Informed Comment

Aljazeera Arabic is reporting a breakthrough in the negotiations between the new government in Tripoli and the elders of the city of Bani Walid, a center of pro-Qaddafi military personnel and sentiments. The city authorities say they will permit the Transitional National Council’s troops to enter the city without opposition around noon on Tuesday, according to the Doha-based channel. These negotiations had postponed plans to invest the city formulated last week. The TNC fighters also said that Saif al-Islam Qaddafi had left, or would momentarily leave the city.

If the TNC really can enter Bani Walid peacefully, it would be a great accomplishment for the new Libya, obviating a siege of a reluctant population, and helping with the process of national reconciliation.

Indeed, a large military convoy of regime loyalists, consisting of some 200 vehicles, departed south Libya for Niger on Monday, raising questions of whether the remaining Qaddafis were in it or planned to join it. Deposed dictator Muammar Qaddafi is said to plan to flee to Burkina Faso in West Africa.

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Human Rights Watch found documents in Libya after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi that it passed on to the Wall Street Journal, which is analyzing them. The WSJ reported today that the documents show that Qaddafi developed so warm a relationship with George W. Bush that Bush sent people he had kidnapped (“rendition”) to Libya to be “questioned” by Libya’s goons, and almost certainly to be tortured. The formal paperwork asked Libya to observe human rights, but Bush’s office also sent over a list of specific questions it wanted the Libyan interrogators to ask. Qaddafi also gave permission to the CIA from 2004 to establish a formal presence in the country.

Qaddafi had been on the outs with the West for decades, but was rehabilitated once he gave up his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ programs (Qaddafi had no unconventional weapons, and no obvious ability to develop them, so his turning over to Bush of a few rotting diagrams that had been buried was hardly a big deal.

I have been going blue in the face pointing out that Muammar Qaddafi is not a progressive person, and that in fact his regime was in its last decades a helpmeet to the international status quo powers.

Now it turns out that Qaddafi was hand in glove with Bush regarding “interrogation” of the prisoners sent him from Washington.

Alexander Cockburn’s outfit has been trying to smear me by suggesting that I had some sort of relationship with the CIA, when all I ever did was give talks in Washington at think tanks to which analysts came to listen; when you speak to the public you speak to all kinds of people. I never was a direct consultant and never had a contract or employment with the agency itself. I spoke to a wide range of USG personnel in those talks in Washington in the Bush years, including the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and even local police officers, and the intelligence analysts were just part of the audience.

In fact, we now know that the Bush administration was upset that I was given a hearing in Washington and was influential with the analysts, and asked the CIA to spy on me and attempt to destroy my reputation.

So how delicious is it that those who supported Qaddafi, or opposed practical steps to keep him from slaughtering the protest movement (such as A. Cockburn and his hatchet man John Walsh), were de facto allies of the CIA themselves– and not just allies of the analysts, who try to understand the intelligence, but allies of the guys doing “rendition,” i.e. kidnapping suspects off the street and having them “interrogated.”

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The CSM reviews the jockeying for position in Libya at the Friends conference in Paris, and especially the prospects of the US.

But a spokesman for the Transitional National Council emphasized that oil bids would be let on the basis of the company’s expertise and experience, not on the political grounds of whether its nation supported the TNC.

The conference released $15 bn. in Libyan assets to the new government. If the money can be disbursed quickly and put to use efficiently, it could help overcome the country’s current shortages of staples and services, in the wake of the revolution.

Larbi Sadiki writes:

“Libyans did not begin the Arab revolution. However, they are about to close one link in the Arab revolutionary chain: three neighbouring countries with a total population of 100m Arabic-speaking people, covering a surface area of more than 3m square kilometres, are free. That is how it must have felt when the colonists left Algeria to join Morocco or Tunisia, or when the free officers came, one by one, to ditch monarchical rule in several Arab states.

