Unmasking the Muslim Brotherhood: Syria, Egypt, and Beyond

[Len Colby]

NGO/CIA/STATE DEPT = ARAB SPRING = COLONIALISM = WHAT GAAL'S TALKING ABOUT

Most of the claims that the various SNC leaders are or were associated with various uga booga (cue scary music) organizations are unsourced, the rest with perhaps 1 or 2 exceptions only sourced to a Guardian “Comment is free” blogger described by Wikipedia as “a comedy writer, journalist and actor”

[Steven Gaal]

SEEMS THE GAURDIAN LIKES HIM, WORKS ON TV,MANY,MANY ARTICLES/BLOGS GAURDIAN

Charlie Skelton is a comedy writer, journalist and olive farmer. He is script editor of Channel 4's 10 O'Clock Live and writes on various similar sorts of things for television and radio

The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?

The media have been too passive when it comes to Syrian opposition sources, without scrutinising their backgrounds and their political connections. Time for a closer look …

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NGO/CIA/STATE DEPT = ARAB SPRING = COLONIALISM = WHAT GAAL'S TALKING ABOUT

The IMF & Arab Spring

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Sara

“Could someone please arrest the head of the IMF for screwing the poor for 60 years?” Paul Kingsnorth.

I recently read that the IMF offered to make several loans to Egypt to speed up its post-revolution economic recovery. My immediate reaction was dread. No country has ever taken a loan from the IMF and survived. My personal theory is that the IMF (and World Bank) are there to make sure that neo-colonialism is kept in place and that no developing country succeeds/does well. I just read a fantastic article on the IMF and Egypt by Austin Mackell, who argues that IMF loans would ruin Egypt & Tunisia even before post-revolution elections take place (link here).

To some extent, though, the IMF is aware that its policies contributed to the desperation that so many Egyptians and Tunisians currently face, and is keen to distance itself from its past.

Beginning in the 1990s, IMF-led structural adjustment programmes saw the privatisation of the bulk of the Egyptian textile industry and the slashing of its workforce from half a million to a quarter-million. What’s more, the workers who were left faced – like the rest of Egypt – stagnant wages as the price of living rocketed. Though you wouldn’t know it from western coverage, the

long and gallant struggle

of these workers, particularly the strike of textile workers of Mahalla el-Kubra, is credited by many Egyptian activists as a crucial step on the Egyptian people’s path towards revolution.

I think that’s a very important point: the Egyptian revolution did not begin on Jan 25 2011. It began a few years earlier when workers at Mahalla began strikes demanding better wages and benefits. The protests were brutally suppressed, but they were a clear sign that neo-liberalism, which include IMF loans, was ruining the country. In fact the first signs of unrest were in 1977, with the Egyptian bread riots. These riots were a response to the first wave of neo-liberalism, in the form of Sadat opening up the economy (opening it up to be raped, really).

This failure to appreciate the revolutions as a rebellion not just against local dictators, but against the global neo-liberal programme they were implementing with such gusto in their countries, is largely a product of how we on the western left have been unwitting orientalists, and allowed the racist “clash of civilisations” narrative to define our perceptions of the Middle East. We have failed to see the people of the region as natural allies in a common struggle.

This is brilliant! The revolution can’t work if it only happens in a few countries. We ALL need to revolt against the capitalist, patriarchal, neo-liberal system that enslaves us ALL. That’s why it is so amazing to see what is happening in Spain. A global revolution is needed, not just an Arab one.

These new loans from the IMF threaten to bind the newly democratic Egypt and Tunisia in much the same way. Once more, local elites could collaborate with the institutions at the helm of global capitalism to screw the broader population. If this occurs, these revolutions will be robbed of much of their meaning, and a terrible blow will be dealt to the broader Arab spring.

An important question is why the IMF is making back-room deals with the old regime instead of addressing the new players on the Egyptian scene. Hmmm, I wonder. Easier to bribe? control? manipulate?

At this point, taking a loan from the IMF is maybe the worst thing Egypt can do.

