Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Is Qaddafi The New Saddam & Excuse For U.S. Intervention While Ignoring The Crackdown On Protests In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia , Syria, Morocco , Jordan etc.

UPDATE: 7:42 PM, March 23, 2011

It’s the black gold that drives nations mad and inevitably raises the question of whether America and the former European colonial powers give a damn about human rights as the basis for military intervention. If Libya didn’t have more oil than any other nation in Africa would the West be unleashing high-tech military mayhem to contain what is essentially a tribal-based civil war? Once again an American president summons the passions of a human rights crusade against a reprehensible ruler whose crimes, while considerable, are not significantly different from those of dictators the U.S routinely protects.


"Be Consistent—Invade Saudi Arabia " by Robert Sheer


"And this Libyan "Shock and Awe"? Shame on France, shame on Britain and the US and a UN avowed: "... to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." Every shattered body, every child maimed or blown to bits, every widow, widower, orphan, will have their name of those countries, and the UN., written in their blood in their place of death. 
And the public of these murderous, marauding Western ram raiders, will be told that we were bringing democracy, liberating Libya from a tyrant, from the "new Hitler", the "Butcher of Bengazi." by  By Felicity Arbuthnot at Information Clearing House , March 19, 2011


By far, though, the worst GOP hypocrisy comes from failed 2008 candidate John McCain, who is saber-rattling for even more U.S. action in Libya than Obama proposes. But McCain was for Gadhafi before he was against him: As Justin Elliott reveals, McCain and his sidekicks Sen. Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman visited Libya only18 months ago and even discussed renewing arms sales to the dictator McCain now despises. "We discussed the possibility of moving ahead with the provision of non-lethal defense equipment to the government of Libya," McCain told a press conference, noting that "ties between the United States and Libya have taken a remarkable and positive turn in recent years." Joan Walsh at Salon.com

Saudi Arabia-An American Love Story



Morocco Uprising: Casablanca Protest 20 Mars ثورة المغرب



'Terrorism Is the Product of Al Saud-Wahabi ideology'.
March 15, 2011




America and the West hypocrisy over the human rights violations, its medieval Sharia Islamic Law and its support for the Taliban and of Al Qaeda and other terrorists organizations besides having made up the majority of the 9/11 hijackers -15 were Saudis out of the 19.

So now Qaddafi is the new bad guy who happens to be sitting on a large oil field which the us wants free and cheap access to. Meanwhile the Saudi continue to spend billions over the past few decades spreading Sunni Wahabbi Islamic extremism around the globe.
Iran is a Shiite country and is the sworn enemy of Saudi Arabia's client the Afghanistan Taliban. Over the last two decades Iran has become more moderate and less strict in its adherence to Sharia while the Saudis cling to an extreme form of Sharia and zero tolerance of dissent.

Be Consistent—Invade Saudi Arabia by Robert Scheer at TruthDig via Common Dreams.org, March 23, 2011

It’s the black gold that drives nations mad and inevitably raises the question of whether America and the former European colonial powers give a damn about human rights as the basis for military intervention. If Libya didn’t have more oil than any other nation in Africa would the West be unleashing high-tech military mayhem to contain what is essentially a tribal-based civil war? Once again an American president summons the passions of a human rights crusade against a reprehensible ruler whose crimes, while considerable, are not significantly different from those of dictators the U.S routinely protects.


...The fallback position for U.S. policymakers is the “war on terror” standard under which our dictators are needed to control super-fanatic Muslims. That’s why the U.S trained the Republican Guard led by the son of the despised ruler of Yemen as the counterterrorism liaison with Washington. On Tuesday it was the tanks of the lavishly U.S-equipped Republican Guard that stood as the final line of support surrounding the Presidential Palace as calls for departure of Yemen’s dictator increased in intensity. The U.S. was still following the lead of Saudi Arabia, long a financier of the Yemeni ruler.

The Saudi lead was made clearer in the kingdom’s support for the royal family in neighboring Bahrain as Saudi troops were sent in along with forces from the United Arab Emirates to suppress Bahraini democracy advocates claiming that freedom would enhance the power of the majority Shiite population. The fraud here is to locate Shiite Iran as the center of terrorism when it was the Sunni monarchies that were most closely identified with the problems that gave rise to al-Qaida. Not only did 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 come from Saudi Arabia but Saudi Arabia and the UAE, along with Pakistan, were the only countries to diplomatically recognize the Taliban regime that harbored al-Qaida. In Bahrain the majority Shiite population is dismissed as potentially under the sway of the rulers of Iran without strong evidence to that effect. Once again it is convenient to ignore the fact that Iran, as was the case with Saddam’s Iraq, had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack that launched the U.S. war on terror.

