Exclusive: Hillary Clinton’s Libyan “regime change” project remains in chaos with one U.S. official likening rival factions to rogue water “droplets” resisting a U.S.-carved rewards-and-punishment “channel” to reconciliation, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The Obama administration is hoping that it can yet salvage Hillary Clinton’s signature project as Secretary of State, the “regime change” in Libya, via a strategy of funneling Libya’s fractious politicians and militias – referred to by one U.S. official as chaotic water “droplets” – into a U.S.-constructed “channel” built out of rewards and punishments.
However, so far, the “unity government” – brokered by U.S. and United Nations officials – has floundered as the leaders of two rival governments bristle at demands for their compliance and show little interest in being good little water “droplets” flowing through the Obama administration’s “channel.”
Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011.
In recent days, competing militias, supporting elements of the three governments, have converged on Sirte, where the Islamic State jihadists have established a foothold, but the schisms among the various Libyan factions have prevented anything approaching a coordinated attack. Indeed, resistance to the U.S.-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) appears to be growing amid doubts about the political competence of the hand-picked prime minister, Fayez Sirraj.
Jonathan Winer, the State Department’s special envoy on Libya, voiced some of the U.S. government’s frustrations during a May 20 panel discussion at the Middle East Institute in Washington as he explained the U.S. strategy for reunifying Libya under the GNA.
“It’s a bit like water hydraulics,” Winer said. “You can’t predict where an individual particle is going to go when water is flowing through something turbulent, that’s the core of chaos theory, right? But if you dig a trench, you know most of the water’s going to go down that trench, and if you turn it into a channel, more of the water’s going in. And then after you dig the channel, you then coat the channel and put in filters and a variety of things to then get that water looking good and useful for more purposes.
“So what we’re doing with the Government of National Accord is we’re trying to create a channel, for national unity and reconciliation, and for building the institutions Libya needs, for building enough stability so the economy can come back, so they can pump oil, which Libya needs for Libyans, distribute the wealth fairly, equitably, in a way that brings people in, and take advantage of Libya’s natural resources to rebuild the country. …
“Libyans overall can be quite fractious, so carving that channel in a way that’s good, that they’re going to say is good, is what we’re trying to do, even if we can’t predict where individual droplets are going to go, even if it’s going to take time, which it is and it will.”
Thus far, however, many Libyan political figures have been unwilling to jump into the “channel,” which has led the Obama administration to both impose and threaten punishments against these rogue water “droplets,” such as financial sanctions and even criminal charges.
Jonathan Winer, State Department’s Special Envoy on Libya. (Screenshot from C-SPAN)
“We’ve sanctioned [Aguila Saleh] the speaker of the parliament of the government in Libya we had recognized prior to the GNA after he undertook a series of activities to prevent people [in the parliament] from voting, which included substantial threats of violence and intimidation when a majority was ready to support the Government of National Accord,” Winer said. “We sanctioned him.”
The European Union also imposed sanctions on Saleh, whose government is known as the House of Representatives (HOR), based in Tobruk, as well as on Nouri Abusahmain and Khalifa al-Ghwell, the president and prime minister, respectively, of another rival government in Tripoli.
That government denied Sirraj and other GNA officials the right to land at the Tripoli airport in March, forcing the U.S./U.N.-backed “unity government” to arrive by sea and set up shop at a heavily defended naval base. The GNA threatened to deliver its rivals’ names to Interpol and to the U.N. for “supporting terrorism.”
Support from a Jihadist
Ironically, even as U.S. officials confront defiance from the rival Libyan leaders in Tripoli and Tobruk, they have won cooperation from Abdelhakim Belhadj, who was the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadist militia whose members were once driven out of Libya by Col Muammar Gaddafi and developed close ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
After the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Belhadj was tracked by the CIA and captured in Malaysia in 2004 before being renditioned back to Libya, where he was imprisoned until 2010. In 2011, after Secretary of State Clinton convinced President Obama to join an air war against the Gaddafi regime on “humanitarian” grounds, Belhadj pulled together a jihadist force that helped spearhead the decisive attack on Tripoli.
