Deja Vu on the Streets of Libya - Spot the Difference

Further to my article yesterday something I recently predicted would happen, has happened.

Pro-Gaddafi demonstrations, albeit at the moment rather small ones, are beginning to break out on the streets of Tripoli.

The response of the new Western-backed government? They have opened fire on them!

Can somebody please refresh my memory as to why NATO claimed to have become involved in this conflict in the first place?

Playing the New World Order's Tune

The forces of the Libyan "revolution".  Will you tell him or shall I?

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There was a time, in a previous life, when I was happy to sing the praises of the almost-but-not-completely-deposed Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

It was a time, after all, when I dealt solely in absolutes and, having read the Green Book and marvelled at its convoluted strategy for total democracy, I would hear nothing that suggested revolutionary Libya was any less a paradise on Earth in practice than it was in theory. The Third Universal Theory, to lend it its correct title.

Of course in truth Gaddafi's Libya was anything but a paradise. Power games, between tribes as well as politicians and army generals, and some simple realities about human nature and the personal ambitions, and innate corruptability, of some ensured that not everybody stuck to the manual. Clearly it became a dictatorship with an idea, and one which wasn't too fussy about some of the friends it made around the world in its efforts to carve for itself an ideological niche that would challenge the twin evils of capitalism and communism for the hearts of minds of the people of the world.

But the diet of lies, so barely concealed as to be insulting to the intelligence, that has been fed to the British public in respect of the current NATO campaign has led me instinctively to sympathise with the pro-Gaddafi elements as they continue their desperate, impossible fight against hopeless odds in those few isolated Libyan cities that remain outside of "rebel" (i.e. NATO) control.

From the moment the United Nations gave them the green light for intervention the NATO bombing campaign has quite obviously had nothing whatsoever to do with "protecting civilians" and everything to do with regime change. The fact that there remain up to 10,000 civilians holed up in Sirte, and that NATO is bombing their city relentlessly whilst turning a blind eye to the completely indiscriminate rocket attacks being made upon them by the inexpert and untrained "rebels" provides us with indisputable evidence of this.

Yes Gaddafi was a dictator, a murderous one to boot, but considerably less so than many of the rulers in the region whom the West is actually arming as well as doing regular business with. The difference is of course that Gaddafi was a dictator with a political ideology that, in times of real economic strife such as those we would seem to be heading into, presented a real danger of being taken seriously. After all, who wants a Third World leader who, unlike us it would seem, was able to provide an efficient free healthcare service and universal access to education without increasingly prohibitive tuition fees?

How embarrassing was it for our political establishment to see Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing and released on compassionate grounds two years ago due to his terminal cancer, still alive after all this time thanks to a drug that is freely available in Third World Libya but had been kept quiet about and withheld from British cancer sufferers because it is too expensive to issue?

Who wants a Third World dictator who, in his own small way, had begun to build his own political power base in Africa to rival those of the US superpower or the almost-super powers of Russia and China? Not much we can do about the global machinations of such giants on the world stage, after all. But Libya?

Most of all, who wants a Third World dictator who threatened to trade his people's own oil in "African dinars", based upon gold reserves, as opposed to US dollars?

Understand this and you will understand how a man who was a political pariah in the 1980s and 1990s became cuddly Uncle Muammar in 2003, and how his elite forces became worthy of SAS training little more than a year ago, only for his "dictatorness" to be suddenly rediscovered earlier this year.

We are told the ground forces that are currently struggling to overwhelm Sirte in spite of their massive numerical superiority and unanswered NATO air support are "revolutionaries". But revolutions come from the people, they are not imposed by foreign powers. What has happened in Libya has not been a revolution, but an invasion.

Even now, after having taken Tripoli, the "revolutionaries" have been entirely dependent upon NATO air power in order to take a small city from the scattered remnants of an already defeated army. These guys may believe they are fighting for freedom, and their grudges against the old regime may be well-founded and very real, but they will discover before very long that they have in fact been the foot soldiers of a far more subtle and sinister dictatorship than their eccentric ex-Brother Leader could ever have imposed upon them.

No Representation in Lieu of the People?

Despite my relative lack of interest in national and international politics these days I do find myself pondering the current troubles in Libya.

As a leading National Front activist in the late 1980s I was an avid admirer of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (or "Qathafi" as my erstwhile comrades and I liked to spell it at the time, lending us a sense of affected superiority). Where there was a suggestion that his regime was anything short of perfect, for instance his arming of terrorists, I simply ignored the evidence.  In that way I was able to able to maintain a rose-tinted picture of revolutionary perfection throughout.  So ghettoised and unpopular was the NF at the time that it considered Gaddafi and the Ayatollah Khomeini to be desirable sources of political respectability!

