It seems like only yesterday that I wrote the following:
“We are already half way down the slippery slope of Libya’s internal turmoil, and we’re in so deep at this point that I cannot see our way out for quite some time. The President is reported to have told congressional leaders that the intervention should last “days, not weeks,” and this is the biggest lie of all, a lie the President is apparently telling himself as well as us. We now own Libya’s insurrection: its fate belongs to us, and we’ll be wearing that albatross around our necks for quite some time to come.”
By Justin Raimondo / Antiwar.com
Heck, it was only yesterday, come to think of it. The same day someone in the Obama administration leaked the newssome people are: that the CIA has had its boots on Libyan ground for at least the past three weeks. I can’t say I’m shocked, but“It’s so surreal, so discordant with what the president has told the American people, so fantastically contrary to everything he campaigned on, that I will simply wait for more confirmation than this before commenting further. I simply cannot believe it.”
Believe it, Mary – and get over it. And by “it,” I mean devotion to the cult of Obama, the hypnotizing effect of which has blinded his partisans to the reality that they’ve been conned – big time.
Of course Libya is crawling with CIA, as well as British, French, and Italian spooks, and what they’re gathering is a lot more than “intelligence”: they’re out there collecting potential “leaders” among the rebels, choosing up sides, determining who will go on the payroll and who will be quietly sidelined or eliminated. I don’t know why Andrew Sullivan is pretending to be so surprised: how else are the “Allied” nations “and NGOs,” meeting in London, going to provide “political guidance” to post-Gadhafi Libya?
I love the part about the participation of the NGOs: this is transnational progressivism in action. This is what Sullivan and his fellow fools voted for, and now they’re getting it. All the whining about how its “fantastically contrary to what he campaigned on” is yet more evidence of cultic blindness: after all, if Obama refused to rule out bombing Iran, why not bomb easy pickings like Libya? In his reaction to the Georgian attack on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, you’ll recall, Obama competed with McCain to see who could maintain a more belligerently anti-Russian stance.
He said he wasn’t against all wars, just “dumb wars,” a phraseology that invites the cultist to project his own evaluation of what constitutes dumbness into the mind of the Great Leader.
A statement issued by British Foreign Minister William Hague said those at the London conference “agreed that Gadhafi and his regime have completely lost legitimacy and will be held accountable for their actions.” Translation: Forget about a negotiated settlement – this is a fight to the death. By signaling Gadhafi that he will either die fighting, or stand trial at their kangaroo court at the Hague, the Western powers are ensuring that this will not end soon.
Such intransigence seems odd coming from these alleged “humanitarian” interventionists, who, according to our President, were acting only to avert a “massacre.” Why, then, take action to prolong the killing – or is there some motive behind this war that is not quite as “humanitarian” as these Do-Gooders-with-a-sword would have us believe?
The US and its allies are fighting a religious war, not in the sense of the Christian crusaderism of the previous administration, but because only religious authorities have previously claimed such overweening moral authority.
The clueless pawns who imagine themselves “leaders” of the conservative movement are so busy conjuring far-fetched visions of Sharia law taking over America, that they’re caught flat-footed when the real holier-than-thou warriors take up arms in the name of the “responsibility to protect.” Newt Gingrich is so focused selling his updated version of “Red Dawn,” where American women are forced to wear the chador and the President is replaced by a Caliph, that he and his ilk haven’t noticed the progress of our very own secular jihadists, who are conducting a holy war – on an international scale — of political and moral “uplift.” As Rand Paul so cleverly put it the other day:
“I was happy to see that Newt Gingrich has staked out a position on the war, a position, or two, or maybe three. I don’t know. I think he has more war positions than he’s had wives.
“There’s a big debate over there. Fox News can’t decide, what do they love more, bombing the Middle East or bashing the president? It’s like I was over there and there was an anchor going, they were pleading, can’t we do both? Can’t we bomb the Middle East and bash the president at the same time? How are we going to make this work?”
Like all US wars since the Revolution, this one is about the internal politics of the US, rather than a real external threat to our security. The Clintonian wing of the Democratic party is determined to regain power, and Hillary’s push for war is the spearhead of the Restoration. The Clintonites are determined to outflank the Republican party in the foreign policy field, and eliminate the Democrats’ alleged “national security deficit” once and for all, albeit while swathed in a penumbra of moral righteousness.
The Republicans, who have presided over the most aggressive expansion of the American empire since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, are in no position to criticize this new crusade in the Middle East. They do so with the albatross of Iraq weighing heavily around their necks. Politically, it’s win-win for the Democrats, as they gear up to save what remains of their hold on power. While the American public may have its doubts about this particular intervention, this is more than balanced out by the general perception that the Democrats are just as “tough” as the Republicans, if not more so.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although pursued with some alacrity by the Obama-ites, are the legacy of the previous administration. This is a war the White House can call its own – and it surely bears the trademark arrogance and slippery two-faced double-dealing that is the hallmark of Team Obama.
The “Arab Spring” that was previously being celebrated and closely watched the world over has now been co-opted and transformed into something else entirely. Faced with the prospect of losing its Middle Eastern allies to a wave of uprisings, the Americans have decided to go with the flow, so to speak, and try to control it as best they can.
In Syria, these events are being watched very closely, of that you can be sure. By the time this column is posted we’ll see calls to intervene there, too. If and when Iran’s “Green” movement takes to the streets again, the US and its allies are telling Tehran they’re prepared to give the mullahs the Gadhafi treatment. Yes, Washington may suffer a few more losses, such as in Egypt: Yemen looks shaky, and Bahrain not much better, but these are countries on the margins of the Middle East. The core – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq – is secure, for the moment, and the acquisition of Libya will be a major gain. As Rahm Emmanuel would put it, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
The Libyan people certainly have a right to rebel against the sinister clown Gadhafi. They also would be fools not to accept such aid as they can manage to find in order to win their fight. The problem is that the price of that aid will be so high that their independence will be compromised beyond redemption. It may be preferable to have one’s future “mapped out” by the Western powers acting in the name of the “international community,” rather than by an aging autocrat with delusions of grandeur, but in the end they’ll rebel against that, too, and rightly so.
Libya is but a prelude to a major extension of US power and influence in the region, the first war in a series that will culminate in the final assault on Iran. This is what the Israelis, lurking in the background, are counting on, and what their energetic American lobby is furiously campaigning for. The Clinton faction, having seized control of the foreign policy-making apparatus, is fully on board, and there’s no one of any consequence in the Democratic party to oppose their course.
So get ready for the big build-up – and buckle your seat-belts, because the main event is going to make the wars of the Bush era look like a garden party.
Justin Raimondo writes a column for antiwar.com. He is a regular contributor to The American ConservativeChronicles magazine. He also writes for Taki’s Top Drawer. He is the author of several books.
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