We all watched the dramatic scene unfold over the last few days. On Saturday we reported a dramatic uprising, and the media wondered if it was premature. By Sunday the opposition fighters were closing in, the people of Tripoli seemed to be taking up arms, NATO was launching frequent airstrikes, and by Sunday night/early Monday morning it became clear that the long-declared "stalemate" was a thoroughly poor evaluation of the reality on the ground. By Tuesday morning the city of Tripoli was almost entirely under opposition control, and by Tuesday afternoon the opposition fighters were dancing on the symbols of Muammar Gaddafi's pride and strength.
The debate has already begun about the significance of the event. Robert Dreyfuss posts a ridiculous, partisan analysis that this was a war for oil, Obama's War. Matt Osborne offers an impressive analysis that would seem to counter this, arguing that the Libyan conflict was born of water-and-wheat power struggles, a Libyan-fought and Libyan-won conflict of which the Libyan people should be proud. While we ask, "Where are Gaddafi and sons?" we will see a lot of alarmist analysis and economic pondering, we will hear about symbolism, and we will be told lots and lots about what happens next.
There is a crucial point that most of this analysis has missed. How and why did the experts, Obama's military advisors and the media get this story so wrong at almost every step of the way? The answer will explain what the West is still failing to adequately understand about the "Arab Spring."
Between them, Tunisia's Ben Ali, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi ruled their countries for almost a century (24 years, 30 years, and 42 years, respectively). That can be set alongside some different math: the Egyptian regime fell 18 days after protests started, and Ben Ali went in 29. Libya is on day 186, Syria on day 162 (and counting) of protests, and Yemen maintains an edge at day 208. Beyond this, Mohammed Bouazizi, the unemployed fruit vendor in Tunisia, lit himself on fire on Dec. 17, 2010, sparking the first of the Arab Spring protests, in Tunis, the next morning -- exactly 250 days ago.
In 250 days, three governments have fallen, and two more are well on their way. The momentous events were not triggered by presidents or coalitions, "regime change" or terrorism, but rather by the actions of the people within those countries. As the world, and even the "experts" who study, report and advise others about the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, remain surprised that these events happened and continue to happen, they continue to miss the obvious point: these events are connected, and the world is changing faster than their worldviews can adapt.
We need to look no further than Libya in order to see this dynamic playing out. At the beggining of the conflict, the Obama Administration struggled with the decision to get involved in a no-fly zone over Libya. The list of objections was lengthy. Libya is a nation-state, but somewhat in name only. It is comprised of tribes, tribes that could war with each other if and when Gaddafi's regime fell. The opposition was not an easily identifiable group, did not have a name and had no clear leader. It was unclear whether there was enough of a reistance on the ground to overcome Gaddafi's war machine. And, even if there was a strong enough opposition, would it be led by someone who would just become the next tyrant?
The U.S. had recent experience with overthrowing Middle Eastern governments and attempting to replace them with a weak political organisation that is somewhat favorable to U.S. interests. That adventure has not gone so well. And speaking of U.S. interests, Libya was not necessarily a front-line concern for Washington, given that its oil reserves and geographic position were not as significant as those of other countries.
In other words, going into Libya militarily, even if it was only to establish a no-fly zone, did not make a lot of sense because it did not match any of the standard criteria on the checklist of the Western power structure. And the Obama Administration had dragged its feet on taking a position on the unrest in Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain, three countries where the U.S. had a lot to lose. Obama, to his credit, had spoken with the leader of each country and quietly encouraged them to work toward more human rights and more democracy, but he waited until the Egyptian president was hanging by a thread before he requested that Hosni Mubarak step down. According to these calculations, made by the military advisors, and by many pundits, the U.S. was on the losing end of the Arab Spring already, and the worst-case scenario was a new "quagmire accomplished" in Libya.
Yet, by some miracle, the U.S. convinced the United Nations to allow NATO to get involved in Libya. Why? Back in March, I explained that the human rights activists in the Obama Administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Advisor Samantha Power, were convinced that if the U.S. did not act, then it would find itself on the wrong side of history. They persuaded Obama that they were right, and Obama threw his weight, behind the scenes, into an appraoch to U.N. and NATO allies, convincing them to pass a resolution and establish an air campaign "to protect civilians" in Libya.
But that didn't quiet the critics. The opposition National Transitional Council began the military pushback against the Gaddafi regime, established law and order in captured territory, distributed medicine and reopened hospitils, kept oilfields closed out of concern for the safety of the workers and established legitimacy by reaching out to many of the tribes, villages and cities in the country. Still the media continued to doubt: "Who are the rebels? Can they be trusted? Are they working for al-Qaeda? Aren't they a bunch of rag-tag soldiers who will be crushed by Gaddafi's might?" These were legitimate questions to ask, but when the evidence was piling up around them that the NTC was a legitimate, though fledgling, organization, the media continued to doubt.
