The B word rises again

When civil society rises up, the US government has some choices, most of which are available, and they all have costs and benefits:

US response to civil society uprising

action	costs	benefits
none	accusations of collusion with oppressor	nothing provable
rhetorical support	accusations of moral abdication	citable support
$ to nonviolent CSOs	contamination of resistance with US meddling	citable and efficient
military support	·         blowback ·         costs to US taxpayer	profits for war profiteers

And so, here we are with Libya, a bit like another Afghanistan waiting to happen, since we backed the military uprising and Islamists are now emerging as the leadership, including allies with al-Qaida. Though Chalmers Johnson is an expert on blowback and says it only applies to covert ops, I think that definition has morphed and we can apply it now to the overt Libyan mess.

Reagan gave military support to the Taliban, al-Qaida and the other mujahedeen in Afghanistan, $hundreds of millions every year in the 1980s. Thanks for your role in setting up 9.11.01, Ronnie (didn't hear about that at Ground Zero ceremonies, did we?). Clinton gave tiny amounts of financial support (ca. $25 million) to the nonviolent resistance in Serbia (after his failed $billions in a 78-day military attack). Obama did almost nothing for anyone except the armed Libyan rebellion. Brilliant.

As ever, backing the nonviolent horse will give the best sustainable results. Are Obama's advisers so clueless? Is the CIA urging this sort of ahistorical analysis and action? Meanwhile, US-friendly oppressors, such as the royals in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, continue to get away with murder of--oh, that's right--civilians, the ones Obomber said he was protecting in Libya. The only hope of replacing the state terrorist Qaddafi with a decent Libyan government was by using the financial aid to civil society organizations that Clinton used in the 2000 Serb case. That was a victory, but the war machine thrives on conflict. Now more of that promises to emanate from the "new" Libya, which will look a lot like the old Libya, only possibly worse.

It is one thing for the spooks to miss the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ben Ali and Mubarak. They just don't get nonviolence. It is another thing for them to fail utterly to learn and to continue the military model that has multiple costs in the short and long terms.

Ain't but one way out

Ben Rhodes is director for strategic communications at the National Security Council, a high official in the Obama administration. He says that the approach to Libya might just provide a model for a way to use the US military to advance US national interests even when our national security is not threatened.

This is Stalinist, Hitlerian, or, if you like, simply brutally imperialistic. If international law meant anything, it would be enforced against any power using military force to further its national interest. It is the Doctrine of Our Oil By Any Means. 

Libya ranks 8th in proven oil reserves. Syria ranks 34. Both featured brutal dictators slaughtering nonviolent democracy activists, except Bashar Assad is still doing so (this video is quite rough, quite graphic, in Arabic, and the uploader is calling for violent revolution, but it is still an example of documented killing of nonviolent activists). 

When Mubarak was opposed, the US did nothing, which was a blessing, since Mubarak's regime was entirely dependent on US military backing. Same with Ben Ali in Tunisia. If decades of US military aid to these kleptocrats couldn't save them, more of the same wasn't going to redound well for the US. 

So our enemies get the military ouster when they have oil that needs exploiting, but if they barely have enough for their own needs, the people are left twisting. What sort of messages do Ben Rhodes and President Obama think they are sending? 

The problem is that these issues cannot be handled by the US nor by NATO. What is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization doing bombing anyone in Libya? The costs to the US, to other countries in NATO, and to Libyans, are tremendous and are a moral failure. This is all about the deadly confluence of the conflict industry and propaganda, moving our species backward rather than forward. While we marvel at the fury and cost of the new storms that our global climate changing is producing we continue the resource usage that causes it, failing to connect the ironically named Irene to our solution to all problems: bomb somebody. 

We need a revolution on a matriotic nonviolent basis. Humanity has one path out: nonviolence. All others are just wandering in the worsening hell of violence, oil capture, violence, conflict debt, violence, income and wealth inequality, violence, and war against the very air, water, and natural paradise Mother Earth has been giving us for our entire evolution. That path isn't easy but all the others are disaster. 

Libya: Wrong turn

US President Barack Obama, right, and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi pictured during the G8/G5 summit in L'Aquila, Italy Thursday July 9, 2009. (AP Photo/ Michael Gottschalk/Pool)
Who could possibly believe that after Tunisia and then Egypt showed that Arab civil society was capable of disciplined nonviolent regime change in less than three weeks with fewer than 100 mortalities each, that it would be a good idea to use violence in Libya?

Oh, Obama, I guess. Since the Arab Street had so successfully outflanked the war system, apparently the Libyan Arab Street needed to be derailed and brought back to the place where we can properly stereotype it as rabidly violent and undisciplined. Nice going, Obomber.

The conflict industry seems to generally panic at the use of nonviolent civil society resistance, especially when it's massive and persistent. And even some of the so-called peace people jump to call for violence in these cases, despite overwhelming evidence that violence is simply not the solution.

Some colleagues in peace education actually supported a no-fly zone. This example of analytical deficit is disappointing at best; who do we think enforces a no-fly zone? How is it enforced? Who benefits and who dies? The answers lead straight back to the problem of violence. It always sounds cleaner and clearer on paper and from the talking heads than it looks like on the ledger sheets of human profit and loss after the fact.

Others actually believe the rebels need armed support. How do you make nonviolent resistance irrelevant and nonexistent? Ramp up violence. If the US wants to show that the terrorists are actually correct, we should make sure we pour arms into a conflict in Muslim lands and, just to make sure all Muslims get it, we should send in pilots in war birds to bomb.

Naturally, more and more Libyans will take advantage of the 'help' offered by Obama and they will mostly do so in one of two ways.

Al Qa'ida types will use US military involvement to rally Muslims of all nations in opposition. This may not seem logical to Americans, but watch. It's just what will happen. We are once again the hated Crusaders, thanks to Obama.

Gadafi will use this to solidify his own power. He will be the champion of his people, standing up to the Washington bully. He is once again the brave leader, thanks to Obama.

We are now conducting massive violence that is making the armed rebellion more protracted, giving it hope, calling its bluff, and thereby ensuring it will end with more dead and wounded than if the armed revolt had simply been crushed or deterred promptly.

Is our Bomber-in-Chief mad? Stupid? Evil? No, just beholden and uncreative. He owes his power and position to forces that represent not democracy but an oligarchy that profits from the war system. This is the lobbying power that selects its puppets from amongst the most charismatic yet malleable, and, sadly, the independent aura cast by Barack Obama in 2008 is revealed again and again to be the chimera of the new millennium. Yes, he's smart. And basically sane and probably genuinely if superficially nice. But getting elected to the presidency of the US probably also requires more moral flexibility than anyone with a strong conscience can muster.

Perhaps we will see the best outcome of the current spiked levels of polarized incivility in Washington DC and our government will shut down. When Obama was slow to respond to the nonviolent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, it gave nonviolence a chance to succeed in an environment much more untainted by external meddling. Egyptian revolutionaries were free to embrace and thereby coopt and defang their own military. I know it's a pipe dream, but I fantasize about a long government shutdown that leads us out of so many violent conflicts. We are, after all, by far the largest arms dealer in the world. Close it down and violence might take some time off. We can dream.