By TARIQ ALI

Libya's ragtag "rebel" army. Neither its actual popularity, nor crimes, nor strength have been investigated by the Western media, eager to rubber-stamp the imperial design.

The US-Nato intervention in Libya, with United Nations security council cover, is part of an orchestrated response to show support for the movement against one dictator in particular and by so doing to bring the Arab rebellions to an end by asserting western control, confiscating their impetus and spontaneity and trying to restore the status quo ante.

It is absurd to think that the reasons for bombing Tripoli or for the turkey shoot outside Benghazi are designed to protect civilians. This particular argument is designed to win support from the citizens of Euro-America and part of the Arab world. “Look at us,” say Obama/Clinton and the EU satraps, “we’re doing good. We’re on the side of the people.” The sheer cynicism is breathtaking. We’re expected to believe that the leaders with bloody hands in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are defending the people in Libya. The debased British and French media are capable of swallowing anything, but the fact that decent liberals still fall for this rubbish is depressing. Civil society is easily moved by some images and Gaddafi’s brutality in sending his air force to bomb his people was the pretext that Washington utilised to bomb another Arab capital. Meanwhile, Obama’s allies in the Arab world were hard at work promoting democracy.

The Saudis entered Bahrain where the population is being tyrannised and large-scale arrests are taking place. Not much of this is being reported on al-Jazeera. I wonder why? The station seems to have been curbed somewhat and brought into line with the politics of its funders.

All this with active US support. The despot in Yemen, loathed by a majority of his people continues to kill them every day. Not even an arms embargo, let alone a “no-fly zone” has been imposed on him. Libya is yet another case of selective vigilantism by the US and its attack dogs in the west.

They can rely on the French as well. Sarkozy was desperate to do something. Unable to save his friend Ben Ali in Tunisia, he’s decided to help get rid of Gaddafi. The British always oblige and in this case, having shored up the Libyan regime for the last two decades, they’re making sure they’re on the right side so as not to miss out on the division of the spoils. What might they get?

The divisions on this entire operation within the American politico-military elite have meant there is no clear goal. Obama and his European satraps talk of regime change. The generals resist and say that isn’t part of their picture. The US state department is busy preparing a new government composed of English-speaking Libyan collaborators. We will now never know how long Gaddafi’s crumbling and weakened army would have held together in the face of strong opposition. The reason he lost support within his armed forces was precisely because he ordered them to shoot their own people. Now he speaks of imperialism’s desire to topple him and take the oil and even many who despise him can see that it’s true. A new Karzai is on the way.

The frontiers of the squalid protectorate that the west is going to create are being decided in Washington. Even those Libyans who, out of desperation, are backing Nato’s bomber jets, might – like their Iraqi equivalents – regret their choice.

All this might trigger a third phase at some stage: a growing nationalist anger that spills over into Saudi Arabia and here, have no doubt, Washington will do everything necessary to keep the Saudi royal family in power. Lose Saudi Arabia and they will lose the Gulf states. The assault on Libya, greatly helped by Gaddafi’s imbecility on every front, was designed to wrest the initiative back from the streets by appearing as the defenders of civil rights. The Bahrainis, Egyptians, Tunisians, Saudi Arabians, Yemenis will not be convinced, and even in Euro-America more are opposed to this latest adventure than support it. The struggles are by no means over.

Obama talks of a merciless Gaddafi, but the west’s own mercy never drops like gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It only blesses the power that dispenses, the mightiest of the mightiest.

Tariq Ali’s latest book “The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad’ is published by Verso.

