All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Rajan Menon.
He is the Monroe J. Rathbone Professor and Chairman of the Department of International Relations at Lehigh University.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining us.
So you have this great piece at the Huffington Post, Libya, what the intervention has wrought.
We're running it as our spotlight today on AntiWar.com.
And, of course, the news headlines there right at the top of the page, too, is about the fighting in the west of Libya right now.
And the so-called National Transitional Council government is trying to broker a ceasefire between some warring militias.
Would it be OK if we start with that and you can try to catch us up on just the latest news out of Libya?
And then maybe we can get to some of the context of, you know, the bigger answers here.
Absolutely.
The latest news out of Libya is actually old news in the sense that this tussle between a multitude of militias, with some of them being extraordinarily powerful, almost statelets within a state, has been going on for quite some time.
So these are militias that basically run their territories as they see fit, capture members of Gaddafi's regime and hold them without due process, do not take orders from the central government, do not give up their weapons.
And it's the flip side of what was a grassroots rebellion that quickly became an armed rebellion.
It was spontaneous.
It was based on a series of these private and local militias.
And they are often responsible to charismatic leaders, see themselves as representatives of their locality.
And the most powerful ones from the cities of Misrata, Zawiya and Zintan basically take the position that the Transitional National Council, the nominal transitional government of Libya now, was not of much consequence during the war.
This is a war they fought and died and bled for.
And they are now going to retain their weapons for bargaining leverage.
But the question is how long this goes on and what Libya will look like if this continues.
All right.
Now, I mean, it took so long for them to accomplish the regime change.
I thought I mean, I guess I never thought they were going to get a lucky hit with an airstrike and get Gaddafi.
But it was kind of surprising how long it took him to finally sack Tripoli.
But then, you know, in the meantime, that gave us plenty of time to speculate about what is what it's going to be like once they finally do sack Tripoli.
Because, of course, with Western special forces and air forces leading the way with their laser pointers and air delivered bombs, obviously the war, the outcome of the fall of Tripoli, the fall of the regime was a fait accompli.
It was just a matter of time, you know, to see.
But so then we started speculating.
Well, let's see.
You have the National Transitional Council types, you know, the self-appointed politicians and the people who've been living just outside Langley, Virginia for the last 20 years and people like that.
Then you have Hakeem al-Belhaj and all the jihadists.
I guess it was I think it was Pepe Escobar first reported that this veteran of the Afghan and Iraq jihads against American forces in the last decade and former rendition victim was leading the the military forces on the ground of the rebels.
And then, of course, you have the former regime defectors and the regime holdouts that lasted till the end.
And these are all just from Texas.
You can see how these are going to be at least the larger descriptions of the divisions between warring factions there.
And then, of course, there will be smaller divisions and warring tribal matters and things that Texans have no idea about whatsoever.
You just see all of this, at least just on the face of it was there's going to be war in Libya for a long time.
And this is why I've been predicting and I think I'm still predicting that eventually the U.S.
Army will be on the ground and they'll stay for a generation and they'll have to build up a new state and do the whole Iraq/Afghanistan nation building project again, because otherwise it's just going to keep on like this.
And at some point, that's going to be bad PR for Sarkozy or somebody.
And we're going to have to go bail them out.
Right.
Right.
Well, it's important to understand what the divisions are in Libya, because this is what makes it complicated.
You now have an east-west division because under Gaddafi, unlike under the monarchy, eastern Libya, called Karenika or Barkha in the Arabic language, was essentially not frozen out of power, but was marginalized.
The National Transitional Council in its inception was heavily weighted with people from the east cities like Tobruk and Benghazi.
So there is now this east-west division.
And as you know, recently, the east essentially declared autonomy, which some people in Libya, Libyan nationalists worry will segue into outright separatism.
Now, this is worrying for several reasons.
A, it may not happen peacefully because secessions don't usually happen within the states peacefully.
B, most of Libya's pipelines and oil wealth are in the east.
So there's the east-west division.
Then there are divisions between secular, shall we say, and Islamists.
Now, the Islamists are a divided group.
Some belong to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Others are like Belhaj.
Still others are Sufis.
So I don't want to call them all one kind of ideological group.
But there is the secularist versus Islam division.
Then there's the central government versus tribalist division.
Then there are the people who suffered under Qaddafi and who are known for being respected leaders, and those who were in the safety of places outside Libya and who returned, and there's some tension between the so-called emigre returnees and the locals.
So if you add all this together, it's getting very messy.
And now, of course, and this was part of the point of my op-ed piece, all of this has overflown into Mali.
Right.
Well, now talk about that a little bit.
I guess on the face of it, they say, I mean, they don't want to get into it too much, the whole highlighting the cause and effect here.
But they're basically saying that some former Qaddafi mercenaries, after his government fell, they went home and their compadres have been waging some kind of low-level insurgency against the government there for a while.
And they came home with all these new Libyan arms.
And so then the military got mad at the elected government and somewhat elected government, I guess, and overthrew it for not doing enough to protect them from the newly armed and now more dangerous insurgency going on.
