We Have Seen This Movie Before: The Fascists Have Arrived

 

in World — by Chris Hedges — 27/09/2022

The failure of the neoliberal order—which continues to ignore the needs and aspirations of the people—gives fuel to an ascendant far right that feeds on the despair and humiliation of the working class.

“The Bankruptcy of the Liberal Ass.” (Cartoon: Mr. Fish)

Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall. Billions of dollars are diverted by Western nations at a time of economic crisis and staggering income inequality to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. The liberal class, terrified by the rise of neo-fascism and demagogues such as Donald Trump, have thrown in their lot with discredited and reviled establishment politicians who slavishly do the bidding of the war industry, oligarchs, and corporations.

The bankruptcy of the liberal class means that those who decry the folly of permanent war and NATO expansion, mercenary trade deals, exploitation of workers by globalization, austerity and neoliberalism come increasingly from the far-right. This right-wing rage, dressed up in the United States as Christian fascism, has already made huge gains in Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Bulgaria and France and may take power in the Czech Republic, where inflation and rising energy costs have seen the number of Czechs falling below the poverty line double.

By next spring, following a punishing winter of rolling blackouts and months when families struggle to pay for food and heat, what is left of our anemic western democracy could be largely extinguished.

Extremism is the political cost of pronounced social inequality and political stagnation. Demagogues, who promise moral and economic renewal, vengeance against phantom enemies and a return to lost glory, rise out of the morass. Hatred and violence, already at the boiling point, are legitimized. A reviled ruling class, and the supposed civility and democratic norms it espouses, are ridiculed.

It is not, as the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill points out, as if fascism ever went away. “The U.S. did not defeat fascism in WWII,” he writes, “it discretely internationalized it.” After World War II the U.S., U.K. and other Western governments collaborated with hundreds of former Nazis and Japanese war criminals, who they integrated into western intelligence services, as well as fascist regimes such as those in Spain and Portugal. They supported right-wing anti-communist forces in Greece during its civil war in 1946 to 1949, and then backed a right-wing military coup in 1967. NATO also had a secret policy of operating fascist terrorist groups. Operation Gladio, as the BBC detailed in a now-forgotten investigative series, created “secret armies,” networks of illegal stay-behind soldiers, who would remain behind enemy lines if the Soviet Union made a military move into Europe. In actuality, the “secret armies” carried-out assassinations, bombings, massacres and false flag terror attacks against leftists, trade unionists, and others throughout Europe.

See my interview with Stephen Kinzer about the post-war activities of the CIA, including its recruitment of Nazi and Japanese war criminals and its creation of black sites where former Nazis were hired to interrogate, torture and murder suspected leftists, labor leaders and communists, detailed in his book Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, here.

Fascism, which has always been with us, is again ascendant. The far-right politician Giorgia Meloni is expected to become Italy’s first female prime minister after elections on Sunday. In a coalition with two other far-right parties, Meloni is forecast to win more than 60 percent of the seats in Parliament, though the left-leaning 5-Star Movement may put a dent in those expectations.

Meloni got her start in politics as a 15-year-old activist for the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, founded after World War II by supporters of Benito Mussolini. She calls EU bureaucrats agents of “nihilistic global elites driven by international finance.” She peddles the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that non-white immigrants are being permitted to enter Western nations as part of a plot to undermine or “replace” the political power and culture of white people. She has called on the Italian navy to turn back boats with immigrants, which the far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini did in 2018. Her Fratelli d’Italia, Brothers of Italy, party is a close ally of Hungary’s President, Viktor Orban. A European Parliament resolution recently declared that Hungary can no longer be defined as a democracy.

Meloni and Orban are not alone. Sweden Democrats, which took over 20 percent of the vote in Sweden’s general election last week to become the country’s second-largest political party, was formed in 1988 from a neo-Nazi group called B.S.S., or Keep Sweden Swedish. It has deep fascist roots. Of the party’s 30 founders, 18 had Nazi affiliations, including several who served in the Waffen SS, according to Tony Gustaffson a historian and former Sweden Democrat member. France’s Marine Le Pen took over 41 percent of the vote in April against Emmanuel Macron. In Spain, the hard-right Vox party is the third largest party in Spain’s Parliament. The far-right German AfD or Alternative for Germany party took over 12 percent in federal elections in 2017, making it the third largest party, though it lost a couple percentage points in the 2021 elections. The U.S. has its own version of fascism embodied in a Republican party that coalesces in cult-like fashion around Donald Trump, embraces the magical thinking, misogyny, homophobia and white supremacy of the Christian Right and actively subverts the election process.