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[Black Star News Editorial] / GUEST EDITORIALS SERIES  SHAMEFULLY: NATO Almost Delivered On The Fatwa France's sybaritic president Sarcozy and his model wife Carla Bruni. Good at ordering death at one remove. Not in vain he's been called France's own George Bush. As this newspaper concluded in an editorial last week, it’s a disgraceful shame for President Barack Obama to be involved in the assassination of any foreign leader however detestable the United States may find such a leader to be. It places the U.S. in the same category as Syria which murdered Lebanon’s Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. We made this pronouncement shortly after President Obama authorized the use of armed American predator drones in Libya by NATO. The president had also co-authored a barbaric editorial with warmongering Nicholas Sarkozy and David Cameron, of France and Britain, respectively. In the editorial, published in newspapers around the world, these wise leaders, including Obama, in essence issued a Fatwa against Muammar al-Quathafi. They declared that he must go and “go for good.” As we noted then, the only way a person “goes for good” is when he’s dead. Is it wise for an American president to be calling for the assassination of the leader of any foreign country the U.S. has major disagreements with? What about the leaders of North Korea, Iran and Venezuela? When will Fatwas for those three be issued? NATO tried to deliver on Obama’s and Cameron’s and Sarkozy’s Fatwa today. Al-Quathafi and his wife reportedly survived the bombing on his compound by NATO, which of course was meant to kill him. NATO has been acting like hired MAFIA enforcers for Benghazi. Reportedly al-Quathafi’s youngest son, 29-year-old Saif al-Arab, was killed as were three of his grandchildren. This is how NATO, the U.S., France and Britain are “saving civilian lives” and enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya? Is this really what United Nations Resolution 1973 was intended for? Wake up President Obama. France’s, Britain’s and the U.S.’s lies about caring for the lives of people in North Africa and the Middle East have been exposed by these countries’ silence towards Syria. The leadership in Syria is not even fighting a rebellion financed by the West and Qatar –as Libya is– but massacring with tanks unarmed protestors seeking the ouster of Bashar al-Assad. Revoltingly, the U.S.’s only reaction was to announce “financial sanctions” that don’t even impact Syrian leadership and completely spares al-Assad. Why not take out al-Assad as well? Libya, as we’ve previously pointed before, will turn out to be President Obama’s most shameful mistake. It should, deservedly, haunt him and his legacy even beyond his presidency wether he wins a second term or not. President Obama can still distance himself from France’s and Britain’s posterings. Those former powers have an imperial mentality when dealing with Africa. They will not compromise with people they regard as lesser human beings. That’s also the mentality that guides the editorial pages of corporate newspapers such as The New York Times–big cheerleaders for war on Libya. Obama should call off NATO’s attacks dogs. Stop the bombings. Allow South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma to work with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to revive the African Union (AU) Peace proposal which was rejected by Nicholas Sarkozy and Benghazi. NATO bombs will not rescue civilians in Libya. Assassinating al-Quathafi will not usher democracy. Allow Libyans to ceasefire. Allow Libyans to start negotiations for a constitution and open elections. The government in Tripoli reportedly agreed to these conditions when it accepted the AU plan. France, Britain and the U.S. should curb the insatiable Dracula-like greed for Libya’s sweet crude. Abandon what Russia’s Vladimir Putin referred to as a medieval crusade. Leave Libya for the Libyans.

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By Zaid Jilani

ACROSS the country, Main Street Americans are speaking out against a GOP budget plan that would effectively end Medicare.

In taking aim at Medicare, these conservative members of Congress are claiming that they are actually “saving Medicare” from financial ruin and that there is no possible choice other than to privatize the program and throw seniors to the insurance industry. They say this to justify a plan that the Congressional Budget Office says would have the elderly spending the majority of their income on health care.

Yet what Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the architect of the plan to end Medicare — and other right-wingers don’t want you to know is that there are actually numerous way to shore up the fiscal solvency of Medicare that wouldn’t involve such a dangerous privatization scheme.

