John Glaser, Assistant Editor at Antiwar.com, discusses the seemingly victorious Libyan rebels (or was NATO the victor?); imagining Libya post-Gadhafi, with a devastated infrastructure, East/West schism, wrecked economy and human rights abuses galore; whether this is the end of foreign intervention or just the beginning; and the manic, self-destructive US empire, where limited resources are spread ever thinner.
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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Antiwar.com assistant editor John Glazer.
He's got new pieces at news.antiwar.com and at antiwar.com/blog about the finally revolution in Libya.
Welcome to the show John, how are you doing?
Pretty good, how are you doing?
Actually before we start, is this line secure?
No, it is not.
It's being recorded just like The Simpsons.
If you ever saw, if you slow motion, oh it's the chili episode.
If you slow it down, you can see between the floors of The Simpsons house, there's AT&T and NSA, ATF, FBI, KGB.
Should have been FSB.
I'm sure we have them all been tapping us, but we'll be careful with what we say.
Well you know, if disaster ever strikes and somehow all of my archives get blitzed or something, I can always do a Freedom of Information Act and see if I can get the National Security Agency to back up my 2,000 interviews for me.
You know, I'm sure they have copies of lots of them anyway.
You bet.
I hope so.
A friend of mine was writing on Facebook that antiwar.com, we ought to be proud that the FBI is after us.
Just shows we're doing a good job paying attention to the right things.
Yeah, typically if you're saying the right things, the government has you on the radar.
But screw it, we'll keep saying them.
And here I thought I was just a paranoiac assuming all this surveillance, but there we go.
Not that it'll stop me, that's why I'm doing it in the first place.
Who wants to live in a police state?
Not me.
All right, well, and not the people of Libya.
Many of them anyway.
And so Qaddafi's finally fallen.
There's a New York Times piece, but I didn't have a chance to look at it, but there's a New York Times piece that gives NATO all the credit for it.
Precision strikes and that kind of thing, which sounds reasonable enough to me since last I heard there were only a few thousand armed rebels.
Yeah, it's being sort of hailed as this great victory by the rebels.
But that's after, of course, almost 20,000 NATO sorties were launched over the country, F-16s dropping over 500 bombs.
It was an extensive NATO air effort against Qaddafi, and we can be relatively sure that it wouldn't have made much progress without without NATO, because this group of rebels that we've been fighting on behalf of whom we've been fighting and who are now we expect to lead the country, like you said, they're not high in number and the group is not even cohesive.
It's made of a bunch of disparate factions of rebel group based out of Benghazi and defected government ministers and with a bunch of different political agendas.
The military forces are just armed groups, former soldiers, freelance militias.
There's basically amateur neighborhood gangs that got together, just young men that needed to release some testosterone with some guns, stuff like that.
Some of them legitimately wanted a fall of the regime, which is a legitimate aim.
But we have to consider this in a view of what are the consistencies of US foreign policy and are any of them legitimate?
I don't think they are.
First of all, this rebel group, there's no indication that they can run a just and humane government.
I mean, we've seen extrajudicial killings, suppression of free speech, beating people up.
They've been looting places throughout this conflict.
And they have huge problems before them.
The economy is ruined.
Infrastructure has been bombed and destroyed.
Communications are down, you know, and there's a refugee problem.
And there's an issue about the politics of the country and whether or not it should be divided between Eastern and Western tribes.
So they have a huge task ahead of them.
And I think that now that people are finally talking about a way forward and what to do about a post-Qaddafi Libya, now people are sort of wringing their hands in the West over what kind of group we've been supporting this whole time.
Yeah, isn't that great?
Now that the regime's fallen, the people in D.C. are beginning to wonder, now what are we going to do?
They've got no plan.
Exactly.
Jeez.
And here I would have thought that if we learn anything from the last war, it would be let's try to imagine the future a little bit here.
You know, no, I guess not.
Let's just do it.
It'll be fine when we get there.
Trust me.
Precisely.
Precisely.
And so that's the question.
There's a question about the level where they have all these, they're basically incompetent.
But there's also a question about, you know, how much of the Libyan population actually supports them?
How much of them are happy about this rag tag disparate group with guns that have taken over the country?
Now, who knows?
Yeah, well, if you look at the New York Times or the Washington Post today, you see or on TV, you see pictures of Benghazi, where everybody's celebrating in the streets, and they go, Tripoli Falls.
And it makes it seem as though this is the scene from Tripoli, if you're just looking on the surface there.
Right.
If you were to read the mainstream media and watch those television reports, you'd also think that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were the ones that rode into Tripoli to get rid of Gaddafi.
There's all sorts of propaganda going on.
But so that's legitimacy about the rebels themselves.
