Libya situation

4 comments

1. Re: Libya situation
   Humanitarian Intervention
   Noam Chomsky

   _Boston Review_ (http://bostonreview.net/BR18.6/chomsky.html) , December,
   1993 – January, 1994
   The first question that comes to mind about “humanitarian intervention” is
   whether the category exists. Are states moral agents? Or were Machiavelli,
   Adam Smith, and a host of others correct in concluding that they commonly
   act in the interests of domestic power – in Smith’s day, the “merchants and
   manufacturers” who were “by far the principal architects” of policy and
   whose interests were “most peculiarly attended to,” whatever the effects on
   others; in ours, corporate and financial power centers, increasingly
   transnational in scale? A second obvious question has to do with those who are to
   be in charge: what do their institutions and record lead us to expect?

   There is ample documentary material supporting the belief that states are
   moral agents, in fact uniformly so. Without having read the texts, I
   presume that when the invasion of Afghanistan began to go sour, pre-Gorbachev Pr
   avda portrayed it as having begun with “blundering efforts to do good”
   though most people now recognize it to have been a “disastrous mistake” because
   Russia “could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to
   itself;” it was an “error” based on misunderstanding and naiveté, yet another
   example of “our excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence.” The
   quoted phrases are those used to describe Kennedy’s invasion of South Vietnam,
   later expanded to all of Indochina, at the dissident extreme, well after
   the Tet offensive convinced US business leaders that the enterprise should
   be liquidated (Anthony Lewis, John King Fairbank). There is no need to
   sample the harsher parts of the spectrum.

   Furthermore, these examples generalize, though it is true that only in
   cultures with a deeply totalitarian strain do we find such notions as
   “anti-Soviet” or “anti-American,” applied to the miscreants who see something other
   than righteousness and benevolence in the actions of their noble leaders;
   imagine the reaction to a book on “anti-Italianism” in Milan or Rome, or
   any society with a functioning democratic culture.

   The pattern is familiar since biblical days. But the conventional
   pronouncements plainly do not suffice to refute skepticism about the morality of
   states. It is necessary to review the record, which reveals, unequivocally,
   that the category of “humanitarian intervention” is vanishingly small.

   One might take the heroic stand that in the special case of the United
   States, facts are irrelevant. Thus the Eaton Professor of the Science of
   Government at Harvard instructs us that the United States must maintain its
   “international primacy” for the benefit of the world, because its “national
   identity is defined by a set of universal political and economic values,”
   namely “liberty, democracy, equality, private property, and markets” (Samuel
   Huntington). Since this is a matter of definition, so the Science of
   Government teaches, it would be an error of logic to bring up the factual record.
   What may have happened in history is merely “the abuse of reality,” an elder
   statesman of the “realist” school explained 30 years ago; “reality itself”
   is the unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history
   as our minds reflect it,” and that shows that the “transcendent purpose” of
   the United States is “the establishment of equality in freedom in
   America,” and indeed throughout the world, since “the arena within which the United
   States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide” (Hans
   Morgenthau).

   Assuming these doctrines, it would be an elementary error, in evaluating
   Washington’s promotion of human rights, to consider the close correlation
   between US aid and torture, running right through the Carter years, including
   military aid and independent of need, an inquiry that would be pointless
   to undertake as Shultz, Abrams, et al. took the reins. And our love of
   democracy is also immune to empirical evaluation. We may put aside the
   conclusions of years of scholarship, recently updated for the 1980s by Reagan State
   Department official Thomas Carothers: democratization in Latin America was
   uncorrelated (in fact, negatively correlated) with US influence, and the
   United States continued “to adopt prodemocracy policies as a means of
   relieving pressure for more radical change, but inevitably sought only limited,
   top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the
   traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied.”
   We need not waste words on the nature of these “traditional structures.” In
   practice, “democracy” has been defined in terms of outcome, not conditions
   and process. But that cannot affect what is true by definition of our
   “national identity.”