ThinkProgress has assembled three different policy options that, if enacted, could help Medicare’s future financial issues and save the taxpayer billions of dollars:

1. Empower Medicare To Negotiate For Lower Drug Prices: One policy option that would be very simple to enact and would not require any sort of increased spending or expansion of government would be to simply allow Medicare to use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate with drugmakers for lower prices. The program is currently banned from doing so, thanks to the clout of the drug industry. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) estimates that doing this could save as much as $156 billion over 10 years. {Editor’s Note: Obama, as usual, sold us down the river on this own, behind the legendary closed doors, but the truth eventually seeped out. The mainstream media barely touched the story.}

2. Allow Drug Reimportation From Canada: One of the major costs in the U.S. health care system that drives up the costs not only in the private sector but also among Medicare are the costs of prescription drugs. One very easy was to greatly relieve this cost is to eliminate protectionist barriers and allow the free importation of prescription drugs from our neighbors like Canada. A failed measure proposed by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and John McCain (R-AZ) to do exactly that in 2009 estimated that doing so would save consumers $80 billion over ten years.

3. Globalize Medicare: Another protectionist barrier and detriment to free trade in the U.S. health care system is that seniors currently aren’t allowed to use their Medicare insurance system outside of the United States. An alternative to this would be to drop these trade barriers and allow seniors on Medicare to seek care abroad, where services are much cheaper. Economist Dean Baker estimates that if fifty percent of Medicare beneficiaries opted for this globalized option, then taxpayers would save more than $40 billion a year by 2020. President Obama dismissed this option when asked about it at a recent town hall meeting.

The primary reason these three common sense initiatives have not been enacted in the United States is because of deep opposition from the drug industry, for-profit hospitals, and other medical-industrial complex interest groups. Yet they all present simple and effective ways to lower costs and help shore up the finances of the Medicare program. If Ryan and other so-called reform advocates were serious about ensuring the fiscal solvency of the Medicare program and lowering health care costs for Americans, they would not remove these options from the debate.

ZAID JILANI writes on medical issue for Thinkprogress.org

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Bachmann Backs Away From GOP Medicare Plan: ‘I’m Concerned About Shifting The Cost Burden To Seniors’

By Alex Seitz-Wald

Following rowdy town hall meetings this week in which constituents confronted their representatives for voting for the GOP plan to effectively end Medicare, Republican leaders are insisting that they are not having second thoughts about the scheme.But even Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — perhaps Congress’ most outspoken conservative and most sincere promoter of the anti-government Tea Party movement — seems to be backing away from the plan. Appearing on Fox News Sunday today with host Chris Wallace, Bachmann refused to back everything in the GOP budget, saying there should be an “asterisk” next to her vote for the plan because she is concerned about how it would shift healthcare costs to seniors:

WALLACE: What do you tell people nearing retirement who say I can’t afford to pay more of my own healthcare costs out of pocket? Which is what the Ryan and Republican Study Committee plans would do.

BACHMANN: And I understand that. I put an asterisks on my support, I put a blog posting up that said just as much. That is my area of concern, I support this bill with that proviso. … One position that I’m concerned about shifting the cost burden to senior citizens. Seniors are saying, look, I’m not in a positon to be able to handle that. I also share that real fear, that’s why I put that asterisks out there. […]

WALLACE: So you’re not wedded to the idea of a voucher program for Medicare?

BACHMANN: I’m wedded to the idea of efficiencies and cost cuttings and savings in healthcare, but how we get there is open to discussion.

Watch it:

Indeed, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that “[u]nder the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system.”

On Thursday, in an op-ed on Red State, Bachmann wrote that while she supports most of the GOP budget, “I’ve expressed caution about how we approach the issue of Medicare.” Considering that Bachmann has previously said we must “wean everybody” off Medicare and Social Security, her new hesitancy to do so belies the extremely unpopular nature of the GOP plan.

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CounterPunch Diary

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN | April 29 – May 1, 2011

AMERICANS were offered closure Wednesday to one of among the multifarious strands  of our national dementias. It took the drab guise of the “long-form” birth certificate, signed and filed in Hawaii on August 8, 1961, indicating that the president is a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office. But will the White House’s release of the certificate finish off the “birther” movement? Certainly not.  We’re dealing here with cognitive dissonance.

Harold Camping, president of Family Stations Ministry, has been preaching for some time now to a vast and devoted national audience that God’s plan is to inaugurate the Second Coming and end the world by flooding on May 21, 2011 (thus achieving a Judeo-Christian planetary closure before the prime current pagan rival, the end of the Mayan calendar, scheduled for December 21, 2012.)

