A reply to Jean Bricmont

Jean Bricmont

I am having a hard time deciding whether Jean Bricmont’s article on today’s Counterpunch is more meretricious than the one that appeared yesterday by Diana Johnstone. Both attempt to depict Libya as a second Kosovo with a looming “humanitarian intervention”. Bricmont’s article is slightly ahead in this horse race since it starts off with a cheap smear against unnamed “Trotkyist” [sic] groups:

The whole gang is back: The parties of the European Left (grouping the  “moderate” European communist parties), the “Green” José Bové, now allied with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who has never seen a US-NATO war he didn’t like, various Trotkyist groups and of course Bernard-Henry Lévy and Bernard Kouchner, all calling for some sort of “humanitarian intervention” in Libya or accusing the Latin American left, whose positions  are far more sensible, of acting as “useful idiots” for the “Libyan tyrant.”

My first reaction after reading this glob of rhetorical spit was to post a query on the Marxism listserv as to which Trotskyists are for a US-NATO war on Libya. Whatever the foibles of this tendency on the left, it is not known for backing imperialist interventions. After parsing Bricmont’s prose carefully, I finally figured out what he was trying to say. There are some groups and individuals who are for no-fly zones, etc. (Cohn-Bendit) or there are some groups that accuse the Latin American left (that’s his term, not mine, for the proclamations of Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro—I see the left as being a lot broader) of acting as “useful idiots” for the “Libyan tyrant”. That’s a pretty nifty use of the connective “or”. I imagine that Bricmont must have learned it from whatever is the equivalent of Time Magazine in Belgium.

Bricmont throws up his hands and says that not enough is known about what is happening in Libya to make an opinion on—one presumes— which side to support:

It is difficult for ordinary citizens to know exactly what is going on in Libya, because Western media have thoroughly discredited themselves in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine, and alternative sources are not always reliable either. That of course does not prevent the pro-war left from being absolutely convinced of the truth of the worst reports about Qaddafi, just as they were twelve years ago about Milosevic.

I don’t know what kind of information Bricmont needs to get his hands on to figure out what Qaddafi is all about but I would start with this article that I posted in full yesterday:

The European Union is keen to strike a pact with Muammar Gaddafi to stem the flow of immigrants across the Mediterranean, officials said today, after the Libyan leader put a price tag of €5bn (£4.1bn) a year on the deal.

“There is great scope to develop cooperation with Libya on migration,” said Matthew Newman, a commission spokesman. Other officials said three negotiating sessions were expected by the end of the year between Brussels and Tripoli as well as the staging of a summit of EU and African leaders in Libya in November.

In a highly theatrical visit to Italy this week, Gaddafi warned that Europe would turn “black” unless it was more rigorous in turning back immigrants. Libya is a key transit point for illegal migration from Africa to Europe. The Libyan leader said the bill for sealing the crossing routes would be at least €5bn a year.

I found out about Milosevic by digging through 10 years worth of Lexis-Nexis articles. You can pretty much do the same thing with Qaddafi. Maybe Bricmont is too busy studying neutrons or whatever it is he does for a living to take the trouble. My advice is to limit his search in Lexis-Nexis to “Libya” and “Blair” and “deal” from the period 2004 to 2007 as a start, sorted by relevance. I am sure he will find it most edifying. This is from the Scotsman newspaper dated March 28, 2004:

IT was only lunchtime but the whisky and gin were flowing from the British Embassy in Tripoli last Thursday. Fresh camels’ milk and water had been on offer outside Colonel Gaddafi’s tent, and the returning diplomats went straight for something stronger.

The mood was of mild but universal shock. Even those who had for weeks recited the political rationale of the meeting found themselves stunned at the sight of a British prime minister lunching with one of the world’s most notorious dictators.

Tony Blair called it extending the “hand of partnership.” For one embassy guest, this was more than a soundbite: Malcolm Brinded, Royal Dutch/Shell’s head of exploration, had just signed a GBP 110m deal to hunt for gas off Libya’s coast.

Britain’s diplomatic invasion of Libya last week was a superbly orchestrated coup which has stolen a march on America. In the 15 weeks since Gaddafi agreed to surrender his nuclear and chemical weapons programme, London has not missed a beat.

