The floods of September 2023 in Libya and the ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
19.09.2023
The suffering of the Libyan people after the bursting of two dams following the unusually violent cyclone Daniel is given two causes by Western media: “climate change” and “internal political disorder”. Most people already see what is behind “climate change”, attributing it to capitalist industrial pollution, especially over the past 100 years. But few see what, just a decade or so ago, caused the collapse of this wealthy oil-rich country with developed infrastructure and good social services into the “internal political disorder” responsible for the dams bursting like that. While “climate change” is no longer seen as being an “act of god or of the gods”, “internal political disorder” in present-day wonderland, curiously, is.
“Veni, vidi, vici!”
The key words to remember date back 2,000 years or so, though: “veni, vidi, vici!” And two-thirds of these words are in, of all things, Latin. Hilary Clinton, who was then US President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, sat in a chair in Libya in October 2011, laughing her head off at the news of the killing of Libyan dictator, Muammar Kadhafi, and she quoted Julius Caesar’s famous three words, “Veni, vidi, vici” – “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Braggart that he, Caesar, was known to be. Cruel Emperor that he was known to be. You can still see Hilary Clinton laughing as she quotes him until today, her action preserved in all its macabre madness on Youtube. For context, Julius Caesar said this when called away from his mistress Cleopatra in Egypt to deal with trouble in the Asian Empire, and had to gather an army fast to go inflict defeat upon the said trouble-maker out East. Once he had done this, he sent his famous, succinct words home to Rome via a messenger, “Veni, vidi, vici.”
So, Hilary Clinton quotes him when she is out East in Libya and hears of Kadhafi’s car being hit by a US airstrike, during a NATO attack. Her actual quote is an amended version of Caesar’s words, “I came, I saw, he died.” And then when asked if her arrival there at that moment was linked to his death, she said first “No”, then, “Yes”. CBS writes it up like this: “The reporter asked if Kadhafi’s death had anything to do with her surprise visit” to Libya. “‘No,’ she replied, before rolling her eyes and saying ‘I'm sure it did’ with a chuckle.” The chuckle was more like a guffaw, for the record. Like Caesar, she is a cruel braggart. But, afterwards, it was found out that not only should she have said “I came, I saw, he died,” but more accurately, “I came, I saw, he was hit by a US missile, taken prisoner, sodomized with a bayonet, shot in the head three times until dead.” So much for even the Geneva convention. Let alone human decency. Not much for a westernly civilized lady to chuckle about. So much for any illusion that women in positions of power within patriarchal hierarchies like the US administration weakens the reign of patriarchy!
For the record, in LALIT, we were never, unlike many in the MMM at the time and in its nationalist wing, supporters of Kadhafi or preachers of his Little Green Book. We thought it was gobbledygook. However, we found it interesting, decades later when Kadhafi, presiding the African union a year or two before his assassination began working towards a “gold dinar”, as he suggested calling it, to replace the US dollar as African reserve currency. Important African countries had begun to show support, including Nigeria, Egypt and Angola. This move may have been the unspoken causa belli of the USA, who knows? In that war aim, the USA did have success. But, they can hardly stand on a soap box and claim it.
Since Hilary Clinton clipped that “I came, I saw, he died”, however, Libya’s people live in a failed state, with all the suffering she helped cause, and the US people responsible admit helping cause. The country with the purest oil in the world and that employed over a million workers from neighbouring African countries, and that was running fairly good social services, many of them free, now has no employment for anyone – causing the networks that organized the million or so migrant workers to now organize to send migrants to Europe via places like Lampadusa, instead, provoking a massive refugee crisis in the USA’s competitor, Europe – while Libyans, too, flee. All these are unintended but perfectly predictable consequences of the US strategy and tactics.
During the Arab spring, in the run-up to the missile strikes, the USA spent millions on financing the rebellion in Libya. They financed literally anyone, just as it did in Syria, thus fuelling more religious extremism, both in Libya and Syria. And, then the USA supplied the missile that would strike, and thus lead to the dictator’s capture, torture and assassination, all in direct consequence of the strike. Then we got “I came, I saw, he died” by Hilary Clinton. And ruination for millions of Libyans.
The country, since 2011 and until now, is run by warring war-lords that have banded together in two groups. As one commander fighting on behalf of one group, the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), Salem Bin Ismail, told the BBC in 2020: “We have had chaos since 2011.” Up against this weak UN-recognized GNA is a former Kadhafi general, who is a U.S. citizen and even an ex-CIA man called Khalifa Haftar. These two teams are locked in mortal combat, and have been since 2011. But they are not alone. Various world powers support one side or the other. Major countries that were usually allies in NATO, like the USA and France, for example, supported different sides for years. Now regional military powers have joined in, aggravating the situation. The mess was and still is total. The importance of the pure oil of Libya, that needs so little refining, haunts the interventions.
The infrastructure, once so good in Libya, is now neglected, and has been ever since Hilary Clinton announced, like Caesar, “I came, I saw, he died”. It is known, and widely reported that the up-keep on the two dams that burst was totally neglected. Cracks had been reported. Meetings had been held. Upkeep of schools, hospitals, bridges, and everything else people need to live reasonably well has been neglected. The country has fallen apart. One thinks of Iraq. One thinks of Afghanistan. One thinks of Syria.
The Libyan poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, before the dam-bursting floods, in which he lost his own life, had predicted the falling apart in a poem called “The Rain”, but even he could not have predicted the sheer scope of the tragedy. He wrote, “The rain/a sign of goodness,/ a promise of help,/ an alarm bell”. Imagine he foresaw that “rain” was “an alarm bell”. He wrote, “The rain/exposes the drenched streets,/ the cheating contractor,/ and the failed state.” Note the last two words, “failed state”, exposed by the rain. The deaths will probably number over 10,000. Peoples’ lives and all their living culture has been swept away by two neglected dams, in a failed state.
It was not an act of nature.
Every country that the USA has bombed and aimed missiles at ends up in this kind of mess. It seems that the USA is a state apparatus without a memory. Memory is essential for doing better next time. But the USA state does not. And, it is not just a mess that it leaves. It leaves social destruction that is very deep indeed, and long-lasting. It leaves suffering so vast it is beyond imagination. The Libyan dictator had already wreaked one kind of violence on society, as it is, but then this kind of civil war triggered by US missiles and assassination, this kind of social and economic collapse, just makes a bad situation much, much, immeasurably much, worse.
“Probably the worst mistake”
Later, to his credit, President Barack Obama, who ordered the NATO airstrike on Hilary Clinton’s advice, in a Fox Newsinterview on 10 April 2016, confessed that the US war on Libya was a big mistake. The word “mistake” somehow sounds inappropriate, given the suffering caused. But that is what he calls it. He said his “worst mistake” was “probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in Libya”. (The “day after” that Obama did not plan for is still going on today.) Even President Joe Biden said publicly, five years afterwards, that the military intervention had been a mistake.
The working people of the USA will have to study the history of their own ruling classes just one step further back each time there is a new tragedy in the world, and not just look at the last few months before the new disaster. They sure cannot rely much upon their own media on a day-to-day basis to help out, or even on most of the intelligentsia in the country, who bow down to what the French call raison d’etat. There is no reason for an act which is done because the State needed it done. A slightly more devious way of saying might is right.
The State is not a reason. Just as might is not right.
LALIT, 19 September 2023