It’s a safe bet that Camping and his disciples will be saying on May 22 that his math was merely a year or two off, and the end is still nigh. His congregation will have its faith fortified. Membership will probably increase, as it did after the failure of Camping’s last prediction of the Second Coming, which he scheduled for September 6, 1994.

Sociologists call the phenomenon of increased commitment to a batty theory, at the very hour of its destruction by external evidence, “cognitive dissonance.” The theory was developed by three sociologists, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, who infiltrated a group headed by Dorothy Martin of Chicago who had received messages from the Planet Clarion that the world was scheduled for destruction by flood in the predawn hours of December 21, 1954. A flying saucer would save the group, whose members had abandoned, often at considerable expense and upheaval, all terrestrial commitments, pending transfer to Clarion.

The sociologists theorized that, when neither spaceship nor flood materialized, the group’s best strategy to avoid public humiliation would be to dismiss the failure of the prophesied events as due to minor miscalculations and then to proselytize vigorously, advertising a re-dated flood and interplanetary rescue. Dissonance between nutty theory and reality would be diminished amid growing popularity of the nutty theory. Anyone following the growth of the Christian religion in its early decades, or the Lesser of Two Evils crowd advocating support of a Democratic candidate, will recognize the dynamics.

The three sociologists, who later faced some ethical censure for failing to disclose their motivations or true identities to Martin (whom they renamed Keech) and the group, wrote up the saga and the theory in When Prophecy Fails: a Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, published in 1956.

Perhaps aiming to subvert the imminent publication of Jerry Corsi’s Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President,Obama released the oft-demanded long certificate at a press conference, where he declined questions but said the birther movement was becoming a distraction from serious political issues, fanned by “carnival barkers,” by which he evidently meant Donald Trump who’s been campaigning for the presidency on the issue.

The words were scarcely out of Obama’s mouth and the document hardly lofted onto the White House website before leading birthers were expressing skepticism about the certificate as allegedly photo-shopped, also insisting that, anyway, it was a “side issue” and distraction from the serious matter of Obama’s qualifications as a “natural born citizen” as opposed to an ineligible Third World foundling from Kenya or Indonesia, as around 25 per cent of all Americans and 50 per cent of all Republicans have come to believe.

Trump immediately claimed victory and vindication as the man who had forced the birthers’ cause into the headlights.

Cognitive dissonance has become standard equipment for political scientists and reporters across America. They advance on a daily basis the premise that the Republican Party is guided by cunning and sophisticated manipulators of public opinion. They simultaneously report that the stated aim of these manipulators is to destroy two of the most popular government programs, Medicare and Social Security. Medicare is essentially socialized medicine for the elderly and Social Security keeps millions from homelessness and starvation in their sunset years.

Yet for months now the national press has been lauding as a principled and effective Republican crusader for budgetary discipline U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who wants to end Medicare, handing it over to management by the “private sector,” with similar brutal attacks on Social Security.

The bloc most likely to vote in any election are the older crowd, with Medicare Health Insurance cards in their wallets and receiving their Social Security checks on the second Wednesday of every month. So it’s a no-brainer to say that the Republicans today are politically insane, just as George Bush was in 2005, when he proclaimed that “reforming” Social Security was to be the prime cause of his second term.

Three months later, battered by furious protests by the elderly plus those younger folk with ambitions to slide into their 70s on a diet better than scraps from trash bins and under a roof more durable than cardboard, Bush dropped the issue of reform for Social Security forever.

The Republicans are politically insane because the only way to “reform” – i.e., cut back these programs – is to swear you’re doing the opposite, the tactic of Bill Clinton and, prospectively, of Obama. But the Republicans, lapping up the plaudits of the elite press – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal – doling out measured praise for Rep. Ryan’s responsible commitment to fiscal prudence, forgot the need for dissimulation, and now Ryan and his fellow Republicans have gone back to their districts, and are discovering to their amazement that the voters have scant confidence in Obama’s handling of the economy but even less in the Republicans’ proposals.

