“Shock and Awe” in Libya

Sad to see that Canada’s NDP and The Green Party did not foresee the inevitable mission creep in Libya when they both supported the bombing mission in Libya.

The following is a good article I found on the subject of this type of mission.

April 27, 2011
www.consortiumnews.com

Trying ‘Shock and
Awe’ in Libya [ http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/042711.html ]

By Robert Parry

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek.]

Having laughed off Libyan government peace feelers, Official Washington is
now beating the drum for a new round of “shock and awe” bombings and
close-combat air strikes to “finish the job” of ousting Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

Typically, this Washington debate is being framed as a series of choices for
President Barack Obama and NATO: one, abandon the current campaign of air
strikes and let Gaddafi prevail; two, continue the conflict at its current
pace and accept a stalemate; or three, commit more military resources to
“win.”

The neoconservative-dominated opinion circles of Washington are almost
unanimous in their determination to push Obama and NATO to adopt option
three. It is a consensus not seen since almost all these same Serious People
supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which started off with
the “shock and awe” bombing that was supposed to solve everything.

Left out of today’s Libyan debate is any consideration of building on the
African Union’s proposal for a ceasefire and a transition to democracy with
Gaddafi on the sidelines. Gaddafi’s embattled regime agreed to those terms,
but the plan was spurned by anti-Gaddafi rebels and doesn’t even rate a
mention when the “options” are listed in the Big Media.

Besides taking a page from Bush’s “shock and awe” playbook, the Smart Talk
in Washington also suggests modeling “regime change” in Libya after NATO’s
bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Those NATO strikes against the capital of Belgrade inflicted hundreds of
civilian deaths, with estimates ranging from about 500 to more than 1,200,
including the killing of 16 people working at the Serb TV station.

NATO generals justified their bombing of Serb TV on the premise that “enemy
propaganda” is a legitimate target in wartime, even if the station’s
personnel were unarmed and defenseless. Since then, the intentional
targeting of civilian TV and radio stations has become part of Western
military doctrine when trying to overthrow Arab and Third World regimes.

The Serbian model is now being applied to Libya with the blessings of senior
military officials who participated in that campaign. For instance, Gen.
John P. Jumper, who commanded U.S. Air Force units over Serbia, told the New
York Times that bombing high-profile institutional sites in Belgrade proved
more effective than the destruction of Serbian tanks and other military
targets.

“It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in
Belgrade and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade,
that [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic’s own people began to turn on
him,” Jumper said.

Now, Jumper said a similar approach is being pursued in Libya. This week,
NATO planes bombed Libya’s capital of Tripoli briefly knocking Libyan TV off
the air and blasting Gaddafi’s personal residence (although NATO insisted
that the raid wasn’t an assassination attempt, wink-wink).

In other words, the anti-Serb air campaign, which was estimated to kill four
Serb civilians for every Serb soldier slain, is now becoming the model for
NATO’s military strategy in Libya.

Contradicting a Mandate

One might think the application of the Serbian model to Libya would raise
red flags in the U.S. news media since it suggests that NATO may end up
killing large numbers of civilians under a United Nations mandate to protect
civilians.

However, led by the Washington Post and the New York Times, major U.S. news
outlets have ignored this obvious contradiction. Instead, there’s a renewed
excitement over the prospect of a new “shock and awe” bombing of an “enemy”
country that’s been stripped of its air defenses.

In influential U.S. opinion circles, it’s pro-war propaganda all the time.
Indeed, the New York Times seems to publish only editorials and essays
favoring an expanded conflict.

Dominating the Times op-ed page on Tuesday was a call from retired Army Lt.
Gen. James M. Dubik to “finish the job” in Libya.

Dubik, who served in the Iraq War and is now a senior fellow at the
Institute for the Study of War, framed the debate in a way to make
escalation and victory the only “responsible” choice. He also projected a
long-term U.S. and NATO presence in Libya after Gaddafi’s defeat.

“If Colonel Qaddafi falls, the United States and NATO will have a
responsibility to help shape the postwar order, including providing security
to prevent a liberated Libya from sinking into chaos,” Dubik wrote.
“Washington must start planning and preparing for this complex and expensive
contingency and muster the substantial political will required to see it
through.”

In other words, we’re looking at another U.S./NATO occupation of a
“liberated” Arab or Muslim country.

What’s also clear from the U.S. news coverage is that the Times editors and
other opinion-shapers are engaged in Dubik’s important first step, building
the “political will” for this new war and future occupation by excluding any
serious questions about the wisdom of the desired course.

The Times on Wednesday published another pro-war op-ed ­ focusing on
Gaddafi’s supposed failure to provide quality milk to his countrymen.
Meanwhile, there has been zero reexamination of a key rationale for U.S.
participation in the war, Gaddafi’s alleged guilt in the Pan Am 103 bombing
over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

“The blood of Americans is on [Gaddafi’s] hands because he was responsible
for the bombing of Pan Am 103,” declared Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, after
a recent trip to rebel-held Benghazi during which McCain joined the call for
a larger U.S. military role.

The Times and other leading U.S. news outlets also treat Libya’s guilt as a
flat fact, but the case actually remains murky.