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NGO/CIA/STATE DEPT = ARAB SPRING = COLONIALISM = WHAT GAAL'S TALKING ABOUT

HAY ONLY A BUCK !!!

From Arab Spring to American Colonial Rule

By Kazi Mahmood

$1.00 Rating: Not yet rated.

Published: Nov. 08, 2012

Words: 19,388 (approximate)

Language: Simple English

Short description

The Arab Spring The Arab Spring is a cleverly masterminded tool by the Western powers. Instead of sending troops to be killed while regimes are overthrown in the Arab-Muslim world, why not use the populations of these countries to overthrow their regimes and install purely pro-American/Western ones? In the same breath, the strategic advantages and the oil and other resources in these 'colonized'

EXTENDED DESCRIPTION

The Arab Spring

The Arab Spring is a cleverly masterminded tool by the Western powers. Instead of sending troops to be killed while regimes are overthrown in the Arab-Muslim world, why not use the populations of these countries to overthrow their regimes and install purely pro-American/Western ones? In the same breath, the strategic advantages and the oil and other resources in these 'colonized' states falls right into the lap of Washington and the EU.

Sunni Versus Shia? <a href="http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/252882#longdescr">(Read more) The Arab Spring

The Arab Spring is a cleverly masterminded tool by the Western powers. Instead of sending troops to be killed while regimes are overthrown in the Arab-Muslim world, why not use the populations of these countries to overthrow their regimes and install purely pro-American/Western ones? In the same breath, the strategic advantages and the oil and other resources in these 'colonized' states falls right into the lap of Washington and the EU.

Sunni Versus Shia?

On the otherhand, we all know – unless you did not know – that the Arab Spring is also to do with the fact that Iran is poised to become the most powerful nation in the Middle East. The Sunni majority states in the Middle East do not want to see that happen. Thus they are doing everything to stir trouble in the region, establish 'slave' regimes to the US-West and to the Arab monarchs, thus hoping to 'isolate' Iran in its march to conquest of the region. More on Iran's role in the Arab Spring will come in our second edition.

With the Arab Spring comes the Arabian 'Neo-Cons'.

The Project For A New American Century or PNAC devised by the Neo-Cons in America well before the retirement of Bill Clinton as President of the United States resembles strangely to the PNAC of the Middle East (Project For A New Arab Century) promoted by TV Channel Al-Jazeera. Could this be the undeniable evidence that the Neo-Cons are the ones in control of Al-Jazeera? Could they may have 'captured' the Qatar government in the process? We leave this to 'Wikileaks Cables' unless the Wikileaks too is part of the American-Middle East PNAC.

By all means, nothing in the events taking place in the Middle East and North Africa suggest a 'genuine' revolution led by angry people is underway in the Islamic world. Libya had its revolution in 1969, Iran in the early 70's and Yemen too in the late 70's but they are still convulsing and the voices we hear is a pro-American one, not an Islamic one. Not at all.

And the Syrian Quagmire?

From attempts to find faults with Syria's regime to the creation of panic on the country's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Syrian Spring is well under Western control. A rebellion that has used extreme violence to achieve its goals and will probably end up being the regime of the future.

Towards a global war

On top of that, the American declaration of a global war is soon and this has

much to do with the fact that the Arab world in particular is in ebullition.

In this edition of our annual publication, we attempt at explaining the Arab Spring in several countries with a different view point. Our view point differs from that of the main stream media which we believe is the sold out media.

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Edited April 20, 2013 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

SEEMS THE GAURDIAN LIKES HIM, WORKS ON TV,MANY,MANY ARTICLES/BLOGS GAURDIAN

Not that much, they have him as one of their “Comment Is Free” bloggers, not a regular columnist or reporter. But that is almost besides the point most of the claims have no citations at all.

Charlie Skelton is a comedy writer, journalist and olive farmer. He is script editor of Channel 4's 10 O'Clock Live and writes on various similar sorts of things for television and radio

"10 O'Clock Live is a British comedy/news television programme"

[Steven Gaal]

CONTRARY TO COLBY'S IDEAS, RE-COLONIALISM IS ON THE MARCH.

