Libya, the Left, and Losing Our Way; Reflections on Empire, Inequality, and “Operation Odyssey Dawn” By Paul Street
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Iowa City, IA, Tuesday, March 29, 2011. Beneath the often vituperative intra-left debate over whether or not to support any aspect of the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya and what the consequences of that intervention will be, lay a fundamental question: why did Obama go to cruise missile war? What did the White House hope to achieve? What’s it all about? The administration claims that it merely seeks to protect the democratic rebels and the broad populace against the vengeful dictator Muammar Gadaffi. It’s a humanitarian mission, consistent the United States’ and the West’s supposed longstanding democratic ideals, according to the official White House line.
The knee-jerk, almost self-caricaturing counter from some sides of the so-called radical left says that it’s all about Washington’ desire to grab Libya’s oil by ousting the unsavory but nonetheless anti-imperialist and objectively progressive Muammar Gadaffi in the deceptive name of humanitarian intervention and democracy. This, some on the “radical left” argue, is George W. Bush and Afghanistan and Iraq all over again, with Gadaffi standing in for Saddam Hussein and the Taliban as the bad guy and the Libyan rebels standing in for the Northern Coalition and Ahmad Chalabi as props to justify another long American colonial war of imperial occupation.
My own position, significantly influenced by the reflections of the two leading left intellectuals on U.S. policy in the Middle East (Gilbert Achcar and Noam Chomsky) is consistent with neither side of this difference.
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Some U.S. Web “radicals” (their self-designation often reflects confusion between [a] stridency and cynicism of rhetoric and [b] depth of analysis/ knowledge) are uncomfortable with the notion that any U.S. and Western military intervention in what we used to call the Third World might happen to have a positive humanitarian impact in one instance. They are afraid that their core identity as bad-ass, hard-core enemies of Empire (and of Obama) will be compromised. Let me (an early radical-Left critic of Obama and the author of a book titled The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power) assure these comrades that acknowledging this is in no way to go soft on Washington or the current administration and its commitment to the petro-imperial project. The analysis presented in this essay is as cynical, radical, and power-centered as any hard core leftist could want.
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