Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya

Horace Campbell

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781583674123
• eBook ISBN: 9781583674185
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this incisive account, scholar Horace Campbell investigates the political and economic crises of the early twenty-first century through the prism of NATO's intervention in Libya. He traces the origins of the conflict, situates it in the broader context of the Arab Spring uprisings, and explains the expanded role of a post-Cold War NATO. This military organization, he argues, is the instrument through which the capitalist class of North America and Europe seeks to impose its political will on the rest of the world, however warped by the increasingly outmoded neoliberal form of capitalism. The intervention in Libya—characterized by bombing campaigns, military information operations, third party countries, and private contractors—exemplifies this new model.
Campbell points out that while political elites in the West were quick to celebrate the intervention in Libya as a success, the NATO campaign caused many civilian deaths and destroyed the nation's infrastructure. Furthermore, the instability it unleashed in the forms of militias and terrorist groups have only begun to be reckoned with, as the United States learned when its embassy was attacked and personnel, including the ambassador, were killed. Campbell's lucid study is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this complex and weighty course of events.

1—INTRODUCTION THE NATO INTERVENTION IN LIBYA: A LESSON OF COLOSSAL FAILURE

When the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings erupted in Africa in the first two months of the year 2011 with the chant, “The people want to bring down the regime,” there was hope all over the continent that these rebellions were part of a wider “African Awakening.” President Ben Ali of Tunisia was forced to step down and fled to Saudi Arabia. Within a month of Ben Ali’s departure, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was removed from power by the people, who mobilized a massive revolutionary movement in the country. Four days after the ousting of Mubarak, sectors of the Libyan people rebelled in Benghazi. Within days, this uprising was militarized, with armed resistance countered by declarations from the Libyan leadership vowing to use raw state power to root out the rebellion.

The first Libyan demonstrations occurred on February 15, 2011, but by February 21 there were reports that innocent civilians were in imminent danger of being massacred by the army. This information was embellished by reports of the political leadership branding the rebellious forces as “rats.” The United States, Britain, and France took the lead to rush through a resolution in the United Nations Security Council, invoking the principle of the “responsibility to protect.” This principle had been embraced and supported by many governments in the aftermath of the genocidal episodes in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. UN Security Council Resolution 1973 of 2011 was loosely worded, with the formulation “all necessary measures” tacked on to ensure wide latitude for those societies and political leaders who orchestrated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention in Libya.¹ What was left out in the reporting on this resolution was that there had been provisions for mediation and a cease-fire.

In the following nine months, the implementation of this UN resolution exposed the real objectives of the leaders of the United States, France, and Britain. With the Western media fueling a propaganda campaign in the traditions of “manufacturing consent,” this Security Council authorization was stretched from a clear and limited civilian protection mandate into a military campaign for regime change and the execution of the president of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi.² When, a week after Gaddafi’s execution, Seumas Milne wrote in the UK newspaper The Guardian, “If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure,” he was communicating a conclusion that had been echoed by democratic forces all over the world, and repeated by concerned intellectuals who had written “An Open Letter to the Peoples of Africa and the World from Concerned Africans.”³ The themes of NATO’s failure were repeated by Western newspapers that opined, “The Libya campaign, far from demonstrating NATO’s abiding strength, rather exposed its manifold, and growing, weaknesses.”⁴ Think tanks and opinion framers such as the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) of London and the Jamestown Foundation of the United States could not but comment on the clear failure of this highly publicized mission that was presented under the rubric of “humanitarianism.” As a display of Western military strength and cohesion, the NATO operation was a failure and was understood to be so by the majority outside the orbit of the mainstream of the Anglo-American media.⁵ Writers from Asia were linking the role of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) to the new power grab in Africa, while there was massive opposition from Africa. In studying the catastrophic failures, African intellectuals have sought to highlight the illegal actions of NATO, calling for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate and establish if war crimes were committed in Libya.