While Washington has refused to lift trade sanctions and boasts about “moving the goalposts”, Blair has succeeded in positioning Britain’s defence industry alongside Libya while returning Shell to the country after a 30-year absence.

This is neither a fortuitous side-effect nor a cynical attempt to make money. Blair last week deployed a carefully crafted model where business is the agent of regime change. It was peace, tailor-made for a country with 30 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

In fact as I have pointed out repeatedly, the analogy is not between Qaddafi and Milosevic but between Qaddafi and Kostunica, the neoliberal Serbian politician who succeeded Milosevic in a coup. What is confusing for people with little interest in recent Libyan history, like Bricmont and Johnstone, is that Qaddafi morphed into his opposite. He was not being demonized in the Western press but treated as “one of us”. It was only when a mass movement began to threaten to remove him by force that the imperialists rediscovered that he was a bad guy. The only reason they have considered moving against him was to make sure that they maintained some kind of foothold in Libya. But if Benghazi had not risen up, there would have not been the slightest interest in removing Qaddafi. After all, Shell, BP and Exxon would have found that most inconvenient when it came to cutting deals with the Libyan bourgeoisie, especially the head of the state oil industry who was quoted in the New Yorker magazine as follows:

[Prime Minister Ghanem] Dr. Shukri, as he is called by those close to him and by those who pretend to be close to him–he has a Ph.D. in international relations from the Fletcher School, at Tufts–has a certain portly grandeur. With a neat mustache and a well-tailored suit, he exuded an effortless cosmopolitanism that seemed more conducive to facilitating Libya’s reentry into the world than to winning over the hard-line elements at home. When I arrived, he was sitting on a gilded sofa in a room furnished with Arabic reimaginings of Louis XVI furniture, before many trays of pastries and glasses of the inevitable mint tea. In the Libyan empire of obliquity, his clarity was refreshing, and his teasing irony seemed to acknowledge the absurdity of Libyan doubletalk.

I mentioned that many of his colleagues saw no need to hasten the pace of reform. This was clearly not his view. “Sometimes you have to be hard on those you love,” he said. “You wake your sleeping child so that he can get to school. Being a little harsh, not seeking too much popularity, is a better way. Those who can excel should get more–having a few rich people can build a whole country.”

What a far cry from Milosevic’s defiant stand against Western financial and military power.

Finally, after all this fire-breathing “anti-imperialism” from the tenured physics professor who never organized a single antiwar demonstration in his entire life (I’m willing to bet), we are left with this “peace” proposal:

The recent meeting of the Bolivarian Alliance could serve as an example: the Latin American left wants peace and they want to avoid US intervention, because they know that they are in the sights of the US and that their process of social transformation requires above all peace and national sovereignty. Hence, they suggest sending an international delegation, possibly led by Jimmy Carter (hardly a stooge of Qaddafi), in order to start a negotiation process between the government and the rebels. Spain has expressed interest in the idea, which is of course rejected by Sarkozy. This proposition may sound utopian, but it might not be so if it were supported by the full weight of the United Nations.

To start with, to talk about “peace” in Libya implicitly means accepting the legitimacy of the Qaddafi dictatorship. This is a government that rules by terror and that has been in power for 41 years, seeking to extend its rule through a dynasty based on bloodlines. How can a leftist call for anything except the overthrow of such a despotic regime? Before its neoliberal turn, a confused left-liberal like Bricmont might have had some excuse but with such a combination of police state brutality and the economic policies described by the former Prime Minister as being “hard on those you love”, no such justification exists.

For someone so self-consciously anti-imperialist as Bricmont, it is shocking to see his approval for a peace plan “supported by the full weight of the United Nations”. I don’t know how to break it to comrade Bricmont, but that full weight has fallen heavily in the past on Korea, Congo, and Haiti—three victims of armed intervention by the blue helmet imperialist peace-keepers. And when the UN was not dispatching its troops, it was organizing a sanction against Iraq that cost the lives of a half-million children.

Like the League of Nations, the United Nations is an imperialist institution. Dominated by the U.S. and its lackeys, it is doubtful that it would ever do anything that threatened the class interests of the dominant powers. Perhaps Bricmont’s time would be better spent learning about the class realities of such a reactionary institution rather than giving it his benedictions on Counterpunch.