Benghazi 2012-Tehran 1979: Another big screwup

A U.S. administration is accused of not increasing security at a sensitive diplomatic outpost in the Middle East, despite warnings from its own intelligence agencies. The results are catastrophic.

We’re talking not just about Libya today---but Iran 30 years ago—when 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days.

According to several top secret U.S. government documents, which we revealed on 60 Minutes on  March 2,1980, the administration of Jimmy Carter failed to heed warnings from top Iranian officials and its own diplomats about the dangers if the U.S. were to admit the deposed Shah of Iran to the United States.

On November 4, 1979, several hundred radical Iranians, outraged at the U.S. decision to admit the Shah they detested to New York for medical treatment, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, overwhelmed the security guards, and took the American diplomats hostage.

It looked as if the Carter administration was innocent, overwhelmed by events:  they had simply extended a humanitarian hand to a former ally who suddenly and desperately needed medical treatment.

It later turned out that the taking of the embassy was far from spontaneous. On the other hand, as we discovered, U.S. government planning for the Shah to come to the U.S. had begun months before, and had continued despite ample warning of looming disaster.

Ironically, chapter and verse of those warnings were provided by files seized during the embassy takeover. As the mobs surged through the gates, officials inside frantically shredded thousands of documents. The hostage-takers, however, turned over that supposedly illegible mountain of debris to an army of local Iranians—many of them supposedly skilled weavers. After months of effort, they painstakingly pieced hundreds of documents back together. They were then published and put on sale –outside the American Embassy itself, for instance, where we picked up a copy.   

Among that trove was a State Department document classified “secret sensitive.” written in August 1979 and titled “Planning for the Shah to come to the U.S.” That was three months before the Shah’s arrival in New York. It said that once Khomeini is firmly established “it seems appropriate to admit the Shah to the United States.”

The discussion between officials in Washington and Tehran continued. In September, 1979, the embassy’s charge d’affaires, warned that the Shah’s coming to the U.S. could spell trouble to the embassy.  “I doubt that the Shah being ill, would have much ameliorating effect on the degree of reaction here.”

About that reaction, a State Department report specifically warned of “the danger of hostages being taken” and advised “When the decision is made to admit the Shah, we should quietly assign additional American security guards to the embassy, to provide protection to key personnel until the danger period is considered over.”

Despite that warning, Henry Precht then head of the Iranian Desk at the State Department, admitted to us that, “those guards were never provided.”

The Carter administration attempted to defend itself by claiming that Iranian officials had assured them that, if the Shah were to come to the United States, the Iranians would still protect the embassy.  

But Ibrahim Yazdi, Iran’s former Foreign Minister, gave us a different story. He told us that he was officially informed by the U.S. only 24 hours before the arrival of the Shah in New York.

Yazdi said that he then warned the State Department, “You are playing with fire. There will be a very drastic reaction.”

When President Carter asked then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance if the embassy could be protected, Vance later told Mike Wallace, “We said that we could. But we didn’t.”

Libya-The Question not being asked.

Apart from Mitt Romney’s ridiculous slur against President Obama following the murder of a U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, Americans should be focusing on a much more formidable question:

When was the last time a Chinese diplomat was murdered or even roughed up by an angry mob? When did you least hear about a Chinese embassy burned down or pillaged? We’ll be back to that question.

From Morocco and Tunisia to Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Iraq, anti-American crowds have taken to the streets. The outpouring of hatred is symptomatic of the fact that across much of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia American policy is in tatters. Probably more than ever before.

The region is strewn with the wreckage of failed U.S. ambitious and disastrous American plans.

Incredibly though, even as the U.S. surveys the shambles of Libya, there are still Americans pushing for the United States to intervene in Syria’s bloody civil war. (In fact, for months now, the US. And some of its Arab allies have been clandestinely doing just that. )

Even the Prime Minister of Israel, supposedly America’s most valuable ally in the region, makes political points by sticking his finger in the eye of the American President.

The reason for America’s obsession with this part of the world, we’ve heard for years, is that its trade routes and resources are critical to U.S. interests.

But hold on—that may once have been true, but, as things stand now, those trade routes and resources are even more crucial to China than to America. China, for instance, gets a greater percentage of its oil through the vital straights of Hormuz—which the U.S. spends billions to patrol--than does the United States.