Economic collapse was indispensable to the Nazis’ rise to power. In the 1928 elections in Germany, the Nazi party received less than 3 percent of the vote. Then came the global financial crash of 1929. By early 1932, 40 percent of the German insured workforce, six million people, were unemployed. That same year, the Nazis became the largest political party in the German parliament. The Weimar government, tone deaf and hostage to the big industrialists, prioritized paying bank loans and austerity rather than feeding and employing a desperate population. It foolishly imposed severe restrictions on who was eligible for unemployment insurance. Millions of Germans went hungry. Desperation and rage rippled through the population. Mass rallies, led by a collection of buffoonish Nazis in brown uniforms who would have felt at home at Mar-a-Lago, denounced Jews, Communists, intellectuals, artists and the ruling class, as internal enemies. Hate was their main currency. It sold well.

The evisceration of democratic procedures and institutions, however, preceded the Nazis’ ascension to power in 1933. The Reichstag, the German Parliament, was as dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress.  The Socialist leader Friedrich Ebert, president from 1919 until 1925, and later Heinrich Brüning, chancellor from 1930 to 1932, relied on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to largely rule by decree to bypass the fractious Parliament. Article 48, which granted the president the right in an emergency to issue decrees, was “a trapdoor through which Germany could fall into dictatorship,” historian Benjamin Carter Hett writes.

Article 48 was the Weimar equivalent of the executive orders liberally used by Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to bypass our own legislative impasses. As in 1930s Germany, our courts  — especially the Supreme Court — have been seized by extremists. The press has bifurcated into antagonistic tribes where lies and truth are indistinguishable, and opposing sides are demonized. There is little dialogue or compromise, the twin pillars of a democratic system.

The two ruling parties slavishly serve the dictates of the war industry, global corporations and the oligarchy, to which it has given huge tax cuts. It has established the most pervasive and intrusive system of government surveillance in human history. It runs the largest prison system in the world. It has militarized the police.

Democrats are as culpable as Republicans. The Obama administration interpreted the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force as giving the executive branch the right to erase due process and act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Two weeks later, a U.S. drone strike killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar’s 16-year-old son, who was never linked to terrorism, along with 9 other teenagers at a cafe in Yemen. It was the Obama administration that signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force. It was the Obama administration that bailed out Wall Street and abandoned Wall Street’s victims. It was the Obama administration that repeatedly used the Espionage Act to criminalize those, such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who exposed government lies, crimes, and fraud. And it was the Obama administration that massively expanded the use of militarized drones.

The Nazis responded to the February 1933 burning of the Reichstag, which they likely staged, by employing Article 48 to push through the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State. The fascists instantly snuffed out the pretense of Weimar democracy. They legalized imprisonment without trial for anyone considered a national security threat. They abolished independent labor unions, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press, along with the privacy of postal and telephone communications.

The step from dysfunctional democracy to full-blown fascism was, and will again be, a small one. The hatred for the ruling class, embodied by the establishment Republican and Democratic parties, which have merged into one ruling party, is nearly universal. The public, battling inflation that is at a 40-year high and cost the average U.S. household an additional $717 a month in July alone, will increasingly see any political figure or political party willing to attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are true here and in Europe, where energy costs are expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is eating away at incomes.

The reconfiguration of society under neoliberalism to exclusively benefit the billionaire class, the slashing and privatization of public services, including schools, hospitals and utilities, along with deindustrialization, the profligate pouring of state funds and resources into the war industry, at the expense of the nation’s infrastructure and social services, and the building of the world’s largest prison system and militarization of police, have predictable results.

At the heart of the problem is a loss of faith in traditional forms of government and democratic solutions. Fascism in the 1930s succeeded, as Peter Drucker observed, not because people believed its conspiracy theories and lies but in spite of the fact that they saw through them. Fascism thrived in the face of “a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” He added, “nobody would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.”

As in the past, these new fascist parties cater to emotional yearnings. They give vent to feelings of abandonment, worthlessness, despair, and alienation. They promise unattainable miracles. They too peddle bizarre conspiracy theories including QAnon. But most of all, they promise vengeance against a ruling class that betrayed the nation.

Hett defines the Nazis as “a nationalist protest movement against globalization.” The rise of the new fascism has its roots in a similar exploitation by global corporations and oligarchs. More than anything else, people want to regain control over their lives, if only to punish those blamed and scapegoated for their misery.

We have seen this movie before.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2019).

