THE
LIBYAN REVOLUTION
PART 2
By
Dr. Stanley Monteith
July 30, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
The U.S. has essentially become the air force of a hard-core militant Islamic insurgency in Libya. This parallels the last multilateral "humanitarian" war carried out by Washington - the 78-day NATO-led terror bombing of Serbia, in which the United States attacked a socialist-ruled Christian country in order to compel it to surrender sovereign territory to the control of an Islamo-Leninist terrorist outfit called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Under United Nations supervision, the KLA was transformed from a squalid pack of nominally Islamic (but ideologically Marxist) pimps, dope peddlers, and black market organ smugglers into the "legitimate" government of Kosovo - a province that has been an organic part of Serbia for centuries.[1]
In fact, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the most bloodthirsty commentators in the entire Establishment-aligned punditocracy, made the Kosovo parallel explicit in a March 16 Wall Street Journal op-ed column, writing that it would be possible to "deliver the same kind of potent combined-armed punch that drove the Serbs out of Kosovo when NATO aircraft supported ground operations by the Kosovo Liberation Army."[2]
As was the case in Kosovo, the CIA has been on the ground organizing, training, and aiding the Islamist rebels in Libya long before the announced presidential decision to commit the U.S. government to war on their behalf.
According to the New York Times, this is actually a joint venture between the intelligence assets of Washington and London: "In addition to the C.I.A. presence, composed of an unknown number of Americans who had worked at the spy agency's station in Tripoli and others who arrived more recently, current and former British officials said that dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces and missile installations...."[3] This is very similar to the kind of on-the-ground support provided to the KLA leading up to, and during, the NATO assault on Serbia.
Perhaps the most important parallel between the Clinton-era war on Serbia and the Obama administration's Libyan war is the fact that at no time did the president seek congressional authorization of any kind - let alone a formal declaration of war, which the Constitution explicitly demands as a non-negotiable prerequisite for conducting military operations abroad.
In fact, this has been standard operating procedure for Washington since December 1945, when Congress enacted the United Nations Participation Act - a standing declaration of war supposedly authorizing the president to commit American military personnel to combat overseas as dictated by our supposed "obligations" to the UN and its affiliates.[4]
When the first Bush administration decided to wage war against long-time Washington asset Saddam Hussein, it organized a war coalition through the United Nations. True, Congress ratified this decision with a constitutionally spurious resolution "authorizing" that action after the fact. But as Bush administration officials recently admitted in a forum at Texas A&M University, they were prepared to launch the war in defiance of Congress, claiming that the UN Security Council resolution provided sufficient legal "authority" to conduct an aggressive war even in the teeth of congressional opposition. [5] The second Bush administration behaved in exactly the same fashion when overt war with Iraq resumed in 2003 (following a dozen-year starvation embargo punctuated by regular bombing by an Anglo-American military coalition).
What distinguishes the Obama administration's war is the brazenness with which the president and his handlers have treated Congress as utterly irrelevant to the matter. Yes, Obama and his clique emulated the diplomacy of the two Bush administrations in arranging wars with Iraq, and Clinton in arranging the bombing of Serbia. But in this case, the administration used the Arab League, an 18-member coalition of thugs, monarchs, and dictators, to commit the United States to action - thereby circumventing Congress entirely.
Just days before the UN Security Council vote, the Arab League, by unrecorded voice vote, petitioned the UN to enact a "no-fly zone" over Libya. The League's resolution was brought about, in large measure, through a covert deal between Washington and Riyadh allowing the Saudis to dispatch an expeditionary force to Bahrain to help the Sunni al-Khalifa monarchy put down an uprising on the part of its suppressed and persecuted Shiite minority.[6]
Thus it is that with Washington's tacit blessing, Saudi troops are helping Bahrain's U.S.-equipped security forces to massacre peaceful protesters. This was done, once again, to secure an Arab League resolution asking the Security Council to authorize a "no-fly zone" in Libya, which the public was told would be a "limited" engagement. Of course, as Rep. Ron Paul points out, a "no-fly zone" is an act of war. And the resolution that was passed by the Security Council - significantly, without the support of Russia, China, India, Brazil, and Germany, nations that account for roughly 40 percent of the global population [7] - doesn't limit the military options that can be employed in prosecuting a "humanitarian" war in Libya. It is the blankest of blank checks for open-ended military engagement in a civil war that, as Defense Secretary Gates has pointed out, is not in any sense related to America's national interest.[8]
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the Libyan war is the suggestion by Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Congress should consider a resolution retroactively "authorizing" the war weeks after it had begun.
"I'm interested in a vote authorizing military action," Levin said on March 29 - a week and a half after that war had begun. "The president said he'd welcome it and I think it would be helpful. It'd show public support for the effort. And that's always useful."[9]
The Constitution doesn't describe a congressional declaration of war as a "useful" gesture to ratify an ongoing military campaign; it dictates that such a declaration is mandatory before the government of the United States commits itself to military action against another country.
Were this an actual constitutional republic, public support for a formally declared war, expressed through an appropriate vote by elected representatives before the war began, would be mandatory. Now we're told that a useless resolution issued well after the fact would be taken as a binding statement of "public support," which is "useful" but materially irrelevant to the actions of our rulers.
