•••

“With Assange, the political context is the totalizing immorality of the national security state on a global scale.”

By JoAnn Wypijewski [2]

Every once in a while, a situation arises that so completely captures the spirit of the time—in this case, the horror moving like an amoeba under the surface of our pleasant days, our absurd distractions, our seemingly serious politics—that ordinary assumptions, ordinary arguments and their limited conclusions serve only to obliterate honesty, and so any hope of grappling with the real. Such is the case of Julian Assange now.

He is the wanted man. Wanted for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings, ostensibly on sexual misconduct allegations in Sweden, but maybe not; maybe on charges of espionage or conspiracy in the United States instead; maybe to face indefinite detention, maybe torture or life in prison. It’s so hard to know… But one thing is not mysterious: the law is no more capable of delivering justice in his case today than it was for a black man alleged to have raped a white woman in the Jim Crow South.

I am not comparing the founder of WikiLeaks, a white man benefiting from not only white-skin privilege and straight-man privilege but also class and celebrity privilege, with black men on the other side of a lynch mob. This is not about the particulars of oppression; it is about the political context of law, the limits of liberal expectations and the monstrosity of the state.

Liberals have no trouble generally acknowledging that in those rape cases against black men, the reasoned application of law was impossible. It was impossible because justice was impossible, foreclosed not by the vagaries of this white jury or that bit of evidence but by the totalizing immorality of white supremacy that placed the Black Man in a separate category of human being, without common rights and expectations. A lawyer might take a case if it hadn’t been settled by the mob, but the warped conscience of white America could do nothing but warp the law and make of its rituals a sham. The Scottsboro Boys might have been innocent or they might have been guilty; it didn’t matter, because either way the result would be the same.

With Assange, the political context is the totalizing immorality of the national security state on a global scale. The sex-crime allegations against Assange emerged in Sweden on August 20, 2010, approximately four and a half months after WikiLeaks blazed into the public sphere by releasing a classified video that showed a US Apache helicopter crew slaughtering more than a dozen civilians, including two journalists, in a Baghdad suburb. By that August, Pfc. Bradley Manning, the reputed source of the video and about 750,000 other leaked government documents, was being held without charge in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, subjected to what his attorney, David Coombs, describes in harrowing detail in a recent motion as “unlawful pretrial punishment.” In plain terms, Manning was tortured. He faces court-martial for aiding the enemy and has been denounced as a traitor by members of Congress.

For disseminating classified materials that exposed war crimes, Assange has been called a terrorist. A coloring book for children, The True Faces of Evil—Terror, from Big Coloring Books Inc. out of St. Louis, includes his face on a sheet of detachable trading cards, along with Timothy McVeigh, Jared Lee Loughner, Ted Kaczynski, Maj. Nidal Hasan and Bill Ayers. A commentator on Fox News urged President Obama to order his assassination. Vice President Joe Biden called him a “high-tech terrorist” and suggested that the Justice Department might be angling for a prosecution; that was two years ago. Indications of a secret grand jury investigation and imminent indictment have helped ratchet up the rhetoric and tension in and around the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange has received political asylum.

It has been common for the media to compartmentalize: on the one hand, there are complaints of sexual misconduct against Assange by two women in Sweden, which must be seen as a straightforward matter for law enforcement; on the other hand, there is his political activity, also his “attention-seeking,” “narcissism” and “arrogance,” which, come to think of it, sound a lot like traits in a rapist’s profile. Only rarely has anyone—notably Naomi Wolf and the team from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners program—begun with the intrinsic political challenge posed by WikiLeaks and proceeded from there to scrutinize the Swedish prosecutorial machinery.