   Those who are still not satisfied can be offered the doctrine of “change
   of course,” soberly invoked whenever the stance of noble intent becomes
   impossible to sustain. True, bad things have been done in the past for und
   erstandable reasons, but now all will be different. So our terrorist wars
   against the church and other deviants in Central America in the 1980s, leaving
   the region littered with hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated
   victims and ruining its countries perhaps beyond recovery, was really a war
   with the Russians. Now we will “change course” and lead the way to a bright
   future. The same line of argument had been used to dismiss as irrelevant the
   enthusiastic support for “that admirable Italian gentleman” Mussolini (FDR,
   1933) and for the moderate Hitler, both barring the Bolshevik threat; the
   resurrection of fascist collaborators and destruction of the anti-fascist
   resistance worldwide after the World War; the overthrow of democracies and
   support for neo-Nazi monsters throughout the world in subsequent years; and
   on, and on. Similarly, the second superpower invoked the threat of the Evil
   Empire as it carried out its atrocities at home and in the region.

   To evaluate these useful doctrines, we must again investigate cases,
   impossible here. What such inquiry reveals is that for both superpowers, the
   threat of the other served primarily as a device of population control,
   providing pretexts for actions taken on quite different grounds. Furthermore, we
   discover that policies were hardly different before and after the Cold War.
   True, Woodrow Wilson needed different pretexts. He was protecting the
   country from the Huns, not the Russians, when he invaded Haiti and the
   Dominican Republic, where his warriors – as viciously racist as the Administration
   in Washington – murdered and destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery,
   dismantled the constitutional system because the backward Haitians could not see
   the merits of turning their country into a US plantation, and established
   the National Guards that ran the countries by violence and terror after the
   Marines finally left.

   The story has been the same since the origins of the Republic. The first
   great massacre, of the Pequots, was imposed upon us by “base Canadian
   fiends,” the President of Yale University explained. Thomas Jefferson attributed
   the failure of “the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness
   of the aboriginal inhabitants of our vicinities” to the English enemy, who
   forced upon us “the confirmed brutalization, if not the extermination of
   this race in our America. . . .” And on through the conquest of the national
   territory, the Philippines, the marauding in our “backyard,” and the rest
   of the disgraceful history, continuing through the Cold War without
   essential change – though as a global power, the United States by then placed
   Third World intervention in a much broader context of domination and control.

   As the Cold War ended, new pretexts had to be devised. George Bush
   celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall by invading Panama, installing the regime
   of a tiny minority of bankers and narcotraffickers who, as predicted, have
   turned Panama into the second most active center for cocaine money
   laundering in the Western Hemisphere, the State Department concedes, the United
   States still holding first place. The Red Menace having disappeared, he was
   protecting us from Hispanic narcotraffickers led by the arch-demon Noriega,
   transmuted from valued friend to reincarnation of Attila the Hun, in standard
   fashion, when he began to disobey orders. And we were soon to learn that
   in the Middle East, long the major target of our intervention forces, the
   “threats to our interests . . . could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door”
   (Bush National Security Strategy Report, March 1990); after decades of
   deception, the Soviet pretext can no longer be dredged up to justify traditional
   Pentagon-based industrial policy and intervention forces, so it is “the
   growing technological sophistication” of the Third World that requires us to
   strengthen the “defense industrial base” (AKA high tech industry) and
   maintain the world’s only massive intervention forces – a shift of rhetoric that
   at least has the merit of edging closer to the reality: that independent
   nationalism has been the prime target throughout.

   The end of the Cold War has broader effects on intervention policy than
   change of pretext. As US forces bombarded slums in Panama, Elliott Abrams
   noted that for the first time, the United States could intervene without
   concern for a Soviet reaction anywhere. Many have observed that the
   disappearance of the Soviet deterrent “makes military power more useful as a United
   States foreign policy instrument . . . against those who contemplate
   challenging important American interests” (Dimitri Simes, Senior Associate at the
   Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Dec. 1988). Such considerations
   aside, a rational person will recognize that policy flows from institutions,
   institutions remain stable, and thus intervention is likely to be
   undertaken, when deemed necessary, for much the same reasons as before.