All of which elevates the question of how long will the U.S. and its allies ignore the elephant in the room posed by an alliance for human rights and anti-terrorism with regimes in the Middle East that stand for neither? While the jury is still out on whether the West’s attack on Libya will prove to be a boon for that nation’s population, at the very least it should expose the deep hypocrisy of continuing to sell huge amounts of arms and otherwise supporting Saudi Arabia and its contingent tyrannies.


and Felicity Arbuthnot expresses her fears that the action being taken against Libya seems far too reminiscent of the Iraqi war in which the Americans destroyed much of the country's infrastructure roads, hospitals, schools, power plants, water and sewage treatment plants and killed thousands of civilians . The Neocons & the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Regime in their hubris actually believed they needed no contingency plans in case of unrest, looting or an insurgency and had no idea how to piece the country back together again and had as now we see no exit strategy since the US military is still occupying Iraq.

They messed up but refused to own up but rather created various Public Relations damage control responses to any and all criticisms blaming Iran or some other nation for the insurgency. But this was a lie since Iran never made up more than 4% of so called insurgents. The thing of it is they were not insurgents but rather a resistance movement like the French resistance against the NAZIS or the Algerian resistance to the French occupiers of Algeria or the New England 13 colonies resistance to British occupation.


Libya, Hypocrisy and Betrayal by the United Nations By Felicity Arbuthnot at Information Clearing House , March 19, 2011


"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever." - George Orwell.

-- The bombing of Libya will begin on or nearly to the day, of the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the destruction of Iraq, 19th March, in Europe. Libya too will be destroyed - its schools, education system, water, infrastructure, hospitals, municipal buildings. There will be numerous "tragic mistakes", "collateral damage", mothers, fathers, children, babies, grandparents, blind and deaf schools and on and on. And the wonders of the Roman remains and earlier, largely enduring and revered in all history's turmoils as Iraq, the nation's history - and humanity's, again as Iraq and Afghanistan, will be gone, for ever.

The infrastructure will be destroyed. The embargo will remain in place, thus rebuilding will be impossible. Britain, France and the US., will decide the country needs "stabilising", "help with reconstruction." They will move in, secure the oil installations and oil fields, the Libyan people will be an incidental inconvenience and quickly become "the enemy", "insurgents", be shot, imprisoned, tortured, abused - and a US friendly puppet "government" will be installed.

The invaders will award their companies rebuilding contracts, the money - likely taken from Libya's frozen assets without accounting - will vanish and the country will remain largely in ruins.

And the loudest cheerleaders for this, as Iraq, will be running round tv and radio stations in London, Europe and the US, then returning to their safe apartments and their UK/US/Europe paid tenures, in the knowledge that no bombs will be dropping on them. Their children will not be shaking uncontrollably and soiling themselves with terror at the sound of approaching planes.

And this Libyan "Shock and Awe"? Shame on France, shame on Britain and the US and a UN avowed: "... to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." Every shattered body, every child maimed or blown to bits, every widow, widower, orphan, will have their name of those countries, and the UN., written in their blood in their place of death.

And the public of these murderous, marauding Western ram raiders, will be told that we were bringing democracy, liberating Libya from a tyrant, from the "new Hitler", the "Butcher of Bengazi."

The countries who have ganged together these last days to overthrow a sovereign government have, again, arguably, conspired in Nuremberg's: " ... supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole", and yet again, plotted to overthrow a sovereign government, with a fig leaf of "legality" from an arm twisted UN. We have seen it all before.

When it comes to dealing with the usual "liberators", be careful what you wish for. In six months or so, most Libyans, whatever the failings of the last forty years rule, will be ruing the day.

Meanwhile other American journalist such as Joan Walsh of Salon.com for example  are not so certain that this intervention will lead to another Iraq or Afghanistan as long as the EU and Arab League and other non-Western nations are included and that the US doesn't run roughshod over them to get all the glory and the oil.



