Hey everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line is Charles Featherstone.
He writes for LewRockwell.com because he's a libertarian like that.
He used to live and report in the Middle East and knows a hell of a lot about a lot.
And I got an email this morning saying, Hey, what about this and that about the Eric Margulies interview from KPFK last Friday?
So let's talk about that, Charles.
What's the deal?
How you doing, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Welcome back.
I actually didn't have a lot of complaints about it.
And I trust to defer to Eric Margulies because he's better traveled than I am.
He does what he does, and he's done it a lot longer than I did.
But there was just something in that interview that just – granted, there aren't an awful lot of Libyan rebel fighters, but I think there was an assumption put forward in the interview that somehow the rebellion, at least in the eastern part of Libya, isn't a mass uprising or wasn't at the beginning a popular uprising in Libya, I think is not a correct assertion.
I think it was.
Well, didn't I chime in there and say, yeah, but it started out a huge protest, civilian protest movement across the country, including in Tripoli, before he started dropping bombs on them, and then they all went home, right?
I think so, and I would suspect at this point most Libyans are probably sitting on the side waiting to see what happens.
For example, after the air raids started, I remember that there was some allegedly minder-free interviews done in Tripoli, and I'm thinking Tripoli specifically, in which western reporters talked to Libyans allegedly without the contact, with the protection of their minders, preventing them from free interviews, so to speak.
And you had some Libyans saying, yeah, yeah, this goes on one more week and we'll uprise.
Well, that was more than two weeks ago, and there's been nothing in Qaddafi-controlled cities.
I am guessing still, I don't know how much support there is for Qaddafi and his people, but there has to be some, and there has to be some honest support, because there would get to be a certain point where even which frightened people, I think, might take things into their own hands.
So I suspect a fair number of Libyans are just sitting this out at this point.
Well, and there seems to be a regional divide between east versus west here, and not just geographically speaking, but tribal relationships, and I forgot, Eric mentioned the name of the tribe that used to be the ones that had more power and now don't, but are the second runners up, and that kind of thing.
Well, and we, in our previous interview, had talked a little bit, a little bit.
You mentioned something about tribe and tribal societies in the context of states are interesting because you have, and this is actually true how it works in Saudi Arabia too.
I'll give you an example in Saudi Arabia.
When I was at Ohio State, I got to know a fair number of Saudis there at Ohio State, including one member of the Saudi ulama, a religious scholar, who was there with the American Language Program.
His name is Hamdan al-Hamdan, and apparently, I did not know this at the time, I would learn this later when I actually traveled to the region, but Dr. Hamdan is very well known as a scholar, and he's also well known as a critic of the Saudi government, of the king.
He was one of the members of the ulama who signed a petition in 1991 calling for a more democratic and accountable political process in Saudi Arabia.
Normally, that kind of thing would get you arrested.
The worst that ever happens to Dr. Hamdan, though, is he loses a job, and so he has bounced between two universities in Riyadh, in the capital of Saudi Arabia, between King Saud University, the religion department, and Jamiat Imam Muhammad, Islamic University, and he bounces between them because he is highly regarded, but he also belongs to a very powerful clan.
And even though the state has power, a lot of that power also is part of clan relationships and clan alliances, and so there are some things the state can't do in some situations because it would risk putting clan support.
It would risk support from the clan.
And I suspect Libya works this way as well.
So, for example, let's go back two weeks when Gaddafi was at the gates of Benghazi and he was making all sorts of promises about going from door to door and finding the opposition.
My guess is that the prominent clans of Libya would have, particularly in the east, would have gone to Gaddafi and they would have made some arrangement that would have protected most of their members or at least a significant portion of their members.
The worst offenders would not have been protected, of course.
But it wouldn't have been the bloodbath that would have been promised that would have been a bloodbath still, but it wouldn't have been what Gaddafi was promising or threatening, in part because clan leaders would have come to Gaddafi and said, Okay, enough.
What do we need to do to secure, to prove our allegiance to you?
And we will be loyal to you again.
He would have had some of that.
Well, that's funny because I don't remember that argument being included when all the propaganda was he's, I guess, going to nuke Benghazi and kill every civilian.
He's going to go door to door killing every civilian until they're all dead, which is why we had to intervene.
Remember that?
Yes, and in states where you have post-clan, post-tribe arrangements, in modern states in which you have modernity, in which everything that mediates between the individual and the state is annihilated, there are no intermediate structures that can step in and protect an individual from the state, which is why, for example, the Soviet state could murder its own citizens and people subject to its own power, or the Nazi state could, for that matter, the American state, because there are no intermediate institutions which the state has to placate because their opposition could be dangerous to state authority.
Right.
All right, now here's the thing.
We've seen, it was in McClatchy, and it's all over the place now.
I guess they're not hiding it.
