The USA, Britain and France have in effect declared a regime-change war against Libya, for which there is no justification in the United Nations resolution or in international law. How should the anti-war movement respond?
National Chair, Stop the War Coalition
17 April 2011
Regime-change war against Libya is illegal says Russian president Medvedev
The war against Libya is now entering a new phase which the anti-war movement needs to respond to with a view to developing a still broader unity in the campaign against this NATO aggression.
Our framework in considering the conflict is the “war on terror” – basically the imperialist drive to impose its hegemony on the Middle east and South Asia by force, which has already laid still-occupied Iraq to waste and is mutilating Afghanistan.
That war is not going at all well for its prosecutors. There is no consensus around the occupation of Afghanistan in official Washington and London, and no believe that the war there can be brought to a successful conclusion for NATO.
And there is the growing split between the Pakistani establishment and the US, which has led last week to the expulsion of over 300 CIA agents from the country. What this is as a proportion of the total is unknown, but it is stark evidence of the destabilisation the Afghan war is wreaking on Pakistan – a development fraught with danger for the region and the world.
So the war is not going at all well – it is coming unglued on one front after another. Add to that the revolution unfolding in Egypt – and still advancing despite all difficulties – which has the potential to undermine the single most decisive pillar of the Pax Americana order in the region.
For the USA, the decisive issue remains Iran. It sees the Tehran regime as the main threat to the positions it holds along the Gulf, and the danger of an attack on Iran has by no means disappeared. This focus on the so-called “Iranian menace” dictates Obama’s indulgence towards the repression by Saudi Arabia in Bahrain, in contradiction to the stated desire to uphold democracy and preserve civilian lives.
That is the context to the decision by the western powers, or some of them, to intervene militarily in the Libyan conflict.
There is also of course a context rooted in Libya itself. People and organisations active in the anti-war movement have somewhat different appreciations of both the Gaddaffi regime and of the uprising against it.
This is not the main question for the anti-war movement in Britain. Our principle is that it is for the Libyan people alone to resolve these questions, without any external interference whatsoever. This applies whether one takes one view or another of Gaddaffi and his opponents.
However, we cannot avoid a broad assessment of these forces, since without such an assessment it is difficult for the movement to orient itself towards intervening in political events as they unfold, and because they are important to many of the arguments around the war being fought out in public opinion.
Regarding Gaddaffi, we may say that in the past, before 2003, his regime had an authoritarian and eccentric anti-imperialist character, taking positive stands on some international issues and with some progressive domestic policies. Without an understanding of that it is impossible to appreciate the support given to him in this crisis by much of the left in Latin America, for example.
More recently, his regime has remained authoritarian and erratic, but has moved into the orbit of imperialism, embracing both Tony Blair and BP, in so far as the two aren’t the same thing. He has not, however, become a puppet of the Mubarak type.
On the other side, it is wrong to assert that the rebellion based in Benghazi was some sort of pro-imperialist plot from the outset. There is no evidence for that, and that line of thought assumes that there could be no legitimate reason for Libyan people to rebel, against the regime, at a time when similar developments were occurring across the Arab world.
What is certain, however, is that the NATO attack has changed the nature of the uprising entirely. Whatever democratic content the rebellion had at the outset, it has now lost. This change has not been imposed on Benghazi, it has in large measure been solicited by it.
A new leadership has been introduced into the uprising, based both on elements imported from the USA, and pro-imperialist defectors from Gaddaffi’s camp. This leadership is now urging still more NATO bombing.
Under these conditions, the rebellion has become subordinated to the attack on their own country. Whether it can change again in the future, after a new twist in the war, is an uncertain prospect – the aggression, as these things always do, will have led to an accretion of patriotic sentiment on Gaddaffi’s side.
Where does this analysis leave the anti-war movement? Not cheering for either side in the Libyan civil conflict, which is not our job in any case. And nor letting any position taken by either Gaddaffi or his opponents veto us from taking the positions we need in order to halt the external intervention.
The character of the war has become clearer over the last month. The early rhetoric about protecting the civilian population and eschewing regime change has been discarded by the war troika – the USA, Britain and France.
We can openly identify their motives. First of all, to attempt to revive the bankrupt politics of liberal or humanitarian interventionism, disgraced as it has been in Iraq above all. Trying to refurbish a workable justification for interfering where they will is an important aim for the imperialists, and it must have seemed that taking on Gaddaffi, an unpopular figure in the west, under circumstances were he was threatening is own people was a good opportunity to do so.
