Posted on 08/20/2017 8:44:01 PM PDT by Lorianne
Official Washington never likes to admit a mistake no matter how grave or obvious. Too many Important People would look bad. So, the rationalizations never stop as with the Libyan fiasco
In recent weeks, the Washington Post’s Cairo bureau chief Sudarsan Raghavan has published a series of remarkable dispatches from war-torn Libya, which is still reeling from the aftermath of NATO’s March 2011 intervention and the subsequent overthrow and murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
On July 2, Raghavan reported on what amounts to Libya’s modern-day slave trade. According to his report, Libya is “now home to a thriving trade in humans. Unable to pay exorbitant smuggling fees or swindled by traffickers, some of the world’s most desperate people are being held as slaves, tortured or forced into prostitution.”
The numbers help tell the tale. “The number of migrants departing from Libya is surging,” writes Raghavan, “with more than 70,000 arriving in Italy so far this year, a 28 percent increase over the same period last year.”
On August 1, Raghavan returned to the pages of the Post with a disturbing portrait of life in Tripoli, reporting that: “Six years after the revolution that toppled dictator Moammar Gaddafi, the mood in this volatile capital is a meld of hopelessness and gloom. Diplomatic and military efforts by the United States and its allies have failed to stabilize the nation; the denouement of the crisis remains far from clear. Most Libyans sense that the worst is yet to come.”
Raghavan notes that “Under Gaddafi, the oil-producing country was once one of the world’s wealthiest nations.” Under his rule, “Libyans enjoyed free health care, education and other benefits under the eccentric strongman’s brand of socialism.” It would be difficult not to see, Raghavan writes, “the insecurity that followed Gaddafi’s death has ripped apart the North African country.”
Taken together, Raghavan’s reports should come as a rude shock to stalwart supporters of NATO’s intervention in Libya. Yet the embarrassing fervor with which many embraced the intervention remains largely undiminished – with, as we will see, one notable exception. An Upside-Down Meritocracy
Anne Marie Slaughter, who served as policy planning chief at the State Department under Hillary Clinton, emailed her former boss after the start of the NATO operation, to say: “I cannot imagine how exhausted you must be after this week, but I have never been prouder of having worked for you.”
Five months after the start of NATO operation against Gaddafi, Slaughter went public with her approval in an op-ed for the Financial Times titled “Why Libya Skeptics Were Proved Badly Wrong.” Proving, if nothing else, that the foreign policy establishment is a reverse meritocracy, Slaughter holds an endowed chair at Princeton and is also the well-compensated president of the influential Washington think tank New America.
President Obama’s decision to intervene received wide bipartisan support in the Congress and from media figures across the political spectrum, including Bill O’Reilly and Cenk Uyghur.
Yet the casus belli used to justify the intervention, as a U.K. parliamentary report made clear last September, was based on a lie: that the people of the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi were in imminent danger of being slaughtered by Gaddafi’s forces.
The report, issued by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, states that “Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence.”
The report also noted that while “Many Western policymakers genuinely believed that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered his troops to massacre civilians in Benghazi … this did not necessarily translate into a threat to everyone in Benghazi. In short, the scale of the threat to civilians was presented with unjustified certainty. US intelligence officials reportedly described the intervention as ‘an intelligence-light decision.’”
Even as it became clear that the revolution had proved to be a disaster for the country, the arbiters of acceptable opinion in Washington continued to insist that NATO’s intervention was not only a success, but the right thing to do. It is a myth that has gained wide purchase among D.C.’s foreign policy cognoscenti, despite the judgment of former President Barack Obama, who famously described the intervention as “a shit show.”
Still Spinning
A full year after the commencement of NATO’s campaign against Gaddafi, former NATO Ambassador Ivo Daalder and NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Stravidis took to the pages of that reliable bellwether of establishment opinion, Foreign Affairs, to declare that “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention.”
For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Hillary Clinton’s Failed Libya ‘Doctrine.’
Khaddafy foretold each and every consequence of our interference/intervention in Libya when he saw it coming and complained. He realized he had in essence fully cooperated with the US as far as getting rid of WMDs and was about to be summarily betrayed. Libya had a highish standard of living even though it was more along the lines of a socialist model; All of his predictions were fairly well known, including the predicted trans-Mediterranean “migration” that would result. The US truly vandalized Libya and caused much of its disintegration as a functioning country.
The Arab Spring was about creating huge numbers of "refugees."
