront the challenge posed by terrorist organizations in the region.”

Recent events, however, have called into question American dedication to taking a backseat role, especially with the hysterical calls of danger coming from General Ham.

The recent bombing in of the UN mission in Abuja, Nigeria by Boko Haram saw heavy handed American involvement. The FBI was promptly on the ground assisting in operations, though many Nigerians balked at this and declared that they had not only run roughshod over Nigerian investigators, but had completely taken over the investigation. There is no better way to “foster collaboration and communication” than to hijack an investigation.

For all the talk of encouraging cooperation and respect among allies in order to eradicate terrorism, American calls for good faith seem to be, more than anything, a disguise for commanding around foreign countries. Cables obtained by Wikileaks show that the US continues to use one of the oldest tricks in the book for those not fully cooperating with the TSCTP: the power of the purse and well monied insiders.

The American friendly Ben Ali regime, when compared to other members of the TSCTP, was not doing all that well.

We will want to emphasize to Grira that while we value our relationship with Tunisia, shrinking resources will be prioritized for those countries that are willing to work with the U.S., particularly in regional security efforts such as the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Program (TSCTP) and NATO’s Operation Active Endeavor.  Tunisia’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) will drop from $15 million in FY-2010 to $4.9 million in FY-2011.

Congress was also unimpressed with Tunisia’s performance as a partner in counterterrorism, and “would need to see concrete benefits coming from the assistance… [and] a willingness to increase engagement…” in order to receive more funding. But perhaps what irked the United States the most, and really threw a wrench in the gears of the military component of TSCTP, Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara (OEF-TS), was the lack of a status of force agreement between the US and Tunisia.

 As they stood up to depart, the DCMA told the Defense Minister that the U.S. was still interested in establishing a SOFA [status of force agreement] for U.S. military forces in Tunisia and that Congress considers a SOFA very important in judging the strength of a relationship. Grira said that he was aware of the issue, but that the Tunisians were waiting for the U.S. to respond to their proposal for text changes.

The US, yet again, was more focused on responding to terrorism rather than preventing it.

The policy of leading from behind has also seemed to have been abandoned in Mauritania. The government of Mauritania unveiled a plan called “Social and Economic Aspects of the National Strategy Against Terror.” Rather than supplementing the strategy already established, the TSCTP “parallels the GIRM’s [Government of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania] SNLT [Strategie Nationale de Lutte contre le Terrorisme], but goes a step further.” In little Mauritania, American policy has supplanted that of the host country. Leading from behind? Hardly.

The man responsible for Mauritania and America’s close “cooperation” is “Ministry of Economy and Finance Director for Cooperation Mohedyne Sidi Baba, who has been the Mission’s primary counterpart on USAID’s Trans Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership.” Baba’s is indebted to and very comfortable with the financial organizations of all kinds:

Mohedyne Ould Sidi Baba has been a vital player in building Mauritania’s relations with the IMF, World Bank and donors. His tireless work was instrumental to Mauritania’s consideration for the MCC [Millennium Challenge Corporation] and re-establishing confidence with the IMF.

Baba, in other words, has shown so much willingness to act on the behalf of the United States because they keep the money flowing to poverty stricken Mauritania.

The recent establishment of AFRICOM, TSCTP and OEF-TS were created in the aftermath of 9/11 paranoia. Any threat of terrorism, real or otherwise, had to be scrutinized and, whenever possible, acted upon. While al-Qaeda had attacked US interests in Kenya and Tanzania years before, there was never once an existential threat to the US from African terrorist groups. American officials, in their crusade to destroy a war tactic, are now onto Africa.

It looks as though Africa is being colonized yet again, but not by those searching for diamonds or by loan sharks from the IMF. Rather, the United States, acting as a partner in the War on Terror, seems dedicated to crafting and shaping malleable countries throughout the turbulent and eternally hopeless continent.

One thing that I’ve been discouraged by is the lack of antiwar music. It certainly is out there, but does not come close to what was seen during the Vietnam war era. Perhaps it’s because of the lack of awareness due to our consumption culture, reality TV nation, or lack of a draft. But for whatever the reason, so much music of today is petty garbage more concerned with the latest pair of sneakers or mommy and daddy problems than real world issues.

Lowkey, aka Kareem Dennis, with the help of M-1 of Dead Prez and Black the Ripper offers the most riveting critique of American foreign policy that I have ever heard in song form. In a truly beautiful and dark style, Lowkey holds no punches attacking American militarism gone awry and “Peace President” Obama. An ode to his honesty is the following, “I say things that other rappers won’t say ’cause my mind never close like Guantanamo Bay.”

Additionally, this man is no foreign policy lightweight. From pondering a possible “humanitarian” attack on Syria:

Drones over Pakistan, Yemen and Libya

Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?

To the Obama administration’s coup attempt in Ecuador: 

Did he defend the war? No! He extended more

He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador

It’s clear that he digs deeper than what the establishment media spoon feeds the rest of society.

Personally, I am not a huge fan of rap. This song, however, blew my mind. It is a must listen.

[Note: some bad language and a cold dose of reality.]