Originally published by Scheerpost

Copyright Robert Scheer, 2020.

https://countercurrents.org/2022/09/we-have-seen-this-movie-before-the-fascists-have-arrived/

Congress Has Yet to Investigate the Bioweapons Attack Against It

 

BY SAM HUSSEINI

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Photograph Source: US Postal Service – Public Domain

Congress has had hearing after hearing on Jan. 6, with another due to start on Wednesday. For certain elements of the Democratic Party, this has become something of a Passion Play.

In contrast, as I note in the latest Capitol Hill Citizen, the Democrats, especially in the House, have blocked any meaningful Congressional inquiry into the origins of the pandemic which has killed millions and turned everyone’s life upside down for years.

But Jan. 6 we are told was an unprecedented attack on the Capitol, the very seat and symbol of our democracy. The massive attention paid to the attack has nothing to do with partisan politics, the Democratic Party leadership claims, but is simply defending the integrity of the foundations our nation was built upon.

But after the 9/11 attacks, Congress itself came under a false flag biowarfare attack, shutting down Congress and terrorizing the entire country.

There was never a single Congressional inquiry.

The effects of the 2001 anthrax attacks could hardly have been more far reaching.

Someone mailed letters with deadly anthrax to a series of targets including Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

The two had been raising concerns about the Patriot Act, which the Bush/Cheney administration wanted to ram through Congress after 9/11.

The anthrax letters were a “false flag” attack. That is, whoever sent them deceptively tried to pin the attacks on innocents. In this case, Arabs or Muslims. Text in the anthrax letters included the date “9-11-01” and the words: “You can not stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is Great.”

Brian Ross of ABC claimed repeatedly that the spores in the attack letters had been coated in bentonite — the Iraqi method of weaponization. Ross’s anonymous government sources who claimed Iraq was the culprit were shown to be lying, but ABC to this day still protects their identity. Why? (See my piece “Should Media Expose Sources Who Lied to Them?“)

The 9/11 attacks were obviously a major traumatic event, but the anthrax attacks which followed sent fear to virtually everyone in the country. People were frightened to open their mail. The terror was palpable. Many could hardly think straight. With much of the public gripped by panic, Bush, Cheney and company succeeded in getting the so-called Patriot Act through. Bush and Cheney also launched the invasion of Afghanistan during this period and would launch the deceptive campaign to invade Iraq a year later, in the Fall of 2002, exactly 20 years ago.

Graeme MacQueen, author of The Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, notes: “By the end of 2001, however, all stories of foreign terrorists had collapsed. The nature of the spore preparations revealed the operation as an inside job — the spores came from one of three possible labs, all inside the U.S. and serving the military and the CIA.”

The FBI would try to pin blame for the attacks on a series of individuals. Its case fell apart each time. Eventually, it blamed Fort Detrick Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins. Just then, he died of an alleged suicide. So no case was brought forward. There was no trial.

In 2008, Leahy, one of the targets of the attacks, told then-FBI head Robert Mueller, who claimed that deceased government scientist Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator: “I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people.”

In 2010, President Obama actually threatened to veto a move to investigate the anthrax attacks.

In 2015 Richard Lambert, who was for some years the Inspector in Charge of the FBI’s anthrax investigation, charged that “While Bruce Ivins may have been the anthrax mailer, there is a wealth of exculpatory evidence to the contrary which the FBI continues to conceal from Congress and the American people.”

Lambert said: “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” The New York Times reported: “He declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.”

While postal workers and other were dying from the anthrax in 2001, Judy Miller of the New York Times would get harmless powder that appeared to be anthrax, causing her to become a major media figure; her book Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War had just come out.

Whitney Webb has noted the role of others like Robert Kadlec, who was the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration; it was a position he actually helped create during the Bush administration during which time he help produce the Dark Winter bioterrorism exercise held in June 2001.

Immediately after the events of September 11, 2001, Kadlec became a special advisor on biological warfare to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. In the days that followed, Rumsfeld openly and publicly stated that he expected America’s enemies, specifically Saddam Hussein, to aid unspecified terrorist groups in obtaining chemical and biological weapons, a narrative that was analogous to that used in the Dark Winter exercise that Kadlec had helped create.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Dark Winter’s other co-authors — Randall Larsen, Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby — personally briefed Dick Cheney on Dark Winter, at a time when Cheney and his staff had been warned by another Dark Winter figure, Jerome Hauer, to take the antibiotic Cipro to prevent anthrax infection. It is unknown how many members of the administration were taking Cipro and for how long.