But there's also questions of legitimacy for the people who have helped the rebels succeed.
I mean, the U.S. doesn't have any legitimacy there.
Nothing that the Obama administration and the U.S. military did was approved by Congress.
And they also basically spat on the U.N. mandate that justified the intervention by almost immediately abandoning the sort of mandate to protect civilians and then moving towards regime change.
And U.S. conduct in the war has made it even harder to justify any sort of U.S. legitimacy in pushing who should be the ruler of Libya.
Obama was in violation of domestic U.S. law, the War Powers Resolution.
The NATO bombed television stations and allegedly bombed a hospital that might have led to the death of 85 people, innocent civilians.
I mean, these are war crimes.
And so any power that tries to have dominance over a country that has that kind of recent record, it's really hard to justify them having any legitimacy of carrying in a new government.
And yet, and I've been wrong about a couple of things in my life, I guess, but I'm trying so hard to imagine a situation where now NATO walks away.
Good job.
I don't know, maybe at minimum send in some U.N. peacekeepers to oversee an election or something.
No way.
I don't know whose troops are going in, but the West, as in, you know, France, Britain, USA, are not leaving Libya alone from here on ever.
Absolutely not.
There's no possibility for that to happen because they've branded their names on this conflict and this regime change, and so they're now responsible.
And it's too much of a political liability to just, you know, pat the rebels on the back and wish them good luck in their new Qaddafi-free Libya.
I mean, to be honest, and honest is a tough sort of principle to pull through in the American war machine, but it's actually been known for some time now that NATO troops would eventually be necessary.
General Carter Ham, back right after NATO took the lead and U.S. sort of sat back a little bit, predicted in April that, you know, ground troops will eventually be necessary.
The Foreign Policy Magazine article for Josh Rogin, I believe, interviewed U.S. Admiral Samuel Locklear, who anticipated that ground troops would be necessary if Qaddafi fell.
I mean, this has sort of been the underlying elephant in the room.
They don't say it out loud, and it's still not being said.
And it's even admitted out in the open that Libyans don't want to be ruled by a foreign power, but this is what's coming.
Yeah, well, the UN resolution bans occupation troops, but liberation troops are just fine.
And of course, AFRICOM, this is AFRICOM's first big deal.
There's no going back for them.
Just think of the interest involved in expanding this thing now.
The Humvee factories will be cranked back up.
We'll be right back with John Glaser, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Warren.
I'm talking with John Glaser, assistant editor at Antiwar.com, and he's got pieces about the war in Libya and all the breaking news at Antiwar.com/blog and at news.antiwar.com.
And now, John, take a minute, would you please, and just catch us up on the facts of, you know, last 24 or 36 hours or something like that, the seeming fall of Tripoli here?
Sure.
So, it was yesterday and last night that the rebels started encircling Tripoli, and last night they got within two miles of the city center.
Part of Tripoli was still sort of under Qaddafi's control, or so they said.
And there's still sort of sporadic fighting going on.
There's still Qaddafi loyalists who are sniping people from atop buildings in Tripoli, but for the most part, Tripoli has been given to the rebels.
Now, Qaddafi's presidential guard surrendered in Tripoli.
His prime minister has reportedly fled the country.
His two sons were arrested, according to the rebels.
So, you know, it's pretty clear at this point that the Qaddafi regime is close to being gone.
It's always important in these situations not to speak too soon, but those are the views right now of what the situation is on the ground.
Well, and then, I guess, you know, it's very hard to tell from here even with the best, you know, second-hand sourcing or whatever, but do you have a sense at all of how much support Qaddafi has?
Like, for example, if they did put in an occupying force of one kind or another, you know, would they be facing the same kind of battle for Baghdad kind of thing, getting sniped from the rooftops all the time?
Or is everybody pretty much, you know, happy to see him gone?
You know, I mean, he's a dictator, so there's obviously lots of people that don't want him there, but there's also a large group of people that are somehow connected to him.
They're in the same tribe.
In recent years, especially after normalization of relations in the Bush administration, he's been using oil revenues as patronage, basically, to, you know, help people out and be sort of cursory humanitarian measures and stuff like that, and basically just sort of giving people he liked good positions and so on and so forth.
So there's certainly contingents that want him there, but I mean, I wouldn't expect most of Libyans to actually want him to stick around.
Then again, if we're talking about the alternative, I'm not sure most Libyans want the rebels to take control either.
And if there were a U.S. occupation or NATO occupation, like you spoke about, I'm not sure that Qaddafi loyalists, the snipers from buildings, would be the main problem.
I'm concerned that factions of the rebel group would start to fight in an insurgency, because it's so sort of mixed up with all these different agendas, and many of them are Islamists and would be very, very unhappy with any sort of U.S. occupation and control of their central government.