But then again, it came out to that the guys that did the coup were trained by the U.S. and had an upcoming training mission with the U.S. and things like that.
So people started speculating as to whether the Americans gave their OK for the coup in the first place.
What do you make of all that?
Well, right, for some context.
So the rebellion in Mali is by a group called the Tuaregs, who are nomadic people.
They're scattered all over, principally in Mali and Niger, but also in Algeria, Libya, parts of Nigeria.
And as you mentioned, there has been a long-running war between the Tuaregs of Mali and the majority people, the Bambara, who hold most of the power.
Now, what has happened as a result of Libya is that the Tuaregs of Libya, whom Gaddafi often used as mercenaries and private frontier forces, once Gaddafi collapsed and the state began to collapse, were marked men.
But they were also very well armed because there was a lot of looting of Gaddafi's armories and arsenals.
A lot of weapons came in from the outside, as you know, but there were lots of weapons taken from Gaddafi's arsenal.
So these Tuaregs from Libya moved into Mali with weapons, adding to the firepower and critical mass of the Tuareg brethren, shall we say, in Mali.
And the Mali army simply has totally lost control of the north.
The troops were demoralized because they were taking it on the chin.
And there was a coup in what has been a relatively successful, at least in the last 20 years, democratic government Mali.
And this is sort of getting ugly because not only is Mali a problem, there are thousands now of refugees flowing to neighboring countries, Burkina Faso and Niger, who themselves are hardly wealthy countries.
So this is not over by a long shot.
Yeah, well, yeah, it's simply the beginning.
And of course, there are consequences untold still to come.
In fact, one of them that seemed pretty obvious is that we're going to start seeing civilian airliners shot down from shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles out of Gaddafi's stockpile.
Brand new supply of those just hit the global black market, right?
Right.
Well, I hope you're wrong about the airlines being shot out of the sky, but there is no question that there are lots of arms in the hands of lots of people.
I'm sorry.
You know what?
I should have wrapped it up there.
We've got to go to this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Rajen Menon after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm on the phone with Rajen Menon.
And he's got this piece at the Huffington Post, Libya, what the intervention has wrought.
And sorry about the heartbreak built in there.
Where we left off, we were talking about the loose weapons.
And I guess you were saying something optimistic, that you're not too afraid that we're going to see a bunch of airliners shot down with these loose surface-to-air missiles?
No, no, no.
You and I should both be afraid of it.
I was just saying that I hope your prediction is wrong.
Oh, I see.
That would be a disaster.
I thought you had reason to doubt that it was going to happen.
That would have been nice.
No, no, no.
There is certainly a problem with large amounts of weaponry because Qaddafi had a substantial arsenal in the hands of we don't know quite who and we don't know quite where.
That is certainly a problem.
It goes back to the point that, and this is the one theme of my piece, that when you topple a regime or a repressive regime, there are significant follow-on consequences that you have to anticipate and that you have to plan for.
And we have a situation now where that clearly was not done.
And we're facing the consequences.
But above all, the Libyan people are facing the consequences.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing, I guess, I never really hear this criticism.
I mean, hardly anybody ever talks about the Libya war at all ever since Qaddafi was shot.
That was just the end of that and everything's fine now, I guess, according to the American media or something.
Nothing we need to worry about anyway.
But it seems important to me that they lied us into war.
I mean, they claimed that they were stopping, you know, in Kosovo, they said, oh, 100,000 men, women and children have been massacred, which was an obvious lie.
But at least they lied about a thing that had already happened.
In this case, they lied and said, oh, he's going to kill every man, woman and child in Benghazi, the city, a city the size of Charlotte, South Carolina.
And so we have to, or North Carolina, we have to put up this no-fly zone to protect the people.
And yet it was so obvious before the fact, and it worked out exactly as I had predicted, which is once they get a no-fly zone, then that means that in order to provide security, in order for the people of Libya to be safe from their own government, we have to be in the way, which means that we have to overthrow the government.
That it's only one step in logic to regime change in Tripoli.
And there it was.
But that's not how they sold it to the American people or to the British or the French or anybody else who participated in it either.
And they, you know, it's not, so far it doesn't have Iraq war-sized consequences, but it's no more honest than weapons of mass destruction, seems to me.
Right.
Well, there are two points to be made about this.
When civil wars start in countries, and they start in many countries, including our own, they tend to be violent and they tend to be vicious.
Now, in the case of Gaddafi, because of the Arab Spring, there was, in fact, a spontaneous uprising that had many, many causes that there isn't time to go into here.
And it was rooted primarily in the east, above all in Benghazi, and then it spread and spread as far west as Tripoli and then further west.
There's no question that Gaddafi faced a problem.
There is also no question that this leader was not a Boy Scout.
We should say that.
Now, however, if you read his speech in the middle of February, right, about a week after the uprising begins, or maybe it was the 21st of February, I forget exactly.
That speech has been quoted as the basis for action because it is known as, in some quarters, the genocide speech.
