As the fighting continues in Libya, the Gaddafi government has invited foreign reporters to Tripoli, as long as they stay in the Rixos hotel. They are barred from leaving to report on actual events, but occasionally get to hear government statements or get taken on organized tours for propaganda purposes.
That tightly-controlled system was violated this morning when Eman al-Obeidy, a Libyan woman from the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, escaped from two days of imprisonment at the hands of Gaddafi’s militia. She managed to flee to the Rixos, where she told reporters about her ordeal. According to Obeidy, she was tied up, beaten, and raped by 15 men, who also defecated and urinated on her. She pleaded for her friends who are still in custody, and showed a number of bruises and injuries on her body.
Being surrounded by international media did not keep her safe, as she was soon confronted by security forces as she told her story. Despite resisting frantically and some attempts at intervention by journalists, she was taken away in a car. Hotel employees sided with the security forces, threatening Obeidy and using knives to hold off journalists who were trying to help her. Soon thereafter, government spokespeople accused her of being drunk and mentally ill, claiming that her story of rape and abuse was a fantasy.
Here’s a video of Obeidy being taken away. Warning: intense and very real.
reminds me of a song:
We’ll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song
Change it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fall that’s all
But the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
‘Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war
Some of the comments here leave me more disheartened than the video, if that was even possible.
There appears to be this great urge on the part of of Western leaders to Do Good in the Middle East. The most obvious results are the interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, theocracy in Iran, the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein, two Gulf Wars, a succession of brutally repressive dictatorships armed with America weapons, and loads of cheap oil.
The time is long past when we should have figured out that the West ruins everything it touches there. The actions of the West have never been about helping the Middle East, free of Western geopolitical interests. We have never acted “morally” in the region, and the disastrous consequences of this legacy mean “moral” involvement of foreign powers is likely precluded. I can’t help but think if we stopped meddling in their affairs, both the West and the Middle East would be better off. Surely the historical record of unremitting, abject failure in the region is evidence enough that some radical change in approach is desperately needed.
The urge to Do Good can be powerful. Seems to me the best way to help Arab world in the long run is to fight acting upon that urge using the conventional methods. All evidence indicates such involvement only makes things worse.
Low math, I would agree with your argument except for one thing. What occurs is as you say, but I think the West, and especially the Americans, have an intrinsic blood lust and greed. It seems to be a thing that dares not reveal itself above the subconscious level. What occurs instead is a perverse need to rationalize ones impulse by always looking for all the stars to align, where all the outward circumstances will mitigate against our being the perpetrator of evil, where we can say that we are only acting on the behalf of terribly victimized nations.
So yes, we convince ourselves what we do is for the benefit of other nations. But it for us and we just deceive ourselves. We have never been an inward looking nation.
Let’s not kid ourselves. There are concrete realpolitik motivations for the west intervening in Libya where it has not intervened in other similar situations before, and where it is not intervening in Bahrain or elsewhere.
1) Western leaders wish to appear to muslims that they are capable of acting in humanitarian, disinterested fashion; this is to counteract accusations of only intervening when political or economic interests are involved. Of course, there are economic interests involved, as Italy gets much of its oil from Libya. But England, France, USA, and Canada have little or no economic ties to Libya, and they all want to win the hearts and minds of the masses of Arabia as a means of counteracting the appeal of Islamist extremists (which western governments rather overestimate). So by acting in support of a popular uprising against an unpopular tyrant, they are trying to gain credibility as acting in the interests of the people of the region rather than the interests of themselves or their puppets.
2) In acting against Libya, they are acting against a leader, Khaddafi, who has no international support anywhere. He is tolerated by the international community as long as he does nothing outside his borders; but no one will lift a finger to save him. So he is the perfect target of opportunity.
3) The governments of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are faithful allies who provide (in the case of Bahrain) docking facilities for the US 5th fleet and other benefits. So intervening there would be dicey at best. And by still being committed to Iraq and Afghanistan for some time to come, the west can realistically claim to be “too busy” to intervene everywhere.
Khaddafi is no idiot – or rather, in the mathematics of political survival he has some practical ability. He knows that to survive he has to frame this as a battle of muslim vs. christian, which he’s been doing. He knows that he can hang for quite a while if he correctly assesses how much of his behaviour the west will tolerate before committing to take him out. This is why he announced a cease-fire when there wasn’t one; then blamed the rebels for violating it, and will now probably dial back his military offensive and hope to ride it out until the west gets tired and goes home. If he can last that long, and still has significant air and armour left at that time, he’ll resume the offensive.
