The Arab Spring and "the War on Terror"

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

why do the UN always completly disregard preventitive measures, then get themselves in a mess when they have to tidy up the atrocities they should've prevented.

[carlitobrigante]

I agree with the ones saying people need their own exit strategy when working out in such places. From the little i know, the UK has got as many flights into the airport as possible, with us getting similar amount of planes in as all the other countries. Cant really attach too much blame to our government for not being fully prepared what is such an unprecedented, delicate and volatile situation thats developed so quickly.

[Awol]

why do the UN always completly disregard preventitive measures, then get themselves in a mess when they have to tidy up the atrocities they should've prevented.

Politics. China and Russia are repressive and horrible regimes that are not going to authorise international intervention via the UNSC just because a senile dictator turns anti aircraft guns on unarmed civillians.

In essence though that doesn't matter. Kosovo was a unilateral NATO intervention (we very nearly came to blows with Russia at Pristina airport) and we pulled it off because we got in before the Serbs went postal and didn't fart about wth international talking shops. At the cost of 500,000 innocent lives NATO learned some important lessons in Bosnia about when and how to do the right thing, but sadly some very ill judged interventions/invasions since then are making us draw the wrong conclusions now.

Sometimes being true to our values requires us to use force if by doing so we serve the greater good. Libya is without doubt one of those times.

[Gringo]

yahboooo"]"DAY OF RAGE"

Hundreds of people have backed a Facebook call for a Saudi "day of rage" on March 11 to demand an elected ruler, greater freedom for women and the release of political prisoners.

Saudi analysts said the king might soon reshuffle his cabinet to inject fresh blood and revive stalled reforms.

Saudi stability is of global concern. A key U.S. ally, the top OPEC producer holds more than a fifth of world oil reserves.

The king announced no political reforms such as municipal council polls demanded by opposition groups. Saudi Arabia has no elected parliament or parties and allows little public dissent.

Jeddah-based Saudi analyst Turad al-Amri welcomed what he called "a nice gesture" from the king, saying the measures were not unprecedented or prompted by Arab protests elsewhere.

But other Saudis were critical. "We want rights, not gifts," said Fahad Aldhafeeri in one typical message on Twitter.

The saudis are still supporting the Bahrain regime (I did read in one paper (indie?) of truck fulls of bodies being driven over the bridge to saudi to keep the reported body count down) and don't want the contagion spreading.

[chrisp65]

From my own limited experience, the company I work for were negotiating working in Libya on a couple of schemes. One out in the dessert (any remember the great man made river project?) and a couple in Tripoli.

The Libyans were always great value. Negotiations would involve driving around Malta having meetings in the back of cars followed by other cars.

In the end we couldn't get any insurance or assurances that those of us out there could get back if it all went a bit tits. The company took the view the risk for individuals outweighed the benefits. Clearly the greater monies to be made in oil made it a risk that looked to be worth taking.

For what it's worth, I think we've done the right thing to try and get people out.

[Awol]

UKSF have got 150 Brits out of the desert in Herc's and returning workers suggest there are over 100 remaining in different locations.

Bright of the media to be reporting operational details while the mission is still ongoing...

[Gringo]

You can't be blaming just the media when there's a govt secretary announcing the deployment of SAS teams into the area.

[Awol]

You can't be blaming just the media when there's a govt secretary announcing the deployment of SAS teams into the area.

Oh I don't mate Ministers and Civil Serpants have been desperate to show they are doing something after all the media coverage to contrary.

It's worth bearing in mind though something like this (sending armed men and aircraft to violate the sovereignty of an unstable and exceedingly violent country) isn't simply jacked up overnight and will have been some time in the planning. Press reporting that forward recce teams sneaked of HMS Cumberland in Benghazi and buggered off into the desert a few days ago, but HMG should have resisted the temptation to counter bad PR by blurting out details while guys are clearly still searching.

It shows a concern about the 24 hour news cycle that I had hoped would die when Labour got kicked out. Obviously not.

Also read that Blair has been making private calls to Gaddafi... one war criminal to another. Bet that was an interesting conversation.

[Gringo]

Also read that Blair has been making private calls to Gaddafi... one war criminal to another. Bet that was an interesting conversation.

Oh that's nothing, even brutal dictators are allowed to speak to their financial advisors.

Tony Blair sets up Mayfair-based investment services firm

Muammar Gaddafi invites Tony Blair to his Mayfair celebration

Gaddafi secretly transfers £3bn to Mayfair-based fund

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

Gaddafi payrolls half of africa, it'll be interesting to see what happens when their funding goes.

[Awol]

Two dead in Oman

Nothing major in Muscat yet and unlikely to be imo, but even so it's not good.

[brommy]

From my own limited experience, the company I work for were negotiating working in Libya on a couple of schemes. One out in the dessert (any remember the great man made river project?) and a couple in Tripoli.

The Libyans were always great value. Negotiations would involve driving around Malta having meetings in the back of cars followed by other cars.

In the end we couldn't get any insurance or assurances that those of us out there could get back if it all went a bit tits. The company took the view the risk for individuals outweighed the benefits. Clearly the greater monies to be made in oil made it a risk that looked to be worth taking.