That machinery is tricky. Police were so quick to initiate the arrest process that one of the women who came to them—to see if Assange could be forced to take an STD test after she’d had unprotected sex with him—became distraught and refused to give further testimony. The Swedish prosecutor’s office issued an arrest warrant for rape and molestation on one day and withdrew it the next, saying there was no reason to suspect rape, and that the other claim wasn’t serious enough for a warrant. About a week later, the Swedish director of prosecution reopened the investigation, and a court later approved her request to detain Assange for rape, molestation and unlawful coercion. By then he was in London, having been told he was free to leave Sweden. Assange was working with the New York Times and the Guardian in advance of launching the Iraq War Logs when the Swedes issued an international arrest warrant. He was readying the release of a cache of diplomatic cables when Interpol got involved, issuing a “red notice” for his arrest. In London, his legal efforts to block extradition were rejected by the High Court—whose strained decision was praised by the New Statesman’s David Allen Green as the ultimate in reasoned justice—and by the UK Supreme Court.

If the Swedish claims against Assange had involved anything but sex, it’s unlikely that liberals, and even some self-described radicals, would be tiptoeing around this part of the story, either by asking “So I guess he’s a bad guy?” or by arguing “Of course he needs to answer for his crimes.” If it were anything but sex, we would insist on the presumption of innocence. We have instead gotten comfortable with presuming guilt and trusting in the dignified processes of law to guarantee fairness.

“Believe the victim” entered the lexicon decades ago for historically understandable reasons. Women had been denied their own due process, in a sense—their right to make a complaint and expect justice, not vilification or worse. They are still being denied and derided, as the idiot spewings of Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin illustrate. The mutation of basic rights into an imperative for belief, and of full citizens into victims, has not made women any safer, but its cultural manipulation—particularly in high-profile cases—has struck at the foundations of civil liberty in a way that may not have been anticipated.

So here is the spectacle of Assange, as yet unindicted, bearing the dual brand of Sex Offender and Terrorist, the subhuman beings of the twenty-first century. The fusing of abuse and terror in his case thus implies two victims who must be believed, the women and the state. But the women’s claims are murky, and the state is not credible.

It should be possible to imagine a resolution outside the criminal justice system for problems that arise in the course of consensual sexual coupling: dissatisfaction over the use (or ill use) of condoms, constraints that keep people from expressing their wishes or intuiting those of another, selfishness, insensitivity, confusions as “yes” slides into “no” and back to “yes,” perhaps wordlessly—all issues that seem to apply in the Assange case but exist beyond it. That will require a braver sexual politics (and at least another column), and it does not demean experience to recognize that the language of punishment is a poor substitute for the lost language of love.

About the state, though, there must be no illusions. A nation that goes to war on fraud, that insists “We don’t torture” when evidence to the contrary abounds, that kidnaps foreign nationals and puts them on planes to be delivered to dungeons, that spies on its people, asserts its right to lock them up indefinitely and lets documented CIA torturers off the hook of accountability because they were only following orders: that nation will plot, and it will double-cross, and it will kill. Sweden participated in the US program of extraordinary rendition. The United Kingdom has threatened to storm Ecuador’s embassy. The United States now says it does not recognize the historic right of persons to seek diplomatic asylum. Assange’s lawyers have said that he will go to Sweden if he gets an absolutely firm guarantee from the Obama administration that it will not arrest him. Such a guarantee is impossible in an empire of lies.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/julian-assange-hunted-americas-violent-empire
Links:
[1] http://www.thenation.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joann-wypijewski
[3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/julian-assange-0
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wikileaks-0
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/law-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/bradley-manning-0
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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Tactics & Strategies—

Is “nonviolence” to be embraced absolutely? Does it really work against a system that has a huge advantage in propaganda in addition to repressive powers? Is Hedges a radical or a liberal? And if the latter, can liberals defeat an entrenched system with centrist tactics?  And, equally important, can a post-capitalist, anticorporate world ever be built with ideas and people who continue to believe in capitalism?  With people who have long militated in the anti-communist camp?

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•••

For half of the last century, Arab nationalists, socialists, communists and others were locked in a battle with the Muslim Brothers for hegemony in the Arab world.—Tariq Ali ^[1]

By Stephen Gowans, What’s Left

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which played a major part in the rebellion to depose Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, may have plotted the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi which led to the death of US ambassador Christopher Stevens, according to US officials.