Also see Webb’s interview with Robbie Martin from last year.

Several times, including in 2011, shortly before the tenth anniversary of the anthrax attacks, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), who is a scientist, introduced the Anthrax Attacks Investigation Act. It never got anywhere.

Journalists Bob Coen and Eric Nadler produced the documentary Anthrax War, which was aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The documentary features Leahy asking Mueller: “These weapons that were used against the American people — and they’re weapons; they’re weapons — the weapons that were used against the American people and Congress — are you aware of any facility in the United States that is capable of making the weapons that were used on Congress and the American people besides Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and the Battelle facility in West Jefferson, Ohio?” Mueller would not respond in public.

Anthrax War quotes noted scientist, Jonathan King, a professor of molecular biology at MIT: “The response to the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism initiative has been to launch a nationwide billion-dollar campaign to, quote ‘defend us from unknown terrorists.’ But the character of this program is roughly as follows. You say well, what would the terrorists come up with? What’s the nastiest, most dangerous, most difficult to diagnose, difficult to treat, microorganisms that we can think of? Well, let’s go bring that organism into existence, so that we can figure out how to defend against that. The fact of the matter is, it’s indistinguishable from an offensive program in which you would do the same thing.”

Anthrax War also features Putin charging that, as a result of U.S. government actions: “It’s now obvious that a fresh round of a new arms race has started.”

Indeed, the U.S. government perversely drastically increased funding for biodefense/biowarfare after the anthrax attacks, a prime example of putting out the fire with gasoline. And that’s just one of many consequences of the attacks that has not had a reckoning.

It is beyond depraved that no real investigation took place regarding the anthrax attacks. Congress in 2001 was gripped by fear and failed to fulfill any legitimate democratic function or to be a meaningful check on an administration intent on repression and war.

What’s Congress’s excuse for not investigating the attacks in the two decades since? Or now?

Andrew Sullivan, an influential writer, in October 2001, during the anthrax biowarfare attack, effectively argued for nuking Iraq, writing the piece “The Coming Conflict“:

We have to extend it to Iraq. It is by far the most likely source of this weapon; it is clearly willing to use such weapons in the future; and no war against terrorism of this kind can be won without dealing decisively with the Iraqi threat. We no longer have any choice in the matter. Slowly, incrementally, a Rubicon has been crossed. The terrorists have launched a biological weapon against the United States. They have therefore made biological warfare thinkable and thus repeatable. We once had a doctrine that such a Rubicon would be answered with a nuclear response. We backed down on that threat in the Gulf War but Saddam didn’t dare use biological weapons then. Someone has dared to use them now. Our response must be as grave as this new threat. I know that this means that this conflict is deepening and widening beyond its initial phony stage. But what choice do we have? Inaction in the face of biological warfare is an invitation for more in a world where that is now thinkable.

Sullivan is in fact correct on his last point: “Inaction in the face of biological warfare is an invitation for more in a world where that is now thinkable.”

It’s just that the “terrorists” aren’t foreign Arabs or Muslims, but elements within the U.S. government.

This article first appeared on Sam Husseini’s Substack page.

Sam Husseini is an independent journalist. He writes at husseini.substack.com.         

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/29/congress-has-yet-to-investigate-the-bioweapons-attack-against-it/

European gas prices soar on Russian pipeline news

 

The export license of the TurkStream operator has been revoked by Dutch authorities due to EU sanctions

© Getty Images / B2M Productions

Natural gas prices in Europe rocketed more than 10% on Friday, to $2,100 per thousand cubic meters, following news that the operator of the TurkStream pipeline had lost its license because of the latest EU sanctions on Russia.

November gas futures at the TTF hub in the Netherlands were trading at $2,087 per thousand cubic meters, or €205.995 per megawatt hour.

Prices have seen upward pressure due to uncertainty over supply after the Russian-owned operator of the TurkStream pipeline, South Stream Transport, said on Thursday that the Netherlands had withdrawn its export license.

Media reports claim that if the TurkStream natural gas route is damaged, the operator won’t be able to mount repairs because of the sanctions. However, South Stream Transport stated it will continue gas transportation, adding it had already requested the resumption of the license.

READ MORE: Key Russian Black Sea gas pipeline under threat – US state media

The TurkStream pipeline, which has an annual capacity of 33 billion cubic meters of gas, supplies Russian fuel to Türkiye and Southern Europe. Launched in 2020, it has carried some 18 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas to Türkiye and 16.8 bcm to European customers, according to Daily Sabah.