And, while the U.S. has been lavishing hundreds of billions on bases, the Chinese have been spending their huge wad across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia buying up mineral deposits, land, forests, petroleum, inking construction contracts for huge infrastructure projects, as well as opening up vast new markets.

Where are the Chinese troops to protect all this? Where are the sprawling Chinese naval and air bases, their drones, killer teams and special forces? Not needed, thanks, the U.S. is handling security.

Which makes for some sad ironies. The fact, for instance, that the murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens had spent months aiding the Libyan rebels during their uprising against Khadhafi—while China was one of the last major allies to continue supporting the dictator. Yet the Chinese are back in Libya wheeling and dealing for construction contracts and oil.

Meanwhile, next door in Egypt, newly elected President Mohammed Morsi, whose country, mind you, continues to receive more than 1 billion dollars in aid from the United States, judged he had more to gain by joining in attacks against the U.S., than by cooling the popular passions. And where was his first trip abroad after winning election? To China.

Yet China would seem a very appropriate target for Muslim anger.

The U.S. may have invaded Muslim countries, but for decades China has been brutally persecuting and repressing millions of its own Muslim minorities, such as the Uighars in Northwest China.

But how many furious crowds have taken to the streets in Muslim lands to protest the plight of the Uighars? How many have even heard of them?  How many Muslim leaders who are lambasting the United States because of an off the wall film that the U.S. government had absolutely nothing to do with, how many of them have ever uttered a single word of public protest against China.

That’s not to say the Chinese are beloved in the region. There’ve been violent, sometimes bloody, protests against their labor and trade practices.

But nothing that compares in scale and depth to the hatred and suspicion of the United States throughout the region.

The current outcry over a film insulting Mohammed is just the tip of an emotional iceberg. Underneath it all are more than half a century of Western and American interventions in the region, as well as the U.S.’s continued support of Israel.

While the U.S. has spent huge sums, trying to overthrow regimes, punish perceived enemies, prevent nuclear proliferation (except in Israel), and shape the outcome of the  new political forces that are roiling the area, the Chinese have had their eyes fixed on one objective only—getting hold of vital natural resources to fuel their ravenous economy, finding new markets for their products and mammoth projects for their construction companies.

Why can’t the U.S. do the same?

That’s the kind of basic questions that American should be discussing in the wake of the killing of the U.S. Ambassador, as they go about electing a new President.

But don’t count on it.

Osama Bin Laden-Everyone's Missing the Point

A tale of two Arabs: Osama Bin Laden and Mohamed Bouaziziz

The jubilation of Americans and Western leaders at the death of Osama Bin Laden, though understandable, misses the point. In many ways, the figure gunned down in Pakistan was already irrelevant—more a symbol of past dangers than a real threat for the future.

Indeed, from the point of view of America and many of its allies, the most menacing symbol in the Arab World today is not Osama Bin Laden but another Arab who recently met a violent death--Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor who chose to set himself on fire after being harassed by corrupt local police.

His act, of course, ignited the storm that has spread across the Arab World and proven a much more serious threat to America’s allies in the region than Al Qaeda ever was. Ironically, his sacrifice probably also dealt a far more devastating blow to Al Qaeda’s fortunes than the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.  

The Arab world today bears no relationship to the situation a decade ago after 9/11. Obsessed by Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the U.S. has been sucked into a vast quagmire--a disaster for the Americans, their economy, and their standing in the Arab World.  

What particularly provoked Osama Bin Laden—a Saudi--was the decision of Saudi rulers to accept the presence of more than a hundred thousand “infidel” U.S. troops and their allies in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. In general, |he and his followers were outraged by U.S. support for corrupt, repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia, to Egypt to Yemen, as well, of course, for America’s backing of Israel.

As Osama himself  told CNN in 1997, “the U.S. wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this, If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists…Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”

Bin Laden’s message reverberated throughout the Muslim world. But U.S. officials remained deaf to its meaning, and continued obsessed by Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. The upshot--U.S. policy was the best recruiter Osama could have asked for. Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, CIA killer teams, mercenaries, predators and, and “diplomats” swarmed across the region from Iraq, to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia, supported by sprawling new bases and pharaonic embassies. 