The Jihadists who toppled the secular nationalist Gaddafi government—and not without the help of Nato bombers, dubbed “al Qaeda’s air force” [2] by Canadian pilots who participated in the bombing campaign—are no longer disguised in the pages of Western newspapers as a popular movement who thirsted for, and won, democracy in Libya. Now that they’ve overrun the US consulate in Benghazi and killed the US ambassador, they’ve become a “security threat…raising fears about the country’s stability” [3]—exactly what Gaddafi called them, when Western governments were celebrating the Islamists’ revolt as a popular pro-democracy uprising. Gaddafi’s description of the unrest in his own country as a violent Salafist bid to establish an Islamic state was doubtlessly accepted in Washington and other Western capitals as true, but dismissed in public as a transparent ploy to muster sympathy. This was necessary to sanitize the uprising to secure the acquiescence of Western publics for the intervention of their countries’ warplanes to help Islamic guerillas on the ground topple a secular nationalist leader who was practicing “resource nationalism” and trying to “Libyanize” the economy– the real reasons he’d fallen into disgrace in Washington. [4]

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which played a major part in the rebellion to depose Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, may have plotted the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi which led to the death of US ambassador Christopher Stevens, according to US officials.  The uprising of militant Muslim radicals against a secular state was, in many respects, a replay of what had happened in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, when a Marxist-inspired government came to power with aspirations to lift the country out of backwardness, and was opposed by the Mullahs and Islamist guerillas backed by the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China.

An Afghan Communist explained that,

“Our aim was no less than to give an example to all the backward countries of the world of how to jump from feudalism straight to a prosperous, just society … Our choice was not between doing things democratically or not. Unless we did them, nobody else would … [Our] very first proclamation declared that food and shelter are the basic needs and rights of a human being. … Our program was clear: land to the peasants, food for the hungry, free education for all. We knew that the mullahs in the villages would scheme against us, so we issued our decrees swiftly so that the masses could see where their real interests lay … For the first time in Afghanistan’s history women were to be given the right to education … We told them that they owned their bodies, they would marry whom they liked, they shouldn’t have to live shut up in houses like pens.” [5]

That’s not to say that Gaddafi was a Marxist—far from it. But like the reformers in Afghanistan, he sought to modernize his country, and use its land, labor and resources for the people within it. By official Western accounts, he did a good job, raising his country’s standard of living higher than that of all other countries in Africa.

_______
For decades the United States and its allies worked hard to stamp out all vestiges of leftism and progressivism in the Arab and Central Asian world, often urging various strongmen (i.e. Saddam, the Shah, etc.) to persecute and eliminate the left. As a result, the whole region is now being fought over by two equally despicable forces: American led Western imperialism and the utterly reactionary Islamic fanatics and factions of Al-Qaeda.”—Eds

_______

Gaddafi claimed that the rebellion in Libya had been organized by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, and by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which had vowed to overthrow him and return the country to traditional Muslim values, including Sharia law. A 2009 Canadian government intelligence report bore him out. It described the anti-Gaddafi stronghold of eastern Libya, where the rebellion began, “as an ‘epicenter of Islamist extremism’ and said ‘extremist cells’ operated in the region.” Earlier, Canadian military intelligence had noted that “Libyan troops found a training camp in the country’s southern desert that had been used by an Algerian terrorist group that would later change its name to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” [6] Significantly, US officials now believe that the AQIM may have plotted the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. [7]

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the Libyan rebellion’s most powerful military leader, was a veteran of the U.S.-backed Jihad against the Marxist-inspired reformist government in Afghanistan, where he had fought alongside militants who would go on to form al-Qaeda. Belhaj returned to Libya in the 1990s to lead the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was linked to his al-Qaeda comrades. His aim was to topple Gaddafi, as the Communists had been toppled in Afghanistan. The prominent role Belhaj played in the Libyan uprising should have aroused suspicions among leftists in the West that, as Western governments surely knew, the uprising was not the heroic pro-democracy affair Western media—and those of reactionary Arab regimes—were making it out to be. Indeed, from the very first day of the revolt, anyone equipped with knowledge of Libyan history that went back further than the last Fox News broadcast, would have known that the Benghazi rebellion was more in the mold of the latest eruption of a violent anti-secular Jihad than a peaceful call for democracy. [8]

