03/17/16 – Jeff Bachman – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show, here on the Liberty Radio Network, live on the weekdays, noon to two, Eastern Time, scotthorton.org, et cetera, et cetera, like that.
All right.
Next up is Jeff, no, first up today, Jeff Bachman.
He is professor of human rights and co-director of ethics, peace, and global affairs at American University's School of International Service.
And he's the author of this article at Common Dreams, Revisiting the Humanitarian Intervention in Libya.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
I'm good, thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
And I'm happy to say that there's a little bit of revisionist history finally coming out about the Libya war, reminding people about just what happened there and providing a bit of context.
But I'm happy to say that yours really stands out among them as far as, well, I just like the way, you know, which arguments you make and how you incorporate them here.
It's a very good job you did.
Thank you.
Revisiting the humanitarian, quote, unquote, there, ironic quotes, intervention in Libya.
Again, commondreams.org here.
And I guess today's the day, right?
Five years ago today, you write March 17, 2011, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1973, authorizing what exactly?
I'll ask you in just a second.
But the point there being that under international law, under the U.N.
Charter, it's illegal to start a war unless the U.N. Security Council says that you can.
And that's what happened, sort of or not?
Sort of.
I mean, it authorized the use of military force or all necessary means for the prediction, I'm sorry, for the protection of the civilian population of Libya.
And I should note there that it did not specify civilian supporters of the rebels or of the Qaddafi regime, which I think is another element that I didn't include in my piece, which, you know, we can always come back to is that, you know, the intervention was more concerned with supporting the rebels and, you know, therefore also protecting the supporters of the rebels, whereas the Qaddafi supporters, you know, who have every right to their right to life and physical integrity and everything else, whose lives I don't think were seen as important as the others.
But the, you know, go back to the question.
The argument that I make is that the intervention clearly exceeded the mandate and also went beyond anything that could be described as, you know, again, quote, unquote, humanitarian intervention.
And at that point, once you exceed the mandate of what was authorized, then you actually are stepping into the area of an act of aggression.
Now, let me ask you about back then, if you remember or if you have, you know, facts that you could report about back then, was was there really any, you know, denial of this fact back then at the time?
Because certainly on this show, it was easy to see the logical dominoes that fall down.
It's only a matter of, you know, two plus two equals four here.
If the people of Benghazi are not safe from Qaddafi, then that means from, you know, the interventionist logic, they never will be until Qaddafi is gone.
And so a vote to protect them with a no fly zone is a vote for regime change in Tripoli.
As simple as that was obvious in the first place, wasn't it?
Sure.
And, you know, this this actually got the intervention itself connects to sort of the responsibility to protect movement.
And, you know, this is an issue that the R2P advocates and scholars have sort of tackled with is is regime change also justified under R2P?
Is it only for civilian protection?
And then it gets at the question, if the regime intends to kill civilians, then to protect them, is the change in the regime necessary?
But I think the, you know, a related question is, you know, whether Qaddafi was actually I mean, I don't want, you know, just to head off some of the, you know, sympathizer type statements that some might say, you know, I'm not in any way condoning Qaddafi's rule.
But the the facts on the ground appear to show that he was not indiscriminately attacking civilians, that he was actually dealing with a violent uprising, one that was maybe peaceful for the first couple of days.
And that also, you know, he his threats were aimed at the rebels in Benghazi.
And then, you know, I quote to Cooperman in my piece, Alan Cooperman, who's at Texas A&M, who wrote about how, you know, the number of civilians that were killed in Misurata before the intervention occurred, you know, the it's it's not it doesn't demonstrate indiscriminate use of force or intentional targeting of civilians.
So if NATO slash U.S., if the intervention was actually under false pretenses, as Cooperman argues, then right from the start were actually the humanitarian, you know, justification for the war does not stand.
Well, and I think we know from reporting by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro and Kelly Riddell in The Washington Times from a year ago that the CIA and the D.I.
A.told Hillary Clinton and Obama and the administration, no uncertain terms, that the whole Benghazi cossus belly was fake and they went along with it anyway.
Right.
And, you know, I have that I quote that one email that we've seen released where I forget what the individual's name was, but writing to at the time Secretary of State Clinton that the humanitarian justification was of a limited nature and is in the past at this point.
So and this was at the end of March.
So we know within two weeks, Benghazi had been secured or the security had been provided, but the intervention continued.