Then there is business interests. War for oil has become a bit of a left-wing cliché, but clichés get that way by being true at least some of the time. BP’s considerable interests in Libya would be motive enough for this or any recent British government, given that company’s influence over the political process. Half the oil in French refineries comes from Libya too.
Libya has also been a profitable market for British and French arms. The weapons the British and French air forces are destroying are weapons our countries have sold to Libya, and given a new government in Tripoli no doubt we will sell them replacements at a fat profit.
The bottom line here is that Britain and France need a Libyan government they could do business with. For some time, Gaddaffi’s regime was that government, but once he started putting down the uprising with violence, it could serve the purpose no longer.
The war also opens up the possibility of creating a new base for western interference in the region, putting a check on the momentum and outcome of the Egyptian revolution above all.
However, we should note the lack of unity in the war party, and in particular the vacillating role of the Obama administration, heavily involved at first, then apparently handing off control to Britain and France, and now stepping back in.
This reflects the contradictory interests Washington has. It has made it clear that its own vital interests in the Middle East are focussed along the Gulf and in supporting Israel. Libya is peripheral to these.
Yet on the other hand it is a vital US interest that it maintain its hegemony over NATO and the “western camp” in general, not in allowing Britain and France to get too much of a taste for independent action in the Middle East, nor for them to meet a reverberating rebuff.
These divisions are undoubtedly a weakness for NATO. Indeed, the whole packaging of the war has reflected the setbacks suffered in the Iraq war above all. Hence Cameron’s determination to do this differently from Blair on the surface level – UN endorsement, a figleaf (however threadbare) of Arab support from the despots and puppets of the Arab League, humanitarian excuses etc.
Now it would seem Cameron and Sarkozy are going for double or quits. The war has clearly not worked out as they expected – they anticipated that once the bombing started one or both of two things would happen. The rebellion would be able to sweep all before it up to the gates of Tripoli and beyond, or the Gaddaffi regime would crumble from within.
Neither has occurred. So Britain and France, with Obama now back centre stage, have changed the demand – it is now absolutely clearly and upfront a regime change war, something for which there is no justification in the UN resolution or international law.
Gone is the priority supposedly given to saving civilian lives. Were that really the concern, surely the African Union ceasefire proposal would have been embraced. That would have been the best way to save lives – instead the peace plan was brushed aside and everything is being done instead to prolong the conflict.
So now it is clear who is extending the war. We cannot accept that the departure of Gaddaffi from power can in any sense be a precondition for stopping the bombing. We are by no means against regime change as a principle, but we are against externally-imposed regime change delivered from the bomb hold of a NATO plane.
The best outcome is a political settlement fashioned exclusively by the Libyan people themselves, ideally one which leaves them free to choose their own government without external interference. The prospects of that will improve once one party to the civil conflict is no longer underwritten by NATO’s military power.
Instead, more aggressive efforts are being made to train and arm the soldiers in Benghazi’s army, a new extension of the intervention. We are also on an escalator which may yet lead to the deployment of a ground army by Britain and France if they fail to achieve their objectives by other means, and the possibility of the kind of partition which is familiar from the history of imperialism and colonialism and usually leads to misery and strife for generations.
The more they press on down this road, the more Cameron and Sarkozy are isolated. Most of the world’s states are now firmly opposed to the war, as is the majority of public opinion in this country – indeed, never has the anti-war movement had such a proportion of the public on our side at this early stage of a conflict, including in the first weeks of the Iraq war in 2003.
Unite and Unison, the two biggest unions, have come out for peace. So people are against the war, but has not yet assumed a high enough priority in the public sphere.
That is why we need to intensify our campaigning efforts, emphasising what is new in the situation, what has changed over the last four weeks, so that we can reconnect with those elements which supported the initial UN resolution but are now dismayed at developments.
We should highlight the illegality of the present NATO position, the dangers that follow from externally-imposed regime change, the dismissal of the possibility of negotiations for peace, and we should support the demand for the recall of Parliament to consider Cameron’s policy.
There is no doubt that this war is floundering, both in Libya itself “on the ground” and in public opinion here. With a renewed campaigning focus – more meetings against the war as a vital first step – there is no doubt we can deal a major blow to the whole “war on terror” in this, its latest chosen battlefield.
