Libya says: no foreign intervention. Jamie spells it out:
I think it’s a reasonable supposition that the banner represents the broad opinion of the insurgents. It’s natural to want to finish your own revolution. Whether it represents the opinions of the civilians stuck in the middle is another matter. But that in itself points up that if you do decide to – say – return the Sixth Fleet’s Marine Expeditionary Force to the shores of Tripoli, then you’re going to have a lot of angry revolutionaries to deal with as well as Gaddafi’s mob. And if you want to influence the eventual political outcome of a revolution, the first people you need on your side are the ones who took up arms.
Let’s do the maths once more here, for clarity. In the past decade, Britain and/or the Americans have either bombed, invaded and/or occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; our wacky allies have bombed Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, and the United States also maintains military bases in Bahrain, Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
You can assess that using whatever justifications and euphemisms you like, but any major campaign against Libya is going to be a hard, hard sell to the UN as disinterested humanitariansm, even if it’s exactly that. Assuming we’re bothering with the formalities this time, that is.
Still, the British government, eh? All the memory capacity of a geriatric goldfish in a body filled with adventuresome spirit and a few hundred bloody bulletholes. What a plucky bunch we are.
But, as Louis Proyect reports, that doesn’t stop some on the left from automatically taking a pro-khadaffi, or as they call it, a anti-anti-khadeffi stance just because the US and UK are making some noise about maybe doing something about Khadaffi. It’s a blindingly stupid attitude, both to not support a popular uprising because you think the US might profit from it and to think that this is actually could be an American engineered revolution. Anybody with half a brain can see that the US and EU were both taken completely by surprise by the developments in the Middle East, had no idea about how to respond to the uprisings and are still trying to regain control somehow. To think any of this was engineered by anybody is so clueless it edges into Glenn Beck territory.
All the talk about no-fly zones and intervention, though it should resisted of course, is just an attempt to spin events in such a way to put the western powers back in the driving seat, or at least give the impression they are in control again and on the side of angels. Reality is otherwise: it’s the people of Libya, Egypt, Tunesia, Yemen, Oman, Bahrein and so on who are, for the first time in decades, in the lead.