Following the sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines, TurkStream remains the only conduit for Russian natural gas to the EU besides the pipelines that pass through Ukraine.

https://www.rt.com/business/563778-european-gas-prices-soar/

Understanding Libya’s Relentless Destabilization

 

BY JOHN P. RUEHL

Photograph Source: Leonhard Lenz – CC0

After leading a military coup in 1969, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi cemented his rule over Libya for more than 40 years. A variety of different political ideologies—Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, socialism, Islamic leftism, and others—characterized his leadership, which were further reinforced by a cult of personality. While living standards for Libyans increased under his rule, Gaddafi attracted resentment among some non-Arab populations, Islamic extremists, and other political opponents.

As the Arab Spring spread outward from neighboring Tunisia into Libya in February 2011, protestors and militant groups seized parts of the country. Loyalist armed forces retook control of much of what they had lost over the next few weeks after the outbreak of the protests, but Gaddafi’s historical antagonism toward Western governments saw them seize the opportunity to impose a no-fly zone and bombing campaign against Libyan forces in March 2011.

Alongside assistance from regional Middle Eastern allies, the NATO-led intervention was successful in helping local militant groups topple Gaddafi, who was later captured and executed in October 2011. Soon after his death, questions were immediately raised about how Libya could be politically restructured and avoid becoming a failed state. After militant groups refused to disarm, they along with their allies began to contest territory and control over Libya’s fragile new national institutions.

The National Transitional Council (NTC) was established to coordinate rebel groups against Gaddafi, and naturally inherited much of the Libyan government after the war. But a number of countries did not recognize its authority, and after handing power over to the General National Congress (GNC) in 2012, Libya’s weak central government steadily lost political control over its enormous territory to competing groups.

Libya’s population of almost 7 million people lives in a highly urbanized society that has led to the development of strong regional identities among those living in its northern coastal cities. There has also historically been an east-west divide between the two coastal provinces of Cyrenaica in the east and Tripolitania in the west.

A large Turkish and part-Turkish minority also live throughout Libya’s major cities, particularly in the city of Misrata. Most of them have descended from the Ottoman troops who married local women during Ottoman rule from 1551-1912, and though not a strictly homogenous group, the majority revolted against Gaddafi as nationwide protests began in Libya.

The historical lack of central authority in Libya’s more rural south resulted in widespread autonomy for the Tuareg tribe in the southwest and the Tubu tribe in the southeast. While the Tuaregs largely supported Gaddafi, the Tubu joined the revolutionaries, sparking increased tension between these two tribes to gain control over the city of Ubari, local smuggling routes, and energy infrastructure.

Alongside ethnic and cultural disputes, Libya was further destabilized by radical Islamists after the fall of Gaddafi. Mass unemployment among Libya’s relatively young population fueled recruitment for ISIS and the Al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Sharia. Having gained battlefield experience and with limited economic prospects, many militants in Libya had little incentive to return to civilian life, while the influx of foreign jihadists also kept the violence ongoing.

Rivalries between these numerous factions helped lead to the outbreak of the second Libyan civil war in 2014. The UN-brokered Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) was signed in December 2015 to create a Presidential Council (PC) for appointing a unity government in Tripoli but failed to curtail growing violence between local actors.

Two major entities came to dominate the country. The Government of National Accord (GNA), which was presided over by the PC, was recognized in March 2016 to lead Libya, with Fayez Serraj as the Libyan prime minister. This move partly incorporated elements of Libya’s political Islamic factions.

The Libyan House of Representatives (HoR), meanwhile, refused to endorse the GNA, and relocated to Tobruk in Cyrenaica after political pressure and Islamist militias forced it out of Tripoli in 2014. The HoR is led by former General Khalifa Haftar, who commands the Libyan National Army (LNA).

The GNA retained official recognition by the UN as well as Libya’s most important economic institutions, including the Central Bank of Libya (CBL). But both the GNA and the HoR continued to fight for influenceover the National Oil Corporation (NOC), while many other national institutions were forced to work with both factions.

Military force has also been integral to enforcing rival claims to Libya’s leadership. In 2017, Haftar’s forces seized Benghazi, consolidating power across much of the east and center of the country. But his attempt to take Tripoli in 2019-2020 was repelled by GNA and allied forces, prompting an HoR retreat on several fronts. A ceasefire between the GNA and the rival administration of the LNA declared an end to the war in October 2020, but tensions and violence persisted.