The bill for all this—for an America crippling cutbacks in health, infra-structure. and education-- will be in the trillions of dollars. But despite this massive effort, none of those targeted Arab countries could by any stretch of the imagination be considered a success story. Hostility to the U.S. is high throughout the region. In polls, the majority of those Arabs queried consider the United States a greater threat than Al Qaeda.

In Pakistan, despite the U.S. lavishing tens of billions of dollars on that country’s  military, it turns out that, Osama Bin Laden, rather than groveling as an outlaw in the isolated tribal regions, has been living in a fortified villa near the country’s major military academy and a large army base, just a few miles away from the capital city.

America had also launched an ambitious civilian aid program: 7.5 billion dollar over five years, designed to win Pakistani hearts and minds and bolster the civilian government.  But, corruption is so rife throughout the Pakistani government, and its officials so incompetent, that the U.S. has been unable to disburse most of the aid. As the New York Times reports,

Instead of polishing the tarnished image of America with a suspicious, even hostile, Pakistani public and government, the plan has resulted in bitterness and a sense of broken promises…

The economy is failing. Education, health care and other services are almost nonexistent, while civilian leaders from the landed and industrialist classes pay hardly any taxes.

Pakistanis see the aid as a crude attempt to buy friendship and an effort to alleviate antipathy toward United States drone attacks against militants in the tribal areas.

The same reports come from Afghanistan. A decade after the U.S. invaded, tens of thousands of American troops are still fighting what seems to be, at best, a see–saw battle against the Taliban. There also, according to another report in the New York Times,  the U.S. is backing incompetent, corrupt, unpopular leaders. Millions of dollars of U.S. funds actually get diverted as payoffs to the Taliban and their allies—bribing them not to attack U.S. projects, such as $65 million highway that may never be completed in Eastern Afghanistan.

The vast expenses and unsavory alliances surrounding the highway have become a parable of the corruption and mismanagement that turns so many well-intended development efforts in Afghanistan into sinkholes for the money of American taxpayers, even nine years into the war.

Now back to Mohamed Bouazizi the Tunisian fruit vendor, whose death unleashed the Arab Spring that is still roiling the region,

Though Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have yet to be credited with overthrowing an Arab regime, the spark provided by Bouazizi has already led to the downfall of  American-backed tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt, and continues to threaten other despots in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

Ironically, most of the leaders overthrown or desperately trying to hang on to power, had declared themselves implacable enemies of Al Qaeda. Yet, again, it was not Bin Laden but Bouazizi that turned out to be a far greater menace.

Precisely for that reason, it is Mohamed Bouazizi’s Arab Spring, not sophisticated U.S. killer teams, that most threaten Al Qaeda and its allies. By demonstrating that secular uprisings can succeed in toppling the aged, crusty tyrannies, young Arabs across the region have—so far--undercut the appeal of the Islamic radicals.

So far, because despite the early successes in Tunisia and Egypt, the future of the Arab Spring is far from clear. The current process will take decades to play out. The political and economic establishments have been decapitated in Egypt and Tunisia, but not decimated. In the rest of the region, though seriously shaken, the old order still reign supreme. 

The same corrupt Saudi regime that fueled Bin Laden’s outrage is still in power, still backed by the United States. Indeed, they have been doing their utmost to tamp the spreading revolt, spending millions to bribe Yemen’s tribal leaders, dispatching their troops to Bahrain to help crush the uprising of the Shiite majority in that country.

Indeed, that brutal repression may radicalize thousands of young Shiites, generating hosts of new recruits for Al Qaeda or other extremists Islamic groups—even as the corpse of Osama Bin Laden lies somewhere at the bottom of the sea.

  

A Tale of Two Hospitals: Kuwait 1991, Bahrain 2011

Scene: The Human Rights caucus of the U.S. Congress hears the testimony of a fifteen-year old girl, introduced by only her first name Nayira, in order, the audience is told, to protect the safety of her family. The young girl recounts how invading soldiers had stormed into the hospital where she says she had been working as a volunteer. Tearfully, she describes how rampaging soldiers had trashed the hospital, brutalized patients, gone “into rooms where fifteen babies were in incubators. They tore the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the floor to die.”

That story is flashed around the world by a horrified media. “I don’t believe that Adolph Hitler ever participated in anything of that nature,” declares the outraged American President.

If anything justified the U.S. going to war against Saddam in 1991 to a wavering Congress and American public, that performance was it.

