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Showing posts with the label militias

Libya

The brothers who terrorised a Libyan town Related The Western powers that helped destroy Libya A 2013 paper by Alan Kuperman argued that NATO went beyond its remit of providing protection for civilians and instead supported the rebels by engaging in regime change. It argued that NATO's intervention likely extended the length (and thus damage) of the civil war, which Kuperman argued could have ended in less than two months without NATO intervention. The paper argued that the intervention was based on a misperception of the danger Gadaffi's forces posed to the civilian population, which Kuperman suggests was caused by existing bias against Gadaffi due to his past actions (such as support for terrorism), sloppy and sensationalistic journalism during the early stages of the war and propaganda from anti-government forces. Kuperman suggests that this demonization of Gadaffi, which was used to justify the intervention, ended up discouraging efforts to accept a ceasefire and negotiated
Libya A good beginning in putting the situation in a big picture of "civilisational" context. However, I always wonder why most writers do not qualify "democracy" as if everybody agrees with the existing order. The socio-economic formation in which this "democracy" functions is rarely questioned, especially in today's "neoliberal" form of capitalism that even liberal sccholars have attacked as a source of violence and destruction. The social groups/strata that formed the former Libyan regime and how the regime came about and why it took the features it took is fundamental in understanding why Libya could not have a capitalist democracy. Neither Egypt, Syria or China. The focus on individuals doesn't help that much because the individuals themselves work within the trappings they found before them. There is a difference between structure and moment. Furthermore, one should not conflate the ideals of the French revolution and how capit
Iraq We have been here before: the destruction of the Ba'th's regime state by imperialism had led to similar consequences: neglect, fuelling sectarianism, geopolitics...  Actually, those consequences have significantly determined the present situation in Iraq. "Nascent territorialism in Mosul threatens long-term reconstruction efforts by institutionalising division between traumatised populations and security actors, as well as by breeding local resentment at perceived government neglect. With insufficient military and economic resources to commit to liberated areas, the Iraqi government may struggle to reverse trends toward factionalism without sustained international assistance. Yet today, long-term international aid seems unlikely, as Baghdad’s critical foreign partners scale back post-ISIS cooperation." Rivalries threaten post-ISIS Mosul
As long as the Assad regime remains in place, and millions of Syrians remain at its mercy , Isis and al-Qaeda will have a lot going for them.