06/17/14 – Jesse Franzblau – The Scott Horton Show

The military-industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power...
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All right, y'all.
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I'm Scott Horton.
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All right, our next guest today is from Foreign Policy In Focus, Jesse Franzblau.
And the article is called Libya, A Cautionary Tale.
I've been falling behind on my Libya coverage, so now I'm trying to make up for it.
Welcome to the show, Jesse.
How are you doing?
Good, thank you.
Very well.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
So, yes, please update us on General Khalifa Haftar and his coup d'etat in Tripoli.
Essentially, this was about two weeks ago now that General Khalifa Haftar made a move to essentially garner his forces to hold siege the National Congress, which is the elected authorities in Libya now.
And General Haftar, his main reasoning justification is essentially an anti-Islamist movement, kind of a scourge of the militia groups that are Islamic-leaning.
And it's somewhat emblematic of what happened in Egypt with General al-Sisi in justifying further militancy and undemocratic activities in the name of purging the institutions of this connection to what he refers to as Islamic militancy.
And so that was about two weeks ago.
And essentially, the General National Congress has been able to...
They've affirmed the prime minister.
They've given...
They've still given affirmation there, but it's still brinkering on a pretty dangerous state.
And today, I'm sure the readers saw in the latest news, the suspected...
A suspected individual involved in the Benghazi attack was grabbed over the weekend by U.S. Special Forces.
Ahmed Abu Qatala was grabbed Sunday, and I think news is just coming out today.
And he looks like he's the suspected leader of the Ansar al-Sharia militia group, which is believed to be responsible for or connected to the attack of September 11, 2012.
And so that's the latest development.
But, I mean, it seems that...
I mean, I guess this latest capture of Abu Qatala demonstrates that the U.S. doesn't have much confidence in the Libyan government itself and is taking these measures kind of upon itself to deal with these security threat situations.
And so we'll see how that develops.
Supposedly, he's on his way out of Libya and will be taken into a U.S. court.
So that'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
All right.
Now, so as far as Haftar and his coup, is it fair to say and not worth dwelling on that this is a CIA operation here?
I mean, come on, he lived in Virginia all this time.
They are at least somewhat supporting this, this overthrow of the elected government there.
But are they helping him?
To what degree are they helping him?
Do you know?
Is he winning?
Can you explain how much power he has in Tripoli now or over any part of the rest of the country or what?
He definitely seems to have a lot of power, particularly in eastern Libya, where he's garnered a lot.
In his kind of waging this campaign against the Islamic militia groups there.
And his connection to the CIA is that there's definitely a lot of speculation, but it's, you know, of course, hard to say.
It's hard to confirm what connection he has or has maintained.
Well, the Marines started moving from, I don't know, elsewhere in Italy to then to Sicily in the days before the coup.
That kind of thing.
It sort of seemed like they at least knew about it and he was their guy.
I don't know if there's any more information than that, really, other than sort of everybody knows.
Right.
It's hard to say.
I mean, I'm sure more information will come out.
But he certainly appears to have a history of being connected to the U.S.
Well, and it makes sense, too, that if they fought a war that has benefited Islamist militias and others so much and that they've even done so well in the elections, it's the same thing that the Americans have done since 1993 in Algeria, is always cancel election results they don't like, you know, like in Egypt.
And so, you know, it makes sense that they would want to, you know, try to take that back a little bit if Obama doesn't want to be the guy that brought, you know, Bin Ladenites, not just more influence, but actually to power in Libya.
That would be pretty bad for his own personal political problems, at least.
Anyway, it could be.
Yeah.
I mean, you definitely see, I mean, some of the first statements that came out, you know, on the U.S. side were generally somewhat, you know, favorable in terms of saying, well, Haftar is on a campaign to strike out this kind of militancy that obviously we see as a threat, and so we're not going to really condemn that.
You know, they haven't condemned the actions.
That's for certain.
His connections, I mean, he certainly, so he lived in the U.S. for many years.
He was originally an officer with Qaddafi who helped come to power with Qaddafi in the coup against the king in 69 that brought Qaddafi to power.
He was part of that, you know, kind of inner circle.
And he fought in the war in Chad, which ended up being quite a disaster for Libya.
And there's a lot, there's still, it's still murky what exactly happened then.
It appears he was captured at a point, and the U.S. tried to, and he was turned against the Libyan government, and the U.S. helped supposedly in an operation there to support him and other former officers who had turned against Qaddafi to create, you know, an insurgency against Qaddafi to turn back against him.