   It is in this light that a reasonable person will evaluate policy
   pronouncements. Suppose that Brezhnev had announced that the USSR would no longer
   be content with containing the Evil Empire; rather, it would move to a
   policy of “enlargement” of the community of free and democratic societies. If
   they did not merely collapse in ridicule, rational people would ask just how
   the USSR had been defending freedom and democracy before. And they would
   react exactly the same way when Clinton’s National Security Adviser explains
   that we can now go beyond containment to “enlargement – enlargement of the
   world’s free community of market democracies,” adding that we are “of
   course” unlike others in that “we do not seek to expand the reach of our
   institutions by force, subversion or repression.” A reasonable person will ask
   just how we have been protecting democracy and markets, and will quickly
   discover our antagonism to democracy (unless “top-down” rule by the traditional
   gentle hands can be assured) and to markets (for us, that is; they are
   fine, indeed obligatory, for the weak, who are not entitled to the massive
   state intervention and protection that has always been a leading feature of
   policy, as in every successful developed society). As for our distaste for
   “force, subversion or repression” – again, no words need be wasted.

   It is a useful exercise to compare the actual reaction to Anthony Lake’s
   announcement of the new Clinton foreign policy with the reaction that
   minimal rationality would dictate. We can learn a good deal about our political
   and intellectual culture by carrying it out.

   It is not that the reaction lacked honesty. Thus The New York Times’s
   chief diplomatic correspondent, Thomas Friedman, outlined “the Administration’s
   foreign policy vision” quite accurately: its “essence” is “that in a world
   in which the United States no longer has to worry daily about a Soviet
   nuclear threat, where and how it intervenes abroad is increasingly a matter of
   choice”; the insight of Simes and others, when we understand the “nuclear
   threat” appropriately. The “essence” of policy was clarified further the
   following day in a report on the conclusions of the White House panel on
   intervention, announcing the end of the era of altruism. No more “nice guy,” as
   in the days when we turned much of the world into graveyards and deserts.
   Henceforth intervention will be where and how US power chooses, the guiding
   consideration being: “What is in it for us?” – the words highlighted in
   the Times report. To be sure, the “vision” is cloaked in appropriate rhetoric
   about “democracy” and all good things, the standard accompaniment whatever
   is being implemented, and by whom, hence meaningless – carrying no
   information, in the technical sense.

   The declared intent, the record of planning, and the actual policies
   implemented, with their persistent leading themes, will not be overlooked by
   someone seriously considering “humanitarian intervention,” which, in this
   world, means intervention authorized or directed by the United States.

   Consider, for example, the torture of Cubans, intensified with Cold War
   pretexts removed. It has two major elements: first, to ensure that the island
   is returned to its status as a US economic dependency and haven for rich
   tourists, drug traffickers, and the like, perhaps under a facade of
   democracy (with outcome controlled). Second, to punish Cubans for the crime of
   disobedience. Servants elsewhere must be taught the heavy cost of standing up
   to the Enforcer.

   Since these are natural policy imperatives, we find them quite generally.
   It was not enough to slaughter millions of people in Indochina and destroy
   three countries; two decades later, its people must still be ground to dust
   by economic warfare to teach the proper lessons, while in our peculiarly
   American way we whimper piteously about the tragic fate we have suffered at
   the hands of our Vietnamese tormentors, setting “guidelines” that they must
   follow for entry into our “civilized world” – and relaxing our grip only
   when the business community comes to fear that substantial profits are being
   sacrificed.

   Or consider Nicaragua, now reduced by US violence and economic warfare to
   virtually the level of Haiti, with thousands of children starving to death
   on the streets of Managua and far worse conditions in the countryside. Its
   people must suffer much more; the United States is nowhere near satisfied.
   In October 1993, the US-run international economic institutions (IMF, World
   Bank) presented new demands to the government of Nicaragua. It must reduce
   its debt to zero; eliminate credits from the national bank; privatize
   everything to ensure that poor people really feel the pain – losing water, for
   example, if they cannot pay. Nicaragua must cut public expenditures by $60
   million, virtually eliminating much of what remains of health and welfare
   services, while infant mortality rises along with disease, malnutrition, and
   starvation, offering new opportunities to condemn the “economic
   mismanagement” of the despised enemy.

   The $60 million figure was perhaps selected for its symbolic value. Last
   year the already privatized banks shipped $60 million abroad, following
   sound economic principles: playing the New York stock market is a far more
   efficient use of resources than giving credits to poor bean farmers. The bean
   harvest was lost, a catastrophe for the population, though the sophisticated
   understand that such considerations are irrelevant to economic
   rationality. Nicaragua has now been ordered to fully privatize banks, to ensure that
   what capital there is will be efficiently used, with consequences that are
   evident.