“On Feb. 15, 2011, citizens in Benghazi organized what they called a Day of Anger march. The demonstration soon turned into a full-scale battle with police. At first, security forces used tear gas and water cannons. But as several hundred protesters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails attacked government buildings, the violence spiraled out of control.” [9]

As they stormed government sites, the rampaging demonstrators didn’t chant, “Power to the people”, “We are the 99 percent”, or “No to dictatorship.” They chanted “‘No God but Allah, Moammar is the enemy of Allah’.” [10] The Islamists touched off the rebellion and did the fighting on the ground, while U.S.-aligned Libyan exiles stepped into the power vacuum created by Salafist violence and Nato bombs to form a new U.S.-aligned government.

Syria’s Hafiz Asad, and other secular nationalists, from his comrade Salaf Jadid, who he overthrew and locked away, to his son, Bashar, who has followed him, have also been denounced as enemies of Allah by the same Islamist forces who violently denounced Gaddafi in Libya and the leaders of the People’s Democratic Party in Afghanistan. The reason for their denunciation by Islamists is the same: their opposition to an Islamic state. Similarly, Islamist forces have been as strongly at the head of the movement to overthrow the secular nationalists in Syria, as they have the secular nationalists in Libya and the (secular) Marxists in the late 1970s-1980s Afghanistan.

As they stormed government sites, the rampaging demonstrators chanted “‘No God but Allah, Moammar is the enemy of Allah’.”

As they stormed government sites, the rampaging demonstrators chanted “‘No God but Allah, Moammar is the enemy of Allah’.”

The secular nationalists’ rise to power in Syria was a heavy blow to the country’s Sunni Islamic militants who resented their society being governed by secular radicals. Worse still from the perspective of the Islamists, the governing radicals were mostly members of minority communities the Sunnis regarded as heretics, and which had occupied the lower rungs of Syrian society. From the moment the secular nationalists captured the state, Islamists went underground to organize an armed resistance. “From their safe haven deep in the ancient warrens of northern cities like Aleppo and Hama, where cars could not enter, the guerrillas emerged to bomb and kill.” [11]

In 1980, an attempt was made to group the Sunni opposition to the secular nationalists under an “Islamic Front’, which promised free speech, free elections, and an independent judiciary, under the banner of Islam. When militant Islamic terrorists murdered Egyptian president Anwar Sadat a year later in Egypt, Islamists in Damascus promised then president Hafiz Asad the same fate. Then in 1982, Jihadists rose up in Hama—“the citadel of traditional landed power and Sunni puratinism” [12]—in a bid to seize power in the city. The ensuing war of the Islamic radicals against the secular nationalist state, a bloody affair which costs tens of thousands of lives, convinced Asad that “he was wrestling not just with internal dissent, but with a large scale conspiracy to unseat him, abetted by Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the United States.” [13] Patrick Seale, a veteran British journalist who has covered the Middle East for decades, described the Islamists’ movement against Syria’s secular nationalists as a “sort of fever that (rises) and (falls) according to conditions at home and manipulation from abroad.” [14]

Media accounts of Syria’s civil war omit mention of the decades-long hostility between Islamists and secular nationalists—a fierce enmity that sometimes flares into open warfare, and at other times simmers menacingly below the surface—that has defined Syria in the post-colonial period. To do so would take the sheen off the armed rising as a popular, democratic, progressive struggle, a depiction necessary to make Western intervention in the form of sanctions, diplomatic support, and other aid, against the secular nationalists, appear just and desirable. Today, only Trotskyists besotted by fantasies that the Arab Spring is the equivalent of the March 1917 Petrograd uprising, deny that the content of the Syrian uprising is Islamist. But the question of whether the uprising was initially otherwise—a peaceful, progressive and popular movement aimed at opening democratic space and redressing economic grievances–and only later hijacked by Islamists, remains in dispute. What’s clear, however, is that the “hijacking”, if indeed there was one, is not of recent vintage. In the nascent stages of the rebellion, the late New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid noted that the “most puritanical Islamists, known by their shorthand as Salafists, have emerged as a force in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with suspicions that Saudi Arabia has encouraged and financed them.”[15]