After Gaddafi fled Tripoli and was captured in his home town of Sirte, U.S.-backed rebels sodomized him with a knife and murdered him. Upon hearing of Gaddafi’s demise, Secretary of State Clinton clapped her hands in obvious glee and declared, “we came, we saw, he died.”
Now, Belhadj, who has since branched off into various business ventures including an airline, is viewed as a key American ally with his militia helping to protect Sirraj and other GNA officials operating from the Tripoli naval base. (Gee, how could an Al Qaeda-connected jihadist with an airline present a problem?)
But U.S. officials have been unwilling to negotiate with some other Libyan figures, such as General Khalifa Haftar, who is commander of the Libyan forces supporting the HOR government in the east. Haftar, who has vowed to crush the Islamic State but also wants broad powers as the country’s military chieftain, is viewed as a potential strongman in the mold of Gaddafi.
Immediately after being selected as Prime Minister of the U.N./U.S.-arranged “unity government” Fayez Sirraj reached out to Gen. Kahlifa Haftar on Jan. 30, 2016, a move that infuriated U.S. officials who favored isolating Haftar.
Sirraj, after being picked to lead the U.N.-U.S.-brokered “unity government” in January, reached out to Haftar in a face-to-face meeting that infuriated U.S. officials who preferred isolating Haftar and felt that the get-together with Sirraj would create confusion among anti-Haftar forces in Libya’s west.
Rather than pursue such negotiations, the Obama administration’s strategy has focused on using coercion, such as financial sanctions and threats of arrest, to force the chaotic Libyan water “droplets” into the U.S.-dug “channel.”
Although the purported reason for the “channel” in this case is to promote positive goals such as political reconciliation and economic development for all Libyans, a troublesome question about the tactic is where – in reality – does the “channel” go. Some Libyans suspect that the “channel” may lead to a neoliberal end that would privatize the nation’s oil wealth, rather than sharing it with the people in an equitable way.
There’s also the issue of how such a strategy of financial and legal inducements can be used in other undemocratic or even imperialistic ways, benefiting outside powers or coercing the people of a country into policies that they otherwise would reject. Like any weapon, the sophisticated application of sanctions and other pressures can inflict harm in the wrong hands.
‘Work in Progress’
In the case of Libya, the wielding of such “smart power” risks further deepening the country’s bitter divisions and making the building of bridges between the various factions even harder. That, in turn, could leave the Libyan crisis as a sore point for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in which she has tried to put the best face on the bloody mess, presenting Libya as a “work in progress.”
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton honor the four victims of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, at the Transfer of Remains Ceremony held at Andrews Air Force Base, Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Sept. 14, 2012. [State Department photo)
This past week, central bank officials in the east announced that they had printed 4 billion Libyan dinars through a Russian company while bank officials in the west said they had a British company print dinars for them. The U.S.-backed GNA denounced the eastern dinars as counterfeit, but last year, the U.S.-based International Monetary Fund recognized the central bank governor in the east, Ali Salim al-Hibri, as its sole contact and ended ties to a rival bank operation in the west.
Summing up the confusing situation, The New York Times reported on June 2, “One Western official who recently visited the country said the political mood in Libya had become increasingly confrontational during recent months as the United Nations, acting under pressure from the United States and its allies, has struggled to win acceptance for the unity government.”
The ongoing violence and chaos in Libya is a far cry from what Hillary Clinton’s State Department team envisioned when the “regime change” was being accomplished in 2011 and the expectation was to announce a “Clinton Doctrine” based on the use of “smart power,” according to State Department email exchanges.
Clinton and other “liberal interventionists” around Obama had pressured the President to intervene in Libya supposedly to protect Libyans from a possible slaughter at the hands of Gaddafi, who was mounting an offensive against what he described as Islamic terror groups around Benghazi. The Western bombing campaign decimated the Libyan army and cleared the way for the rebels to seize Tripoli and murder Gaddafi.
However, with Gaddafi and his largely secular regime out of the way, Islamic militants expanded their power across the country, with some proving that they indeed were terrorists, just as Gaddafi had warned. One Islamic terror group attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American personnel, an incident that Clinton called the worst moment of her four-year tenure as Secretary of State.
As the violence spread, the United States and other Western countries abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. Once prosperous with many social services, Libya descended into the category of failed state with the Islamic State taking advantage of the power vacuum to seize control of Sirte and other territory. In one grisly incident, Islamic State militants marched Coptic Christians onto a beach and beheaded them.
