This piece of mine appears on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.
It's March, the sun is shining and spring is just around the corner. Oh, and Britain is bombing a foreign country again. If you've got a distinct feeling of deja vu about what's been going on this weekend, then it's hardly surprising.
In this very week in 1999 Britain took a leading role in the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
And on this very day in 2003, Britain took a leading role in the bombing – and invasion – of Iraq.
And now we're at it again in Libya.
You can read the whole article here.
UPDATE: In case you haven't read it yet, there's a great piece by Andrew Murray, of the Stop the War Coalition in today's Guardian.
Under Cameron the state is big enough for a war, but too small to keep our local libraries open......
The Economist last week ran editorials demanding the shrinking of the state across the world and urging military intervention in Libya. The calibration of a state big enough to impose its military will on the Middle East but too small to keep the local library open is a study in the contradictions of neoconservatism worth pondering as David Cameron brings the "big society" to Benghazi with a bang.
You can read the whole of the piece here.
16 comments:
Great article (just read it at Cif); I just can't believe that warmongers and twitter based "news" reporting has dragged Britain into another war!
Brilliant article! I'm from Serbia, I didn't support Milosevic, but I also think we didn't deserve bombing. No one did.
Iv
You've missed out the start of all this stupidity: Brzezinski's persuasion of Carter to arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan.The Socialist Afganistan was the first domino to fall,since when the dullards have created an Islamic menace out of nothing which Sorcerer's Apprentice style they now cannot control.Well done dullards!
Gaddafi supplied the IRA with explosives and weapons used to kill police, soldiers, and civilians in Northern Ireland and England. He meddled in the internal affairs of the UK, now the UK (and others) are meddling in his internal affairs. He deserves everything he gets.
Thank you for this article. Bombing and military will only cause civilian death, and country losing infrastructure. Peace can't be achieve that way.
I think the West is insane for helping Al-Qaeda gain a foothold in Libya. Regardless of what Kadafi is or isn't, he is certainly better than terrorists running a state.
Very good article, Mr Clark. Perhaps your best ever.
To radex33: Are we supposed to annihilate every single Third World scumball who ever backed terrorists, IRA or otherwise, or meddled in Western affairs? If we are, then where do we stop? Or are we not supposed to stop at all?
(Incidentally, if the criterion for intervention was past IRA support, then there would be an excellent case for Britain dropping bombs on Washington DC, given that the IRA was largely a US invention in the first place, and was mostly subsidised by the Kennedy and Moynihan Democrat political machines via Noraid.)
thanks for the comments and kind words.
DBC- good point about Afghanistan.
Excellent article, Mr. Clark. On a somewhat related topic, isn’t it odd that governments nowadays always seem to have money for wars but cry “we’re broke!” when it comes to, say, providing unemployed people with public employment or maintaining public services?
Hi John,
Many thanks. There's ALWAYS money for war. As Andrew Murray said in his article- neoconservatism means a state too small to run libraries, a public health service, or a postal service, but big enough to wage war on behalf of finance capital and the big multinationals.
Good to see at least some people still keeping the antiwar line. The sad fact is that the Libya War has gotten more support on the European left - even pretty far to the left - than any other war in my lifetime. Even parties that were solidly antiwar in 1999, 2001 and 2003, like the Left Party in Sweden and the Unity List (Red-Green Alliance) in Denmark, are now backing the bombing of Libya. The Security Council resolution explaines a lot of this, but there is also an element of leftist "revolutionary romanticism", where some people have identified so strongly with the rebels that they do anything to support them.
My impression is that, at the moment, the antiwar side is strongest in Germany, where even the right wing government wants nothing to do with it, and in the USA, where even Democratic congressmen are talking about impeaching a Democratic president over the war. Perhaps the opposition is strong in Britain as well, at least there were a handful MPs who voted against. It might not be entirely coincidental that it is in the countries that have suffered most from misguided military adventures that you find most opposition to yet another war.
Libya the latest war on a independent govt by the coalition of the killing.
Anyone who wants to get a radical view of this issue can start with these articles....the rest ca go back to Fox or the US state depts latest asset: the BBC World Service.
Thomas Mountain explains just who the 'rebels' in east libya are:
http://www.countercurrents.org/mountain220311.htm
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/libya-getting-it-right-revolutionary-pan-african-perspective
http://www.just-international.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4363:coalition-of-crusaders-join-with-al-qaeda-to-oust-qaddafi-and-roll-back-libyan-revolution&catid=45:recent-articles&Itemid=123
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23801
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23880
Brian
no surprise the following:
"This man (Gaddafi) helped us at a time when we were all alone, when those (Britain and the US) who say we should not come here (Libya) were helping the enemy."
Nelson Mandela, 1997
yes the brits(SAS) and US/NATO are backing jihadists of east libya;
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110223-jihadist-opportunities-libya
its 1980s afghanistan all over again
Brian
its no surprise the left is backing war...Gadaffi is a demonised figure little known in the west outside racist a caricature.
FYI meet the rebels 2:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/ford030311.html
No Tahrir in Benghazi: A Racist Pogrom Rages On against Black Africans in Libya
by Glen Ford
Brian
did u know?
'The Arab League has been consistently embarrassed by Qaddafi's outspoken criticism of their double standards and hypocrisy with regard to Palestine, Iraq and a host of other issues, they are terrified by Qaddafi's revolutionary Islam, and are contemptuous of Black Africa and Qaddafi's attempts to bring about African-Arab unity.
Recently, when Qaddafi urged Libyans to intermarry with Africans, following the example of Prophet Muhammad himself, who encouraged intermarriage between races, Libyan and Arab contempt for Black Africans re-surfaced. Extremely few fair skinned Arabs would sanction the marriage of their daughters to a Black African. Rarely do fair skinned Libyans marry Black Libyans. Their disdain for Black people runs deep.'
http://www.just-international.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4363:coalition-of-crusaders-join-with-al-qaeda-to-oust-qaddafi-and-roll-back-libyan-revolution&catid=45:recent-articles&Itemid=123
brian
gerald perreria on Libya and the new crusade:
for a deeper look at Libya:
http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2011/03/coalition-of-crusaders-join-with-al.html
'The Arab League has been consistently embarrassed by Qaddafi's outspoken criticism of their double standards and hypocrisy with regard to Palestine, Iraq and a host of other issues, they are terrified by Qaddafi's revolutionary Islam, and are contemptuous of Black Africa and Qaddafi's attempts to bring about African-Arab unity.
Recently, when Qaddafi urged Libyans to intermarry with Africans, following the example of Prophet Muhammad himself, who encouraged intermarriage between races, Libyan and Arab contempt for Black Africans re-surfaced. Extremely few fair skinned Arabs would sanction the marriage of their daughters to a Black African. Rarely do fair skinned Libyans marry Black Libyans. Their disdain for Black people runs deep.
In fact, across other Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Gulf States, the horror stories emerging regarding the mistreatment of African domestic servants is reminiscent of the kind of treatment meted out to Black people during the days of chattel slavery. So a project for the development and unification of all of Africa, uniting, on equal terms, the 'Arab' north with Black Africa, is not close to the hearts of many fair skinned Arabs. Qaddafi is an exception to the rule.'
Brian
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