One year after the NATO forces embarked on their mission to carry out regime change in Libya, it is still pertinent to restate the principal ideas that came from Africa in the face of the present lawlessness, torture, and terror campaigns of competing militias. Amnesty International, by no means an organization unfriendly to NATO, issued a report in February 2012 detailing widespread torture in the prisons and makeshift detention facilities in Libya. This report documented savage practices that included beatings with whips, cables, metal chains, and wooden sticks, electric shocks, extraction of fingernails, and rape. Militia fighters conducted these attacks brazenly, in some cases abusing prisoners in the presence of human rights advocates.⁶ Amnesty International has also reported the widespread persecution of innocent citizens by out-of-control militias. In January 2012, a report by a human rights group from the Middle East documented war crimes carried out by NATO in their eight-month operation for regime change.⁷ No less a person than Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, noted that “the lack of oversight by the central authority creates an environment conducive to torture and ill-treatment.”

The more chilling aspect of this persecution is the racist attacks on those who are supposed to be “black” Africans. There are reports from numerous sources that, in addition to black Africans being detained en masse on the suspicion that they were mercenaries for Gaddafi, the town of Tawergha, previously a black African community, has been completely emptied and declared a “closed military zone” by the NATO-supported militia forces. Revenge and retribution is now being followed by separatist movements calling for either the dissolution of the present state or the establishment of a federal authority.

This reality of continued warfare and widespread torture of Africans demands a revisit of the position of the African Union (AU) that was articulated on March 10, 2011, at the 265th meeting of the Peace and Security Council of the AU. This “road map” was a five-point plan demanding:

a cease-fire; the protection of civilians; the provision of humanitarian aid for Libyans and foreign workers in the country; dialogue between the two sides, i.e. the Gaddafi regime and the National Transitional Council (NTC); leading to an “inclusive transitional period” and political reforms which “meet the aspirations of the Libyan people.”

The Scramble for African and Libyan Resources

One year after the UN resolution authorizing the use of force to implement the no-fly zone, the deployment of NATO military forces—coordinating with “special forces” from Qatar, under the umbrella of unlimited bombing campaigns—has left the international headlines. However, the reality of the destruction in Libya has not left the consciousness of Africans and those who support peace internationally.^.8 In the open letter to the citizens of the world, the concerned African intellectuals expressed their pain and anger at the manipulation of the United Nations by the ruling elements in France, Great Britain, and the United States.⁹ Drawing attention to the lessons from the wars against the people of Iraq and the statement by sectors of the neoconservative forces in the United States wishing for the “death of the United Nations,” these intellectuals clarified the manipulation of information that preceded the passing of the United Nations Resolution 1973 of March 2011.

This attack on Africans in the midst of a depression is not new, and reminded African intellectuals of the context of the demise of the League of Nations. African scholars wanting to inspire a new appreciation of global history readily understand that it was during a capitalist depression that the League of Nations collapsed, after the European powers failed to intervene to halt the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, in October 1935.¹⁰ This failure of the League of Nations laid the foundations for the triggers of war that engulfed humanity in the tragic cycles of economic crises, fascism, war, genocide, and the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 2011, in the midst of another depression, international diplomacy had failed in Africa, and African intellectuals, like their predecessors of the International African Service Bureau (IASB) of the Depression years, were warning of the cascading forces for more war.¹¹ These African intellectuals reminded those who would listen that the UN Security Council had failed to prove that its authorization of the use of force under Chapter VII of the UN Charter was a proportionate and appropriate response to what had, in reality, developed into a civil war in Libya. They maintained:

It is clear that the U.S. and its European allies are reverting to crude military means to re-colonize Africa. The independence that Africans fought so hard for must be defended. We cannot allow the second scramble for Africa to occur on our watch. We condemn the U.S., UK and France for the flagrant abuse of the UN Security Council and demand that the International Criminal Court investigate NATO to establish if war crimes were committed in Libya. We condemn the extra-judicial killing of Col. Gaddafi and call for an independent transparent international inquiry to establish the true facts surrounding it.