That failed, and they gave asylum to many Qaddafi soldiers and officers who had defected to come to the U.S.
And from there, they definitely maintained, you know, close relations or, you know, some sort of relations with the U.S. government at some level, and reportedly with the intelligence services.
I think that's pretty clear.
And so he was part of an opposition group for years and years.
And then when the time came in 2011, he went back and started to fight with the rebel forces.
But there was a lot of infighting within the rebels themselves, and a lot of mistrust, because Haftar had spent so much time in the U.S. and had these, everyone, you know, perceived him as being very close to the U.S. interests.
Because of his history, and so other generals kind of won out in terms of having greater authority than he did in the National Transitional Council.
And then afterwards, he kind of, you know, he still held a large amount of influence, but he was quiet for a while.
And even to the point where people were kind of asking, you know, where's Haftar?
What is he up to?
And it seems that he had been planning this for quite some time.
I think he's given interviews and said up to a year, two years even, of kind of planning this, garnering support, you know, amongst the militia forces.
And doing it, you know, planning this at a time where it was advantageous that he could make his way to, you know, I guess, foment enough instability and create enough power that he could make a run at the next election.
All right, and when's that supposed to be?
It's kind of unforeseen now.
All right, well, hold it right there.
I'm surprised they're even talking about elections at this point.
But hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Jesse Franzblau from Foreign Policy and Focus, fpif.org.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, wrapping up the show for the day.
On the line, I've got Jesse Franzblau from Foreign Policy and Focus.
That's fpif.org, and he's written a really great piece.
I hope you'll look at it.
Libya, a cautionary tale.
Got that right.
And so now here's my question.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like Haftar or any of these other guys, Ansar al-Anything, have any real power other than, you know, like gangs fighting over neighborhoods.
It seems like the Libyan state, such as it was, the dictatorship of Colonel Qaddafi there, having been smashed, has been replaced with nothing.
And I wonder how it's working out, really.
I mean, is it that much more violent than it was under his reign?
It seems like probably the worst part would be foreigners get to run off with all the oil money since there's no organized Libyan force to keep it.
But other than that, I don't know.
It's definitely much more unstable.
I mean, it's pretty much fractioned into kind of...
There was a balkanization effect, essentially, afterwards, where militia forces took hold of cities, and the government, in the wake of the conflict, essentially farmed out the security tasks to the rebel groups that turned into these kind of non-state armed actors.
The February 17th Brigade was a major fighting force during the conflict.
It was supported by NATO and NATO allies, and they were in charge of security details, in charge of security around the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
And these are the kind of factions that essentially have authority.
And so you have groups like Ansar al-Sharia, and they themselves have been broken down to even less controllable armed groups.
And then you have Haftar's forces, who, just as of Sunday, have been carrying out renewed attacks, leading to more deaths in Benghazi.
And so how far their control will go, it's kind of hard to say, because there are strong factions on other sides that will continue to fight.
Well, in your article, you cite this number 1,700 different militias, and that makes it sound like, you know, none of them are all that powerful.
Or they're in the process of consolidating now, maybe?
It kind of, I think, ebbs and flows.
They consolidate, they break up.
I mean, I think some, you still have, I think, militia forces in Misrata that are somewhat unified.
I think they consolidate when they feel threatened by a larger militia.
But no, I think they are kind of up and down, and there are so many of them that it is unlikely that one would gain enough control.
But now, is life normal at all in Tripoli and other cities, or it's all just Mad Max beyond Thunderdome over there, or what?
I mean, normal to the extent of, you know, at times it is peaceful.
There are cities that are relatively peaceful, but there's cities with a huge militia presence still that, you know, it's hard to tell who are militias, who are the government forces.
It's incredibly unstable.
I mean, one thing that the conflict itself did was infuse even more weapons into the situation.
I mean, under Qaddafi there were massive stockpiles of weapons, but he kept them, essentially he kept a lot of them buried, he kept a lot of them hidden, he kept a relatively strong military, but he kept it under wraps, I guess as it is.
But massive amounts of weapons, and that was just compiled by the conflict and intervention, which fueled a new influx of weapons, weapons drops that came from France and from Qatar and from UAE, much with U.S. approval, that just added to it and helped fuel these insurgent forces that became these militias.
And so the conflict itself has a lot to do with the instability now, and I think that is, I mean, yeah, a huge challenge.
And afterwards there was a particularly lack of interest in rule of law and other type of state building or support for state building, human rights issues, that could have actually, I think, brought security, but it was all security-based.