I am not saying for a moment that Gaddafi wouldn't have used violence against the protesters, but if you read the speech itself, what he says is that there are people who have taken up arms against the government, that if you lay down your weapons, you can surrender.
If you continue to use weapons against the government, we will come after you and destroy you.
That is generally what governments do when people take up arms against the central government.
Now, then we go to the no-fly zone, which happened about a month later.
Now, the thing in Syria has been dragging on and on and on forever.
Within a month, we have a new fly zone because there was supposedly going to be a mass killing in Libya.
The no-fly zone, though, becomes very quickly much more than that.
It becomes an active intervention in the civil war in all the ways that you mentioned.
This is one of the reasons, by the way, that I don't think this kind of thing will ever happen again, for a long time at least, to the Security Council, because both the Russians and the Chinese feel that they were had.
They believe that what began as no-fly zone, just to prevent aircraft from flying, right, then morphed into supply of weapons, special forces, reconnaissance, and the whole bit where the international community became involved in deciding the outcome of the civil war.
And so, that is sort of where we have things now.
All right.
Now, can you talk to us a little bit about race in Libya post-regime change here?
Because from what I understand, maybe there was a kernel of truth to this that Gaddafi had hired sub-Saharan African mercenaries to be part of his own kind of personal Gestapo, which was really the power in the country, not the army.
And that based on that, the conclusion of the rebels was, or at least they claimed to believe anyway, that anybody with black skin is a mercenary of Muammar Gaddafi, and so let's take out our revenge on them.
And David Enders from McClatchy Newspapers interviewed at least a dozen black women from this refugee camp, I believe just outside Tripoli, who talked about the rebels coming in and committing mass rapes every night, kidnapping them and taking them away.
And I've talked to Enders before over the years, and I'm pretty sure that he wasn't just falling for Gaddafi's passing out Viagra-type propaganda.
I mean, he was interviewing these women himself there.
And then RT played footage of black men bound, gagged with green flags, being held in the zoo.
And I'm thinking, what in the world is going on here?
And gee, why isn't this on CNN and stuff like that?
So Scott, I mean, some of the problems that you described were due to the collapse of the state and the freewheeling justice meted out by the militias.
There's no question that black Africans in Libya, or Libyans with dark skin, were set upon and brutalized in ways that are unforgivable and unlawful.
There were several types of people.
There are the Tuaregs in the south.
There are black African mercenaries that Gaddafi periodically used.
But there were large numbers of migrant workers from poor African countries who came to Libya because, relatively speaking, you could have a better life there.
But there was no distinction drawn sometimes by marauding groups that set upon these people, because if you were black, then you were by definition a collaborator with the regime.
And there were lots of incidents involving people getting hurt, raped, in some instances killed perhaps.
And it is a very difficult problem.
And to have these problems cease, you need a government with legitimacy and authority and implementation power.
And you don't have that now.
Well, can you give us some kind of numbers?
I mean, is this still, you know, I guess I'd like to imagine that, well, this was just really at first in that original chaos, but it's still just chaos.
I mean, has there been a reduction?
Is there any kind of numbers of people who've been murdered based, you know, race-based murders and that kind of thing going on?
I couldn't give you the numbers because I don't have them with any degree of confidence.
I mean, hundreds or tens of thousands, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I'd like to speculate, Carl, but I really cannot.
But, you know, even five is too many.
In other words, when you have a transition, which is a transition to democracy, which is supported by states on the basis that they're supporting liberty, freedom, democracy, this sort of problem should not happen at all.
So whether it's five or 500, the brutalization of people simply based on their racial characteristics is unacceptable.
The government may not have deliberately wanted to do this, but it certainly has no capacity to stop it.
It really governs at this stage at the pleasure of the militia.
This is the problem.
Can you talk to me a little bit about Hakeem al-Belhaj?
I mean, it seems important that he was the military leader.
I remember Michael Shoyer, the former CIA officer, went on CNN and got the hairdo lady, anchor ladies mad at him for saying that, well, you know, the CIA is talking to some people, but there are a lot of people who won't talk to the CIA.
So they might think that things are going to go this way, but really they're going that.
And then it turned out that actually, yeah, this guy Hakeem al-Belhaj was the military commander, apparently had not been talking to the CIA.
And he was the one that they were really fighting for.
Oops.
And then, but we haven't heard too much about, you know, how much power and influence he has at this point, for example, or how much he's set to have.
He is an extraordinarily powerful person.
He was the leader of one of the major militias.
He then became commander of the Tripoli garrison.
And the real question about Belhaj is if there is some sort of stable institutional structure, will he morph into the run of the mill politician?
And if he does, what is his vision for Libya?
There's just a lot about the people in power now that we don't know.
And again, this is a guy who was a veteran of the Afghan and Iraq wars on the side against the Americans in both cases that we just fought a war for.
Yes, it's not a pretty picture.
All right.
Thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
You're welcome.
That's Rajan Menon, everyone.
He's got the spotlight today on Antiwar.com.
It's at the Huffington Post.
Libya, what the intervention has wrought.