" Hypocrisy breaks out all over on Libya Ignoring Congress makes Obama's war look like Bush's. But the right reacts in ways it used to consider traitorous" By Joan Walsh  at Salon.com. March 22, 2011

I'm stuck believing this could well be a worthwhile humanitarian exercise, to stop Gadhafi's looming slaughter of political opponents and protect space for the widening democracy movement in the Middle East. The involvement of the United Nations as well as the Arab League, however wobbly, makes equating Libya and Iraq impossible. But I think the president's failure to consult Congress is wrong, yet another example of Obama and the people around him doing things they blasted under the Bush-Cheney administration. 
Meanwhile, GOP presidential hopefuls are trashing the president in ways they insisted were near-traitorous when Democrats said anything similar about President Bush. (Let me be clear: I don't think leaders of either party should be muzzled when they disagree with a president about military intervention; I object to the persistent GOP double-standard.) Poor Mitt Romney, whose every flip-flop seems to be cataloged on YouTube: In 2007 he agreed with Fox's Sean Hannity that Democrats were "playing politics with war" in Iraq. He even quoted Sen. Arthur Vandenberg's oft-repeated, rarely adhered-to aphorism that "politics stops at the water's edge," adding, "I'm afraid Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have gone beyond that water's edge." Of course, on Monday Romney trashed President Obama on Libya by blasting his "absence of a discernible foreign policy" to Hugh Hewitt, blaming said absence on Obama's alleged "fundamental disbelief in American exceptionalism. In the president’s world, all nations have 'common interests,' the lines between good and evil are blurred, America's history merits apology ... And without a compass to guide him in our increasingly turbulent world, he’s tentative, indecisive, timid and nuanced." 

and she then takes shots at Sara Palin. Newt Gingrich and blasts John McCain:

By far, though, the worst GOP hypocrisy comes from failed 2008 candidate John McCain, who is saber-rattling for even more U.S. action in Libya than Obama proposes. But McCain was for Gadhafi before he was against him: As Justin Elliott reveals, McCain and his sidekicks Sen. Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman visited Libya only18 months ago and even discussed renewing arms sales to the dictator McCain now despises. "We discussed the possibility of moving ahead with the provision of non-lethal defense equipment to the government of Libya," McCain told a press conference, noting that "ties between the United States and Libya have taken a remarkable and positive turn in recent years."

As Glenn Greenwald argues that those in favor of intervention in Libya set up a false premise which is basically one either supports Qaddafi or supports the rebels and there is no other options which is the same specious argument made by the Pro-war crowd before going into Iraq.


The manipulative pro-war argument in Libya by Glenn Greenwald Salon.Com, March 22, 2011

Advocating for the U.S.'s military action in Libya, The New Republic's John Judis lays out the argument which many of his fellow war advocates are making: that those who oppose the intervention are guilty of indifference to the plight of the rebels and to Gadaffi's tyranny

...Note how, in Judis' moral world, there are only two possibilities: one can either support the American military action in Libya or be guilty of a "who cares?" attitude toward Gadaffi's butchery. At least as far as this specific line of pro-war argumentation goes, this is just 2003 all over again. Back then, those opposed to the war in Iraq were deemed pro-Saddam: indifferent to the repression and brutalities suffered by the Iraqi people at his hands and willing to protect his power. Now, those opposed to U.S. involvement in the civil war in Libya are deemed indifferent to the repression and brutalities suffered by the Libyan people from Gadaffi and willing to protect his power. This rationale is as flawed logically as it is morally.

...But my real question for Judis (and those who voice the same accusations against Libya intervention opponents) is this: do you support military intervention to protect protesters in Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies from suppression, or to stop the still-horrendous suffering in the Sudan, or to prevent the worsening humanitarian crisis in the Ivory Coast? Did you advocate military intervention to protect protesters in Iran and Egypt, or to stop the Israeli slaughter of hundreds of trapped innocent civilians in Gaza and Lebanon or its brutal and growing occupation of the West Bank?