And NATO, I mean, you know, 1973, the resolution built off of Resolution 1970, which already called for an arms embargo and members of NATO, you know, armed the rebels.
You know, as I noted in my thing by my piece, by middle of May, 14000 airstrikes had been launched.
I mean, this was not civilian protection.
This was clearly, you know, an act of war on behalf of the rebels in Libya.
Well, let me ask you this.
I mean, I'm no lawyer.
That's the other Scott Horton has all the law degrees and everything like that.
But it seems to me like if a president says that he started a war based on a 51 to 49 percent shrug, then that in itself is admissions of war crimes, is it not?
To start a war based on what almost half of you is willing to admit is not a good enough reason.
Sure.
I mean, I don't want to call that specifically a war crime, but what I would say is, I mean, it sounds against me like what I'm arguing, which is it's launching a war of aggression, which is which is itself is a crime.
Yeah.
Isn't that an admission?
That sounds to me like an admission.
You know, I barely decided to do it.
But then Hillary said, come on.
So I said, all right.
Right.
I was I was coaxed into it.
Yeah.
And then, you know, and then to now in this recent Atlantic peace to blame it on Europe, I mean, it's yeah, it's pretty disingenuous to to go and say, well, I thought they would deal with the aftermath.
Well, I mean, we can't even deal with the aftermath until we talk honestly about the intervention itself.
And then certainly look, if you look at what would be became in the immediate aftermath of the intervention and certainly what we see now, I mean, there's arguably a failed state.
And, you know, whether Qaddafi again was a good ruler or not, the state of Libya would be a very different place today if the intervention had not gone forward.
Yeah.
Well, and back to the timeline, because, you know, it's pretty easy, you know, for a Clinton defender to say, yeah, yeah, hindsight, 2020, this, that and the other thing.
But as as you mentioned, and it's made clear in your article here, you have the date.
It's March 27th of 2011.
And there is Sidney Blumenthal informing Clinton that, well, one rebel commander told me his troops continue to summarily execute all foreign mercenaries in the fighting.
And by foreign mercenaries, of course, they mean any blacks that they capture.
Right.
Migrant workers.
Yeah, yeah.
And this is and this is March.
So and again, back to the Washington Times series, we know that there were ongoing efforts by the CIA and the military to thwart the State Department and try to negotiate.
But that she refused even, you know, once the war started, hey, FDR would say, unconditional surrender, man.
We don't stop until Qaddafi is, you know, violated and shot in the side of the head.
Absolutely.
And as I noted in my piece, and when I said there was multiple ceasefires that were rejected again, if this was supposed to be a humanitarian intervention, whether or not they believe Qaddafi would hold himself to any agreed upon ceasefire, they didn't give him give him a chance.
They they rejected it.
The African Union put forth another ceasefire opportunity that was based on the, you know, what was being called for in security.
I'm sorry, in the resolution 1973.
I mean, that would have been the humanitarian thing to do was at least give it an opportunity.
Right.
All right.
Hold it right there.
Yeah, we got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Jeff Bachman.
He's a professor at American University and wrote this piece, Revisiting the Humanitarian Intervention in Libya at CommonDreams.org.
It's a really good one.
Go check it out.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jeff Bachman.
He's got this article at CommonDreams.org.
We're running it on Antiwar.com today as well.
Revisiting the humanitarian intervention in Libya.
Well, we're linking to it.
I mean, we just lifted it.
Revisiting the humanitarian intervention in Libya.
And at the break there, you were talking about the many ceasefires.
And I guess I would try to allow you to get back to that, if you could, Jeff.
You talk about real efforts by the African Union to create what they call a humanitarian corridor here.
Yeah, absolutely.
And South Africa put forward a proposal also.
I mean, the thing about the ceasefires that I find interesting is, you know, the United States and NATO explicitly rejected.
And I don't understand, it's hard for me to understand why they would have a say in whether to reject a ceasefire or not.
You know, when they were authorized to use force for civilian protection, if ceasefire offers are on the table, I think that really should be something that's coordinated through the United Nations if we are going to have an intergovernmental organization that's supposed to maintain international peace and security.
But instead, US and NATO rejected the ceasefire, which, again, I think plays into what I'm arguing is that this is a war of aggression.
They chose not to take these ceasefire opportunities, or at least to call Qaddafi's bluff if they thought that he would ultimately violate them.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, one of the major problems about getting to the bottom of any of these things is that there's no real partisan interest in it because, you know, all the Rubios of the Republican Party, of course, supported the Libya war.