The problem was that the story was not true. Kuwaiti medical authorities denied that the incubator incident had ever occurred. It was only after the end of the Gulf War, however, that the deception was finally revealed. It was a total fabrication, right out of the fertile, high-priced imagination of Hill and Nolton, the Kuwaiti ruling family’s Washington P.R. firm. Nayira, the tearful fifteen-year-old girl who had so convincingly recounted the atrocity, turned out to the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States; she had never been in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. By the time that was discovered, however, the U.S.-led coalition had charged in and the Kuwaiti royal family was securely back on its throne, and the folks at Hill and Knolton had earned their pay.

Scene two: Police swarm through the wards of another major Arab hospital. At least 32 doctors, including surgeons, physicians, pediatricians and obstetricians, are arrested and detained. Their apparent crimes, guaranteeing medical care to people wounded in a popular uprising against an aged, corrupt dictator.

According to emails received from a surgeon at the hospital and published by The Independent, “One doctor, an intensive care specialist, was held after she was photographed weeping over a dead protester. Another was arrested in the theatre room while operating on a patient...many of the doctors, aged from 33 to 65, have been ‘disappeared’ – held incommunicado or at undisclosed locations. Their families do not know where they are. Nurses, paramedics, and ambulance staff have also been detained. The emails provide a glimpse of the terror and exhaustion suffered by the doctors and medical staff.

‘The author of the emails, a senior surgeon, was taken in for questioning at the headquarters of the interior ministry. He never re-emerged. No reason has been given for his arrest, nor has there been any news of his condition.”

A hospital in Libya? In battered Misurata, perhaps? Where President Obama has  ordered a couple of Predator drones to join in the flailing struggle against the barbarous  Muammar Gadhafi, where Senator John McCain jetted in himself for a quick look-see and instantly declared the rebels—my heroes.  Libya, where France and England have dispatched an unknown number of military trainers to see if they can whip the hapless, squabbling rebels into shape?

No,that hospital is not in Libya but in Bahrain: the Salmaniya Medical Complex, the tiny state’s main civil hospital.  And, of course, the more than one thousand heavily armed invading troops who are backing the local police terrorizing the hospital, “disappearing” doctors, and brutally crushing the local uprising are Saudis.

The same Saudis who gave the U.S. and Nato the green light to intervene to save the largely Sunni rebels in Libya. In exchange for which America discretely turned its back as the Saudis invaded Bahrain to prevent a Shiite majority there from toppling  a repressive Sunni monarch. God only knows what the experience will do to radicalize tens perhaps hundreds of thousands of Shiites.

But true to its promise, America’s back remains turned.

A  footnote:  Such smarmy diplomatic trade-offs are not at all unique. In 1991, for instance, the U.S. and its coalition allies were also looking for Arab “cover” for their move into Kuwait. In exchange for agreeing to back the invasion, Syria was given—among other things--a free hand to take control of most of Lebanon. The European Community also lifted economic sanctions it had imposed against Syria, while Britain restored diplomatic relations. In the end it was all symbolic: none of the 18,000 Syrian troops who joined the coalition forces in Saudi Arabia ever fought. [See Barry Lando Web of Deceit, (Other Press, New York.2006) pp. 140-141]

Secret History of the "Arab Spring" Chapter 7

Recruits for Al Qaeda

Since 9/11 the overriding concern of U.S. policy across the Middle East and Central Asia has been to defeat Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on that obsession. Yet when the secret history of the current “Arab Spring” is written, we may learn that one of the many unintended consequences of U.S. attempts to keep up with—and influence--the historic events, was to provide a flood of new recruits to radical Islam.

 The immediate cause: Saudi intervention in Bahrain.

While America and its allies have launched a military effort to protect the rebels in Libya, America has voiced only muted protests as its major Arab ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, crushes the rebels in Bahrain—with what could be ruinous reverberations for all concerned. 

The rebels in Bahrain are predominately Shiites—who have long chafed under minority Sunnite rule. Riding a mounting wave of popular protests, the Shiites seemed to be on the road to forcing the government in Manama to accept at least some of their demands.

With the Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain, U.S. officials have also been concerned about the unrest. But their attempts to encourage the government to meet some basic demands for change failed. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, visiting Manama on 12 March, criticized the regime for its “baby steps” toward reform.