This book is written in the spirit of the international forces that are opposed to the present scramble for Africa and that are campaigning against the remilitarization of Africa. In the process of this analysis, we will elaborate on the insensate struggle among the Western powers for control over the continent’s petroleum resources. African petroleum resources are caught up in a new transitional period, where the future of the top Western oil corporations is on the line. Even before the complete fall of Gaddafi’s regime, one British scholar, David Anderson, had opined on “the fight for Libya’s oil.”¹² Waxing enthusiastically on the “significant pickings” in Libya, Anderson reflected on the opportunities for Europe’s oil giants—Eni, Total, BP, and Repsol YPF—who are “perfectly positioned” to take advantage of these commercial opportunities. What was left out was the deep competition between European oil giants and the “Big Oil” firms from North America. In 2002, the African Oil Policy Initiative Group conducted a symposium titled “African Oil: A Priority for U.S. National Security and African Development.” It was in this setting that former congressman William Jefferson said, “African oil should be treated as a priority for U.S. national security post–9/11. I think that . . . post–9/11 it’s occurred to all of us that our traditional sources of oil are not as secure as we thought they were.” Jefferson was reflecting one sector of the U.S. policy environment that fell under the sway of the alliance between big oil and big banks. The U.S. oil companies emerged as major international corporations after 1945 and influenced the U.S. government initiatives, wielding profound influence over the Pentagon, the State Department, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, and other branches of the U.S. imperial system. In the era of financialization, these corporations became enmeshed in the Wall Street investment game and increased their influence over the U.S. political system at home and abroad. The relationship between the big oil companies, the U.S. political system, and the Wall Street oligarchs is described as the tripartite alliance in the U.S. political system.

After developing the tripartite alliance with the top Wall Street investment firms and riding on high oil and gasoline prices, the U.S. oil giants became the most profitable industry in the world. Six of the ten largest corporations in the world are oil companies. They are, in order, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell (Shell), British Petroleum (BP), Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Total. These large corporations are at the core of what is called “Big Oil.” According to the author of The Tyranny of Oil, Big Oil is experiencing a level of power that has only one historical precedent: that of the Standard Oil era. And, like Standard Oil, the companies appear willing to do anything to maintain their position.¹³

In our examination of the relationship between Goldman Sachs and the Libyan National Oil Company, we will draw attention to the challenge that Libyan independence posed to both oil imperialism and the dominance of NATO over the region of North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea. The oil companies never forgot that Libya’s nationalization of oil in the 1970s was the precursor to Iranian nationalization in 1979 and Saudi Arabia’s full takeover of Aramco in the mid-1980s.¹⁴ Before the uprisings, Gaddafi had again raised the question of nationalizing Western oil companies. Numerous scholars have been explicit that Libya was enmeshed in the new geopolitics for energy resources.¹⁵ These scholars can be distinguished from the spokespersons for Western corporations from universities and organizations such as the Atlantic Council or the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States. It is the very platform for the ideas of the “liberalization” and “freedom” that further exposes the worn-out intellectual apparatus of the West in the service of the tripartite alliance. Yet, as we will analyze in this book, the intelligentsia in the service of finance capital are in a losing battle at the intellectual level and on the ground in the actual competition to control the resources of Africa. After failing to compete in the marketplace with new rising powers, the military management of the international system is coming up against national oil corporations that are seeking new linkages with Brazil, China, India, and other emerging forces in the international system. Throughout the decade after international sanctions were lifted against Libya, the Gaddafi government skillfully used Exploration and Production Sharing Agreements (EPSA) with the Libyan National Oil Corporation to maintain a balance in its relationships among North American, European, Brazilian, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Indian, and other corporate entities that were investing in Libyan energy markets. By the year 2009, the Chinese oil giant PetroChina overtook Exxon Mobil as the world’s most valuable company. Though Exxon temporarily regained its position, the rapid growth of PetroChina, Sinopec, and the Brazilian state-owned Petrobras challenged the dominance of Big Oil and changed the international energy landscape. Libya was able to reflect on alternative sources of financing for its resources. By the end of 2010, China was the top investor in Libya.

The state-controlled Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) entered into the opaque world of financing energy markets before their corporate associates on Wall Street such as Goldman Sachs and the intellectuals who spoke on behalf of the oil companies realized that the neoliberal faction of the political leadership in Libya was too weak to deliver the economy and the Libyan reserves to the West. Gaddafi had kept the Western oligarchs at bay using a revolving-door mechanism. Moreover, the U.S. oil majors found Gaddafi’s flirtation with non-European companies in Libya too threatening. Libya is a top producer of petroleum products, with less than 30 percent of its resources tapped. The leadership of this same Libya had become aggressive in its financial operations, while committing to the establishment of an African Monetary Union, an African Central Bank, and an African Investment Bank. After December 2010, the Central Bank of Libya took the controlling position in the Bahrain-based Arab Banking Corporation, which was owned by the Kuwait Investment Authority, the Central Bank of Libya, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and other, smaller shareholders. (To date, few scholarly writings have linked the Libyan dominance in the Arab Banking Corporation to the tectonic events in Libya since February 2011.) Many of the political leaders in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—whose calling, since the 1970s, had been to recycle the resources of Arabia for the Western financial system—had been alarmed by the independence of the Libyan leadership in its thrust to move the Arab Banking Group out of its servile position to Western banking interests.