I guess Cruz didn't, but he doesn't want to make a campaign issue out of it now for whatever reason.
And Trump claims he was good on it, but actually demanded war in Libya at the time when you go back to the record.
So there's basically no one who really wants to go after what happened here.
Maybe Trump to a certain degree, but he doesn't have any of the rest of politics behind him on that.
Right.
There's nobody in Congress wants to hold these hearings or anything like that, because this was just the Democrats acting like the Republicans here.
Right.
I mean, without someone like Dennis Kucinich, who, you know, is very vocally opposed to this and was involved in hearings, you know, especially when he started invoking the War Powers Act.
Yeah, there's really, you know, I mean, Hillary Clinton still gets to claim that, you know, Libya, the intervention was a success.
And, you know, just to throw out a few other names, I don't think we can talk about those behind this and coaxing Obama into this without also mentioning Samantha Power and Susan Rice, who are also very active in pushing for this intervention.
And Gail Smith as well.
Right.
She she hardly ever gets the headlines, but she's one of the screeching Valkyries of war up there.
It's funny the way everybody always says, well, of course, you know, the women obviously will be the doves when, in fact, they all seem to be having a contest to prove what right wingers they are.
If you go back to and there's multiple reporting about this.
It's almost kind of unbelievable in a way.
If you think of it like a skit where in the Oval Office, they really had the meeting where all the women were on one side baying for blood and all of the men, including the secretary of defense, the national security adviser and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And all of them were saying, don't do it.
And Obama sided with Hillary and Samantha Power and Susan Rice over the Republic.
And just think of the political excuse there.
Hey, my Republican secretary of defense warned me not to do it.
That's all he needs to protect his right flank there.
Gates said, don't do it.
But instead he goes for it anyway.
Listening to these.
Well, I don't know, what are they?
Are they true believers in this R2P thing?
Are they just front men for Lockheed or where do these people come from?
I think one quick thing I would know, you know, in terms of no flies in Libya and also in Syria, the Department of Defense and the Pentagon have basically said that you can't that you can't just provide a no fly zone without actually, you know, something steam rolling into essentially a war because to enforce that no fly zone would be, you know, you'd have to shoot down potentially, say, Syrian planes or Libyan planes.
And that, of course, would constitute an act of war.
You know, the other thing I was going to say is, you know, I think it's really more a neoliberal agenda type thing.
You know, there's Samantha Power, of course, has a problem from hell, her book on genocide, you know, and it's all based around war for human rights.
And, you know, there are people out there like Mary Ellen O'Connell, who's a law professor at Notre Dame, who is big on the peace agenda and and actually talked a lot about how, you know, the intervention in Libya actually probably caused more harm than good in the sense that, you know, had Qaddafi just been, you know, won the Civil War, it would have been over very quickly.
Instead, by dragging it out, more people died on both sides of the Civil War, as well as obviously civilians who got caught up in the Civil War.
And we're at the end of the first quarter where human rights can be can be protected through bombing campaigns.
You know, Kosovo was, you know, maybe the first example in 1999 where it's like we are going to we're not going to put any of our people at risk.
We're just going to drop bombs and that's going to protect human rights.
Right.
And it's interesting in that one, they at least claimed, lied, but claimed that 100,000 people had been killed.
And then in this case, they said, well, 100,000 people will be killed.
Trust us.
Right, right, right.
And I mean, even the numbers, the numbers that they were saying before the intervention happened were extremely inflated.
I mean, at this point, there is actually a New York Times article probably from like September or October 2011 that said they were all the dead bodies.
And, you know, not to trivialize those who were killed, but they're saying that the total number of people killed was probably between five and 10,000 during the entire entirety of the uprising.
And then the intervention where they were claiming over a thousand people killed within the first few days of the of the uprising.
So, I mean, numbers were very inflated.
And that actually brings up another quote from the piece that I wrote in The New York Times.
Again, four days after resolution 1973 was authorized, David Kirkpatrick wrote that the rebels feel no loyalty to their truth and shape in their propaganda, making vastly inflated claims of Gaddafi's barbaric behavior.
I mean, again, these things we knew very early on, but it never entered into the the mainstream narrative.
And I think that's really problematic when U.S. foreign policy issues are the topic of discussion.
The, you know, the primary mainstream media can can bring up in a story things like that.