So yeah, it would be very messy from all sides if we actually went in.
Yeah, that's a real good point.
You know, as soon as we win this thing, now we got to protect the Libyan people from the people we just won the war for.
It was a bunch of, you know, veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars where they fought on the other side against the U.S.
Right.
At least some, I don't know about a bunch or the proportion or something, but there are quite a few anyway, they say.
Yeah.
Well, I guess it's not really altogether clear, is it, that even if they, you know, hang Qaddafi this evening somehow, and his sons too, that this war is over at all.
I mean, now that they're in Tripoli, they got to hold on to it.
Sure, that's right.
They got to stabilize things.
There's been talk recently about sending extra sort of arms to the rebel groups.
There's also been, for the past few months actually, parts of the rebel group that have been traveling to Gulf states that are our allies, like Qatar and Oman and the United Arab Emirates, who are being trained.
I think that's probably more like the training that we do for Latin American countries.
So it's basically, I mean, I would assume it's U.S. led, but they're training, and so then they want them to go back into Tripoli especially to basically, because you and I know that, look, a government is really just a gang that has a monopoly on force.
And I think at this point, the primary U.S. strategy and NATO strategy is to get the Benghazi portion of the rebel group to have a monopoly on force and basically crush any dissent.
There was a quote from, who was it?
It was Joseph Lieberman, who said recently about, I have the quote here, we must support the new Libyan authorities to ensure they are able to prevent acts of retribution, initiate credible processes of national reconciliations, secure weapons depots, again, just arming another gang to make sure they have a monopoly on force.
So that's sort of the main object at this point, as far as we can tell, to basically nation build from afar.
And that's what's going on now.
Right, yeah, that's regime change.
It's not just regime removal.
It's the empire is going to install by hook or crook the people we want in there next.
That's right.
And you can bet, I mean, you can guess that what kind of policies a new regime that is supported by the US will have.
We shouldn't forget, actually, that it was only a few years ago, that we were giving Qaddafi millions of dollars a year.
And helping up helping him out with weapons.
Senator McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham went over there shook his hand, pat him on the back, said he's such a great friend and ally.
I mean, obviously, we should be concerned about sort of the prospect for democracy and peace in Libya, especially since given our track record over the whole Middle East, obviously, peace and stability and and democracy are not primary goals.
I mean, Egypt is a perfect example.
They've just gone through this great transition, they're still going through it.
But the US still has a hold over there over the military council.
I mean, just last month, they they announced 125 tanks, m 25 m 256 armament systems, don't even know what that is.
Machine guns and spare parts, maintenance, support equipment, personal training.
There's the next year 2012, they're supposed to get another $1.5 billion, which is exactly the amount that Mubarak was used to getting.
And if we're not, if people think that we're not using this influence to crush democracy in the Middle East, and have them make policies that we would prefer, which is essentially to put us first and the people last there, they have another thing coming.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's just amazing to that.
Despite the fact that the polls have all shown for years that people are over it, they're tired of these wars, they wanted to end at a time when we're going through this terrible economic crisis with a real unemployment rate is that, you know, nearly a fifth of the American people.
And still the Empire can't do can't think of anything to do except make more bodies and more bases further and further and all frontiers, you know?
Exactly.
There's a there's a old saying that says a government program doesn't shrink ever.
So the same holds true for the American Empire.
They welcome and they feel blessed at the fact that they have another area, another country to put more military bases in, to put more troops in, to have another client state in to expand the empire.
And yet, we can't even afford it.
I mean, even putting aside the humanitarian blunders and atrocities that go on with enthusiastic U.S. support, we're we're we're running a 14 trillion dollar debt and it's going up and up and up.
We think we can handle another insurgency, another out of country.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah.
You know, it seems to me that, you know, when I was just a kid, long before I had any particular interest in foreign policy, necessarily, I knew that all empires fall.
Everybody knows all empires fall.
All you got to do is just, I don't know, show up at first grade or something.
And you know that, right?
Everyone knows that it's suicide.
Well, all this murder.
That's exactly right.
And this will be another sort of piece in the puzzle of America's ruin if we decide to devote, you know, who knows how many resources to Libya occupation or setting up a client state or whatever, whatever it might turn out to be.
It's going to be incredibly expensive and probably incredibly dangerous and incredibly well.
And you mentioned the jihadists there.
I mean, it's just another Sunni Arab country with American troops in it.
It's like they're just trying to prove bin Laden and Zawahiri right about us and prove to people why they ought to join up against us or something.
I think Dick Cheney's double agent for or maybe Obama is.
Maybe they all are.
All right.
Thanks, John.
John Glazer, everybody.
News.antiwar.com, antiwar.com/blog.
Appreciate it.