Now, the Obama administration is trying to re-impose order in the country via a hand-picked group of new Libyan officials and by building a “channel” to direct the flow of the nation’s politics in the direction favored by Washington. But many Libyan water “droplets” are refusing to climb in.
(Research by Assistant Editor Chelsea Gilmour.)
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Cleaning Up Hillary’s Libya Mess.”]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
IMHO, if any outside powers are going to bring peace and stability to Libya, they are Russia and the MENA coalition Russia has built. As Lavrov has repeatedly emphasized, the biggest problem facing those countries is ‘terrorism’, followed by the lack of economic development. It really is time for the U.S. to wise up and work together with Russia and China to become a guarantor of peace instead of an enabler of instability there and elsewhere, so that we can get down to the business of trade, investment, and the chance for a better life for all of us.
Yes, we the US are led by persons who care neither for foreign populations nor their own people. The warring factions of the developing world are it’s greatest problem, and the US has spent its surplus since WWII creating and arming those factions, and preventing others from solving the problems, when the same investments in humanitarian aid would have lifted half the world from poverty. History will have no kind words for the US unless it reverses course.
The state department should leave the flow of water droplets to hydrologists and plumbers and try to understand the people they are dealing with in Libya. Unfortunately, the people at the Libya desk don’t appear to be any more enlightened than those covering other areas of the Middle East and Africa.
Beyond death and taxes there are two constants. Authoritarians with a lust for power and/or wealth will seek to become autocrats ruling their fiefs according to their personal desires and ambitions without regard for and total indifference towards their subjects. If there is anyone among the tired, the poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free there will always be a need for people with courage to speak truth to power.
This nation has always been fortunate to have courageous people rise to oppose malicious power – Thomas Paine, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Muhammad Ali, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Robert Parry, Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, etc. – but they have had limited success against the plutocrats and their puppets in the political oligarchies. That failure is due, in part, to an ill-informed and apathetic populace.
Very true and well said. The mass media are truly enemies of the people of the United States, and with the economic concentrations that support them, have waged economic and propaganda war upon the United States. They are thereby traitors, engaged in a right-wing revolution, and should be utterly destroyed in their ability to do so.
Muammar Gaddafi’s biggest mistake was his believing he could govern a sovereign nation. I use to think that it was all about oil. I believe that the U.S. is largely carrying out Israel’s Yinon plan, but there is more. It’s not so much a U.S. plan, as it is a U.S./London/Zionist conquest for world hegemony. I realize how most of you who frequent this site, already know this, but the majority of Americans I’m afraid don’t have a clue. The western media has promoted the narrative that America is fighting against radical Muslims, and that by winning this war in the Middle East democracy will soon follow. By Robert Parry keeping this Libyian story alive is a good thing. Our MSM is papering over the real reason for all this war, by reporting as much as they can the childish antics of our presidential candidates. Libya, Flight MH17, the corruption in Ukraine, missile sites being installed in Poland and Romania are never or hardly ever mentioned, and that’s not because any of those subjects are not news worthy. It’s good against evil. My worry is that Hillary will make a move to bring home the biggest prize of all, and that will be the conquering of Russia. This doesn’t have anything to do with gender, it’s what is inside ones soul, and of course their agenda.
Brilliant F.G.Sanford, simply brilliant!
Channeling drops and running psy-ops, the machine Clinton helped set in motion,
Is digging a ditch, the drainage from which, will accumulate sooner or later.
All will work out, though Republicans pout, and the pundits refute attribution-
The “A Team” is ready to lend a hand steady, and Clinton will calm this commotion!
Now that Ukraine has become the refrain for successful destabilized mayhem,
The mission complete is a model replete with the fruits of a policy triumph.
The same in Brazil was achieved with good will, and the populace has been preempted,
Chaos resulting through lack of consulting has adequately served to co-opt them.
Those financial vultures and big-banking cultures will send in their thieves for a banquet-
Behind those closed doors, the corporate whores are assembling cohorts adapted:
They’ll get Saakashvili, he’s touchy and feely, Jaresko will also be drafted-
They’ll subvert with abandon inserted to stand-in, and as government puppets they’ll crank it.