There are all kinds of CIA guys who, you know, Libyan exiles, one of whom is living in the United States, and he's now supposedly the leader of this or that council and whatever among the rebels.
And so I think the way Jess Raimondo put it in his piece on antiwar.com today, it looks like once this revolution started, they said, well, you know, we have this whole kind of apparatus for an attempt to coup d'etat in Libya ready to go anyway.
Why not go ahead and put it into motion?
And it seems like we're learning now, you know, the CIA, as we could have guessed, as Margulies was reporting, CIA and the British and whoever else had been in there for weeks in Libya, and why not they decided on the very first day to try to turn it into a color-coded revolution or a 1953 anti-Mossadegh type revolution, even if it started out, you know, for the first hour it was legitimate, uprising against Gaddafi for, you know, whatever tribal splits and, you know, us versus them in terms of power splits inside the country.
Why couldn't the CIA have taken over the whole thing after, you know, 45 minutes?
Is that not what's going on?
I think that there may be some of that going on, but I don't think there's a lot of it.
Now, granted, there are people who are much closer on the ground to it than I am, and so they probably are seeing things that I am and am not.
What I do know is, just from having done a little investigation on my own, that the exiles were crucial, particularly to the making of the flags, those old royal flags you were not going to make in Libya.
And the fact that by the 18th and 19th of February we had people in Benghazi flying those flags, they had to come from somewhere, and they weren't leftovers.
They had to come from somewhere.
They were printed somewhere.
And the very fact that this has been coined the Revolution of February 17th, which I think, as I understand it, comes from the time of a previous uprising in Benghazi.
I think it was 2006.
So there has been some outside coordination, and no doubt there have been Libyan exiles who have worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency and other branches of the U.S. government.
I am just not completely convinced that this was kick-started in Langley, nor do I think Langley is in complete control.
And the reason I don't think so is because if that were the case, nobody would be saying, who are the rebels?
Barack Obama would not be saying that.
Gates would not be saying that.
Hillary Clinton would not be saying that.
David Cameron would not be saying that.
Nobody would be saying that.
We'd have a Chalabi figure, and we don't have a Chalabi figure.
Well, did you see this thing?
This was part of the discussion with Margulies the other night, was this piece in the New Yorker magazine by John Lee Anderson, Who Are the Rebels?
, where he says there's only a thousand armed fighters, and most of them just stand there shooting their gun in the air like an idiot anyway, that America's going to have, well, he doesn't say this, but pretty obviously, America's going to have to do all the work if they really want a regime change.
Well, and I've become convinced of that from the beginning, that once the Europeans pick sides, there was only one way this was going to end.
And we are beginning to see, because stalemate works out, the end is going to be stalemate, and stalemate is what would have happened if Gaddafi would have won.
So now that we've intervened, that means there's only one way out of this thing, and that's from the Empire's point of view, other than installing, creating a brand new Afghanistan-style quisling government over there, huh?
Well, probably not.
There are some very bright Libyans in exiles, but how the exiles are going to work with the people on the ground, especially the Gaddafi defectors, is going to be very, very interesting.
There was an interview with somebody who was a, I think, the finance minister of the new government, and he was Western-educated, an economist, and they asked him about the fact that the former interior, Gaddafi's former interior minister is part of this government, and there was a long silence, and he said something to the effect of, well, we'll just have to find a way to work with each other.
That's going to be the most interesting part of this, and again, the longer this goes on, the less well and the less easily this ends, and the more likely it's going to be that the U.S. Army, the Marine Corps, and the French Foreign Legion are going to find themselves in the midst of the fight, simply because people are going to say, this has to end, this can't be a stalemate.
Yeah, but then comes the State Department and Purple Fingers, and we have to train up an army.
And not only that, but all the international do-gooders who want to help, quote, build civil society, unquote, in a place that doesn't have any, and then pretty soon we will be an occupation army, and there will be IEDs going off.
And whether or not that's, there's going to be a point where somebody's going to say, you know, it might have just been better if Gaddafi had won.
I can hear Jonah Goldberg now whining on about the efficacy, and Andrew Sullivan, too, of the flypaper theory, saying, wow, this is one of the great things about our Libya war is all the suicide attackers that are coming to Libya to fight us, because then we get to shoot them, and that means a net loss, a net decrease in the number of suicide attackers in the world.
Yeah, right.
You know, that's an interesting theory, and it's a stupid one, because it's just more opportunity for suicide bombers.
Well, it is something that Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan agreed about last time around, so, you know, by definition it couldn't possibly be right.
Did you see where Obama apparently called Bill Kristol on the phone to get his approval or to say, is it good with you if we do this Libya war?
He was bragging about it on Fox News.
This is, you know, this is more change we can believe in, apparently.
