Category: News

The contradictions and the lies that are the foundation for the intervention in Libya are so numerous it’s hard to keep track, and can be even harder to write about over and over and over again. But today’s headlines gave me another opportunity…

September 14, 2011:  Libya fighters issue deadline to civilians in Gadhafi stronghold

Libya’s interim leadership gave residents in the pro-Gadhafi stronghold of Bani Walid a 48-hour notice to leave the city, as it sent reinforcements there and to the former regime’s other remaining strongholds at Sirte and Sabha.

…The new deadline warns civilians to evacuate before an offensive by the rebels.

This is pretty serious. The rebels are warning civilians they better leave their homes and become refugees unless they want to be indiscriminately targeted with guns and bombs in a city deemed to be too pro-Gadhafi.

Actually, this sounds rather familiar…

March 16, 2011: Libya army orders Benghazi residents to leave rebel-held areas 

The Libyan army issued an ultimatum on Wednesday to residents of the opposition capital  Benghazi, warning them to leave rebel-held locations and weapons storage areas by midnight, Libyan television reported.

A text on the screen of Al-Libya television addressed inhabitants of the eastern city, saying the army was coming “to support you and to cleanse your city from armed gangs.”

Muammar Gadhafi and the Libyan army issued a deadline back in March for Benghazi residents to evacuate so that they could unleash guns and bombs on a city deemed to be too anti-Gadhafi. This announcement was the straw that broke the camels back, making clear to Western leaders that Gadhafi may soon be killing large numbers of civilians and that a no-fly zone was necessary to prevent such actions.

Gadhafi was much more colorful about it, calling them rats and dogs and such. Nevertheless, the principle is the same and the results for Bani Walid residents would be the same for Benghazi residents. And these things are already a reality for the residents of these last remaining Gadhafi strongholds. As I wrote in today’s news piece, “as rebel forces invaded these last remaining bastions of Gadhafi support and NATO followed up with unrelenting air raids, hundreds of civilians poured out of these towns, fleeing the violence. The refugees reported days of intense firefights and bombing and complained of deteriorating humanitarian conditions.”

Alas, this is the most consistent principle in US foreign policy, though: crimes are only crimes if we don’t already support you.

I was sad to read this morning of the death of Carl Oglesby, one of the great leaders of the early Vietnam antiwar movement.

Oglesby was a leader and one-time president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SDS was the leading antiwar students group in the 1960s until factional politics caused the implosion of the group in 1969. Another SDS leader once described the makeup of SDS: “We have within our ranks Communists of both varieties, socialists of all sorts, 3 or 4 different kinds of anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, syndicalists, social democrats, humanist liberals, a growing number of ex-YAF libertarian laissez-faire capitalists, and, of course, the articulate vanguard of the psychedelic liberation front.”

I joined my high school’s SDS in late 1968 and was quite active until shortly after the split in the national organization (and subsequently, the local Los Angeles high school group). My attraction to the organization was its mass-based approach under the leadership of Oglesby.

Oglesby was a proponent of working with libertarians and conservative antiwar activists in such groups as Young Americans for Freedom on war and other issues. He argued that “the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.”

In his essay “Vietnamese Crucible,” published in the 1967 volume Containment and Change, Oglesby rejected the “socialist radical, the corporatist conservative, and the welfare-state liberal” and challenged the New Left to embrace “American democratic populism” and “the American libertarian right.”

Oglesby was expelled from SDS in 1969, after more left-wing members accused him of “being ‘trapped in our early, bourgeois stage’ and for not progressing into ‘a Marxist-Leninist perspective.'”

Oglesby later became a writer, a musician, and an academic. He wrote several books on the JFK assassination and American class analysis. He also recorded two albums, roughly in the folk-rock genre. He taught politics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College.

Oglesby was friends with Murray Rothbard and other libertarian leaders. Rothbard wrote approvingly of Oglesby’s writings, particularly his books The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Containment and Change.

In a later work, Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement, Oglesby said that two historians “rang his bell”: “One was the liberal William Appleman Williams, and the other was the conservative Murray Rothbard. They were both libertarians, and that is what I had begun calling myself. I still do. Libertarianism is a stance that allows one to speak to the right as well as to the left, which is what I was always trying to do.”

Oglesby’s fight to broaden and open the antiwar movement is still being waged today. We can hope that people will remember the lessons of SDS’s demise and advance beyond sectarianism.

Additional reading:

Jesse Walker’s obituary of Oglesby at Reason.com

Bill Kauffman interviews Oglesby (2008)

Murray Rothbard on The New Left

The Obama cult is going on the offensive, on the theory that the best defense is a good offense, the Obama cult is going on the attack – launching a special web site, and a twitter feed, attackwatch.com, which is devoted to refuting the “smears” being repeated by the counter-revolutinary wreckers who oppose the Will of the Dear Leader. “President Obama’s opponents have falsely suggested that the President has not been a strong ally to Israel,” the Obamaites whine. How dare anyone suggest that the US isn’t at Tel Aviv’s beck and call! Even the suggestion of something less than absolute fealty is considered a “smear.” If that doesn’t underscore what’s wrong with American foreign policy in the Middle East, then I don’t know what does.

 On the boob tube, Rachel Maddow is leading the counter-attack, going after Republicans for “lying” about the Dear Leader’s wise policies.  When Ron Paul said that the US embassy in Iraq is bigger than the Vatican and will cost $1 billion – and that we should be keeping that money at home – Rachel is had a cow on camera. No, she barked, the Vatican is 110 acres and the embassy is 108, and also the cost of the embassy is “several hundred million” under $1 billion.” She then crumpled a piece of paper, threw it at the camera, and bellowed “False!”