Now that Brazil’s got some corporate shills, and those cronies avoided indictment,
Michel Temer may serve, because we observe, he’s been banned for his acts of corruption.
He’ll now volunteer, and Wall Street will cheer, because Roussef got no help from Clinton,
Touting motives progressive she’s quite the obsessive ’til real women garner excitement!
If Haftar gets sloppy, some bin Laden copy will step in to the fray and replace him.
The margin of error for counterfeit terror is large, so there’s no need to worry,
The engineered fraud of a threat from abroad will be stoked by those waves of migration.
If they run out of boats they’ll use rubber tube floats, the Atlantic is such a quick swim!
The only thing left, and the choice must be deft, is a foreign-born finance advisor.
They’re in ready supply, though Heaven knows why, and their provenance seems quite consistent-
Like the one in Brazil, who gave banksters a thrill, he’ll insure that the Dinar will prosper.
Austerity measures will save all those treasures Gadaffi retained like a miser!
Yes, that Neocon panel is digging a channel, that seems more akin to a ditch,
But the “A Team” will fix it, and Haftar won’t nix it, a Jihadi safe-zone will emerge,
They’ll be launching more strikes, we ain’t seen the likes, that excrescence will flow unabated.
The channel will capture to Neocon rapture all that spume and there won’t be a hitch.
But they’ll need a Team Leader, a channeling seeder, with clandestine skills leaner and meaner,
He’ll have to have guts, not some amateur klutz, because courage will make him or break him,
He’ll be thrown in that ditch on behalf of the witch whose nefarious schemes spew that stench:
A shadowy stranger they call “Carlos Danger”, they can’t trust just any old wiener!
His fedora pulled low, and that trench-coat bestow a clandestine and camouflaged perch.
He’ll emerge from the mist, a cell phone in his fist, standing by to tweet classified selfies,
If he opens that coat anywhere near the moat, it won’t matter if boxers or briefs,
The whole White House staff will get a good laugh, but he’s got no image to smirch.
He’ll monitor droplets insuring the witch gets real-time situation reports.
As the channel gets filled with that sewage distilled from another R2P disaster,
She’ll be watching the screen with her friend Abba Dean as intelligence analysts squirm,
Classified pictures could compromise strictures if emails were found in his shorts.
As drops coalesce, she’ll rely on the press to obscure any overflow drama.
Suave Carlos Danger will make like a stranger, awaiting his next big assignment.
If the press were to ask us, that could be Damascus, but secrecy rules must prevail.
There’s no need to flaunt, he’ll remain nonchalant, to prevent any legacy trauma.
The Syrian gambit might be just a scam, but the Russians could really get spooked.
Then something could drop with an ominous flop, and it won’t be a laugh or a cackle.
Engaged on that spectrum twixt knife and the the rectum may arise an indelible quote:
“We spoke with a voice, but you gave us no choice. We came, and we saw, and we nuked.”
An impressive work, well informed and well executed. If I may suggest anything, it would not be technical but audience-related: that you collect some humorous short poems for the uninformed, quotable as historical commentary, perhaps illustrating a perspective of a complex matter. Strongest where agreement on premises is not assumed. Political arguments by simile can be brief, humorous, and thereby compelling. These may have magazine/blog publishability.
Here is a YouTube video from a series on Hillary’s uncharmed life. Relevant here because it treats the subject of Libya Before, and Libya After. That we purposefully targeted this country in the same way we have targeted Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Ukraine, Honduras, Iran (multiple pointless and unfounded threats), as well as most recently Argentina, planted unrest and then pointed to our dirty deeds as the reason our vaunted Secretary of State was compelled to carry out regime-change — that’s the story here. But for what reason? She’s an egomaniac whose rationale rests mostly on: Because we can, could, will — and no one will dare stop us.