Secular nationalists, socialists and communists in Muslim lands have struggled with the problem of Islamist opposition to their programs, to their atheism (in the case of communists) and to the secular character of the state they have sought to build. The Bolsheviks, perhaps alone among this group, were successful in overcoming opposition in the traditional Muslim territories they controlled in Central Asia, and improving the lives of women, who had been oppressed by conservative Islam. Female seclusion, polygamy, bride price, child and forced marriages, veiling (as well as circumcision of males, considered by the Bolsheviks to be child abuse) were outlawed. Women were recruited into administrative and professional positions and encouraged – indeed obligated – to work outside the home. This followed Friedrich Engels’ idea that women could only be liberated from the domination of men if they had independent incomes. [16]

Western governments, led by the United States, have made a practice of inflaming the Islamists’ hostility to secular nationalists, socialists and communists, using militant Muslim radicals as a cat’s paw to topple these governments, which have almost invariably refused to align themselves militarily with the United States or cut deals against the interests of their own people to fatten the profits of corporate America and enrich Wall Street investment bankers. But whether Washington aggravates fault lines within Muslim societies or not, the fact remains that the fault lines exist, and must be managed, but have not always been managed well.

For example, no matter how admirable their aims were, the reformers in Afghanistan had too narrow a political base to move as quickly as they did, and they rushed headlong into disaster, ignoring Moscow’s advice to slow down and expand their support. The Carter and Reagan administrations simply took advantage of their blunders to build a committed anti-communist guerilla movement.

Salah Jadid, who Hafiz Asad overthrew and locked away. Jadid pursued an un-apologetically leftist program, and boasted of practicing “scientific socialism.” The Soviets thought otherwise. Jadid came to power in a conspiracy and never had more than a narrow base of support.

Salah Jadid, who Hafiz Asad overthrew and locked away. Jadid pursued an unapologetically leftist program, and boasted of practicing “scientific socialism.” The Soviets thought otherwise. Jadid came to power in a conspiracy and never had more than a narrow base of support.

The leftist Syrian regime of Salah Jadid, which Hafiz Asad overthrew, did much that would be admired by leftists today. Indeed, Tariq Ali, in an apology apparently intended to expiate the sin of seeming to support the current Asad government, lauds Jadid’s regime as the “much more enlightened predecessor whose leaders and activists…numbered in their ranks some of the finest intellectuals of the Arab world.” [17] It’s easy to see why Ali admired Asad’s predecessors. Jadid, who lived an austere life, refusing to take advantage of his position to lavish himself with riches and comforts, slashed the salaries of senior ministers and top bureaucrats. He replaced their black Mercedes limousines with Volkswagens and Peugeot 404s. People connected with the old influential families were purged from government. A Communist was brought into the cabinet. Second houses were confiscated, and the ownership of more than one was prohibited. Private schools were banned. Workers, soldiers, peasants, students and women became the regime’s favored children. Feudalists and reactionaries were suppressed. A start was made on economic planning and major infrastructure projects were undertaken with the help of the Soviets. And yet, despite these clearly progressive measures, Jadid’s base of popular support remained narrow—one reason why the Soviets were lukewarm toward him, regarding him as a hothead, and contemptuous of his claim to be practicing “scientific socialism.” [18] Scientific socialism is based on mass politics, not a minority coming to power through a conspiracy (as Jadid and Asad had) which then attempts to impose its utopian vision on a majority that rejects it.

