> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
> What imperialist intervention? The world is helping a pro-democracy
> movement
> take their country back from a murderous tyrant. This is a UN mission
> approved by the UN Security Council, including all of the BRICs (they
> abstained from the resolution, allowing it to pass, mostly as a diplomatic
> maneuver to try to talk the Qaddafi regime into leaving voluntarily).
> Ethically, it's the equivalent of saving Republican Spain in the 1930s.
>
Sorry, but this is trite and displays a complete lack of the concreteness that Achcar is at pains to enjoin in his piece. "The world" isn't doing anything. The UN Security Council isn't the world. The driving forces behind this intervention were the US, UK and France, so the US military under Africom direction is leading a mission, with the participation or assent of other strategically significant ruling classes, to enforce a stalemate in Libya, probably leading to partition. Stalemate is implied in the language of the resolution itself, and politicians such as the UK armed forces minister are openly speaking of a de facto partition. This isn't the equivalent of saving Republican Spain - if it were, I wonder why you're not part of an Abraham Lincoln Brigade? - it is a quite conscious attempt to put the counter-revolutionary forces right in the heart of a regional revolutionary process, and to bolster the position of former regime elements in the Libyan revolt who will now continue be dependents of the 'West'.
-- Richard Seymour Writer and blogger Email: leninstombblog at googlemail.com Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer) Book: http://www.versobooks.com/books/nopqrs/s-titles/seymour_r_the_liberal_defense_of_murder.shtml