Evil? Wicked? It’s hard to know how best to characterize someone like this, but the repelling revelations are endless… If she becomes President of the United States, the tragic end may be that there will be no more stories. Someone with an incriminating past like Hillary’s may not care about just blowing the entire Earth away one day. I suspect she could be just that selfish. She seems to be endowed with the mindset of a serial killer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m8efcUhvDA
Regime change, as envisaged by the US, will not survive.And neither will capitalism in its present unregulated form.This is what the Arab Spring was and is all about.The US ‘plants’ in the Middle East have no future, thus the Clinton doctrine is doomed to fail.Trump, for all his inane ways of expressing it, has the better idea:he wants to compete on the consumer products front with an American label.The option is proxy wars led by the Pentagon and military industrial complexes of the world’s three great powers, which will eventually lead to World War 111and the destruction of all mankind.
Of note is that the unity government is not of Libya nor of the Libyan people. It is imposed by the US and is simply yet another example of US Corpocracy (read control of democracy by US corps and banks). That the UN gives it support demonstrates yet again that the UN has become an extension of the 0.01%
All those years of Gaddaffi being a friend, an enemy, a friend once more, and all the time he worked effectively for Libyans and other Africans, building giant works for water and agriculture in Libya, providing services, listening to the people (!!!! who would do that in the USA?) and working to extend communications to all Africa. Removing him, with all the other destruction, was completely unforgivable and as we see has ruined yet another country. Hillary’s sins are many-no need to repeat it.
OIL=MONEY.
What started out as an attempt to divide and destroy Iran’s arc of influence across the region has galvanized it instead.
Moving the mercenary forces of IS out of the region is instrumental in ensuring they “live to fight another day.” By placing them in Libya, Washington and its allies hope they will be far out of reach of the growing coalition truly fighting them across the Levant. Further more, placing them in Libya allows other leftover “projects” from the “Arab Spring” to be revisited, such as the destabilization and destruction of Algeria, Tunisia and perhaps even another attempt to destabilize and destroy Egypt.
IS’ presence in Libya could also be used as a pretext for open-ended and much broader military intervention throughout all of Africa by US forces and their European and Persian Gulf allies. As the US has done in Syria, where it has conducted operations for now over a year and a half to absolutely no avail, but has managed to prop up proxy forces and continue undermining and threatening targeted nations, it will likewise do so regarding IS in Libya and its inevitable and predictable spread beyond.
Despite endless pledges by the US and Europe to take on IS in Libya, neither has admitted they themselves and their actions in 2011 predictably precipitated IS’ rise there in the first place. Despite the predictable danger destabilizing and destroying Libya posed to Europe, including a deluge of refugees fleeing North Africa to escape the war in Libya, predicted by many prominent analysts at the time even before the first of NATO’s bombs fell on the country, the US and Europe continued forward with military intervention anyway.
One can only surmise from this that the US and Europe sought to intentionally create this chaos, planning to fully exploit it both at home and abroad to continue its campaign to geopolitically reorder MENA.
Washington’s Fake War on ISIS “Moves” to Libya
By Ulson Gunnar
https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2016/04/washingtons-fake-war-on-isis-moves-to.html
The CIA was operating a covert mission in the U.S. consulate in Libya when it came under attack by militants, intelligent chiefs have admitted.
In the first days after the attack, various administration officials linked the Benghazi incident to the simultaneous protests around the Muslim world over an American-made film that ridiculed Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.
Only later did they publicly attribute it to militants, linking them to al-Qaeda, and acknowledged it was distinct from the film protests.
The changing explanations led to suspicions that the administration didn’t want to acknowledge a terror attack on U.S. personnel so close to the Nov. 6 election, a charge Obama has strongly denied.
A timeline, released by the agency, had blown open the dramatic sequence of events, revealing that of the 30 American officials evacuated from the country following the deadly attack, just seven worked for the State Department.
IT PROBABLY NEVER HAPPENED….
I remember vague stories about Ghadaffi’s most loyal supporters being black.
When black women were captured and captured in a penned in area, our “good guys”
(male) would rush through and rape at will. But since little was written in the US, perhaps
it never happened. No details.
I remember equally vague stories by some NGO (?) that black males who were loyal
to Ghadaffi were captured and attacked and beaten ferociously by the white
“good guys” being supported by the US-France-UN. All those humanitarian
folks!
But since no details were ever mentioned in the US, this may not have happened either.
But then..what’s the difference?
—Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
http://sputniknews.com/military/20160605/1040800812/us-ignores-russian-cooperation-proposals.html
Yes, Debbie, you’re probably right about the hands pulling the strings in this devastating — and also demented — picture. The latter because I’ve listened to people who were in Libya before we pulled our shenanigans there a la Saddam and Iraq. It seems to be very very difficult for anyone in US governing circles to learn lessons from an incident gone horribly wrong. Could it be arrogance?
In any case, these people who were living in Libya had a strikingly different story to report re the standard of living that obtained in that country, Gaddafi’s rule, etc., from what we were learning from the HRC-run US State Department. Moreover, for their trouble, for their wish to report their experience and tell their fellow Americans the real truth about Libya, they were muzzled and threatened, and from what I remember, soon found out that when you cross the US government and its foreign policy representatives by reporting truths they don’t want the world to hear, the price will be very high. Very high indeed. I believe they soon found themselves unable to find gainful employment and had to subsist on hand-outs from interested and sympathetic listeners.
It seems to be very very difficult for anyone in US governing circles to learn lessons from an incident gone horribly wrong. Could it be arrogance?
It used to be a point of honor in Old Europe for a politician or a public servant who committed a monumental blunder or dishonorable act to resign from his office. If the act was sufficiently serious then suicide might have been called for. In Japan seppuku was a form of self-inflicted capital punishment for samurai and politicians who had committed serious offenses because they had brought shame to themselves and others with whom they were associated.
In the United States and its satrapies, miscreants are much more “pragmatic.” They enlist public relations fabricators to hoodwink the people into believing their naked emperor or empress is dressed in the finest of raiments so they can continue to commit more travesties.
“It seems to be very very difficult for anyone in US governing circles to learn lessons from an incident gone horribly wrong. Could it be arrogance?”
“the Law of the West.” Sixgun Law… ” he who draws the fastest, shoots first and straightest, is Judge, Jury and Executioner, and he wins the game.” Arrogant ignorance and insolent demands made of good folk that are, for the most part, unable to defend themselves against an American war machine.
The real question is who will they send to do the job? NATO or the UN? UN troops are better at rape and pillage, but NATO is much more impressive in the straight out killing line! Both are cheap and ready to go, and they will not have to do it themselves.
So much for humanitarian causes. Why didn’t they just keep on bombing the Libyans until every one was killed in the name of humanity?
It would make about as much humanitarian sense.
Libya is now officially a dysfunctional state, and it will be a simple matter to keep it that way. So… who gives a shit? Certainly not the ones who planned it all!
Now, let’s see…. Who is next on the list?
“Abe, can you get me that old book… who do we go for next?” Syria ?
Why all the hullabaloo and Arab Spring shit in Syria?
An armed and unified functional government in Syria is a threatening deterrent to any militant belligerence which Israel may have toward Hezbollah or Lebanon. Therefore, Syria must be destroyed and neutralized as a player in ME militant diplomacy. This is in accord with Israeli strategic plans of balkanization of all neighboring Arab States in the Middle east and Africa.
Bear this in mind when writing anything about Syria.
It is more than Libya was, and closer than Egypt.
Ten will get you a hundred that, when it is all over and undone, it will be found that the “Extreme Muslim Ter’rist Group,” like so many others, including the infamous Al Qaeda, are associated with, and have been receiving funds and intelligence support, if not direct leadership, command and control from Mossad and/or the CIA.
Apparently Haftar happened to live in Virginia not far from CIA HQ just before he emerged as a leader with resources in eastern Libya.
I agree with you. Why are we supporting factions in Syria that are linked to Al-Queda?
This does not make sense…..
Or does it? to the Military Ind. Complex and defense industry contractors
“…after Secretary of State Clinton convinced President Obama to join an air war against the Gaddafi regime on “humanitarian” grounds, Belhadj pulled together a jihadist force that helped spearhead the decisive attack on Tripoli.” “Upon hearing of Gaddafi’s demise, Secretary of State Clinton clapped her hands in obvious glee and declared, “we came, we saw, he died.” I admit it.
Now, lets get on with doing something to end this crap! Something to undo what you have done to the world. Not to make them “love and respect U ” again, or to recover your “proper” seat at the head of the table, but simply because it is the “right thing to do.”