Meanwhile King Abdullah in neighboring Saudi Arabia looked on with horror as the Arab Spring came sweeping towards him. The Saudis (Sunnis) have their own restive Shiite minority. The King was also concerned that a Shiite breakthrough in Bahrain would strengthen Iran’s sway in the region.

Even more alarming for Abdullah--the alacrity with which Obama turned his back on one-time dictator allies. America’s unceremonious dumping of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was a shocking harbinger. Could Washington’s remaining key Arab ally be next?

Thus, on March 14^th the Saudis (along with their Gulf allies ) finally acted--dispatching a thousand troops along with tanks and armored vehicles across the causeway that separates them from Bahrain-to help brutally stifle the revolt.

In the process, the Saudi king reportedly ignored a specific request from Obama to stay out. The Hell with the duplicitous Americans! He’d had enough of following Washington’s lead. The Americans were shocked and humiliated. Relations between the two governments are supposedly at a nadir. 

That’s the official version. But when the history of these events is written, I imagine the real facts will tell a more Machiavellian tale: that the U.S. in fact gave a tacit go ahead to the Saudis to act—with disastrous results.

There have been some unconfirmed reports to that effect, and they make sense. There was a trade off: Libya for Bahrain. Without the Saudis, the U.S. could never have convinced the Arab League to ask for the creation of a no-fly zone over Libya. And without that Arab League resolution, the intervention in Libya would never have occurred.  The Saudis and their Gulf partners are also taking part to some extent in that intervention, to provide at least a façade of Arab participation.

In return, U.S. officials have been very muted in any criticism of the brutal crack-down in Bahrain—a country much more vital to Saudi interests, than is Libya.

And brutal it has been:  Backed up by the Saudis, Bahraini security forces and pro-regime thugs armed with swords and clubs attacked demonstrators throughout the kingdom. Human rights activists have reported that a total of 26 people have been killed, 300 have been imprisoned, and at least 35 people are missing in the three weeks since the crackdown began in earnest.

Yet scarcely a peep out of Washington.

O.K. you say, what’s wrong with the U.S. trading Bahrain for Libya. It’s realpolitik, right out of the Henry Kissinger playbook.

Except that the consequences of that Saudi intervention may prove much more disastrous to Western (and Saudi) interests than any possible positive fall-out from the adventure in Libya. 

That according to a study just issued by the International Crisis Group. What has happened, says the report, is that that from those hundreds of thousands of largely peaceful Shiite protestors in Bahrain, who had thought they could achieve change through peaceful protests--as the Americans have been advocating--that many of those thwarted, bloodied protestors may now turn to violence—exactly as Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups have been preaching.

 As the report puts it, “Manama’s crackdown and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention are dangerous moves that could stamp out hopes for peaceful transition in Bahrain and turn a mass movement for democratic reform into an armed conflict, while regionalizing an internal political struggle. They could also exacerbate sectarian tensions not only in Bahrain or the Gulf but across the region.

“Along with other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Saudi Arabia purportedly is responding to dual fears: that the takeover would be tantamount to an Iranian one. Both are largely unfounded. It also is concerned protests might inspire similar movements among its own Eastern Province Shiites, oblivious that its involvement is likelier to provoke than deter them.

“Bahrain’s brutal crackdown and Saudi interference fan flames both want to extinguish. The most effective response to the radical regime change threat or greater Iranian influence is not violent suppression of peaceful protests but political reform. Time is running short and trends are in the wrong direction.”

 “In short, the intervention likely achieved precisely the opposite of what it intended.”

Over the years, throughout the region, from Egypt to Yemen to Saudi Arabia, such repression and subsequent radicalization has been a vital source of recruits for Al Qaeda.  

Yet, on his latest visit to Saudi Arabia, Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense of what is still billed as the most powerful nation on the planet, Robert Gates reportedly didn’t even dare raise the issue of Bahrain issue King Abdullah.

Just imagine having to face the monarch’s wrath!

Secret History of the Libyan Uprising

The secret history of the Libyan Uprising (what you’re probably going to read some day)

U.N. resolution 1973 authorizes action to create a no-fly zone in Libya. It does not authorize the use of foreign troops on the ground.

President Obama seemed to accept that limitation when he made his famous “no U.S. boots on the ground” declaration--a statement that has been repeated by every U.S. spokesman since.