Rachel, you need to hire some new researchers: yes, Vatican City is 110 acres, but that’s not the same entity as The Vatican. Vatican City is a sovereign state, which includes the Holy See – the actual residence of the Pope and the organizational headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church – as well as the land around it. Indeed, as this source points out:

“Vatican City, the state, is distinct from the Holy See, which is the episcopal leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. The two entities even have distinct passports.”

Look at this detailed map of Vatican City: clearly the Holy See is centered in the buildings encircling St. Peter’s Square, from the Papal Audience Hall in the southern sector, to the Barracks of the Swiss Guards, to the north — totaling perhaps a third of Vatican City’s land area.

Why am I not surprised that Maddow and her staff know even less about the Vatican than they do about other subjects?

As to the cost issue, the answer is to be found in a piece published on … the MSNBC web ite! And I quote:

“Estimated cost of over $1 billion
Original cost estimates ranged over $1 billion, but Congress appropriated only $592 million in the emergency Iraq budget adopted last year. Most has gone to a Kuwait builder, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, with the rest awarded to six contractors working on the project’s “classified” portion — the actual embassy offices.”

So they want more, and will probably appropriate more in the future – but the original estimates totaled a cool $1 billion, and there’s plenty of time to equal and – yes – surpass that figure.

C’mon, Rachel – you can do better than this – I just know you can!

The question I find fascinating, however, is why – out of all the subjects brought up at the GOP debate – did Mad Cow Maddow pick up on this one in particular? Are the Obamaites getting their clueless followers ready to swallow a new line change about Iraq? You’ll remember that Maddow breathlessly reported on “the last American troops to come out of Iraq” – a laughable propaganda stunt that made her look foolish, what with all those thousands of Americans still there, and the US government making every effort to persuade the Iraqis to let them stay. Oh, but those aren’t troop troops, they’re “back-up” troops, trainers, advisors – and where have we heard this line before?

Maddow gets more disgusting servile by the day.

Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group opposed to what they see as the westernization of Nigeria, is making headlines yet again. Staying true to its name –Boko Haram means “Western education is a sin”– the “Nigerian Taliban” has said that it will bomb 18 Nigerian universities between September 12th and 17th. Most ominously, the group said that the attacks are “not a threat, but a notification which must be strictly adhered to.”

While attacks by Boko Haram are nothing new in Nigeria, the latest “notification” specifically targets the University of Ibadan and University of Benin. If Boko Haram successfully carries out either of these attacks, it will be significant for three reasons: both of these universities are among the most prominent in the country and would deal a devastating blow to the psyche of higher education in Nigeria; both of these universities are located in the Christian south and could enflame religious tensions; and the University of Benin is located in the oil rich Niger Delta.

Boko Haram has evolved rather spectacularly from an organization that shunned modern technology and relied on bow and arrow to attack,  to an internationally recognized terrorist group in the wake of the Abuja bombing. The evolution and internationalization of Boko Haram is not necessarily a sign of contact with al-Qaeda as Nigerian expert Jean Herskovits notes.

There has also been media speculation, fueled by government suggestions, that at various times members of Boko Haram have received training in Somalia, Sudan, Algeria, Mali, Yemen and even Afghanistan. But Boko Haram has at most only a few hundred hard-core members (though sympathizers, brought along by the brutality of the security forces, may add a few thousand), and they are known by those who live among them to be largely unemployed and impoverished. Few seem to be equipped for such traveling abroad.

Nor do sophisticated, powerful, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have to come through an al Qaeda connection. Nigeria’s first major explosion on such a scale came in July 2009, when the militant Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), blew up the Atlas Cove jetty, an oil-storage and loading facility in Lagos, the commercial capital.

Herskovits rightly questions just how extensive, if at all, links are between al-Qaeda and Boko Haram. She does make clear, however, that misguided counterterrorism strategy in the region, as this writer suggested could happen, has the potential to do much more damage than Boko Haram could ever dream of.

Should Africom initiatives – especially in counterterrorism training – identify the United States more closely with Nigeria’s current government and its security agencies, there could be a consequence that neither Americans nor most Nigerians would welcome: America would be seen as an enemy, opening the way to exactly the Al Qaeda presence they least want.

As has been stressed before, the situation in Nigeria ought to be watched very closely. It could soon enough mutate into a hotbed for terrorism or American counterterrorism operations. 

There is a highly valuable lesson that can be learned, and should be learned, by Americans of political persuasions who still believe the idea that al-Qaeda attacked the United States because of its values, not its policies. Al-Qaeda did not wage a brutal campaign against drinking establishments, pot dispensaries, lingerie stores, churches, ball parks and Walmarts. Instead, they struck the Pentagon, the epitome of American militarism run amok, and the World Trade Centers, the symbol of America’s economic superpower status. When considering their goals, the targets could not have been more appropriate: al Qaeda has succeeded remarkably in bleeding America dry through endless wars.

Boko Haram, on the other hand, has attacked schools, beer gardens, and other “Western” institutions precisely because it detests Nigeria for westernizing. However, even Nigeria has experienced blowback, as the US did on 9/11, in response to its ruthless oppression of Boko Haram.

If the motivation of terrorists is to be understood, there could be no better place to start than in Nigeria with Boko Haram.