“So what we’re doing with the Government of National Accord is we’re trying to create a channel, for national unity and reconciliation, and for building the institutions Libya needs, for building enough stability so the economy can come back, so they can pump oil, which Libya needs for Libyans, distribute the wealth fairly, equitably, in a way that brings people in, and take advantage of Libya’s natural resources to rebuild the country. …” Seems like the status quo ante, sans Ghaddafi. Another expectation a la “topple Saddam and the people will throw flowers and sweets at the liberators”? And now a fluid mechanics metaphor to put Libya back to where it was in 2011?
I totally agree with your thought SFOMARCO. As I read this I was thinking, so now it’s a channel. It seems that coming up with a good metaphor is the basis of American Foreign Policy. This is a hang-up of mine. Back in the Vietnam War all we heard was about dominoes falling which makes such an impressive mental “image.” Several years ago I was stunned when I watched Errol Morris’ “Fog of War.” When Morris sat Robert McNamara down with a North Vietnamese contingent, and he was asked what the War was all about, he started to explain The Domino Theory, and the Vietnamese became agitated and basically told him that that was poor theory, and that he hadn’t bothered to educate himself on Vietnamese history or he would know better. I was dumbfounded by that insight. 58,000 casualties because McNamara apparently didn’t have the time to understand Vietnamese History!
How many wars do we have going on now? What do we know of the countries we’re dealing with? We really need to get out of the Empire business once and for all. I’ve watched Hillary enough to realize that regardless of her Wellesley education; she’s not that bright.
Totally agree;She is an idiot,who just follows the current memes of her Zionist masters.
Not one damn evidence of critical thinking ever emanating from her crooked mouth.
Imagine if the moron hadn’t gotten on the crazy train of Iraq,and shown astute thinking,as every other astute thinker realized(Zionists and toads excluded of course)that its destabilization would bring chaos throughout the region.
Of course,this might have been purposeful,but only her Ziomasters knew that,she is incapable.
Yes, fluid mechanics and chaos theory to scare others that perhaps they don’t know the theory here. Just like the use of computers in Vietnam, not 1/1000 of the number, speed, or memory of today’s computers, but just as useful to conceal the foolishness of the plans.
I recall an illiterate who brought a textbook of statistics to a town meeting, to substantiate his claim that a poll of persons affected by an ordinance could not be useful because it did not employ statistics. The assembled citizenry agreed vocally and felt completely supported by mathematics, although none could argue that any useful result would be produced by statistical analysis, and none knew statistics, unlike the poll taker.
SNAFU
Completely off topic, you’d be amazed how many US citizens don’t know that’s an acronym, nor what it means.
In that case, for the younger generations not around during WW2: Situation Normal All F***ed Up
Vietnam era = FUBAR
And WW 2 as well.
Situation Normal All Fucked Up
Yes a thousand times yes, and it’s been about a ‘thousand’ times you’ve demonstrated how horrible Hillary is regarding Libya, and not only. But do you have a further point to make? So much repetition ad infinitum on your otherwise wonderful site, for years and years now. I think your readership already knows your thinking about this and so much else. Do you know whose basic interventionist-lite and fascist-coddling policies you have barely deigned to describe though? I do. And I’m not talking about Trump.
Robert has done a good job, and made the point again, which needs repeating until it becomes common gospel.
Bush/bin Laden family relationships, linked them to the Bush/CIA recruitment and launching of the CIA asset “al Qaeda” during the Russo/Afghan campaign, Al Qaeda, operating under CIA/Mossad aegis and control has been correctly identified ever since then as the manpower provider and major executor of most if not all of the “terrorism which has gone down in the past twenty years, thus making bin Laden and al Qaeda the much sought after black hats, the “boogeymen” behind and justifying all of this stuff.
The fact that the spinmeisters were directed to tell us that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda are dead only tells us that they have some other means of “justifying” the wars and what is going to happen next, which will lead the sheeple into following them right over the edge of the cliff, and when the time is right, run out the new and bigger version to carry the lie onward to…. what?
One of the reasons I find it so difficult to write lately, is that I feel I am repeating the same thing again, and again. Which does not inspire the best of efforts.
“Robert has done a good job, and made the point again, which needs repeating until it becomes common gospel.”
Good. It needs to be repeated again and again and again and again!