He’s also desperately, I imagine, trying to assess what the west will do when and if the rebels begin to advance, and start moving west towards Tripoli. The west’s stated aim is to prevent him from massacring his own people – will the west continue to provide a no-fly zone if it looks like the rebels are likely to take the offensive and turn this into a civil war between equals? Especially if it looks like they might win?
And what about the west? What if they withdraw their no-fly zone when it seems the rebels are starting to win, and Khaddafi resumes bombing? Will the west lose yet more credibility for not following through to the ugly end?
Make no mistake – the west has, by this action, committed itself to an Afghanistan-style campaign, i.e., using overwhelming air superiority and letting locals find the ground battles, with the aim of effecting regime change. If they haven’t realized that, then they’re risking doing a half-baked job and leaving Khaddafi in place and permitting either a massacre of the rebels, or a long-term civil war in which they make sure no one side gets too much of an advantage over the other.
It could get real ugly.
Just a few days before his intervention the President held a conference on bullying in our schools and how we must fight it – yet the US is always the bully in world affairs – we always attack the weak and the hated. Notice we never attack a country with nuclear weapons – the leaders of Iran and other countries are not totally stupid its just a matter of time before we push all small/medium aggressive countries to obtain nuclear weapons so they won’t have to be worried about an American attack.
There is a lot of love and kindness in the world.
#32 Brian 137 —
Indeed, but there is a severe deficit of love and kindness where it is most needed. And conversely, there is a severe deficit of money where it is most needed. The love is mainly in the roots, and the money is mainly in the flowers. Now if someone could figure out how to water the roots with more money, and shine more love on the flowers, we might get somewhere.
Meanwhile, love can’t stop a bullet once it’s fired.
Countries whose leaders fail to look after their citizens best interests give rise to revolutions, so western leaders should hardly be blamed for doing exactly what they’re elected to do. Some people who comment here seem to think it’s quite reasonable for the U.S. to intervene anywhere in the world it wants to, just so long as those people get to pick what is a “just cause” (as opposed to the elected leaders of said country). There’s really only one thing that one can be sure of in the terribly complex Libyan situation: regardless of what ultimately happens, the United States will be blamed for it.
David George,
Thank you for responding to my post (#32).
I am not sure what you mean here: “The love is mainly in the roots….”
…love can’t stop a bullet once it’s fired.
It looks to me as if a lot of bullets that might have been directed against the innocent were stopped before they were fired.
#35 Brian137 —
I had the following written out before I read your #36 comment, I will put it first then comment on #36.
Thank you too — now I get to expound!
I mean that if a human society is a living organism (or an organization of living creatures), the metaphor is of a plant, and the roots are the workers whose labor converts the raw material of Earth, by which the organism lives, into a form useable by the whole organism. And they then send the fruit of their labor up the line. They used to be subsistence farmers and craftsmen, as well as slaves. (Today they are slaves of a pernicious system under which they are “free” in the sense that the masters are freed from the responsibility of looking after them. They are not freed from the masters!)
Before people are slaves, and even after they are enslaved, they work for love. They live in a community unknown to a hereditary ruling class (which may as well be a different species). The community’s practical forms may be a religion, or it may be a system of extended family, or it may be simply a system of honor. But where it is sustained, it sustains itself on love — love your husband/wife, love your family, love your neighbor as yourself. It’s like a loving exchange. Exchange of love creates harmony, and that is power against death (which was always close by).
I believe this community is the historical state of the unknown human race (the one the history books generally ignore in favor of the wars of the power elites). It is a fragile state, easily poisoned, subverted or divided against itself, but when it is harmonic it is powerful. In the plant metaphor, the roots are watered with love — people work for, or by, love. (And it is virtually self-evident that a certain portion of work is good for your health and is also good for the society’s health.) Right now, the roots are in a virtual state of chaos — unemployment, underemployment, underpayment, dispossession, etc. — imposed by the master class. But for all their troubles, they are where the love mainly is and always has been.
I believe money can be understood as (among other things) a system of artificial love. The more artificial love there is in the system, the less natural love. That is not to say that money is evil, because it isn’t. Historically it is simply a promise to pay for work. The issuer promises to pay you for your current labor at a future time (for example, when the next crop of calves arrive — payment in kind), and the coin is the token of the promise. Then the coin is negotiable — the promise is transferrable to immediately available goods or services. And so the long “climb” to “modern civilization” begins. Like all living creatures, societies always want to grow, to create new systems (by the power of human imagination). A constant task is to figure out whether a system’s development is harmonic or chaotic. Is the “dream” healthy, or is it sick? (I think of the modern American system as one that operates largely on snake oil exchanges — while prohibiting healthy or therapeutic substances, thus tending to pervert them. A lot of people swallow the snake oil, but you can also get sick just from the fumes.)