Jadid backed the Palestinian guerrillas. Asad, who was then minister of defense, was less enamored of the guerrillas, who he saw as handing Israel pretexts for war. Jadid defined the bourgeoisie as the enemy. Asad wanted to enlist their backing at home to broaden the government’s base of support against the Muslim Brothers. Jadid spurned the reactionary Arab regimes. Asad was for unifying all Arab states—reactionary or otherwise—against Israel. [19]

Asad—who Ali says he opposed—recognized (a) that a program of secular nationalist socialism couldn’t be implemented holus bolus without mass support, and (b) that the government didn’t have it. So, after toppling Jadid in a so-called “corrective” movement, he minimized class warfare in favor of broadening his government’s base, trying to win over merchants, artisans, business people, and other opponents of the regime’s nationalizations and socialist measures. At the same time, he retained Jadid’s commitment to a dirigiste state and continued to promote oppressed classes and minorities. This was hardly a stirring program for Marxist purists—in fact it looked like a betrayal—but the Soviets were more committed to Asad than Jadid, recognizing that his program respected the world as it was and therefore had a greater chance of success. [20]

In the end, however, Asad failed. Neither he nor his son Bashar managed to expand the state’s base of support enough to safeguard it from destabilization. The opposition hasn’t been conjured up out of nothing by regime change specialists in Washington. To be sure, regime change specialists have played a role, but they’ve needed material to work with, and the Asad’s Syria has provided plenty of it. Nor did Gaddafi in Libya finesse the problem of mixing the right amount of repression and persuasion to engineer a broad enough consent for his secular nationalist rule to survive the fever of Salafist opposition rising, as Patrick Seale writes, according to conditions at home and manipulation from abroad . The machinations of the United States and reactionary Arab regimes to stir up and strengthen the secular nationalists’ opponents made the knot all the more difficult to disentangle, but outside manipulation wasn’t the whole story in Gaddafi’s demise (though it was a significant part of it) and hasn’t been the sole, or even a large part of the, explanation for the uprising in Syria.

The idea that the Syrian uprising is a popular, democratic movement against dictatorship and for the redress of economic grievances ignores the significant history of struggle between secularist Arab nationalists and the Muslim Brothers, mistakenly minimizes the role of Salafists in the uprisings, and turns a blind eye to Washington’s longstanding practice of using radical Muslim activists as a cat’s paw against Arab nationalist regimes.

The idea that the Syrian uprising is a popular, democratic movement against dictatorship and for the redress of economic grievances ignores the significant history of struggle between secularist Arab nationalists and the Muslim Brothers, mistakenly minimizes the role of Salafists in the uprisings, and turns a blind eye to Washington’s longstanding practice of using radical Muslim activists as a cat’s paw against Arab nationalist regimes.

The idea that the uprisings in either country are popular, democratic movements against dictatorship and for the redress of economic grievances, (a) ignores the significant history of struggle between secularist Arab nationalists and the Muslim Brothers, (b) mistakenly minimizes the role of Salafists in the uprisings, and (c) turns a blind eye to Washington’s longstanding practice of using radical Muslim activists as a cat’s paw against Arab nationalist regimes that are against sacrificing local interests to the foreign trade and investment interests of Wall Street and corporate America. With Islamists lashing out violently against US embassies in the Middle East, their depiction by US state officials and Western media as pro-democracy fighters for freedom may very well be supplanted by the labels used by Gaddafi and Asad to describe their Islamist opponents, labels that are closer to the truth –“religious fanatics” and “terrorists.”

Reactionary Islam may have won the battle for hegemony in the Muslim world, as Tariq Ali asserts, and with it, the United States, which has often manipulated it for its own purposes, but the battle has yet to be won in Syria, and one would hope, never will be. That’s what’s at stake in the country: not a fragile, popular, egalitarian, pro-democracy movement, but the last remaining secular Arab nationalist regime, resisting both the oppressions and obscurantism of the Muslim Brothers and the oppressions and plunder of imperialism.