   On Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, 100,000 people are now starving to death,
   with aid only from Europe and Canada. Most are Miskito Indians. Nothing was
   more inspiring than the laments about the Miskitos after a few dozen were
   killed and many forcibly moved by the sandinistas in the course of the US
   terrorist war, a “campaign of virtual genocide” (Reagan), the most “massive”
   human rights violation in Central America (Jeane Kirkpatrick), far
   outweighing the slaughter, torture, and mutilation of tens of thousands of people
   by the neo-Nazi gangsters they were directing and arming, and lauding as
   stellar democrats, at the very same time. What has happened to the laments,
   now that 100,000 are starving to death? The answer is simplicity itself.
   Human rights have purely instrumental value in the political culture; they
   provide a useful tool for propaganda, nothing more. Ten years ago the Miskitos
   were “worthy victims,” their suffering attributable to official enemies;
   now they have joined the vast category of “unworthy victims” whose far worse
   suffering can be added to our considerable account. The pattern is
   remarkably uniform in time and place, along with the impressive inability to
   perceive it.

   Not surprisingly, terrorism has the same status. When the State Department
   confirmed that its Honduran-based terrorist forces were authorized to
   attack agricultural cooperatives, Michael Kinsley, again at the liberal dovish
   extreme, cautioned against thoughtless condemnation of this official
   policy. Such international terrorist operations cause “vast civilian suffering,”
   he agreed, but they may nevertheless be “sensible,” even “perfectly
   legitimate,” if they “undermine morale and confidence in the government” that
   Washington seeks to overthrow. Terror is to be evaluated by “cost-benefit
   analysis,” which we are authorized to conduct to determine whether “the amount
   of blood and misery that will be poured in” yields “democracy,” in the
   special sense of US political culture. Our wholesale terrorism need satisfy only
   the pragmatic criterion; retail terrorism by others, who lack our innate
   perfection, is the “plague of the modern age” to be punished with arbitrary
   harshness by the same judge and executioner, amidst a chorus of praise for
   his unparalleled virtue.

   As in the case of Vietnam and Cuba, so we now stand in judgment over
   Nicaragua for its crimes against us. In September, the Senate voted 94­p;4
   to ban any aid if Nicaragua fails to return or give adequate compensation
   (as determined by Washington) for properties of US citizens seized when
   Somoza fell – assets of US participants in the crushing of the beasts of burden
   by the tyrant who had long been a US favorite, and whose murderous National
   Guard was supported by the Carter Administration right through its
   massacre of tens of thousands of people in July 1979 – and beyond. Shortly before,
   the Senate had cut off aid until Nicaragua proves that it is not engaged
   in international terrorism, the stern judges being those who were condemned
   by the World Court for the “unlawful use of force” against Nicaragua, and
   ordered to pay compensation, which would have amounted to billions of
   dollars; naturally Washington, with the applause of intellectual opinion,
   dismissed the Court with contempt as a “hostile forum” (New York Times). US
   threats finally compelled Nicaragua to withdraw the claims for reparations after
   a US-Nicaragua agreement “aimed at enhancing economic, commercial and
   technical development to the maximum extent possible,” Nicaragua’s agent
   informed the Court. The withdrawal of just claims having been achieved by force,
   Washington has now abrogated the agreement, suspending its trickle of aid
   with demands of increasing depravity and gall. The press maintains its
   familiar deafening silence.

   Torture of Vietnamese, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Iraqi children, and others, is
   a policy priority for the reasons already mentioned, which are understood
   in the Third World, though excluded from our well-insulated political
   culture. The prevailing mood was captured by a leading Brazilian theologian,
   Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of São Paulo: throughout the South “there is
   hatred and fear: When will they decide to invade us,” and on what pretext?