I am starting to stray. I hope you see where this goes. At some point the artificial love tends to drive out the natural love, especially at its source, and especially when the source (the “flower” in my metaphor) issues the money to itself! The money issuing class has no love — it is sociopathic, almost out of necessity. The power must pretend to be impersonal in order to be “impartial” (a lost cause), then the conflicts of social “principle” become incomprehensible. And of course power attracts sociopaths clever enough to market various snake oil remedies, people are poisoned by the snake oil, or maybe at some point they won’t swallow it even when the rulers put huge energy into controlling the dream (thought) by media manipulation or by directly prohibiting certain classes of thought. The noxious ruling class then serves only itself, then its only security is in armed force — justified domestically by some “threat”. When there is war it should be fairly obvious that the society is not harmonic — it is disintegrating. When was America last without a designated war? The malicious and fraudulent “war on drugs” alone has been going on for forty years.
Maybe this metaphor could be quantified — say, the velocity of loving exchange varies inversely with the velocity of money exchange (or something like that). Or, whatever harmony exists in the roots is due to mainly to natural love; the per capita fraction of harmony due to money increases in proportion to the amount of money, but the total harmony per capita decreases proportionately as the amount of money increases. So, quantitatively, most of the love is in the roots since most people of Earth are in the roots. That is overly simplistic but it gives the germ of the metaphor.
But there is an absolute basic need for money exchange when people are separated from what sustains them (food and water). And most people, if not already removed, are being removed from the source of their sustenance. Sadly the modern global system cannot grow on natural love alone (nor by artificial manipulated markets). Right now the roots are parched.
And that is probably enough expounding by me for awhile, deep into uncharted territory and mixing metaphors.
#36 Brian137 —
We will never know, though. We do not know who the “innocent” are in Libya. The initial trouble, as I read, was begun by people who burned down a courthouse in Benghazi, and terrorized the city to the point where no one was on the street, not even the police. And I have a feeling there were agents provocateurs involved. I am not excusing Gaddafi for his brutal response, but maybe he doesn’t have the non-lethal crowd control apparatus that the U.S. has. Nor do I believe forty years in power is healthy. However, the more I read the more it seems this is a setup for control of Africa, and control of the so-called Arab “revolutions” — counter-revolutions is more like it. The rebels do include al Qaeda; there have been atrocities on their side also. But what really gets me is your apparently selective sympathy. How many innocent people do you suppose died directly from American weapons in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and before that in the first Gulf war? And how many are dying today in Afghanistan on Obama’s orders? His own words in his speech are pretty disgusting. Other people can turn a blind eye to atrocities, but not Americans? Give me a break! The U.S. media turns a blind eye to American atrocities on behalf of Americans, they don’t have to turn a blind eye because they don’t see them in the first place!
David George, wow, what a great metaphor! As one grows older there seems to be longer and longer intervals in between learning genuinely inspired concepts. The plant analogy is one of them. Thank you.
Brian123, I think the limitation on your thinking comes from your affiliation. We are all born into a world in which certain things just are. Our social and governmental affiliations are the most important. An area of growth for many people is to imagine another family or nation which they
might have been born into, but through the power of fate they were not. Perform a meditative study of what it might be like to view the world from a personal world far removed from ones present affiliations.
Warning!! Do this at your own own risk. It can be the start of a very rocky road once you make a conscious effort to try to do this. You will see all sorts of injustices in the world where you don’t presently see them and it will likely become harder and harder to bear. You have to be a courageous person to even start on this journey but it is ultimately worth the effort.
chomsky in amsterdam http://vimeo.com/21009223
David and Eric,
Thank you for commenting on my posts. My main point is that human beings have a virtually infinite amount of love, kindness, joie de vivre, or whatever one chooses to call it. You can prove this to yourself with a relatively small amount of introspection.
I think this Libya “revolution” is anything but. It is a total setup. No doubt the same outfits are involved in the “troubles” in Syria.
http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad03312011.html
To me that is an accurate assessment. (Sorry Milan I can’t view videos on this computer, but I believe you are on the right track.)
Poe’s Law?
I was extremely moved by the video in the OP. I am not very interested in discussions of who is right, who is wrong, who is good, who is bad, or political and social theories (not, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, that there’s anything wrong with that).
But I was sorry to see a person – like me in some ways though different in others – apparently in such dire straits. I was happy to read the following sequel in today’s New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/world/africa/05tripoli.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=world