These "refugees" would be overwhelmingly Muslim males.
These Muslim invaders are all necessary for Hussein Obama's fundamental change of America
America's FIRST Muslim President thinks Americans are idiots. So far, he is right.
But then Washington refuses to learn lessons from ANYTHING.
As Time wears on it seems more and more possible that the chief intent of the intervention might have been to permit for exactly the human tidal wave moving northward that we see now.
for all practical purposes, Europe lies just one mile off of coast of Libya.
just one mile.
Back when George Bush started the regime change ball rolling, by destabilizing Iraq, everybody on Freerepublic was cheering. Obama was merely following up on the Bush game plan when he destabilized Iraq. And Hillary promised to make it a threefer by taking out Assad in Syria. At least Freepers learned their lesson and, for the most part, are no longer regime-change boosters. There are few Freepers today who will claim George Bush was a great president - unlike the old days on this site
I meant to say that destabilizing Lybia was just a follow on from bush’s “liberation” of Iraq. McCain wants us to follow up by “liberating” the Syrians - right into the arms of Al Quada
McCain, Graham and Rubio fully backed Obama and Clinton in their reckless Libya fiasco.
Part of Bush’s reasons for taking out Saddam was to knock out one of the three Nuclear Tripod legs of Iraq, Iran and Syria (all of which had active nuclear weapons programs underway or planned, Syria being the Johnny Come Lately to that triumvirate).
Not adequately planning for a realistic post-war Iraq is a valid criticism.
(all of which had active nuclear weapons programs underway or planned
BS. Bush and Cheney both admit now there were no WMDs in Iraq. And invading countries - at the cost of trillions of dollars - because of hypothetical “plans” in the future is INSANITY. Notice Reagan didn’t invade any countries (except a two-day rescue operation in tiny Grenada). Reagan defeated communism without invading countries. Bush the FOOL invaded the middle east, and set it on fire, sending jihadis running wild in every direction. Anybody who still defends his disastrous decision must have been asleep for the last 15 years.
There isn’t a Republican candidate in the country who would ask George Bush to campaign with him. Bush was not welcome at the 2008, 2012 or 2016 Republican conventions, because even the GOP bigwigs know the American people consider his presidency a disaster. He deserves it, for sending 4,100 Americans to die in Iraq and 500000 Iraqis, and destroying that country, which is still in chaos. He was warned that taking out Saddam would let the jihadis run wild. But he was too stupid to listen to anybody but the neocon warmongers. Obama listened to them, too, when he destroyed Libya.
You still haven’t answered my statement about nuclear weapons programs of Iran, Syria and Iraq (planned but not much underway).
Jump to 2017 and the stupid, yeah treasonous US-Iran Agreement on nuclear weapons. Iran either has them or is getting close to it (thanks to Pakistan, Russia and No. Korea). Syria had some nuclear weapons projects which the Israeli air force took out, and papers captured in Iraq showed that Saddam had plans underway for nuclear weapons research.
Those are facts. By the way, my son’s unit captured Soviet Bloc green CBW brand new suits outside of Hindaya, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River. Other American units captured cyanide poison and other CBW goodies. I know something about them as my father served in the Chemical Warfare Service during WW2 and I’ve done extensive research at the National Archives in the CWS records.
Did you know that some Japanese units on the Pacific islands had what were called “Cyanidic (glass) grenades” and some poison gas shells? Oh never mind.
Sorry, I can’t reason with a neocon-head. It’s clear that, like Bill Kristol, you’ve learned nothing from the folly of the Bush-Obama regime-change wars.
And please don’t talk to me about Iran. Saddam was their biggest enemy, a counter-weight, as Trump points out. Bush the FOOOL took out Saddam, and empowered Iran. Trump is soo right about the Iraq invasion being a piece of criminal stupidity.
By what authority did U.S./NATO attack a sovereign government legally recognized by the United Nations?
What should be of particular interest to historians (or, at least, those seeking the truth) are the meetings chaired by Hillary Clinton in Paris in March 201` that led to what the author called “NATO’s March 2011 intervention.” Simply put, NATO was a tool, a hammer, employed by the US and the UK to eliminate Qadafi, and it was done for the their own selfish reasons.
Having no understanding of the Mahgreb, Obaba played the stooge and went along with what History will judge as one of the West’s worst political blunders, direct support and encouragement for an over-hyped “Arab Spring.”
it was Obama + the UK and France that done it
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