I was just going to say how grateful I was that the Benghazi scandal, if there's one value to it, it's that it's completely distracted Obama's opponents from talking about what a lousy job he's done nation-building there, because then, thank God, there hasn't been much pressure on him to go over there and build up an army and hold a purple-finger election and all this nonsense that we don't want to go through again.
Right.
Well, what they've been doing, they've been still providing this, a lot of military support, a lot of it, I think, covert.
And I think that's been the response and the reaction, and that's also, I think, quite dangerous, because as we see more influx of weapons, more influx of training, as is going on in Syria as well, it leads to, I think, the lessons is that it leads to greater instability, I think, is one lesson, if we can take it from these conflicts.
But it seems to be very cyclical, and those lessons seem lost in somewhat of an amnesia foreign policy approach to the region.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Sharon was in a coma at the time, so the fact that he had always said he wanted America to knock off Qaddafi for him shouldn't have counted for that much.
And, you know, it seemed like it just came down to, as Michael Hastings reported it in Rolling Stone, it was really just a PR stunt, because America looked so bad after backing Mubarak to the hilt, way after the shark was jumped, and way after it looked so mean, that America was still insisting on keeping this dictator in spite of the wishes of virtually everyone in Egypt there, that they said, well, you know, we ought to back the rebels in Libya.
Qaddafi, they only just, you know, made friends with him again after a while, and he was no Mubarak as far as a loyal friend of the family to Hillary or anything like that.
Like in Egypt.
And so they decided he was expendable, so they could do basically a PR stunt and make it look like America doesn't back dictators, America backs Democrats fighting for their rights and whatever.
And so just to kind of confuse the issue after Egypt, it seemed to me, and then that was what I guessed at the time, and then it seemed like Hastings' reporting confirmed that that was most of the impetus for even doing this thing.
Yeah, I think, I mean, I think one period of history that's really important to look at is the relationship between Qaddafi and the U.S. and the British in the years leading up to the conflict, when the relationship became pretty close, and I think they were relying a lot on Libya, and particularly on the intelligence after 9-11 to feed the U.S. and U.K. intelligence to track down militants, and they participated in extraordinary rendition campaigns of tracking down Libyan fighting individuals all over, you know, in different places, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, you know, individuals such as Abdullah Kim Balhaj, who was rendered and taken back to Libya, and became, you know, and then when the revolution began, became part of the fighting forces.
And then he even sued the Brits in court, which I thought was hilarious.
Sued the Brits, and I think the Brits ended up essentially settling.
What do you think?
I believe so.
By the way, did the worst of the al-Qaeda guys, I mean, because just the fact that the CIA tortured somebody doesn't mean that Balhaj is the worst to me, but the fact that he had traveled to Iraq to fight the Americans seemed like, you know, at least during the Iraq war, anytime Libyans or Saudis or Syrians or Jordanians went to Iraq to fight, we called them, at least the U.S. government called them al-Qaeda in Iraq, and I guess the assumption at least was that they all fought more or less under what we now call ISIS, but then was the umbrella of Zarqawi's group, and then so I wonder, though, if maybe the worst of those guys from the Libya war have all been funneled off in the rat line to go fight in Syria and now in Iraq again.
What do you think?
Possibly.
I mean, some of the rebel forces from Libya have definitely turned up in Syria, I mean, even openly, giving interviews and saying, now we're here, we're going to fight this conflict.
And so I think it's just emblematic of the uncontrollable kind of Frankensteins that are created when you influx these weapons and training for groups that you think one day are your friends because they're your enemies of your enemies today, but then the next day when things change, we act surprised as if it hasn't happened again and again.
And so I think this, yeah, this approach of just...
Speaking of which, yeah, what about Mali now?
Yeah, I mean, Mali is also a big, I think, consequence, at least partial consequence of the Libyan conflict itself.
Is it still in chaos there even after the French intervention?
Did they just make matters worse?
It's still unstable.
I don't know what that was going to solve in terms of the base conflict still is there.
I think that's what's happened a lot.
It's these consequences of intervention that are unforeseen or not even addressed.
Sing my song, Jesse.
All right, y'all, that's it.
Sorry, music's playing.
Got to go.
Jesse Franz Blau, Libya, A Cautionary Tale at fpif.org.
Foreign Policy in Focus.
Thanks very much, Jesse.
All right, thanks a lot, Scott.
See y'all tomorrow.
See y'all tonight at libertychat.com.
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