[D66] UN vote clears way for US-NATO attack on Libya

[Antid Oto]

UN vote clears way for US-NATO attack on Libya
By Bill Van Auken
18 March 2011

The United Nations Security Council Thursday night approved a resolution that
paves the way for the United States and other major imperialist powers to
conduct a direct military intervention in Libya under the pretense of a
“humanitarian” mission to protect civilian lives.

The resolution, sponsored by the US, France, Britain and Lebanon, goes far
beyond earlier proposals for a no-fly zone, authorizing the use of military
force including “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian
populated areas under threat of attack.” These “areas” include Benghazi, the
city of one million which remains the sole stronghold of the revolt that began
against the Gaddafi dictatorship one month ago. The sole limitation placed by
the resolution is its exclusion of “a foreign occupation force on any part of
Libyan territory.”

The vote sets the stage for a bombardment of Libya by US, French and British
warplanes. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon told France-2 Television that
military action could begin within hours of the resolution’s approval. And the
Associated Press cited an unnamed member of the British Parliament as saying,
“British forces were on stand by for air strikes and could be mobilized as soon
as Thursday night.”

American military officials have already warned that even the imposition of a
no-fly zone entails the prior destruction of Libya’s air defense capabilities,
meaning a major bombing campaign against Libya that will undoubtedly entail
“collateral damage” measured in the killing and maiming of Libyan civilians.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Pentagon officials as saying, “Options included
using cruise missiles to take out fixed Libyan military sites and air-defense
systems … Manned and unmanned aircraft could also be used against Col. Gaddafi’s
tanks, personnel carriers and infantry positions, with sorties being flown out
of US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization bases in the southern Mediterranean.”

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday, Gen. Norton
Schwartz, the chief of the US Air Force, said that a no-fly zone would take
“upwards of a week” to prepare, signaling a sustained bombing campaign. He also
warned that in addition to US warplanes based in the US and Europe, aircraft
would also have to be diverted from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like others military officials, Schwartz said that the imposition of the no-fly
zone would “not be sufficient” to halt the advance of forces loyal to the
dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, which have swept steadily eastward
toward Benghazi over the past 10 days. Clearly, what is being prepared are air
strikes against Gaddafi’s ground forces. The prospect of carrying out a bombing
raid aimed at assassinating Gaddafi has also been broached.

These plans for war are motivated not by any desire to protect the Libyan people
or further the cause of democracy, as its proponents within the UN Security
Council proclaimed. The impending intervention in the oil-rich North African
country is driven by profit interests and geopolitical imperatives that have
nothing to do with the “humanitarian” pretenses of the major powers. The aim is
to exploit the civil war in Libya to impose a regime that is even more
subordinate to these powers and to the major Western oil conglomerates intent on
exploiting the country’s resources.

The gross hypocrisy and cynicism of the imperialist powers backing the
intervention was underscored by the choice of French Foreign Minister Alain
Juppé to motivate the UN resolution. Juppé, who invoked the “Arab spring” as one
of the “great revolutions that change the course of history,” recently assumed
his post after his predecessor, Michèle Alliot-Marie, was forced to resign over
a scandal involving her close political and private relations with the ousted
Tunisian dictator Ben Ali. Juppé’s government was in the process of shipping
anti-riot gear to its former colony when the mass protest forced the dictator to
flee.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who had worked to insert the
“all necessary measures” language allowing for an open-ended military assault on
Libya, praised the passage of the resolution, declaring, “The future of Libya
should be decided by the people of Libya.”

This is unquestionably the case. The task of overthrowing the right-wing
dictatorship of the Gaddafi clique is that of the workers and oppressed of
Libya, who had begun to carry it out. The aim of the US-backed intervention,
however, is precisely to abort any genuine revolution and ensure that any regime
that replaces Gaddafi serves not the interests of the Libyan people, but rather
the demands of Washington and Big Oil. The US hopes to use Libya, moreover, as a
base of operations for suppressing revolutionary movements of workers throughout
the region.

The Security Council vote was 10 in favor and five abstentions. The countries
abstaining included Russia, China, Germany, Brazil and India. While, as
permanent members of the council, both Russia and China had the power to defeat
the resolution by casting “no” votes, they chose not to do so, ensuring that the
UN continued to fulfill its function as a rubber stamp for the demands of the
major imperialist powers.

In their statements explaining their abstentions, however, the ambassadors of
the five countries made clear that the impending attack on Libya has nothing to
do with any consensus by the “world community” to protect the Libyan people, but
rather is the outcome of a conspiracy worked out in secret between Washington,
London and Paris.

Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said that the measure “opens the door to
large scale military intervention” and stressed that questions had been raised
in the prior discussions of the resolution as to how it would be enforced, by
what military forces and under what rules of engagement, but there had been “no
answers.”

India’s ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri noted that while the UN Security Council
had appointed a special envoy on the situation in Libya, it had received “no
report on the situation on the ground” and was acting despite having “little
credible information.” He said that there had been no explanation as to how the
resolution was to be enforced, “by whom and with what measures.” He expressed
concern over the fate of Libya’s “sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity.”

Singh also voiced reservations about a range of new economic sanctions, which
target, among other entities, Libya’s national oil company. He said that the
measures could disrupt trade and investment by member states.

Germany’s ambassador, Peter Wittig, warned that the authorization of the use of
military force increased the “the likelihood of large-scale loss of life” and
said that Germany’s armed forces would take no part in the intervention.

China’s ambassador Li Baodong, the acting president of the Security Council also
voiced reservations, but then justified Beijing’s failure to veto the measure by
invoking the vote last weekend of the Arab League calling on the UN to implement
a no-fly zone.

NATO has also claimed this vote as somehow legitimizing intervention by
demonstrating “regional support.” The reality is that the Arab League is itself
composed of a collection of dictatorships, monarchies and emirates that in no
way represent the desires or interests of the Arab people. Many of them are
actively engaged in the violent suppression of popular upheavals.

While Washington has stressed that any intervention against Libya should include
direct participation by the Arab countries, it appears that their involvement
will be minimal. Following the visit to Cairo by US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, a spokeswoman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry told Reuters: “Egypt
will not be among those Arab states. We will not be involved in any military
intervention. No intervention, period.”

On Thursday, the Arab League could name only two countries prepared to join the
US-NATO assault: Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Both ruled by royal
dynasties, the two emirates are direct participants in Saudi Arabia’s
intervention in Bahrain to suppress the mass movement against the ruling
monarchy. While security forces have shot protesters dead in the streets,
invaded hospitals and carried out a reign of terror in Shia villages, none of
the supposed champions of democracy in Libya are proposing any UN intervention
in Bahrain, the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet.

The Gaddafi government warned that any attack on Libya “will expose all air and
maritime traffic in the Mediterranean Sea to danger and civilian and military
facilities will become targets of Libya’s counter-attack.”

US Secretary of State Clinton set the new strident US tone towards Libya in a
statement made in Tunisia denouncing Gaddafi as “a man who has no conscience and
will threaten anyone in his way. … It’s just his nature. There are some
creatures that are like that.”

As recently as April 2009, the same Hillary Clinton warmly welcomed Gaddafi’s
son and minister of national security to the US State Department, declaring, “We
deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya. We have many
opportunities to deepen and broaden our cooperation and I am very much looking
forward to building on this relationship.”

Like her European counterparts, only months ago Clinton was currying favor with
the Gaddafi regime in pursuit of oil profits and the collaboration of his secret
police apparatus in prosecuting Washington’s “global war on terrorism.”

Now, under the cover of a crescendo of human rights propaganda, with sections of
the media claiming that the repressive actions of the Gaddafi regime amount to
“genocide”, Washington together with French and British imperialism are
intervening in a civil war in Libya which they themselves had no small part in
provoking.

No amount of rhetoric about “saving lives” can mask the fact that what is being
carried out is an act of out and out imperialist banditry, comparable to the
attempts to partition the Congo and Nigeria during the second half of the 20th
century. In those cases, as in Libya, behind the interventions was the drive for
control of strategic resources.

The justifications given for the Libyan intervention are full of grotesque
contradictions. Washington, which professes to be outraged over the killing of
Libyan civilians and bent on saving lives, is itself responsible for the
slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan and, on the very eve
of the UN vote, carried out the cold-blooded murder of some 40 civilians in a
drone attack in Pakistan.

The US and its allies have shown no inclination to seek a resolution authorizing
the use of military force in the Ivory Coast, where a conflict comparable to
that in Libya is unfolding. The obvious explanation is that cacao is not
considered to have the same strategic importance as oil.

And, while claiming that the intervention in Libya is needed to ensure the
triumph of democracy in the Middle East, Washington continues to back the
regimes in Bahrain and Yemen as they mow down protesters demanding democratic
rights.

There is an element of extreme recklessness in the US-NATO intervention. What
will it produce? One likely variant would be Libya’s partition and the
resurrection of Cyrenaica, the colonial territory set up by Italy in Benghazi in
the 1920s. Any elements coming to power under such a regime would be right-wing
puppets of imperialism, comparable to Karzai in Afghanistan or Maliki in Iraq
and would inevitably carry out an even bloodier slaughter of the Libyan people.

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/liby-m18.shtml