The only substantive use for such a tardily issued resolution (which would have no constitutional or legal validity) would be to provide politically useful cover for Barack Obama and Joe Biden, each of whom - as a U.S. Senator - explicitly stated for the public record, that it is an impeachable offense for a president to wage war without congressional approval.[10]
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As if to underscore and italicize its utter indifference to the Constitution and any concept of the rule of law, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - who has been the chief proponent of the Libyan war from the beginning - told Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) during a classified briefing that the administration would ignore any congressional effort intended to end, restrain, or limit the war in Libya. This is a flagrant violation of the 1973 War Powers Act, which itself is a constitutionally spurious measure intended to "limit" the ability of presidents to wage undeclared wars.[11]
What this means is that the Obama Regime would welcome a thoroughly useless resolution ratifying its unconstitutional war in Libya as a useful propaganda measure - while ignoring any substantive congressional action intended to bring its illegal war to an end. It is difficult to find a more suitable illustration of the principle that "Reality is scoffed at, and illusion is king." The Libyan war is a museum-quality exhibit of Power Elite reality manipulation.
A Soviet-era Russian dissident once wryly described his society as one in which the Regime could revise yesterday's weather by decree. In his monumental work of dystopian political commentary 1984, George Orwell captured this facet of totalitarianism in his description of Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth, where he was employed to "rectify" the official record to bring it into conformity with the Party line:
"The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened."
"This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance," Orwell continued. "Day by day and almost minute by minute, the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record."[12]
As the exalted vanguard of the revolution, the Party must preserve its pretense of infallibility. Whatever it decrees is a self-ratifying truth, one to which any contrary historical record must yield. Yesterday's bane enemy becomes today's blessed ally; iron-clad constitutional limits on power suddenly become flimsy suggestions, or anachronisms to be dismissed entirely. A Nobel Peace Laureate becomes an unabashed military dictator, blithely ignoring Congress as he wages illegal wars abroad to replace an aging and unreliable CIA-installed dictator with a fresh criminal oligarchy supported by radical Islamic guerillas who just years ago were killing American servicemen in Iraq.
All of this takes place in the context of a systemic global economic crisis that is literally taking on apocalyptic characteristics in light of the deepening tragedy in Japan - and that will become a full-orbed catastrophe as the long-deferred by inevitable wave of municipal defaults begins. America is collapsing, and the new war in Libya - one of at least five ongoing military conflicts (the others are in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen; the expanding "war on drugs" in Mexico, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives in just a few years, deserves mention as well) can only hasten the demise of the current debt-based imperial system.
This brings us to what may be the real significance of the Libyan war: This is a potentially open-ended military engagement in which the elected representatives of the American people will most likely not be permitted to play any significant role. It was arranged entirely through trans-national, multi-lateral alliances and institutions that are entirely unaccountable to the American people. As left-leaning proponents of UN-centered "peace enforcement" point out with delight, this is a war utterly untainted by any consideration of American national interests, or even stained by the pretense of the same. It is an augury of, and a precedent for, the ultimate alienation of the most dangerous of all government powers - the ability to wage war - into the hands of a global elite that looks on the American people as an enemy to be subdued by whatever means may be necessary.
War, as James Madison warned, is the greatest of all enemies of public liberty, because it contains and develops the germ of all the others. Karl Marx agreed with Madison's assessment, while extolling the revolutionary potential of keeping a population on a permanent war footing.
"You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power," Marx told his disciples in 1851.[13] America - in large measure because of our evil entanglement in the UN system -- has been on a permanent war footing for more than a half-century. We have reached a political inflection point: The current system simply cannot continue. It will soon be sloughed off like a chrysalis discarded by the fully developed butterfly. What emerges from the imperial chrysalis, however, will be a genuinely murderous and monstrous entity.
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Eventually, those who are content to exist in a fog of illusion will no longer have that luxury. In the meantime, those of us who seek to understand the truth, and share it with others, will have to find each other, strengthen each other in fellowship, and fortify our resolve to serve the Truth irrespective of the costs. This means disseminating reality-based information as widely as possible, and preparing both temporally and spiritually for the tumult, upheavals, and turmoil that are already gathering force.
Pray for our country. Pray that we will be able to experience a measure of peace and liberty amid the gathering gloom of tyranny, corruption, official deception, and State-inflicted violence. We must avail ourselves of every opportunity to defy our self-appointed masters by doing the works of our true Master, the Prince of Peace and Author of our liberty.
Click here for part -----> 1, 2,
Footnotes:
1.
For
a useful overview and summary of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.
2.
Max Boot, "It's Not Too Late to Save Libya," Wall Street Journal,
March 16, 2001.
3.
"CIA Agents in Libya Aid Airstrikes and Meet Rebels," New
York Times, March 30, 2011.
4.
See the Yale University Study "A
Decade of American Foreign Policy 1941-1949 United Nations Participation
Act, December 20, 1945."
5.
"Panel Marks Anniversary of First Gulf War," The Eagle (Bryan-College
Station, Texas), January 21, 2011.
6.
Craig Murray, "The
Invasion of Baharain," March 14, 2001. Mr. Murray is the former
British ambassador to Uzbekistan; he was fired and then smeared, by
the British government for exposing the complicity of Washington and
London in propping up the Soviet-style torture state run by retread
Communist ruler Islam Karimov.
7.
"The Libyan War: Unconstitutional and Illegitimate," Michael
Lind, Salon, March 21, 2011.
8.
"Gates Says Libya Not Vital National Interest," Wall Street
Journal, March 27, 2011.
9.
"Top US Senator eyes vote to authorize Libya Strikes," AFP,
March 29, 2001.
10.
Regarding Obama, see "Barak Obama's Q&A," Boston Globe,
December 20, 2007; regarding Joe Biden's statement, see "Obama
VP Choice Biden Will Impeach Bush."
11.
"Clinton to Congress: Obama Would Ignore Your War Resoutions, "Talking
Points Memo, March 30l, 2011.
12.
George Orwell, 1984, Part I, Chapter 4.
13.
Hal Draper, "The
Two Souls of socialism."
� 2011 Dr. Stanley Monteith - All Rights Reserved
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