In 2001, a Scottish court did convict Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi for the
bombing which killed 270 people. But the judgment appears to have been more
a political compromise than an act of justice. One of the judges told
Dartmouth government professor Dirk Vandewalle about “enormous pressure put
on the court to get a conviction.”

Megrahi’s conviction assuaged the understandable human desire to see someone
punished for such a heinous crime, albeit a possibly innocent man.

Reopening a Terror Case

In 2007, after the testimony of a key government witness was discredited,
the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to reconsider the
conviction as a grave miscarriage of justice. However, that review was
proceeding slowly in 2009 when Scottish authorities released Megrahi on
humanitarian grounds, after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

Megrahi dropped his appeal in order to gain the early release, but that
doesn’t mean he was guilty. He has continued to assert his innocence and an
objective press corps would reflect the doubts regarding his conviction.

The Scottish court’s purported reason for finding Megrahi guilty ­ while
acquitting his co-defendant Lamin Khalifa Fhimah ­ was the testimony of Toni
Gauci, owner of a clothing store in Malta who allegedly sold Megrahi a
shirt, the remnants of which were found with the shards of the suitcase that
contained the bomb.

The rest of the case rested on a theory that Megrahi put the luggage on a
flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to a connecting
flight to London, where it was transferred onto Pan Am 103 bound for New
York, a decidedly unlikely way to undertake an act of terrorism given all
the random variables involved.

Megrahi would have had to assume that three separate airport security
systems ­ at Malta, Frankfort and London ­ would fail to give any serious
scrutiny to an unaccompanied suitcase or to detect the bomb despite security
officials being on the lookout for just such a threat.

As historian William Blum recounted in a Consortiumnews.com article after
Megrahi’s 2001 conviction, “The case for the suitcase’s hypothetical travels
must also deal with the fact that, according to Air Malta, all the
documented luggage on KM180 was collected by passengers in Frankfurt and did
not continue in transit to London, and that two Pan Am on-duty officials in
Frankfurt testified that no unaccompanied luggage was introduced onto Pan Am
103A, the feeder flight to London.”

There also were problems with Gauci’s belated identification of Megrahi as
the shirt-buyer a decade after the fact. Gauci had made contradictory IDs
and had earlier given a physical description that didn’t match Megrahi.
Gauci reportedly received a $2 million reward for his testimony and then
moved to Australia, where he went into retirement.

In 2007, the Scottish review panel decided to reconsider Megrahi’s
conviction after concluding that Gauci’s testimony was unbelievable. And
without Gauci’s testimony, the case against Megrahi was virtually the same
as the case against his co-defendant who was acquitted.

However, after Megrahi’s conviction in 2001, more international pressure was
put on Libya, which was then regarded as the archetypal “rogue” state.
Indeed, it was to get onerous economic sanctions lifted that Libya took
“responsibility” for the Pan Am attack and paid reparations to the victims’
families even as Libyan officials continued to deny guilt.

Yet, despite these doubts about the Pan Am 103 case, the U.S. news media
continues to treat Libya’s guilt as a flat fact.

A Defector Questioned

Earlier this month, there was some excitement over the possibility that
Gaddafi would be fingered as the Pan Am 103 mastermind by a high-level
defector, former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa, who was believed to
be in charge of Libyan intelligence in 1988.

Moussa Koussa was questioned by Scottish authorities but apparently shed
little new light on the case and was allowed to go free after the interview.
Very quickly the press interest over Moussa Koussa faded away.

Yet, as the clamor now builds in Official Washington for an escalation of
U.S. participation in the war ­ and as the Pan Am 103 case is cited over and
over as justification ­ there has been no serious reexamination of the
mystery, only the repetition of Libya’s assumed guilt.

Looking across the landscape of the U.S. news media, it is hard to find any
major voice suggesting peace negotiations with Gaddafi’s government or even
advocating that the sincerity of its acceptance of the African Union’s plan
for a cease-fire and democratic reforms should be put to the test.

Instead, virtually all the talking heads are armchair warriors, with the
neoconservative editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times again
leading the way by condemning Obama’s decision to minimize U.S. military
participation.

“If his real aim were to plunge NATO into a political crisis, or to exhaust
the air forces and military budgets of Britain and France,which are doing
most of the bombing, this would be a brilliant strategy. As it is, it is
impossible to understand,” the Post wrote on April 17:.

“Mr. Obama appears less intent on ousting Mr. Gaddafi or ensuring NATO’s
success than in proving an ideological point, that the United States need
not take the lead in a military operation that does not involve vital U.S.
interests.

“How else to explain his decision to deny NATO the two most effective ground
attack airplanes in the world ,the AC-130 and A-10 Warthog , which exist
only in the U.S. Air Force and which were attacking Mr. Gaddafi’s tanks and
artillery until April 4?”

The New York Times has been equally adamant about seeing the AC-130s and
A-10 Warthogs put back into action mowing down Libyan troops loyal to
Gaddafi. “Mr. Obama should authorize [the ground-attack planes] to fly again
under NATO command,” the Times declared on April 14, reiterating a demand
that the editors had made just a week earlier.

Yet, if NATO’s real goal is to minimize civilian casualties, Western
countries might want to think twice about taking sides in what is shaping up
as an ugly tribal war. They might even give peace a chance, rather than
replay the civilian bombings in Belgrade or the “shock and awe” over Iraq.