NGO/CIA/STATE DEPT = ARAB SPRING = COLONIALISM = WHAT GAAL'S TALKING ABOUT

NATO Interventionism: The Disaster in Libya

By Greg Shupak

Global Research, February 28, 2015

The title of Horace Campbell’s book on NATO’s 2011 Libyan intervention, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, is an allusion to a Guardian article by Seumas Milne entitled, “If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure.” Echoing Milne’s use of “catastrophic” is apt. Claudia Gazzini of the liberal NGO International Crisis Group points out that, if the casualty figures provided by Libya’s National Transitional Council are accurate, “the death toll subsequent to the seven-month NATO intervention was at least ten times greater than the tally of those killed in the first few weeks of the conflict” before NATO intervened. As Campbell shows, while NATO claimed to be protecting human rights, it bombed Libyan civilians and enabled the Libyan opposition to persecute black African migrant workers and ethnically cleanse the black Libyan town of Tawergha. Less than four years after NATO attacked Libya, Bernadino Leon, the United Nation’s special envoy to Libya, saysthe country is “close to the point of no return.”

Perhaps as many as two million Libyan refugees have fled to Tunisia, though the exact figure is in dispute. In November, militants claiming affiliation with ISIS secured control of the Libyan city of Derna, where they have carried out public executions and assassinated activists.

Nicholas Pelham reports that almost all of the exiles who returned to Libya after the overthrow of the government have left; that more would have left had European consulates remained open; that warlords have taken power in several parts of the country; that “a once relatively homogenous society has splintered into multiple bickering armed groups”; that separatism has gained traction in Cyrenaica, which has just a third of Libya’s population but two thirds of its oil fields, most of its aquifers, and the country’s gold mines; that cafes and power stations have been burned; that embassies and assorted other targets have been car-bombed; and that airports have been attacked. Tripoli’s population, Pelham writes, is “distraught,” and Libyans “feel even more isolated than when the UN imposed sanctions on [Muammar] Gaddafi.”

Nation Divided by Civil War

At the time of writing, negotiations are underway to end an ongoing civil war. There are two rival seats of government, each with its own institutions. One is the Tripoli-based General National Congress (GNC), which was set up when the capital was seized by Libya Dawn after it did badly in parliamentary elections.

Libya Dawn is an umbrella organization made up of assorted Islamist groups, including the Salafist group Ansar al-Sharia, which is backed by U.S. ally Qatar, as well as various militia from Berber towns. Many of Libya Dawn’s leaders are former fighters from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadist organization that, before trying to kill Gaddafi in the 1990s, fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden. That group was backed by another U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia.

The other seat of government is the Tobruk-based House of Representatives. They have allied themselves with what remains of the Libyan state’s armed forces and with troops loyal to former army commander Khalifa Haftar. The latter helped Gaddafi overthrow the previous regime in 1969 but fled Libya upon falling out with the colonel after Haftar led a failed war with Chad.

Haftar, who is believed to have been a CIA asset, returned to Libya during the war against Gaddafi. Haftar’s forces are backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who have bombed parts of Libya. Haftar has shelled apartment blocks, Pelham reports, and bombed Tripoli’s airports as passengers were about to board planes.

According to Libya Body Count, nearly 3,000 Libyans have died violent deaths since the beginning of January 2014. As Pelham writes, the “scale of the terror and destruction” carried out by both Libya Dawn and Haftar’s forces “far surpasses that of Gaddafi’s last years. One wonders how many of the Westerners who cheered on the war against him recognize this.”

That Egypt and Qatar – both staunch U.S. allies – are on opposing sides of the conflict suggests that the United States is effectively backing both sides of the Libyan civil war.