Doubt, in and of itself, is not a problem. Lack of evidence is a problem. For instance, once the NTC had established approval from all the major tribes and regions of Libya, and despite the fact that there has not been a serious challenge to the authority of the NTC, why does the media continue to ask these question, even after the imminent liberation of Tripoli? General Younis, the commander of the Libyan armed forces, was killed, apparently by forces loyal to the NTC (clearly an example of the old power structure flexing its muscles), but the troops that were loyal to him kept fighting against a common enemy. Still, the media and the experts doubted the "unity" of the freedom fighters. When evidence of rights abuses by insurgents was discovered, the NTC dealt with it and those abuses seemed to stop, so why are allegations still haunting their steps?
There is a larger problem with the way the West is approaching this issue. The old power structures still exist, but all evidence points to them fading. Regimes are falling apart, though remnants remain. Tribalism is giving way to unity, though old divisions still threaten that unity. Al-Qaeda, in almost 20 years, has failed to do what the Arab Spring has done in 250 days. Iran, Israel, weapons of mass destruction, Western imperialism... all of the old bugbears have proven false alarms. They still exist, but their importance, and influence, is fading quickly.
Problems persist in Tunisia and Egypt, and questions remain about Libya, but what is unquestionable is the dedication and spirit of the youth of these countries, a brave and defiant youth that will not sit down while the old powers hijack their revolutions. Perhaps there are still forces that wish to coopt the Arab Spring, but the indications are that these forces are weaker than their predecessors. Yes, these movements are rooted in a new way of thinking, or at least a new embodiment of an old way of thinking -- through the persuit of equity, freedom, democracy and unity, the people will triumph, not the power-hungry.
This way of thinking has toppled three regimes, and each success has inspired the others. The eyes of the world now need to focus on Syria, Yemen and perhaps Bahrain, Palestine and Jordan. One of these countries is likely to be "next," the next domino to fall which will push the chain reaction a little further, or a lot further, down the road. Syria is the likely candidate, and as it is the lynchpin in the region, the fall of the Assad regime has the capability to shake all countries in the region to their core.
The Arab Spring is far from complete, even in the countries where the ruling regime has been toppled, but it shows no sign of slowing, and it shows no sign of being a threat. The sooner we realise this, our eyes will be opened. We will see military successes of a rag-tag organisation as early victories in a campaign bent on success, we will see peaceful protesters marching into gunfire as a sure sign that the spirit of the movement refuses to let obstacles, or even death, stand in its way. If we really open our eyes, we will learn that the only thing to fear from Arab Spring is that if we stand in the way of equity and democracy, our allies, or even ourselves, might be "next," and if that happens, it will be a fate that we signed up for.
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Amb. Marc Ginsberg: A Field Guide to Libya's New Interim Government
Their mistake all along was to ignore human nature - because they are mostly just husks of people themselves. And as such are admirably qualified to provide professional pessimism to order. They are terrified of progress, and therefore determined to smear it wherever it appears, as it has done in the voices of the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and all the other poodle despotisms maintaining the status quo in the region - and beyond.
Are you watching, Africa?
::Obama, to his credit, had spoken with the leader of each country and quietly encouraged them to work toward more human rights and more democracy, but he waited until the Egyptian president was hanging by a thread before he requested that Hosni Mubarak step down.
Speak softly, etc.
::According to these calculations, made by the military advisors, and by many pundits, the U.S. was on the losing end of the Arab Spring already, and the worst-case scenario was a new "quagmire accomplished" in Libya."
The media chose this narrative. The New York Times had an excellent spread on the Nafusa campaign, but the significance of their success was lost on people who, to paraphrase Patton, know less about battle than Kim Kardashian. This war is a huge media fail, and it happened because it's easier and safer and cheaper to report on Kim Kardashian than what is actually happening on the ground in Libya.
The American boots that ought to have been on the ground weren't, and that is sad. There were enough Americans to record Tripoli Tom as hotel hostages. Meanwhile, al Jazeera was all over the Nafusa campaign and had video of Gharyan right after it fell.