   The Nicaraguan case raises another issue that will not be overlooked by
   serious people considering the prospects for “humanitarian intervention.” The
   leader of such intervention will be a state that is remarkable not only
   for its violence, impudence, and moral cowardice, but also for its
   lawlessness, not only in recent years. Washington’s dismissal of the World Court
   decision had its counterpart when Woodrow Wilson effectively disbanded the
   Central American Court of Justice after it had the audacity to uphold Costa
   Rican and Salvadoran claims that the United States was violating their
   sovereignty by imposing on Nicaragua, safely occupied by Wilson’s troops, a treaty
   granting the United States perpetual rights over any canal. The United
   States has sought to undermine the UN ever since it fell “out of control” in
   the 1960s. Washington is far in the lead in vetoing Security Council
   resolutions in these years, followed by Britain, with France a distant third and
   the USSR fourth. The record in the General Assembly is similar on a wide
   range of issues concerning human rights, observance of international law,
   aggression, disarmament, and so on, though the facts are rarely reported, being
   useless for power interests. The United States record at the 1989­p;90
   Winter session of the UN, right after the Berlin Wall fell, is
   particularly informative in this respect; I have reviewed it elsewhere, and there is
   no space to do so here. Such facts, available in abundance, have yet to
   disrupt the chorus of self-praise.

   The standard rendition of the unreported facts is that “the Soviet veto
   and the hostility of many Third World nations made the United Nations an
   object of scorn to many American politicians and citizens,” though with these
   disruptive elements gone and the UN safely under US rule, “it has proved to
   be an effective instrument of world leadership, and, potentially, an agency
   that can effect both peace and the rule of law in troubled regions” (David
   Broder, Washington Post). The same message has resounded through the
   doctrinal system with scarcely a discordant note – yet another achievement that
   any dictator would admire.

   Nothing changes as we move to the new Administration. Clinton won great
   praise for his courage in launching missiles at a defenseless enemy without
   loss of American lives (only expendable Iraqi civilians). In a typical
   reaction, the Washington Post praised him for “confronting foreign aggression,”
   relieving the fear that he might not be willing to resort to violence as
   freely as his predecessors; the bombing refuted the dangerous belief that
   “American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era was destined to be forever
   hogtied by the constraints of multilateralism” – that is, by international
   law and the UN charter. At the Security Council, Clinton’s Ambassador
   defended the resort to force with an appeal to Article 51 of the UN Charter,
   which authorizes the use of force in self-defense against armed attack until
   the Security Council takes action, such self-defense being authorized when
   its necessity is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means and
   no moment for deliberation,” according to standard interpretations. To
   invoke Article 51 in bombing Baghdad two months after an alleged attempt to
   assassinate a former president scarcely rises to the level of absurdity, a
   matter of little concern to commentators.

   The prospective leader of “humanitarian intervention” is also notorious
   for its ability to maintain a self-image of benevolence whatever it does, a
   trait that impressed de Tocqueville 150 years ago. Observing one of the
   great atrocities, he was struck that Americans could deprive Indians of their
   rights and exterminate them “with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally,
   philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single
   great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.” It was impossible to
   destroy people with “more respect for the laws of humanity,” he wrote. So it
   has always been, to this day.

   Several qualifications must be added. The United States is not
   significantly different from others in its history of violence and lawlessness.
   Rather, it is more powerful, therefore more dangerous, a danger magnified by the
   capacity of the elite culture to deny and evade the obvious.

   A second qualification is that intervention undertaken on the normal
   grounds of power interests might, by accident, be helpful to the targeted
   population. Such examples exist. The most obvious recent one is Vietnam’s
   invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 after years of murderous Khmer Rouge attacks
   on Vietnamese border areas; under comparable conditions, the United States
   would probably have nuked Phnom Penh. The Vietnamese invasion removed Pol
   Pot, terminating major atrocities, though that was not the motivating
   factor. And we recall the response in the West to the prime example of
   “humanitarian intervention” in recent years. The United States and its allies at
   once reconstituted the defeated Khmer Rouge at the Thai border so that they
   could resume their depredations. There was furious denunciation of the
   “Prussians of Asia” who had dared to remove Pol Pot (New York Times). The
   doctrinal system shifted gears: instead of invoking the issue of MIAs, we would
   henceforth punish Vietnam for the crime of ridding Cambodia of the Khmer
   Rouge. When it became impossible to deny that Vietnamese troops had withdrawn,
   the system shifted smoothly back to the old pretext – which remains
   unsullied by any notice of the lack of interest about MIAs from earlier wars, the
   atrocious US treatment of POWs in Vietnam, Korea, and the Pacific War, or
   the obscenity of the entire enterprise of holding Vietnamese to account for
   what they have done to us.