NOTES

1. Tariq Ali, “The Uprising in Syria”, www.counterpunch.com, September 12, 2012.
2. Stephen Gowans [A], “Al-Qaeda’s Air Force”, what’s left, February 20, 2012. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/al-qaedas-air-force/
3. Patrick Martin, “Anti-American protests seen as tip of the Islamist iceberg”, The Globe and Mail, September 13, 2012.
4. Gowans [A]
5. Rodric Braithwaite. Afghantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989. Profile Books. 2012. pp. 5-6.
6. Gowans [A]
7. Siobhan Gorman and Adam Entous, “U.S. probing al-Qaeda link in Libya”, The Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2012.
8. Gowans [A]
9. David Pugliese, “The Libya mission one year later: Into the unknown”, The Ottawa Citizen, February 18, 2012.
10. Pugliese
11. Patrick Seale. Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East. University of California Press. 1988, p.324.
12. Seale, p. 333.
13. Seale, p. 335.
14. Seale, p. 322.
15. Anthony Shadid, “After Arab revolts, reigns of uncertainty”, The New York Times, August 24, 2011.
16. Stephen Gowans [B], “Women’s Rights in Afghanistan”, August 9, 2010. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/women%e2%80%99s-rights-in-afghanistan/
17. Ali
18. Seale
19. Seale
20. Seale

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History will keep repeating itself until US foreign policy becomes congruent with its rhetoric.

In his sardonic 1955 novel “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene offered a devastating portrait of Alden Pyle, a young American covert agent in Vietnam, exuding idealist notions of democracy and Americanism while trying to cobble together a “third force” to stem the tide of the Vietnamese revolution. Unleashing mayhem upon the country’s population in the process, he ultimately becomes the victim of his own political intrigues.

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” Graham Greene’s narrator says of Pyle.

The description seems apt as the eulogies pour in for J. Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, who was slain together with three other Americans in an armed assault on the American consulate in Benghazi Tuesday.

No one should take joy in the violent death of a 52-year-old man. But for all the tributes to his “idealism” and—in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—his commitment to “advancing America’s values and interests,” it is impossible to understand the demise of Stevens without recognizing that this was an individual with blood on his hands who, like the fictional Pyle, fell victim to the very forces he helped unleash.

Stevens was a career operative for US imperialism in the Middle East. He was sent to Damascus, Cairo, Riyadh, Jerusalem and Tripoli as “political officer” and “chargé d’affaires,” defending “America’s values and interests” under conditions in which Washington was carrying out a near-genocidal war of aggression in Iraq, propping up the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt, and defending unconditionally every crime carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people.

In Libya, he played a major role in cementing ties between the US and the regime of Col. Muammar Gaddafi. Secret embassy cables written by Stevens from that period and made public by WikiLeaks give a revealing picture of his work.

They discuss, among other things, negotiations with the Libyan government for continued access by American interrogators to Libyan detainees who had been abducted, tortured and then handed back to the Gaddafi regime as part of the “war on terrorism.” Other cables detail multi-billion-dollar deals struck on behalf of American corporations seeking profits from Libyan oil.

At that time, Stevens described Gaddafi as an “engaging and charming interlocutor” as well as a “strong partner in the war against terrorism.”

The cables also reveal that Stevens devoted his attention to researching conditions in eastern Libya, and what he described as its “historical role as a locus of opposition.”

When, in the aftermath of the popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, Washington decided to seize upon demonstrations in Libya and promote a war for “regime change” as a means of bolstering its position in the region, Stevens was the man selected to become US envoy to the so-called rebels organized in the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council (NTC).

At the time, the State Department refused to make public his official biography. Photographs of him were also unavailable. Businessweek was one of the few publications to carry a profile of Washington’s “man in Benghazi.” It noted his previous research on social unrest in eastern Libya and quoted a former State Department colleague as saying that Stevens was “already familiar with some opposition members from his posting in Tripoli.”