Good point, there are not always new ideas to be found when new fact is found, but the value of bringing up the issues again for new viewers is great. Often there are rethinkings and variant views to be expressed.
The theme of Hillary’s blunders may be addressed constantly, but for many of us the variations almost always reveal an aspect or element of which we were not aware and another nail that should be driven into HRC’s “coffin.” This person and her enablers and accomplices are a threat to countless people around the world justifying a constant chorus of criticism until the polls close on November 8th. The great tragedy is that her Republican opponent is probably as perilous as she is.
PS: I’ll consider joining you in telling Robert Parry to discontinue exposing Hillary’s negatives when Hillary quits dissembling in her campaign speeches and interviews.
BILL BODDEN….
We need R. Parry to continue exposing, thank you.
Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
Publishing variations and new information and/or conclusions is useful to interested current readers as well as those who are new to the site. If an essay title doesn’t appeal to me I don’t always examine it at all.
In any event, this one just can’t be republished too often. The murderous ***** Hillary will – if allowed to become POTUS – be a disaster beating out Bush the Dumber.
Obama had a job when he entered the White House – coddling and greasing the skids for the lawless Bankers. He has done that very, very well. So far as I can tell he merely outsourced the rest of the Presidency to the neocons and neoliberals. How else can you explain Hillary and Victoria Nuland and the TPP?
PPS: I tried to read Thomas Friedman’s latest piece of claptrap in our local rag this morning. It was unadulterated drivel supporting Clinton and opposing Sanders and Trump. I’m not qualified to debate Friedman on economics, but James Kwak is: “Just Saying We’re Great Doesn’t Make It So” by James Kwak … “David Brooks has competition for the title of most inane New York Times columnist. I generally never read anything by Thomas Friedman—I gave up less than one hundred pages of The World Is Flat because of his blissfully uninformed discussion of workflow software” – https://baselinescenario.com/2016/02/18/just-saying-were-great-doesnt-make-it-so/
If Robert Parry and others like him are silenced then it is open season for the Clintons and their contemptible enablers and accomplices.
Correction to my comment above about criticizing Clinton through November 8th. If she is elected president the need for incessant criticism will undoubtedly be greater from November 9th into our dystopian future.
If ‘rightist’ elements can repeat lies over and over until they have the semblance of ‘truth’, it becomes even more important to repeat the ‘truth’ over and over to militate against the ‘shiny attraction’ of repeated lies.
PPPS: More on what Robert Parry and those of us who share his views are up against: “Media Trumpwash Clinton’s Reckless Foreign Record” by Adam Johnson – http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/06/04/media-trumpwash-clintons-reckless-foreign-record
American Foreign Policy: Dumbed Down
Since the Cold War there has been a narrowing of foreign policy debate. Does this explain why Washington blunders from one fiasco to another?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAFGswEYC0Q
Since the Cold War, we’ve been run by the Neo-Cons — Bill Clinton was a Neo-Con poorly disguised and his wife is an outright Neo-con and a very very dangerous woman.
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/03/sanders-clinton-yes-trumps-foreign-policy-ideas-are-scary-so-are-yours
While the narrowing of debate may be attributed to control by economic concentrations of the elections and mass media tools of democracy, it is also due to a poorly structured government. Congress has never been able to debate meaningfully due to politics, and the executive has stolen almost all power of Congress over wars, and runs them continually to get campaign contributions from military industry.
For example, Congress utterly failed to debate the Civil War issues from 1820 to 1860, producing nothing but tactical compromises, never bringing the sides to common terms and recognition of the rights and interests of each other. It never seriously debated the issues of Vietnam, nor the wars since.
This is why I advocate a College of policy analysis as a fourth branch of the federal government, to both analyze and debate the issues of each region, preserving the minority viewpoint and the inconvenient solution. It would make available commented summaries of history and fact, analyses of current situations by each discipline and functional area, and debated syntheses of anticipated developments, potential changes due to events human or natural, and the impact of policy alternatives, with comments reflecting the various viewpoints or possibilities. Not many of the uneducated would read the results, but politicians and vocal citizens could more readily be shown to violate what the experts generally agree is workable,
The College would be conducted largely by internet with experts at the universities, applying expert analysis of every region with a broad range of skills and disciplines, and moderated textual debate with the broadest range of viewpoints.