I agree with the assessment about Obama, Mubarak, Arab Spring, ect. I think, in the end, Clinton/Rice/Power recognized that a failure of Arab Spring could risk putting the genie back in the bottle, killing the momentum for pro-democratic change, and I think they realized that the only way to turn a loss into a win on the Arab Spring issue would be to start backing the good guys, at least where convenient. If Qaddafi killed his rebellion, and the American involvement in the region was limited to supplying Mubarak with tear gas, the Obama administration would have successfully found a way to look worse in the Middle East, a tall order.
I'm not sure "boots on the ground" was necessary, though peacekeeping boots on the ground, and army engineers, may be necessary now in order to prevent a humanitarian crisis. I do buy the argument, at least a little, that the other nations in NATO need to step it up, and maybe it is best that they lead the reconstruction as they have the air campaign.
It was Gaddafi’s Libya that offered all of Africa its first revolution in modern times – connecting the entire continent by telephone, television, radio broadcasting and several other technological applications ...
It began in 1992, when 45 African nations established RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organization) so that Africa would have its own satellite and slash communication costs in the continent. This was a time when phone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world because of the annual US$500 million fee pocketed by Europe for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for phone conversations, including those within the same country....
The US$30 billion frozen by Mr Obama belong to the Libyan Central Bank and had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African federation – the African Investment Bank in Syrte, Libya, the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund to be based in Yaounde with a US$42 billion capital fund and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria which, when it starts printing African money, will ring the death knell for the CFA franc through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last fifty years. It is easy to understand the French wrath against Gaddafi.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27936.htm
They will also understand that a Development fund for all of Africa is an achievement similar to the establishment of the World Bank at Bretton Woods in 1944, differing only in that it provides interest free loans from the 70 Billion seed capital provided by Libya.
Hopefully those readers will also question the comprehension of someone who dismissed such an important contribution to Africa as just a "bank".
It is probably too much to hope that many will take the time to examine Libya's system of Government which consists of 2,700 representatives of Basic People's Congresses, and the executive General People's Committee, headed by a General Secretary, who reports to the Prime Minister and the President - and understand that the term "dictator" is inaccurate - but that is another story.
People were protesting Gadafis' alighment with the west, they saw corruption, enter the CIA and real violence; then NATO came in and instantly turned this thing into a national liberation struggle. .
I think this will be ten times worse than Iraq, because peole have no delusions; people could not believe the post-cold war US was doing what it did in Iraq, there was a lot of denial, a lot of disbelief. Now eveyrone knows.
Anyone think this will be implemented ?
In your dreams.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1053/op173.htm
British military and civilian advisers, including special forces troops, along with those from France, Italy and Qatar, have spent months with rebel fighters.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/24/nato-will-not-put-troops-ground-libya
Not long ago, the "rebels" could scarcely field a thousand. It took NATO 20,000 sorties and more than 7,500 strikes against ground targets to effect this "popular uprising".
It will take many imperialist boots to maintain this re-colonisation.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029013/Libya-war-British-troops-act-peacekeepers-Gaddafis-downfall.html#ixzz1W19t5QpD
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029013/Libya-war-British-troops-act-peacekeepers-Gaddafis-downfall.html#ixzz1W19t5QpD
http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/11/events-2-years-ago-sparked-current-uprising-libya
Courageous Libyans defying the repressive Gaddafi regime took to the streets not a month ago, but more than two years ago. Risking death sentences and unnoticed by most of the world, a small group of families began holding weekly demonstrations in Benghazi, the city that has become the epicenter of the uprising now sweeping the nation.
The families' protests were part of an unprecedented campaign to seek the truth about a 1996 massacre of more than 1,200 prisoners at the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, the Libyan capital. Notorious for torture, Abu Salim is run by the Internal Security Agency and houses many of Libya's political prisoners. The massacre followed a prison riot over poor conditions.
The day after the riot, security guards forced hundreds of prisoners into courtyards and opened fire.
"The security officers asked for a list of sick people to take to the hospital. Then they blindfolded them and took them to the corner of the prison. They started with them. They were the first ones killed," a former prisoner who was in Abu Salim at the time said. His brother was killed in the massacre.””
"The details remained scarce, and the government initially denied that an incident had taken place. Libyan groups outside the country said up to 1,200 prisoners had died."
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/06/28/libya-june-1996-killings-abu-salim-prison
Anecdotal evidence is solely from groups with a vested interest in regime change.
Every day, more and more evidence is emerging of majority support within Libya for the status quo and we have the example of Iraq to instruct us in the manipulation of news and "facts" by vested interests. Much evidence is also emerging of interference by France, Italy, Great Britain and America.
Statistics do not lie. Americans should be envious of Libya's wealth-sharing, health and education systems.