Since Obama’s declaration however, we have learned that, in fact, for several weeks CIA operatives have been active in Libya, supposedly to find targets for the missile and rocket attacks of the U.S. and its allies, as well as to get some idea of who the opposition is that Obama and Sarkozy et al have chosen to support. 

The joke was those CIA types are not wearing boots, but sneakers.

O.K. but now we learn, via Al Jazeera English, that there is a secret training site in Eastern Libya where U.S. and Egyptian Special Forces are giving basic weapons training to selected rebels. Those rebels are also now receiving more sophisticated weapons.

You can be sure those U.S. advisers are wearing boots. 0

That report was long expected. For when the secret history of this current struggle is written (there are already several books in the works), we will almost certainly learn that, despite Obama’s public protestations, he was advised prior to launching his Libyan adventure that U.S. “advisors” would more than likely also be needed.

Revelations will probably also make it clear that President Obama was also advised that those U.S. advisors could not just be limited to instructing the rebels how to fire their weapons, but would also have to train them, give them basic military skills. And it probably wouldn’t stop there.

Those advisors are likely also—behind the scenes—already filling key command roles: advising the rebels when and how to advance—either directly or in liaison with special forces from other countries with boots on the ground in Libya--everyone doing their best to maintain the fiction that those “advisors” aren’t there.  And that the rebels are calling their own shots.

For those American spooks and troops are not alone

According to other reports, special “Smash Squads” from Britain’s famed SAS have also been on the ground in Libya for several weeks now pursuing similar missions.

Perhaps they’re the same SAS teams who Britain supposedly dispatched to train Khadaffi’s  Special Forces a year or so back —part of the warming of relations between the two countries. 

And considering the determination of France’s President Sarkozy to push for the original attacks, reports that elite French troops are also on the ground in Libya are almost certainly true as well.

The above would mesh with an unconfirmed report from a Pakistani newspaper claiming that:

“According to an exclusive report confirmed by a Libyan diplomat in the region “the three Western states have landed their “special forces troops in Cyrinacia and are now setting up their bases and training centres” to reinforce the rebel forces who are resisting pro-Qaddafi forces in several adjoining areas.

A Libyan official who requested not to be identified said that the U.S. and British military gurus were sent on February 23 and 24 night through American and French warships and small naval boats off Libyan ports of Benghazi and Tobruk.”

Which brings us to the declaration of an American military official briefing the press.   When he was asked, whether the coalition forces communicate with the rebels in Libya, he said, no. “Regarding coordination with rebel forces, nothing. Our mission is to protect civilians,” said the official. “It’s not about the rebels, this is about protection of civilians,” he added.

Libya and the Danger of Universal Principles

There’s a problem when world leaders announce fervid support for universal principals: there is no way those high-flying words are not going to be flung back at them at some another time, during some other crisis. When they will have no choice but to lie or duck and scamper for cover.

Case in point:  At the Elysees Palace in Paris today, President Nicholas Sarkozy’s declaration after France, the U.S. and several European and Arab states met to work out the mechanics of the no-fly zone over Libya.

France and its partners are acting, Sarkozy declared, to support the legitimate democratic aspirations of the Libyan people--unarmed civilians who have risen up to overthrow a detested dictatorship. There is no way the international community could stand by and watch innocent civilians be slaughtered. This was the same justification cited by President Obama the day before after the U.N. Security Council vote.

Sarkozy took no questions after his statement. Nor did Obama. For good reason.

-Questions such as—Mr. President, how do you justify intervening in Libya to prevent the bloody repression of a popular uprising, when we watch as your good allies, the Saudis--move their forces into Bahrain to quash a popular uprising in that country (where U.S. warships are permanently based.)?

-Or, Mr. President, do you have anything concrete to say about plans for U.N. intervention  in Yemen, where more than 50 demonstrators were shot down in cold blood, by snipers dressed as civilians, but apparently carrying military I.D.? 

-Or, President Sarkozy, does your declaration mean that France is now going to move militarily in your former colony, the Cote D’Ivoire, where your foreign minister has just condemned “a deliberate massacre of civilians” by the forces of President Laurent Gbagbo, the after another bombardment  killed almost thirty in Abidjan.  Gbagbo’s refusal to cede power after losing an election has resulted in the deaths of thousands. So , Mr. President??

-And, while we’re at it, Mr. President, what should the U.N. or your allies do if the people of Zimbabwe rise up?  Or the folks in Shanghai?