Campbell’s book is a helpful guide to how Libya got to this point. At the outset he explains that, before the tumult in Libya began, “he had taken the position that though Gaddafi should be opposed, it was equally necessary to oppose the NATO intervention.” While Campbell worried about how Gaddafi would respond to protesters, he regarded the social forces in Libya as politically underdeveloped and knew that the British and French “were up to mischief” once French President Nicolas Sarkozy began to champion the Libyan opposition, given that Sarkozy was “no friend of progressive African movements.”

Campbell’s view of the Libyan crisis is consonant with the one put forth in an open letter signed by two hundred African intellectuals, a document to which Campbell repeatedly returns. It expressed “our desire, not to take sides, but to protect the sovereignty of Libya and the right of the Libyan people to choose their own destiny.” Toward the end, the letter stated:

“Those who have brought a deadly rain of bombs on Libya today should not delude themselves to believe that the apparent silence of the millions of Africans [sic] means that Africa approved of the campaign of death, destruction and domination which that rain represents. … The answer we must provide practically, and as Africans, is – when, and in what ways, will we act resolutely and meaningfully to defend the right of the Africans of Libya to decide their future, and therefore the right and duty of all Africans to determine their destiny!”

As Campbell’s book makes clear, he and the signatories of that letter were justified in their suspicion that imperialist states and their allies were motivated to intervene in Libya by concerns other than the welfare of Libyans. In that sense, Campbell’s book is an ideal companion piece to Maximilian Forte’s important Slouching Toward Sirte. While Forte’s book is notable for its meticulous detailing of how events played out in the Libyan affair, Campbell situates these in the larger context of the international capitalist dynamics driving them. While it is not perfect, anyone with an interest in NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya should read Campbell’s book. At times it meanders, and several claims that should be supported by citations are not. What he offers, however, is both an illuminating account of how Libya was torn asunder and an extremely useful contribution to efforts to understand precisely how militarized imperialist capitalism operates.

Campbell’s central premise is that NATO, and its allies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, took advantage of and exacerbated the crisis that emerged in Libya following the protests that began in February 2011. The ruling classes in NATO states exploited the Libyan protests to assert Western military and economic control in Africa and to curtail efforts to create African unity and autonomy from the West. Wikileaks cables show Gaddafi’s government was seen as a barrier to these aims, and NATO’s Libyan expedition was also propelled by frustration in the elite sectors of Western states over their inability to control Libyan assets in the financial sector.

Ulterior Motives

One of Campbell’s most important insights is that the decision of Western powers and their allies to seek regime change in Libya has to be understood in the context of the 2008 financial meltdown. Whereas in the crisis of the 1930s colonial powers forced Africans to increase agricultural production so they could continue extracting the same value from the continent that they had before the Depression, Campbell suggests that in response to the 2008 crisis imperial powers had to find new ways of prying wealth from African states because they are now formally independent. Taking advantage of the turmoil in Libya in early 2011 was one way to do that, particularly because European powers did not have as much access as they would have liked to resource-rich Africa, and the NATO states were alarmed by China’s increasing role on the continent. Even during the Gaddafi government’s détente with the West, the Libyan state remained an obstacle to Western imperialist endeavors such as the building of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) military bases.

These tensions came to a head in early 2011, when, Campbell contends, elites in the U.S. wanted to “preempt other revolutionary uprisings of the type and scale that removed the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt,” a goal that he says was “outlined by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., at a major seminar on the implications of the uprising in Egypt.”

Moreover, Campbell writes that shortly after Tripoli fell, and the Libyan government was all but defeated, the Italian energy giant ENI was in the city to discuss resumption of Libyan gas exports. He characterizes Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to Tripoli a few days later as an instance of “fierce competition between French and other Western forces for control over the future of Libyan oil” and quotes the Guardian‘s description of the trip as “first and foremost, the Dave and Sarko spoils of war tour.”

In addition to oil, Campbell suggests that the coalition that overthrew Gaddafi is also likely interested in the enormous water wealth of Libya’s Nubian Sandstone Aquifer and the 4,000-kilometer Great Manmade River Project, as well as in exploiting the physical and mental labour of the Libyan people. This is the framework in which one should consider the British defense secretary’s remark near the end of the NATO intervention that business people should “pack their bags” for Libya and the U.S. ambassador in Tripoli’s claim that Libya had a “need” for American companies on a “big scale.”