This raises the obvious question as to what role Stevens and the US had in fomenting the armed conflict in Libya from its outset. Whatever the case, what was promoted to the public as a crusade for human rights and to save the lives of Libyan civilians was in reality a war of imperialist plunder whose main objectives were to establish hegemonic control over the North African country’s oil wealth at the expense particularly of Russia and China.

Once in Benghazi, beginning in April 2011, Stevens’ role was to coordinate funding, weapons and training for the “rebels,” while ensuring that the collection of exiles, ex-Gaddafi functionaries and Islamists in the NTC toed America’s line.

A central problem in this venture was, in the absence of a genuine mass revolutionary uprising, the organization of a fighting force able to follow up the murderous aerial bombardment by the US and its allies. The opportunistic solution was the utilization of forces tied to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, who had both experience and motivation as fighters.

The Libyan war saw elements that had previously been denounced as terrorists and, in a number of cases, detained and tortured by the CIA, suddenly hailed as freedom fighters and heroes.

Clearly, Washington’s calculation was that, after using these forces, it could dispose of them later as a puppet state headed by the Libyan equivalent of a Hamid Karzai took shape. This state is being formed—now under the leadership of newly elected Prime Minister Mustafa Abu-Shakour, who spent 32 years as an exile in the US, where he worked at one time for the Pentagon—but its power has proven inadequate to disarm and disband tens of thousands of armed and unemployed militia members.

The war in Libya ended in October 2011 with the barbaric lynch-mob murder of Gaddafi. At the time, Secretary of State Clinton gloated over the former Libyan leader’s fate, laughingly declaring, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Speaking in the aftermath of Stevens’ killing Wednesday, Clinton declared, “How could this happen in a country we helped liberate in a city we helped save from destruction?” If the Secretary of State doesn’t know the answer to this question, she should have her head examined.

The same elements that she was lauding as “heroes” when they were sodomizing and lynching Gaddafi are the “savages” she and Obama now say must be “brought to justice.” No doubt, their desire to murder the ambassador was fueled by the conviction that the so-called “revolution” has brought them—not to mention the Libyan people—nothing.

Such sentiments are widespread throughout the region. Those who live in these countries know first-hand that the pursuit of American “interests and values” is a cynical exercise in destruction and greed that no professions of idealism can conceal.

As for the media, the fulsome tributes by those claiming to have known Stevens, in some cases citing emails he sent to members of the press, are a telling self-indictment of the incestuous relations between the Washington ruling establishment and the so-called fourth estate.

As in Iraq earlier, the war of aggression against Libya was possible thanks to deliberate and systematic lying to the American public by a corporate-controlled media that regurgitated the US government’s propaganda. It played an indispensable role in packaging an illegal war for regime change as a humanitarian venture aimed at saving lives and fostering democracy.

Standing out among the media eulogies for Stevens is that offered by the loathsome Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist and former foreign editor, who has churned out column after column promoting US militarism from the Balkans to Iraq. Cohen tells his readers that Stevens “died for American values.”

What he means was spelled out a little over a year ago, when he penned a column on Libya entitled “Score one for interventionism,” arguing that “interventionism is inextricable from the American idea… the idea that the West must be prepared to fight for its values against barbarism.”

Cohen cites a July 4, 2011 email Stevens sent to a large number of people wishing them “a great 4th with plenty of beer, ice cream, hamburgers and Chinese fireworks.” At the time, Libya was awash in blood and gore, having undergone over 100 days of continuous US-NATO bombardment.

The endless repetition of tributes to Stevens’ idealism and good nature will no doubt strike a chord with the layers of the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left that lined up behind the Obama administration’s war in Libya. That this praise has come from both Democrats and the likes of Condoleezza Rice and others within the Bush administration, which he also served, will not faze them in the least.

Stevens in the end expressed the hypocritical and murderous role played by Washington on the world stage that Graham Greene’s novel pointed to more than half a century ago. He was another “quiet American,” concealing naked imperialist interests with rhetoric about democracy and liberation, while leaving a trail of mayhem and destruction in his wake.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Van Auken is a leading member of the Social Equality Party and senior editor with World Socialist Web Site.

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