Those who find comfort in the traditional view of extreme nationalism in the UK as being motivated only by race hate and driven by a political worldview which sits conveniently to the right of the most hardline Conservatives on the "political spectrum" would be confused by this infatuation with a Libyan revolutionary who includes the word "Socialist" in the title of his "State Of The Masses".

But in fact Gaddafi and his Green Book was one of the many ideological affectations embraced by the very eccentric version of the NF of which I was a member circa 1987-1989, and of all those in the party I was probably at the time his most devoted enthusiast.

So I occasionally have to remind myself that my view of the world has altered radically since those bad old days if I am to take an objective view of the events of the last few weeks over in the "Splaj".

The essence of Gaddafi's ideology is that he believes power to lie with the masses and not with centralised government, and that those who speak for those masses do so as delegates rather than as representatives. No Representation in Lieu of the People is a slogan than reoccurs throughout his seminal work.

I have to admit that I retain a great deal of sympathy for this as an ideal. Nonetheless it would seem to be the case that the practice has deviated from the principle rather a lot, and much though Gaddafi would have us (and himself) believe that he is a mere symbol of the Green Revolution and that he wields no executive power of his own, the actuality is almost certainly entirely different. The replacement of most of his conventional army with an "armed people" may avoid giving off an appearance of a military dictatorship but one suspects that, as on Animal Farm, some of the guardians of the Revolution are in fact more equal that others.

All the same it is quite alarming to listen to the news in the UK and to realise just how little the commentators at the BBC and Sky actually understand, or affect to understand, about Libya.

We are told that the army has gone over to the protestors, with the implication that this must inevitably spell doom for the Gaddafi regime. But rarely is there any hint of an understanding of what little importance the men in uniform actually have in a country in which everybody is armed and where power comes through committees of civilians.

We are told that nobody is supporting the government, and yet it would appear not only to be holding the capital but also launching counter-attacks against cities that have fallen into the hands of anti-government forces, albeit today's attempt to retake Brega transpired to be something of a damp squib.

We are told that the strength of the rebels in Benghazi makes a final and decisive incursion into Tripoli an inevitability, rather ignoring the inconvenient fact that the two cities are several hundred miles apart with a desert in-between and that the rebels have no transport.

We are told that the Libyan government has launched air strikes against its own people, a truly despicable thing to do if it is true. The Libyan government insists it is not true, as of course it would, but the Russians who have been monitoring the situation by satellite are saying the same thing.

The real difficulty that arises when trying to understand what is going on in Libya is that nobody seems to be telling us the truth. Gaddafi, absurdly, has tried to suggest that Al-Qaeda is behind the uprising when a cursory glance at the demonstrators will tell any observer that these protests are not the product of an upsurge of Islamism. Quite the opposite in fact - the hand of the United States and its Western allies suggests itself, which would explain the rather peculiar demand that Gaddafi should stand down after having been partially successful in resisting uprisings of a kind that brought down the leadership in both Tunisia and Egypt. It is the cry of an outside party that has seriously botched its attempt to overthrow a sovereign state and wants to destroy the evidence as quickly as it can.

One considers, but not for too long, whether David Cameron and his government would resign and hand over power to the students should they ever decide to replace fire extinguishers with guns, and single-issue protest with revolutionary intent. We all know that in such an event the response of our government - like that of the Libyan government or indeed any other government when faced with the same situation - would be to suppress the uprising ultimately by using any means necessary.

Of course, whatever lies behind the upheaval the people fighting on the streets of Libya against the regime are not Americans and they are not Israelis. The sincere aspirations of the Libyan protestors would appear to be freedom and democracy and if, perhaps a little arrogantly, we are to assume that our version of democracy is entirely good and that Gaddafi's is entirely bad, we should see this as a positive. But a US-sponsored revolution would, given the choice, replace the current regime with something that was more US- and Israel-friendly, which in turn would provide massive political ammunition to the Islamists who wait in the wings.

Whichever way one looks at it, it is not pretty. As I see it there are three possible outcomes for the immediate future:

1. A bloodbath as pro-government forces use their superior firepower and strategic advantage to reassert control.

2. A "two nation" solution, at least in the short term, with the government remaining in control of a smaller Libya governed from Tripoli and the rebels governing themselves independently from Benghazi, possibly under the protection of the UN, the US and/or the Arab League, or

3. Military intervention by the US and its allies to finish the job they began without (incredibly) any proper knowledge of how Libya operates, resulting in illegal regime change openly imposed by invading powers a la Iraq.

Whichever it is to be, I truly hope that it can be done with quickly and with as little innocent blood shed as is humanly possible.