If not, doesn't that necessarily mean -- using this same reasoning -- that you're indifferent to the suffering of all of those people, willing to stand idly by while innocents are slaughtered, to leave in place brutal tyrants who terrorize their own population or those in neighboring countries? Or, in those instances where you oppose military intervention despite widespread suffering, do you grant yourself the prerogative of weighing other factors: such as the finitude of resources, doubt about whether U.S. military action will hurt rather than help the situation, cynicism about the true motives of the U.S. government in intervening, how intervention will affect other priorities, the civilian deaths that will inevitably occur at our hands, the precedents that such intervention will set for future crises, and the moral justification of invading foreign countries? For those places where you know there is widespread violence and suffering yet do not advocate for U.S. military action to stop it, is it fair to assume that you are simply indifferent to the suffering you refuse to act to prevent, or do you recognize there might be other reasons why you oppose the intervention?

...But what I cannot understand at all is how people are willing to believe that the U.S. Government is deploying its military and fighting this war because, out of abundant humanitarianism, it simply cannot abide internal repression, tyranny and violence against one's own citizens. This is the same government that enthusiastically supports and props up regimes around the world that do exactly that, and that have done exactly that for decades. 
By all accounts, one of the prime administration advocates for this war was Hillary Clinton; she's the same person who, just two years ago, said this about the torture-loving Egyptian dictator: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family." They're the same people overseeing multiple wars that routinely result in all sorts of atrocities. They are winking and nodding to their Yemeni, Bahrani and Saudi friends who are doing very similar things to what Gadaffi is doing, albeit (for now) on a smaller scale. They just all suddenly woke up one day and decided to wage war in an oil-rich Muslim nation because they just can't stand idly by and tolerate internal repression and violence against civilians? Please.

 and Greenwald concludes:

 But whatever else is true, the notion that opposing a war is evidence of indifference to tyranny and suffering is equally simple-minded, propagandistic, manipulative and intellectually bankrupt in both the Iraq and Libya contexts. And, in particular, those who opposed or still oppose intervention in Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, the Sudan, against Israel, in the Ivory Coast -- and/or any other similar places where there is widespread human-caused suffering -- have no business advancing that argument.



Robert Fisk writes about the dilemma facing Obama if the Saudis use violence against its own people. Since the article was written the Saudis have used brute force against its own people claiming disingenuously that the majority of the Saudi people "love " King Abdullah and so they argue that these protests are the activities of foreign elements ie Iran. See the propaganda video posted here and on Youtube in a staged event showing tens of thousands of Saudi 's greeting King Abdullah as he arrives from abroad.
It should be noted that Qaddafi has made similar claims that his people "Love Him" even accusing in one of his rambling speeches foreign elements of poisoning the coffee of young people with hallucinogenics.

The Saudis in order to undermine the calls for reform uses the old tactic of divide and conquer by arguing that the Shia are behind this conspiracy against the Royal Family and Sunni Muslims.
They therefore raise the specter of civil war or ethnic cleansing and genocide by the Shia Muslims against the Sunni Muslims.
The facts on the ground as it were is that those protesting include Shia and Sunni Muslims and various ethnic groups.
And what is most troublesome is that the USA is still supporting the House of Saud.




Saudis mobilise thousands of troops to quell growing revolt
By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent The Independent.co.uk, march 5, 2011

Saudi Arabia's worst nightmare – the arrival of the new Arab awakening of rebellion and insurrection in the kingdom – is now casting its long shadow over the House of Saud. Provoked by the Shia majority uprising in the neighbouring Sunni-dominated island of Bahrain, where protesters are calling for the overthrow of the ruling al-Khalifa family, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is widely reported to have told the Bahraini authorities that if they do not crush their Shia revolt, his own forces will.

...Like almost every other Arab potentate over the past three months, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suddenly produced economic bribes and promised reforms when his enemy was at the gates. Can the Arabs be bribed? Their leaders can, perhaps, especially when, in the case of Egypt, Washington was offering it the largest handout of dollars – $1.5bn (£800m) – after Israel. But when the money rarely trickles down to impoverished and increasingly educated youth, past promises are recalled and mocked. With oil prices touching $120 a barrel and the Libyan debacle lowering its production by up to 75 per cent, the serious economic – and moral, should this interest the Western powers – question, is how long the "civilised world" can go on supporting the nation whose citizens made up almost all of the suicide killers of 9/11?

The Arabian peninsula gave the world the Prophet and the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans and the Taliban and 9/11 and – let us speak the truth – al-Qa'ida. This week's protests in the kingdom will therefore affect us all – but none more so than the supposedly conservative and definitely hypocritical pseudo-state, run by a company without shareholders called the House of Saud

and so it goes,
GORD.

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