The three countries should experiment with open borders and the free movement of people, goods, and ideas to show that the dawn of Arab democracies will not have any semblance to the era of Gaddafi, Mubarak and Ben Ali. [Secretary-General of the Arab League] Mr [Nabil] Al-Arabi has a golden opportunity to make this a reality. Just as Arab youth are steadfast in the struggle for freedom and democracy, their elder statesmen should meet them halfway in helping reconstruct a better Arab world.”

Historian Benjamin Stora argues that Algeria’s hostility to the Libyan revolution and to the help it received from Europe betrays a mindset stuck in the jejune Third Worldism of the 1960s. The world has changed, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the election of Barack Obama, Stora argues, but the Algerian leadership hasn’t caught up. (Actually, I think the assumption that the world is bipolar, so that one should oppose anything capitalist Western Europe does, is still widespread in left-leaning countries of the global south. But the irony is that almost all of them have taken the capitalist road themselves, and Western Europe has no obvious opposite pole that one could support, so all that’s left is a dreary knee-jerk anti-Westernism. To deploy the latter to insist that it must be allowed for a Libyan dictator to kill thousands of Libyan citizens is bizarre.

The African Union said it was reassured by the remarks in Paris of TNC leader Moustapha Abdul Jalil, in which he pledged to order the protection of foreign workers in Libya, and that it might go forward with recognizing the new government.

The Wall Street Journal got hold of, and analyzed, intelligence and military documents from the Qaddafi regime left behind when its high officials fled the capital. They show an Establishment that was clueless about the depth and breadth of the rebellion against them; corrupt and venal, giving rufies to women who were then raped; amazed to find themselves outnumbered and outgunned in the Western Mountain region; burdened with the Air Force flyers they were sent who had no notion of how to fight as infantry. They tried but failed to monitor the rebels’ telephone conversations, and to deploy their thousands of domestic spies, but they just seemed unable to understand the scale of the uprising they faced. Bewildered, they blamed it on Shiite Muslims (there are no Shiite Muslims to speak of in North Africa). The charge shows that they just had no idea who their opponents could possibly have been.

China has also begun jockeying for a position in post-Qaddafi Libya, provoking some cynicism and mirth among its dissidents on the internet.

‘Summary: Sing Tao: China Netizens Mock Former ‘Boot-Licking’ PRC Ambassador to Libya…
Sing Tao Jih Pao Online
Friday, September 2, 2011
Document Type: OSC Summary …

According to an article on 1 September by Chih Hsiao-hua carried in independent Hong Kong daily Sing Tao Jih Pao, in a microblog, mainland netizens released an article by former PRC Ambassador to Libya Wang Houli written several years ago, singing the praise of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. While serving as ambassador, Wang had six exclusive meetings with Gaddafi and the two became “good friends.” Wang defended Gaddafi’s “lifestyle,” saying that he was a dedicated Muslim who loved the Arab nation and maintained equality between the rich and the poor. Some Internet users ridiculed the ambassador by saying: “With such an ambassador, how can China not be thrown into a predicament on the Libyan issue? Chinese officials are so smart that they have exported boot licking overseas.”

(Description of Source: Hong Kong Sing Tao Jih Pao Online in Chinese — Website of “Sing Tao Daily News,” non-PRC-owned daily newspaper targeted at an educated audience; sister paper of free English-language daily The Standard; typically maintains a pro-Hong Kong Government editorial line; URL: http://www.singtao.com)’

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A NATO official has told Agence France Presse that it is the “firm view” of NATO member states that they reject the idea of sending any ground troops to Libya. And, they want the UN to authorize any extension of the no-fly zone.

Gee, it doesn’t sound to me as though NATO is the kind of grasping, occupying imperialist power it has been painted by opponents of the UN intervention.

The Friends of Libya are meeting to consider how best to help Libya move forward under the new government. Head of the Transitional National Council Mustafa Abdel Jalil will address the gathering, which includes Russia and China along with Western leaders that were more supportive of the revolution.

China is now moving vigorously to seek a position in post-Qaddafi Libya, even though it was lukewarm about the UN intervention against the former dictator.

The new government says it will honor all legal contracts entered into by the previous regime, which appears to be meant to reassure China and Russia about their investments in the country.