Goldman Sachs in Tripoli

Campbell describes how the financialization of the energy sector deepened alliances between banks and oil companies, particularly after the banks lost billions in the subprime mortgage crisis and placed greater emphasis on energy trading.

During Gaddafi’s rapprochement with the west, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and neoliberal “reformers” in Gaddafi’s government entered the financial sector by establishing the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), a holding company responsible for managing the Libyan government’s investments in the oil and gas industry in the international finance market. The LIA paid Goldman Sachs $1.3-billion for options on currencies and stocks. However, the credit crisis caused the value of Libya’s investments in Goldman to drop 98 per cent. Those losses created tension between Goldman and the Libyan leadership – Libya ultimately rejected Goldman’s efforts to get them to further invest in the company, and the parties did not agree on a deal to compensate Libya for the lost money. Since the overthrow of Gaddafi, Campbell reports, there has been very little discussion of how Libya might recoup these losses.

A closely related issue was Libya’s bumpy relationship with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), an organization established in 1981 by the pro-U.S. governments of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to, in Campbell’s words, “recycle the resources of Arabia for the Western financial system.” At the time of NATO’s intervention, Campbell claims, Wall Street speculators allied with the GCC in a struggle with the Libyan leadership for control of the Bahrain-based Arab Banking Corporation, a major player in regional offshore, investment banking, and project finance services. The reason for the dispute was that the Libyans, Campbell says, wanted “to move the Arab Banking Group out of its servile position to Western banking interests,” a shift opposed by the Kuwait Investment Authority, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and other shareholders.

When NATO wanted the appearance of broad Arab support for the no-fly zone over Libya, an endorsement came from the Arab League in a vote that was held when only eleven of the twenty-two member states were present. Six of the nine who voted in favor were members of the GCC.

Moreover, the LIA, like many Western firms, invested billions in energy money in the “dark markets” of the UAE. Campbell suggests throughout the book that the neoliberals in Gaddafi’s government who were aligned with Western intellectuals of a similar persuasion ultimately helped bring about the government’s demise.

Despite opposition from their nationalist counterparts, the neoliberals entangled the country’s assets with Western companies, who were then able to restrict the Libyan state’s financial options at a crucial moment. After the beginning of the February 2011 uprisings, “when the Libyans started to move to divest their funds from their overexposure to British and U.S. financial institutions, Libya’s assets were frozen. This was prior to the ruse of protecting Libyans.”

Because of the opaque nature of international markets, one can hardly demand of Campbell unambiguous proof of causation between the banks and energy firms’ relations with the Libyan government and NATO’s decision to overthrow Gaddafi. For the same reason, details about the activities of – and relationships between – these actors are necessarily scarce.

Still, Campbell manages to paint a picture of the Libyan state’s often-tumultuous relationship with the financial sector that dominates NATO states. Consequently, his theory that the Gaddafi government’s relationship with other players in the financial sector was a driving force behind the NATO intervention will seem perfectly plausible to readers familiar with the leading role that Wall Street has played throughout the history of American imperialism. In contrast, readers who embrace the “bumbling empire” theory of U.S. foreign policy in North Africa will be less willing to accept that the U.S. government knows what it’s doing.

Internationalism, Not Intervention

As Campbell writes, chronicling the cataclysmic results of recent imperialist ventures in the Middle East and Africa is not about “gloating but part of an effort to strengthen the resolve of the peace and justice movement to challenge militarism and exploitation.”

One aspect of this worthy goal must be opposing those ostensible leftists who call for Western-led military interventions in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Ukraine. Western military interventions like the one in Libya are expressions of capitalist hegemony and only wind up strengthening that hegemony.

If leftists want to build alternatives to global capitalism, we must recognize that claims to internationalism are worse than meaningless when they enable imperialist bloodbaths. •

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Greg Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph in Canada. This article first published by Jacobin magazine.