   Furthermore, unlike states, people are moral agents. Occasionally, the
   population has compelled the state to undertake humanitarian efforts. I need
   not discuss the Somalian intervention, transparently cynical from its first
   days. But consider a real example: the protection zone that the Bush
   Administration reluctantly extended to the Kurds in northern Iraq, after tacitly
   supporting Saddam Hussein as he crushed the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings.
   Here public opinion played a decisive role, overcoming the Administration’s
   commitment to the rule of a unified Iraq by an “iron fist,” whether wielded
   by Saddam or some clone, as Washington explained by way of the Times chief
   diplomatic correspondent.

   The sincerity of the concern for the Kurds is demonstrated by what
   happened as public attention waned. They are subject to Iraqi embargo in addition
   to the sanctions against Iraq. The West refuses to provide the piddling
   sums required to satisfy their basic needs and keep them from Saddam’s hideous
   embrace. The UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs prepared a 1/2 billion
   dollar relief and rehabilitation program for Kurds, Shiites, and
   poverty-stricken Sunnis in central Iraq. The Clinton Administration – “haunted by the
   pictures of Kurdish women and children cut down by poison gas,” the
   President assured the UN – offered $15 million, “money left over from
   contributions to a previous UN program in northern Iraq,” the director of Middle East
   Watch reports.

   Finally, the conclusions that a rational observer will draw about US-led
   “humanitarian intervention” do not answer the question whether such
   intervention should nevertheless be undertaken. That is a separate matter, to be
   faced without illusions about our unique nobility. We can, in short, ask
   whether the pursuit of self-interest might happen to benefit others in
   particular cases, or whether unremitting public pressure might overcome the demands
   of the “principal architects” of policy and the interests they serve.

   There is also a more fundamental question: Can our political and
   intellectual culture, our society and institutions, undergo the radical
   transformations that would be required for an American citizen to use such phrases as
   “American humanitarian intervention” or “enlargement of the world’s free
   community of market democracies” without shame? The fate of much of the world
   depends on the answer we give to that question.

   Reply

2. RE: Libya situation
   Gabriel Christian et al:
   Finally, I get it. We live in an imperfect world and unfortunately for the people in Libya yearning for the freedom of the human spirit, despot Gaddafi just happens to be a feature of our imperfect world with the God given right to kill those who no longer want him to rule them. What the heck? La bloody vie! Whose dumb idea is it that 42 years in charge could ever be enough? So why doesn’t the civilized world just sit back and enjoy the Colonel’s brutal butchery of as many Libyans as he needs to kill so that he can continue to enjoy the exclusive privilege of despotic rule? Its called the divine plan… the spontaneous unfolding of natural law. Damn Obama! Damn Sarkozy! Damn Cameron! Who the hell do they think they are to be interfering? God Bless the Butcher of Tripoli through whose madness and bribe money diplomacy, corrupt Labour Party politicians in the Eastern Caribbean will live happily ever after.
   And so it goes!

   Reply

3. RE: Libya situation
   Dear Lennox:

   First of all it is not Anti-American to criticize a tendency toward
   war-making, and against peace. I reiterate here that I criticized the rush to
   war in Libya, yet hold no brief for any leader who massacres his own. If I
   did not know you better, it would seem that you inferred that one Gaddafi
   supporter who accepts massacre, where one passes on articles written by
   others which are at deviance from the mainstream media, as I have done. I sought
   to simply share alternate views. I abhor group think. We must
   respectfully agree to disagree, and still love each other for that spirit of
   intellectual inquiry without which we may become that which we criticize.

   “God given right to kill those who no longer want him to rule them.”

   The above is a regrettable statement where made in response to my
   stance against the war in Libya.

   This is a red herring and a sad diversion that ensnares a progressive
   President, Obama, for whom we voted in a 3rd war of choice. The drain on
   America’s economy, the cost in lives – such as the more than 800,000 Iraqis
   killed so far as a direct result of that war, is what I resist and condemn here.
   The consistent stance in pursuit of peaceful resolution of conflict is why
   we support Dr. Peter St. Jean and the Peace Summit. A culture of peace is
   better than a culture of war; that is our view.