In a  news story Wednesday headlined “House G.O.P. Members Face Voter Anger Over Budget,” certain to be read with deep alarm by those few Republicans still endowed with powers of rational analysis, New York Times correspondents reported  bluntly that “after 10 days of trying to sell constituents on their plan to overhaul Medicare, House Republicans in multiple districts appear to be increasingly on the defensive, facing worried and angry questions from voters and a barrage of new attacks from Democrats and their allies.”

In Florida, filled with retirees, the NYT story continued, “a Congressional town meeting erupted into near chaos on Tuesday as attendees accused a Republican lawmaker of trying to dismantle Medicare while providing tax cuts to corporations and affluent Americans. At roughly the same time in Wisconsin, Representative Paul D Ryan, the architect of the Republican budget proposal, faced a packed town meeting, occasional boos and a skeptical audience as he tried to lay out his party’s rationale for overhauling the health insurance program for retirees.”

Earlier this week, the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, announced he was folding his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. He said he realized that” he didn’t really have the stomach for a prolonged and costly campaign. Barbour is a good old boy Southerner, ample in girth and prone to dropping clangers on the race issue. He’s also a pretty smart Washington insider who, no doubt, realized that only five months after the great Republican triumph in the midterm polls last November, the party has plummeted swiftly in public esteem, regarded as plain nutty by millions.

Obama isn’t popular. Sixty-seven per cent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. His job disapproval rating stands at 49 per cent. The job “disapproval” rating for Congress, with a House newly led by Republicans, stands at 71 per cent. Current Republican presidential candidates are, in order of popular esteem for their candidacies: Christian evangelical Mike Huckabee, who leads this field with a 17 per cent showing; circus barker Donald Trump; Mormon and failed aspirant in 2008 Mitt Romney; faded star Sarah Palin; adulterer Newt Gingrich; foe of Social Security and Medicare Ron Paul; nutball Michele Bachmann; and a trio of two-percenters: Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels and Rick Santorum, of whom former Senator Bob Kerrey once memorably said, “Santorum? Is that the Latin for asshole?”

These are not impressive or even endearing candidates, except for Paul on account of his anti-war/anti-Fed stance.) It’s hard to imagine any of them offering a credible challenge to as adaptable and opportunistic a candidate as Obama, who has just assigned the man once regarded as a credible Republican presidential candidate, General David Petraeus, as head of the CIA, thus taking him off the political chessboard, at least so far as 2012 is concerned.

It seems the man on the Fox Biz Channel auditioning to take Beck’s place spent an hour on Wednesday going over the flaws in the birth certificate. Gingrich said Thursday the whole thing remains fishy. They can’t let go – at least until cognitive dissonance blows a tire in the early primaries.

Our Latest Newsletter

In the latest edition of our newsletter Guy Rundle lays out in fascinating detail exactly how Julian Assange got trashed by the newspaper he propelled to world fame and fortune with the Wikileaks files – the Guardian. It was the Guardian that took the file on the sex investigations by the Swedish police against Assange and gave to the English-speaking world a version that was prejudicial to Assange and deeply damaging.  What did Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen actually allege? Read the specifics and the distortions.

The western press endlessly touts the rivalry between Putin and Medvedev. It’s a running burlesque. But what is really going on in Russia? What forces are really in contention? In a highly informed report, Israel Shamir lays out the basic conflicts, in which Russia’s president and prime minister are effectively on one side, against the real Russian opposition.

Finally, Larry Portis reports from France on the rise of Marine Le Pen and traces the evolution of the French right and the collapse of the French left, pending the upcoming elections in 2012. Is a form of fascism looming? Or a more complex evolution of populism amid the discrediting of the traditional right and left?

And once you have discharged this enjoyable mandate, I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St. Clair and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA), and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.”

Alexander Cockburn is a legendary media critic and political gadfly, and founder of CounterPunch. He can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

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