Libyan president proposed appointing army general Khalifa Haftar as top military commander; Libyan PM criticizes US, UK and EU for failing to supply weapons.
ed note–all those who fell for this BS known as the ‘Arab Spring’ and who refused to consider counter-arguments (such as those that appeared regularly on this website) that maybe it was all a deliberate move on the part of Israel and the west to engage in regime change without being forced to use American troops, the question we’d like to ask for you is this–
How’s all that ‘freedom’ workin out for ya these days?
@ MG EDITOR: The way I see it, the “Arab Spring” started out as legitimate protests, and was quickly hijacked by the Axis of Evil.
https://quatloosx.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/axis_of_evil_01.jpg
Let’s recap what happened…
Both Bashar al Assad and Muammar Qaddafi made the same disastrous error known as “neo-liberal reforms.” Assad started doing it from the moment he took office in 2000. This made Assad the darling of the West. Qaddafi started doing it in 2004. Qaddafi also became a darling of the West. he corporate media outlets stopped calling Libya and Syria “terrorist nations.” Qaddafi and Assad even participated in the bullshit “war on terror.”
Neo-liberal “reforms” mean a rejection of socialism. It means mass privatization. It means a shift from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism. (Wall Street over Main Street.) It means the decriminalization of financial fraud, and the elimination of laws that protect workers and the environment. It means mass unemployment, the elimination of worker benefits, and a downward pressure on wages. It means re-defining the bribery of politicians into a form of “free speech.” It means higher taxes on the poor, and no taxes on the rich. Above all it means extreme inequality, such that the gap between the rich and the rest grows wider than ever before.
With neo-liberal “reforms” the 1% become wealthier each day, while the 99% become poorer each day. The “markets” (i.e. stocks, bonds, and casino capitalism) do better than ever. This is the financial economy. Meanwhile the real economy remains locked in a permanent depression.
And so, well before the “Arab Spring,” the Arab nations (especially Libya and Syria) were abandoning socialism in favor of casino capitalism. Rich people and their politician friends got richer. Everyone else got poorer. In Syria and Libya, upper class urban dwellers got all the goodies. Lower class people and rural dwellers were increasingly left out, with no jobs, no hope, and no future. The frustrated peasants in outlying areas turned to religious fundamentalism (just as Southerners do in the USA) which is full of hate and resentment.
However poverty alone will not trigger an uprising. For that, we need a food crisis. In 2007 and 2008 the Arab nations experienced an unprecedented drought because of global climate change. Furthermore there had been decades of overexploitation of ground water. All the aquifers were empty, and there was no rain to replenish them. (Libya was an exception because it had the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System. The result was food scarcity, combined with increasing spikes in food prices. When this was combined with unemployment, in which young people sat around in frustration, with no way to vent their energy, we had a tinderbox waiting for a match. Some people tried to survive by selling food on the roadside, but the big companies and prestigious restaurants bribed politicians to outlaw them. The rich lived in splendor, while the masses lived in a nightmare.
The match was thrown on 4 January 2011 when Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi died after having set himself on fire in Tunisia. Throughout the Arab world the desperate masses, already starving, unemployed, and impoverished, started marching and striking. Their intensity came in waves, and it varied between nations.
Within a month came the HIJACKING by the Axis of Evil. How was this done? Simple. The same way it is always done. When people march peacefully in the streets, demanding food and justice, you have snipers shoot at them from the rooftops. (“You” meaning the Axis of Evil.)
Simultaneously you launch a massive media campaign in which you falsely claim that your snipers work for the government of the nation you have targeted for destruction. You pay your operatives to perpetrate terrorism on the masses, always blaming it on the government.
At the same time, you send arms to people in the depressed rural areas. Very quickly your target nation becomes divided. On one side are affluent urban dwellers. On the other side is everyone else. This is called destabilization. Meanwhile you exacerbate divisions along ethnic, racial and religious lines. Affluent and middle class urban dwellers march in support of the government. Everyone else marches against the government. Always you have snipers continue to shoot at both camps from the rooftops, causing fear, anger, and confusion. Meanwhile you send a non-stop stream of arms and foreign terrorists into the nation. And you manipulate the local and foreign media to keep the war going.
VOILA: You have taken a spontaneous uprising and morphed it into proxy war against the nation. If the proxy war has no hope of succeeding, then you start bombing (e.g. Libya). Your goal is to destroy the government and the entire nation, leaving it a wasteland. You don’t seek “regime change.” You seek regime prevention, in which the target nation is so devastated that no central government can ever be formed. Hence there can be no unity against your imperialism.
Meanwhile you extract the oil and gas at will. Libya, for example, is a dystopian nightmare, and Syria is not much better. (“The Road Warrior” in real life.) But the oil wells are flowing, because they are surrounded by troops who have tanks, air support, satellite recon, and everything else. The troops are a mixture of foreigners and locals who are happy to have reasonably well paying jobs.
And you can keep all your oil profits, since there is no central government, and hence no royalty payments. Sweet!
ed note–while I have no doubt that the anger on the streets was real, at the same time the overwhelming evidence is that the US in all of its various civil unrest groups were on the ground in Egypt and elsewhere for years before the ‘Arab Spring’ erupted. As a matter of fact, the various stories appearing in the JMSM indicated that as much as $100 million was allocated to groups such as NED, Freedom House, etc, as early as 2008, as soon as Obama was elected for the stated purpose of ‘bringing democracy’ to these countries.
@ MG EDITOR: You are most correct. I did not mean to imply that there had been no CIA / MI6 / MOSSAD / etc presence before the “Arab Spring.” On the contrary, when Qaddafi and Assad became darlings of the West, they let all these groups operate in their nations. They even maintained some “black sites” for the CIA. Assad even supported the US invasion of Iraq.
I greatly admired Qaddafi because of what he did for his people, but he and Assad made catastrophic blunders when they consorted with the Axis of Evil. Qaddafi paid the price, and Assad’s country has been destroyed.
I note that when you open the door to neo-liberal “reforms,” you cause a radical widening of the gap between the rich and the rest. This causes your friends and family members to become boundlessly greedy. The more they get, the more they want. That’s what happened to the friends and family of Assad and Qaddafi. The result was two nations weakened from within by greed.
Anyway I contend that the “Arab Spring” was not planned, but it was hijacked, which caused it to change from a series of protest marches to a series of proxy wars. Or in Libya’s case, total bombardment.