   If one were to take the position of NATO, then we have to enforce the
   principle that intervention in civil wars in now normative principle in
   international law. This is not about Pro or Anti Gaddafi. It reminds me of the
   old McCarthyism that anyone who condemn US policy domestic – or foreign – is
   anti American. No Lennox, et al, those who protest America’s descent into a
   plutocratic entity enmeshed in wars are defending the democratic practice
   of free speech and equality of opportunity. What if the pro Confederate
   French and British had intervened in the US Civil War to thwart Abraham
   Lincoln’s mission to emancipate the slaves? It almost happened, but for the
   success of the Union Army. No one today can deny that it was right and proper
   for the US Civil War to be handled by the American people. In Libya, the UN
   Mission could not even complete its investigation before this rush to war.
   The African Union mission tried to mediate the conflict but its mission
   leader had to abandon his trip. He could not go to Tripoli or Benghazi, because
   of the “No Fly Zone.” This is a rush to war and it is not even won and
   they are busily signing oil contracts!!! Go figure.

   I am confident that where the Libyan desires to be rid of Gaddafi, or any
   despot, they shall succeed. No leader can oppress his people in
   perpetuity. History proves that.

   I object to US intervention in the Libyan civil war. I do believe that the
   Libyan people will get their freedom, the same way the South Africans did
   – who by the way had no support from NATO after decades of massacres much
   worst than that alleged.

   Now about Dominica: Where we organize, lovingly reach out to those with
   whom we differ, educate the masses about our laws, economics, the science of
   sustainability, the need for volunteerism and civics as a means for uplift,
   transparently build alliances from the grassroots and rely on the power of
   the people, then no dictatorship or errant government can long endure.
   However, in our desire for better in Dominica, let us not conflate the war
   in Libya with our situation in Dominica. That would be a mistake. Dominica
   is not Libya. Our struggle of years have built a different ethic on our
   island. Despite our detractors efforts to tarnish those of us who seek better,
   we have never sought the breakdown of law and order on Dominica. We have
   warned that – where our government engages in misrule – disorder can and
   will come. We have acted to warn, caution and tamp down criminal conduct in
   high and low places. And that is how we must struggle – but do so with
   wisdom. For all our disabilities and failings, there is democratic space within
   which to work and build for better on Dominica. Let us not make any mistake
   and be carried away by passion, to deny otherwise. Indeed, we must seek to
   increase the democratic and rule of law space on Dominica and hold
   Government and people to account. But we shall rue the day, where we demonize those
   who have demonized us and so unwittingly become that which we criticize.

   In countries where people lack a mediative culture, they easily lose sight
   of due process and resort to violent actions and not reason.

   That is not our way. Let us not muddle the message of hope that we seek to
   bring.

   I remain,

   Truly yours,

   GJC

   Reply

4. RE: Libya situation
   Gabriel:
   Your eloquent waffle on what is and what is not Anti-American is merely an attempt to hide your understandable pro Qaddafi sympathies behind opposition to US involvement in another war. I am not buying it. No where in my brief piece was there any attempt to, as you suggest “hurl the inflammatory banner of Anti-Americanism against the anti-war movement”. But that was not enough. You actually found the unmitigated gall to infer that I am seeking to curtail your views because I do not agree with them. Gabriel, is this really you? How do I curtail your views by expressing mine? Should I conclude that you are therefore seeking to curtail my views because you do not agree with them?
   Like you my brother, I read. I am aware of the views on all sides of this Libyan crisis from the mainstream media and beyond
   Unfortunately, I must have missed the anti-war pieces that you penned with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan. You were probably not aware then that Noam Chomsky and others were writing against these wars and so you did not diligently forward their articles to my mail box.
   Comrade, let us just agree that I disagree with you and save your lectures about “McCarthyism”, the abhorrence of “group think” and “plutocratic entities enmeshed in wars” for Cecil Joseph and the other members of your pro-Qaddafi brigade in the Skerrit cabal.
   That is not too much to ask? Is it?
   Bless UP!
   LENNOX

   Reply

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