For what it's worth, I think we've done the right thing to try and get people out.

I suspect the need to complete negotiations in the back of cars in a neutral country were a clue to the possible risks!

[Gringo]

John Pilger"]Behind the Arab revolt is a word we dare not speak

24 February 2011

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the President’s daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the “national security” monolith that is American power and had retired with presidential plaudits. On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other senior officers of the CIA and other intelligence agencies wrote to President George W. Bush that the “drumbeat for war” was based not on intelligence, but lies.

“It was 95 per cent charade,” McGovern told me.

“How did they get away with it?”

“The press allowed the crazies to get away with it.”

“Who are the crazies?”

“The people running the [bush] administration have a set of beliefs a lot like those expressed in Mein Kampf... these are the same people who were referred to in the circles in which I moved, at the top, as ‘the crazies’.”

I said, “Norman Mailer has written that that he believes America has entered a pre-fascist state. What’s your view of that?”

“Well... I hope he’s right, because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode.”

On 22 January, Ray McGovern emailed me to express his disgust at the Obama administration’s barbaric treatment of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning and its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. “Way back when George and Tony decided it might be fun to attack Iraq,” he wrote, “I said something to the effect that fascism had already begun here. I have to admit I did not think it would get this bad this quickly.”

On 16 February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at George Washington University in which she condemned governments that arrested protestors and crushed free expression. She lauded the liberating power of the internet while failing to mention that her government was planning to close down those parts of the internet that encouraged dissent and truth-telling. It was a speech of spectacular hypocrisy, and Ray McGovern was in the audience. Outraged, he rose from his chair and silently turned his back on Clinton. He was immediately seized by police and a security goon and beaten to the floor, dragged out and thrown into jail, bleeding. He has sent me photographs of his injuries. He is 71. During the assault, which was clearly visible to Clinton, she did not pause in her remarks.

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of world war two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of “western civilisation”, found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became “US foreign policy”.

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In “Operation Cyclone”, the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a “priority UK market”, according to Britain’s official arms “procurers”, join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? “It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,” observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, “[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel.”

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now

[Awol]

Two dead in Oman

Make that six dead. A supermarket in Sohar is reportedly looted and burning as protests seemingly continuing there, and army reported to be sealing roads to the town to isolate the protesters from the rest of Oman. Although it's the same geographical size as UK the population is only approx 3 million and quite well spread out so it's quite easy to contain people.

If it does spread to Muscat then things will rapidly get more interesting but that still doesn't look likely.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

What the Gaddafi?

Gaddafi now saying his people love him, there has been no shooting, and no demonstrations against him.

I don't understand this strategy at all, his son was doing the same earlier in the week. If they are trying to calm international pressure then it isn't going to work, we can clearly see what is happening.

Hmm.

And in slightly more worrying news

Seems the dinner jacket has taken preventitive action against any protests and rounded up his opposition leaders and buggered them off to an unknown location.

Hmm.

[Zatman]

Slightly OT but not many people no that his son actually played Serie A football for a few season for Perugia and had shares in Juventus.

He was **** dreadful player

[Awol]

he should (imo) be on the phone to the leaders of France, Spain, and Italy scratching together a joint force of shiny new Typhoons, whatever cruise missile armed naval assets we have in the Med and unleashing holy hell on Egyptian military aviation and airfields, ASAP.

This is going down now and we need someone who is prepared to take action to help these poor bastards. F*** the international consequences, Libyans will thank us for it.

I agree, assuming we make some clear and specific threats first, backed up by evidence that we will do more than make diplomatic objections if they carry on. Needs to happen very quickly though. It'll be the Kurds and the Bosnian Muslims all over again otherwise.

Well Gaddafi amazingly said no when Blair asked him to leave and diplomacy/sanctions/harsh words are going to achieve the square root of **** all. It seems Cameron has finally woken up to this argument but the French, Chinese and Russians are blocking the estasblishment of a no-fly zone over Libya through the UN.

Libya: Russia, China join France in opposing military action against Gaddafi

Russia and China are hardly a surprise because they are despotic butchers themselves, but it's good to see the joint Anglo-French defence cooperation functioning as predicted under its first major test....

What a joke, once again it falls to the English speaking world to stand up and fight Fascism. I hope us the Yanks and the Aussies proceed regardless of the opposition and do the job from Malta.

[OutByEaster?]

I think, importantly that the small group of nations whose people are against military action includes the not unimportant name of Libya. The people don't want our 'freedom' imposed on them, they want their own.

[myb]

I think, importantly that the small group of nations whose people are against military action includes the not unimportant name of Libya. The people don't want our 'freedom' imposed on them, they want their own.

How do you know that? Any footage that has been leaked has shown Libyan's desperately calling for help.

[OutByEaster?]

There's been a lot of stuff on the beeb website and in the papers about this, there's a distrust of the US and a fear that they will no longer be masters of their own destiny. It's very tricky because having taken a stand, I don't think that we can leave Gadaffi alive in case he starts telling tales.

I think the most sensible course of action would involve an opportune lone gunman.