Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton by Johnstone Diana

Author:Johnstone, Diana [Johnstone, Diana]
Language: ara
Format: mobi
Publisher: CounterPunch
Published: 2015-10-11T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Libya: a War of Her Own

As mounting chaos engulfed the Middle East and Ukraine in 2014, a visibly disoriented President Obama characterized his foreign policy caution by a caveat: “Don’t do stupid shit.” In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton stepped up to the plate to show she had sterner presidential fiber: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

She did not make clear what her “organizing principles” would be, but one of her favorite principles has been the “right”, or “responsibility” to protect, shortened to the catchy English tag “R2P”. This principle has turned out to be a disorganizing principle, used to destroy whatever order may have existed in the “protected” region. In the wake of the Kosovo war, Washington strongly promoted R2P as a potential principle of the United Nations, to be invoked in any future Kosovo-type situation as the perfect excuse to undermine the principle of national sovereignty.

R2P was the principle behind Hillary’s very own war, the 2011 assault on Libya, which turned out to be some of the most “stupid shit” ever dumped on a defenseless country.

The pretext for this war was the series of mass protest demonstrations that began in Tunisia on December 18, 2010, labeled “the Arab spring” by the media. This label turned out to be unduly optimistic, implying that the whole region was blossoming into something bright, happy and of course democratic, in the Western sense.

Most of the leaders targeted by the Arab Spring protests were longtime “friends” of the West and clients of the United States. Washington, Paris and London were embarrassed. But there was one striking exception: In February 2011, crowds in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi demonstrated against the country’s leader Moammar Gaddafi. Eureka! Here was an opportunity to put R2P into practice against a man who had been solidly detested by the West ever since he took power over forty years ago.

Colonel Gaddafi first came on the scene in 1969 as a sincere revolutionary in a revolutionary period. He was a Bedouin who had become an army officer in a country that hardly existed.

Once a thriving grain producer for the Roman Empire, the region first known as “Africa” declined into a distant backwater for well over a thousand years, made up of sand, Arabized Berber tribes, a few cities and the impressive ruins of a rich past. After centuries under the Ottoman Empire, the region was conquered by Italy in the first part of the twentieth century, and divided between Cyrenaica in the East and Tripolitania in the West. In 1934, Italy gave the colony the official name of Libya. By losing World War II, Italy also lost its colonies and in 1951, the United Nations recognized the British-sponsored Emir of Cyrenaica, Idris al-Mahdi as-Senussi, who had led armed anti-Italian resistance, as King Idris the first of Libya. The United States took over Italy’s air base near Tripoli and renamed it the Wheelus Air Base.

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