Our leaders’ dilemma is made much worse by technology.

There was a time, before the Internet and mobile phones, before satellites, and  24/7 television, when events took time—sometimes weeks or months--to unfold, When negotiations—say, between rebels in America and the British Crown, transpired with the stately speed of a sailing ship, when word of massacres and revolts could be written off as rumor, repressed for months or be buried for ever.

No longer.

Now events move at the speed of the Internet.  Once isolated villages in Tunisia and Yemen and the Northeastern coast of Japan are all part of the global village. Billions across the planet can both report and witness. Ambassadors become figures of ceremony, looking on with the rest of us as world leaders, who once had days or weeks to ponder their communications, now address each other directly, responding almost instantly—blustering, menacing--with no time for thought or reflection.  Bouncing off each other like billiard balls.

The result also is that the duplicity that underlies what we call “affairs of state,” --the  hypocrisy and cynicism that used to be veiled by vague declarations, by time and distance—that deception becomes ever more blatant.

Such as the Orwellian exchange recently on Al Jazzeera English--when a representative of the Iranian government excoriated a Saudi official for using its army to repress the popular democratic uprising in Bahrain. And the Iranian did it with a straight face, mind you.

On the other hand, the leaders of the United Arab Emirates have managed a bow to all sides:
They are participating in the Saudi-led repression in Bahrain. But their Minister of Foreign Affairs, H.H Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, also showed up today in Paris to announce UAE backing for the no-fly zone and the rescue of the democratic uprising in Libya.

Being an accomplished statesmen, I imagine the good sheikh made that statement with a straight face, as well.

Libya 2011-Iraq 1991

Rebels rise up to overthrow a bloody dictator and the world looks on as the revolt turns into a stand-off.  Libya in 2011 is a distant echo of Iraq in 1991, when Iraqi Shiites and Kurds erupted after U.S. forces defeated the Saddam’s military after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

That led to one of the more shameful episodes in America’s dealings with Iraq:  an American president calling for an uprising, then turning his back, leaving tens, possibly hundreds of thousands to be slaughtered. I recounted that sorry affair in a documentary about “The Trial of Saddam Hussein”,excerpted on Youtube. See part5 and part 6.

In fact, it was President George H.W. Bush who, in February 2001, as the Iraqi army was being driven from Kuwait, called on the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

That call was rebroadcast in Iraq by clandestine CIA radio stations and printed in millions of leaflets dropped by the U.S. Air Force across the country. Problem was, the Iraqis didn't realize until it was too late that Bush and James Baker, his pragmatic secretary of state, didn't really mean it.

When it looked as if the insurgents might actually succeed, the American president turned his back. The White House and its allies wanted Saddam replaced not by a popular revolt which they couldn't control but by a military leader more amenable to U.S. interests. They were also fearful that Iranian influence might spread in the wake of a Shiite takeover. In fact, however, American officials refused to meet with rebel leaders desperate to explain their cause.

Though Washington explained later explained they had turned against the uprising because key Arab allies in the region, like the Saudis, were fearful of a Shiite victory in Iraq, in fact, the U.S. later turned down a Saudi proposal to continue aiding the Shiites.

So, as the United States permitted Saddam's attack helicopters to devastate the rebels, American troops just a few kilometers away from the slaughter were ordered to give no aid to those under attack. Instead they destroyed huge stocks of captured weapons rather than let them fall into rebel hands. According to some of the former rebels in Iraq, American troops prevented them from marching on Baghdad.

Then, as Saddam's forces began carrying out the horrific acts of repression, American forces were ordered to withdraw from Iraq. And all the while George H.W. Bush answered calls for the U.S. to act with denials that the U.S. had any responsibility in fomenting the rebellion in the first place.

In the end he agreed to provide a no-fly zone to protect the Kurds in the North, but that was only because the plight of the Kurdish refugees was being dramatically broadcast around the globe by CNN. Bush had no choice. There was no such TV coverage of the slaughter of the Shiites in the South. So no need for Bush to react.

(The description of the U.S. role in the 1991 uprising is recounted at length in my book Web of Deceit-a History of Western Complicity in Iraq from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush--and (as mentioned above) in video form, from a segment of a documentary I did on the Trial of Saddam Hussein, which is posted on Youtube )