Taking Libya Out of Africa

This book will bring to light the interconnections between the resources of Libya, the NATO intervention, and the discrediting of the liberal discourses on African resources, including the discourses on human rights and the responsibility to protect. It is our intention to draw out the intensity of the Western preoccupation with Libya and the leading roles of Western intellectuals. In the Africanist establishment in the West, there are established experts on every African society. In the case of Libya, however, there were not only the country experts but also the intellectuals in think tanks, such as Chester Crocker (through the Atlantic Council), Joseph Nye, Michael Porter, Francis Fukuyama, Richard Perle, Bernard Lewis, Benjamin Barber, and Robert Putnam (through the Monitor Group), all of whom engaged in a sustained campaign to promote “reforms” in Libya and Africa.¹⁶

Saif al-Islam, one of Gaddafi’s sons, had been schooled in the neo-liberal discourse about “reforms” and had successfully ensnared leading Western intellectuals in a project to burnish the image of the Gaddafi government. The Monitor Group, a Boston-based, top consulting firm associated with the Harvard Business School, was seeking to catch up with the advance work of the London School of Economics (LSE), other British institutions of higher learning, politicians, and sectors of the energy industry. Anthony Giddens, one of the most cited sociologists of the Anglo-Saxon intellectual world and former director of the LSE, made many trips to Libya and brought in Tony Blair, the former prime minister, as an interlocutor to promote British interests in Libya “from strength to strength.”

Joseph Nye (as one of the group of experts of the Monitor Group) has demonstrated, in theory and practice, that the international relations ideas about the soft power of the United States are part of the general “what is good for U.S. banks and corporations is good for humanity” toolbox. Institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) provide the necessary intellectual and policy network for the banks, the oil companies, and the barons of finance. However, the Libyan episode exposed the reality that the belief systems of “free markets” and “soft power” are tools of the neoliberal thrust of permanent war and the Americanization of the world. Richard Haass, president of the CFR, gave u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Preface
• 1. Introduction the NATO Intervention in Libya: A Lesson of Colossal Failure
• 2. The Independence of Libya and the Birth of NATO
• 3. The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Emergence of Global NATO
• 4. Muammar Gaddafi and the Elusive Revolution
• 5. The Neoliberal Assault On Libya: London School of Economics and Harvard Professors
• 6. Un Security Council Resolution 1973 and the Responsibility to Protect
• 7. Libya and the Gulf Cooperation Council
• 8. Libyan Resources
• 9. France and Libya
• 10. Libya and the Financialization of Energy Markets
• 11. The NATO Campaign
• 12. The African Union and Libya
• 13. NATO in Libya as a Military Information Operation
• 14. Who Took Tripoli?
• 15. Tawergha and the Myth of the African Mercenaries
• 16. The Execution of Gaddafi
• 17. NATO’s Libyan Mission: A Catastrophic Failure
• 18. European Isolation in Africa
• 19. Failure Begets Failure: The NATO Quagmire Consumes the U.S. Ambassador to Libya
• 20. “Libya All In”: A Culture of Dysfunctionality in the U.S. Military and Its Explosion in the U.S. Political System
• 21. Conclusion: NATO and the Processes of Failure and Destruction in Libya
• Afterword by Ali A. Mazrui: From the Lockerbie Air Crash to the Libyan Revolution
• APPENDIX 1. Communique of the 265th Meeting of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union
• APPENDIX 2. African Union Peace and Security Council Road Map on Libya, March 10, 2011
• APPENDIX 3. UN Security Council Resolution 1973
• APPENDIX 4. Chinese Businesses in Libya
• APPENDIX 5. “This Is My Will,” by Muammar Gaddafi
• Notes
• Index