But then all the other stories, you know, it could we omit that from them.
And so it becomes a form of propaganda, you know.
Yeah, well, it's just like Jeffrey Goldberg's piece where he starts out saying Assad did the sarin attack.
Assad did the sarin attack.
And all through the article, he says Assad did the sarin attack.
And then, oh, here's this one little anecdote where the director of national intelligence told the president, I refuse to stand by that assertion.
Oh, OK, thanks.
But meanwhile, Assad did the sarin attack.
Assad did the sarin attack, you know, same as always.
Right, right.
But yeah.
And so the other thing is this, is that we also know from all the reporting at the time that there hardly was a civil war at all.
It was Western special forces and air power and a few al-Qaeda guys on the ground fighting this war.
The guys from, you know, the Libyan veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar al-Sharia and JSOC.
They were the ones who were fighting this war.
So, you know, and that's even in the in the emails as well.
There's, you know, even at the time, the reporters calling in from the front on this show were saying there's not really any rebels around.
There's more reporters than rebels on the front lines here, you know.
And as we know, those who were fighting or who NATO was supporting were committing crimes throughout the duration.
And then in the immediate aftermath of that, I think that's telling as well.
You know, Doctors Without Borders in January of 2012 left Libya because basically elements of the rebels were bringing them people who they had tortured and then having Doctors Without Borders give them medical attention and then they'd take them and torture them again.
Doctors Without Borders realized, wait, we just we just aided this person and now this person's back with similar physical ailments.
So, you know, there was a summary executions that, you know, that you mentioned from the email.
I mean, you know, another quick note in terms of how early we knew this, David Zucano from the L.A. Times had written in on March 24th, rebel forces are detaining anyone suspected of serving or assisting Qaddafi regime, locking them up in the same prisons once used to detain and torture Qaddafi's opponents.
And he goes on to talk about how it seems like they're using the same methods that they were supposedly fighting against.
And again, so that was a week into the the intervention itself.
And yet we continue to support these these rebels.
Now, I think the miracle here is that the massive invasion and staying forever that Hillary Clinton promises to begin as soon as she's sworn in.
She invoked, of course, Germany, Japan and Korea as the Libya model to follow just the other day.
And but it seems like a miracle has taken this long.
Like I thought, well, geez, once they it was obvious that if they get rid of Qaddafi, they're destroying the entire state.
What exists of a real state in Libya and they're going to have to start over from scratch.
And the only way to do that is to invade and occupy the place in purple fingered elections and build up an army.
And this exact same Iraq style catastrophe.
And yet it looks like that's the way they're going now because they fought a war for Al-Qaeda guys who now declare their loyalty to the Islamic State.
And so now they're gearing up and already doing missions there and are gearing up for more in Libya right now.
So we're only at the end of Chapter one of this thing.
It looks like Jeff.
That's right.
We're militarily involved in Libya again.
And, you know, after the intervention in Qaddafi was executed, we wiped our hands of it.
There was calls for investigations.
There was calls for greater support in helping build the capacity in Libya.
If I recall correctly, some of the things that were said in response were, you know, the National Transitional Council would ask us if they want us to do those things.
So suddenly, you know, sovereignty didn't matter when it was time to overthrow Qaddafi.
But then once he was overthrown, it was like, well, I mean, we have to we have to give them their sovereignty and let them figure it out themselves.
And of course, as you mentioned, we know how that turned out.
Yeah, well, and I wouldn't have I wouldn't have expected them to do a better job of it than the Libyans that they left it to as far as that goes.
But it just goes to show that, you know, their plan was, well, it'll probably work out or something.
And or if not, then that's fine, too.
We'll just have another war and go save the people that we put in danger.
Just as success was initially, you know, called when we deposed Saddam Hussein and, you know, just as, you know, as soon as Qaddafi was dead, it was like that that that's a success.
I mean, you know, there's that footage of Hillary Clinton laughing, saying something like we came, we saw he died or, you know, or something like that, making essentially a joke out of, you know, the situation.
Yeah.
And tens of thousands of dead since then, at least.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry I kept you away over time.
I got to go.
You got to go.
But thank you very much for your time, Jeff.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
Have a good one.
You too.
All right.
That's Jeff Bachman.
Read this one.
It's really good.
It's at Common Dreams.
Revisiting the humanitarian intervention in Libya.
Will Grigg in one sec.
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