Critics of the Libyan revolution keep intimating that there is something sordid or crooked about business being done in that country by the US and Western Europe, but the eagerness of China to do business there is never mentioned.

Likewise, among the potentially big winners economically in Libya is South Korea, which is attending the “Friends” meeting, and which is planning many deals with the new Libyan government. Trade is generally a good thing and it would be weird if a major world economy did not want to trade with Libya; not everything is a conspiracy.

France is seeking permission to help the new government by turning over to it frozen assets of the Qaddafi regime in that country.. Britain and the US have already been given a green light by the UN Security Council and Britain flew out cash on Wednesday.

The conference will also discuss European Union training for Libyan police and army, as well as help with the judiciary system, education and financial management.

Nicolas Sarkozy, of all people, is trying to put to rest the controversy over Abdelhakim Belhadj, the head of Tripoli’s military council. Belhadj rings alarm bells because of his past association with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and later on fought in Iraq and again in Afghanistan. In other words, they had been among Ronald Reagan’s “Freedom Fighters.” Belhadj was captured by the CIA and reportedly turned against terrorism while imprisoned. The CIA helpfully released him to Qaddafi, which is surely a crime of some sort (civilized countries do not send even enemy prisoners to countries where they might be killed or tortured by the government on arrival).

Sarkozy has been anything but nice to French Muslims (who mostly voted for a Socialist woman in the last election precisely because Sarkozy he was the alternative), and he has been accused of legitimating the racist anti-Muslim discourse of Marie LePen. So if Sarkozy is vouching for Belhadj, then I’d bet that Belhadj is not a danger to the West.

And, of course, the members of the Transitional National Council, the leadership of the new Libya, have been carefully vetted by the US, Britain and France.

Qaddafi and his supporters continually beat the drumbeat of participation by LIFG in the uprising, characterizing the rebels generally as “al-Qaeda.” But since it was a broadly-based uprising encompassing virtually all sectors of society, it would be strange if hard line Muslim groups weren’t part of it– virtually everyone else was. The question is what proportion do radicals constitute of the rebels. The answer as far as I can see is “tiny.” And if it is true that Belhadj has had a major change of heart, then it is even tinier, since he is the one most often instanced by the “al-Qaeda taking over Libya” crowd.

There is a lot of Orientalism in these charges. Muslims, especially practicing ones, are under the sign of danger in the Western press in a way that Hindus and Buddhists are not (nor should any of them be). But Buddhist terrorist groups such as Om Shinrikyo (which sent poison gas into the Tokyo subway) and Hindu ones such as elements of the RSS and others, are never made to stand in for all their coreligionists the way radicalism is made to stand in for Islam.

A corollary is that radical Muslims are viewed in a static way unless they are authorized by Western authorities as “changed.” Thus, it is well known that Hamid Karzai had a six-month political deal with the Taliban in the late 1990s, and that Masoud Barzani briefly allied with Saddam Hussein against a rival Kurdish faction around the same time. Yet nowadays both are feted as strong allies of the US, one the president of Afghanistan and the other the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq. It is unclear in what way Belhadj would be different from them if he in fact gave up radical violence toward the West. But from the point of view of the Neo-Orientalists, one rebel leader who used to be a radical can be used to discredit the whole movement, and no allowance can be made for the way in which former radicals often change.

It is worth noting that most of the leadership of the Egyptian al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, formerly led by the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdelrahman, has renounced violence across the board and the movement is preparing to participate in the upcoming parliamentary elections in Egypt. People and movements change. So the attempt to tar the entire Libyan revolution with the brush of Belhadj is just propaganda, which we’ve seen a lot of surrounding the Libyan uprising. (This is because so many groups, from the Trotskyites to most of the Russian and Chinese publics and press outlets, supported Qaddafi, whether explicitly or latently.)

Propaganda is best combatted by coolly asking precisely the sort of questions I raised above, about proportionality and change over time. Propaganda is about unchanging essences and irrational appeal to emotions.

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