And the annoying thing is now that Barack Obama is officially running for reelection, we're going to have to deal with more nonsense on hope and change.
It'll be another two years of twaddle, or however long it will take.
That reminds me of, what, the day after the fall of the statue in Baghdad, something like that, that Ariel Sharon told John Bolton, and it was in Haaretz, that next you go after Syria, Iran, and Libya for us.
You know, I don't recall the Syria and Iran part.
I don't recall the Libya part.
Oh, yeah.
I'm going to have to Google it now.
What time is it?
I think I can make the cut.
All right.
You tell them something wise while I'm searching.
The interesting thing is, of course, the Israelis think that they're being well served by this, but the Israelis, the Likudnik view has always been, we'll just beat our enemies into submission and eventually they will accept that.
And we don't live in an era where it is possible to beat people into submission like that way anymore.
We just don't.
Well, and it's been since 1947 when the Kalashnikov was invented, right?
And that's the end of it right there.
Absolutely.
And although the Palestinians have gone through several different strategies, the Fedayeen of the 50s, the PLO of the late 60s and the 70s, and then the Intifada, the Palestinians may not have won, but they have not gone away and they have not accepted their conquest.
And that's the important thing, is that they are just simply not going to be reconciled to being conquered.
And you can't conquer people who are not going to be reconciled to it.
You end up having to exterminate them, and the Israelis are.
I have long believed that the Israelis will go to that edge and will not do it, but they will go to the edge.
Yeah, well, and they'll keep trying to encourage us to do it, and here it is.
It's from Haaretz, February 18th.
Oh, so it was right before the invasion.
February 18th, 2003.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday that Iran, Libya, and Syria should be stripped of weapons of mass destruction after Iraq.
Okay, and that makes sense.
And you remember everything that happened with Libya and the Gaddafis coming in from the cold.
I think that was 2003 or was that 2004?
Right, I love the way Eric Margulies put it on that one.
He says, yeah, in a brilliant ploy, he bought a bunch of garage sale junk from AQ Khan and then turned around and gave up his nuclear weapons program.
It was smart maneuvering on Gaddafi.
Gave George Bush that bit of PR, because remember, and they still spin it this way, Rumsfeld was on TV, spin it this way live during the show one day on somebody else's show, saying, yeah, it was because of the Iraq war that Libya came in from the cold when, in fact, Gaddafi had been trying to suck up to the West for years before that.
And Gaddafi didn't change a thing about how he governed at home.
That's an important thing to remember, is that he did not change a thing about how he governed at home.
Right, and somebody went and found the best version of this that I found so far.
Somebody had the link on Facebook, and it was to a Boston.com article about McCain traveling to Libya, which we knew that, but it was in order to finalize the deal, to sell him helicopters and trucks and training.
And that was just a few years ago.
Yes, it was, much like Bob Dole traveling to Iraq in the late 1980s.
I think it was 1988 or 1989.
Oceania has always been at war with North Africa.
Anyway, and there was some comment about what's going on in Syria, and I know that Syria has long been in the sights particularly of the neoconservatives but also many others.
But it is also a government that is not well liked at home, and I do not know what the status of what is going on in Syria is.
But I do know that there are Libyans lending their support to what is going on in Syria.
Do you know that, that Libyans have gone to Syria recently to take part in the protest movement there yet?
No, what I know is that Libyan exiles are lending their organizational support.
And how do you know that?
I've seen it on Facebook.
Oh, there you go, like they announced it.
Yes.
Oh, I dig it.
Not a rumor going around, but from the very groups you're talking about.
That they have been offering their organizational ability to the Syrians.
Because, again, it was the networks of things that were put in place to enable the Libyan uprising.
And there had to have been some networks because we saw that cell phone camera footage, there were flags flying, there were the registries of websites that were designed to follow this information out to the world.
And that all was happening in London, probably in the week to two weeks before the actual uprising began in Libya.
It was relatively well coordinated.
There are people, again, I can understand why it would be easy to say that the CIA must be involved in this.
But I frankly think it is much easier now to do this without any government support whatsoever.
Yes, well, it is the era of Facebook and YouTube.
That certainly works, at least for the young'uns.
Get their flash mobs going.
And I think what we are kind of seeing is a sort of revolutionary flash mob.
Well, and it's Al Jazeera, too, really.
And the coordination with Al Jazeera was very impressive, that the Libyan rebels and exiles managed to do there.
And we are kind of seeing a revolutionary Arab flash mob going here.
Well, it sure is a big, complicated mess.
I sure am glad that I have you to help me sort this stuff out, Charles.
I don't know how much help I am, but thank you, Scott.
No, no, very helpful, very helpful.
I'm sure the audience agrees.
Everybody, that's the great Charles Featherstone from lewrockwell.com and the Feather blog.
Search that.
Thanks again.