Home ownership: 92% (America low 60s)
Education free including tertiary. (Average student debt in the U.S. Average Student Debt: $24,000)
Free health including overseas travel if procedures not available in Libya. (Average U.S. family health insurance policy: $13,375)
Again, the argument being made is not that all is well. Rather, the argument is that the strength is with the people, and the momentum as well, and the people will not accept anything less than change.
I agree with the notion that there should be change and people demand it. However I don't see how things can change, nor do I see people agreeing on what the exact changes should be. I think it would be the best to decide upon demographics metrics to measure the success of the revolution, then go back afterwards and see for the results.
Firstly on the rebels you accuse the media of being suspicious of them and say "doubt itself is not the problem, lack of evidence is the problem". There is plenty of evidence that the rebels are a rainbow coalition of assorted shady characters.
- On March 25th during the first month of bombings in Libya, Abdel Hakim Al Hasidi the 3rd highest ranking military commander in the Benghazi rebels gave an interview in an Italian newspaper where he admitted that many of his fighters are jihadists with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan including himself. He also added " Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8407047/Libyan-rebel-commander-admits-his-fighters-have-al-Qaeda-links.html
- Several of the 33 man members of the rebel council are known to have CIA links including Khalifa Haftar the now top rebel military general after the death of Younes. Haftar a former Gaddaffi general fled Libya in the 1990's after losing the Libya-Chad war and lived 5 miles away from Langley.
HumanRights Investigations.com has profiles of most of the top rebel figures and there histories.
Source: http://humanrightsinvestigations.org/2011/07/27/the-libyan-national-transitional-council/
Here's my argument. The PEOPLE, the ones doing the fighting in Libya, the ones who were peacefully protesting before Qaddafi's tanks and bombs started to kill, are above this fray. In Egypt and Tunisia, the people continue to protest, despite the elements that threaten their revolutions. There is plenty to be concerned about, but that is all the media has covered, and as a result they have failed to predict the baseline reality - the people are the ones who have set aside hate, old tensions and power structures, and they have pushed ahead as a unified force. There has been evidence of bad things, but the group dynamic has condemned those things, and the Libyan people are policing themselves.
It's far from perfect, but it is even further from Iraq, Afghanistan, or the fear of the foreign experts and media.
The "people" can indeed topple governments. But in doing so, they experience chaos. They don't like chaos, and so it's no surprise they should eagerly support those political voices who promise stability and crackdowns.
Democracy takes practice and vigilance. There is precious little experience in the Middle East with democracy. The people have no practice with it and lack the institutions required to furnish vigilance. An optimistic view of what will happen next in Libya, Egypt and the other Middle Eastern states either already toppled or about to topple may be, well, overly optimistic.
Incidentally, in the US we have plenty of practice with democracy. But our institutions of vigilance have suffered through media consolidations and consolidation of the message. The voices we hear are the voices of special interests, and our own government has become captive to those interests. Rather than worrying about Libya, we would do well to focus our attention on preserving what's left of our own democracy.
I sympathize with all of those sentiments, but I push back against the "everything is screwed up here so let's ignore the outside world" isolationist movement. I think what's important, in all sectors of life, is that we focus more on meeting and pursuing the ideals that made this country great. Wealth disparity, "special interests," poor education, imperialism, racism... that's what is eating at our system. But we also need to champion freedom and democracy elsewhere. We should be proud of what just happened in Libya. A dictator is deposed, and the US didn't pick who replaces him. That's two major steps forward.
Indeed, as your comment expressed, we can learn a lot from a wide knowledge of the world, its history, and current events; and how even when not intertwined, lessons can still be learned in lieu of connection by compare and contrast.
This is a thoughtful article. However, there is nothing intrinsically "Arab" or "Islamic" about these revolutions. What they have in common are inequality, lack of opportunity for advancement, chronic repression, youth-based demographics, and enhanced communication capabilities. They are basically humanistic and not religiously founded. Any country or region that approximates that combination of factors is increasingly likely to experience a revolution, as youthful demographics increase and individual communication capabilities become more difficult to repress. Knowledge is power; poor people everywhere have more and more access to it. This is the big deal. These trends, combined with the coming energy self-sufficiency that is a huge new industrial revolution occurring right under our feet, are going to undermine centralized power structures everywhere, including the United States. Some places the transition will happen peacefully, but in most it probably will not. Centralized power structures are going to have to change. The "Po' Folks" aren't gonna stay in their "place" in society. They're rising globally. That probably means the collapse of financial and many capitalistic structures in the first world, which is a more important story than the collapse of individual repressive governments, because it is the death of neoliberalism and the chaos-welcoming and creating mentality of exploitative and predatory power centers.