Libya’s civil conflict has also been inflamed by outside powers. Turkey opposed the original NATO-led intervention in 2011 but supported Libyan Turks, some of whom founded the Libya Koroglu Association in 2015, to coordinate with Turkey. Ankara has also supported the GNA with arms, money, and diplomatic support for years, and Turkish forces and military technology were integral to repelling Haftar’s assault on Tripoli.

Turkey’s business interests in Libya and desire to increase its power in the Mediterranean remain Ankara’s core initiatives, and in June it voted to extend the mandate for military deployment in Libya for another 18 months. Both Turkey and Qatar, which has also been a strong backer of the GNA, are close with the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhoodand associated political circles in Libya, to attempt to promote a brand of political Islam that rivals Saudi-led initiatives.

With few core interests in Libya, the U.S. has shown tacit support for intervening again in a conflict it had allegedly won, but from 2015 to 2019, U.S. airstrikes and military support helped the GNA push ISIS out of many Libyan cities. Yet, Washington has remained wary of being associated with the Libyan conflict and with Islamists allied with the GNA, and the U.S. harbored and provided support to Haftar for decades to pressure Gaddafi before the civil war.

Egypt has been one of the HoR’s most crucial allies, providing weapons, military support, and safe haven through Libya’s eastern border. Besides protecting Libya’s Egyptian population, Egypt’s military-led government is also seeking to suppress political Islam in the region after Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood briefly ruled Egypt from 2011 to 2013 following Egypt’s own revolution. In 2020, Cairo approved its own intervention in Libya.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have similar interests in suppressing rival political Islamic forces in the region and have provided funding and weaponry to Haftar. Doing so has brought them closer to Russia, which has also supported Haftar with substantial military assistance. This includes warplanes piloted by the Russian private military company Wagner, which is suspected to be partially bankrolled in Libya by the UAE.

Libya’s destabilization complements the Kremlin’s attempts to influence Europe. Haftar’s forces and supporters managed to block Libyan oil exports in 2020 and again earlier this year, threatening continental supply and increasing Russia’s leverage. Additionally, instability in the region and porous borders encourage migrant flows to Europe, often increasing the popularity of right-wing political parties which have grown closer to Russia over the last two decades.

The HoR has also found less direct aid from France. Officially, Paris has supported UN negotiations and the GNA and has sought to minimize perceptions of its involvement in the conflict. But the death of three undercover French soldiers in Libya in 2016 showed that Paris remained deeply involved in the country’s civil war, and it has sold billions in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to help Haftar. This is part of France’s efforts to suppress Islamist groups in Africa, where France retains considerable interests.

France’s position has brought criticism from Western allies. In 2019, Paris blocked an EU statement calling on Haftar to stop his offensive on Tripoli, while its support for Haftar has severely undermined its relationship with Italy, which has seen its economic influence in Libya decline.

Since the conclusion of the second Libyan civil war in 2020, steps have been taken to unify the country. A Government of National Unity was established in 2021 to consolidate Libya’s political forces, and the new Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh reached an agreement with Haftar in July 2022 to enforce a ceasefire.

But based on the current dynamics of limited intervention, there is relatively little risk and high rewards for foreign powers to continue destabilizing Libya. Turkey and Russia are also using the conflict to add to their leverage over one another in Syria. With repeated delays in holding elections in Libya and rival local and foreign actors seeking to dominate the country, Libyan citizens risk continuing to be used instead of being helped to ensure a stable and secure future for their country.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications. He is currently finishing a book on Russia to be published in 2022.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/27/understanding-libyas-relentless-destabilization/

Russian security chief names ‘obvious’ beneficiary of pipeline rupture

 

The US stands to win most from disabling Russian-German gas link and has a record of such attacks, Nikolay Patrushev said

The head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, June 17, 2022 © Sputnik / RIA Novosti/ Aram Nersesyan

The US stands to benefit economically from the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines and has a record of targeting energy infrastructure with sabotage operations, the head of Russia's Security Council said.

“Pretty much from the first minutes after the news of the explosions broke … the West launched an active campaign for assigning blame. But it is obvious that the primary beneficiary, first of all in the economic sense, was the US,” Nikolay Patrushev said on Friday.

He compared this week’s incident with the attack on Nicaragua’s oil infrastructure in Puerto Sandino in 1983. Back then CIA officers, based on a ship moored in international waters, coordinated a raid by commandos they had trained to fight against the Sandinista government, US press reported at the time. The US spy agency also provided speed boats for the raid, a CIA source explained, according to Associated Press.

The operation was part of the Reagan administration’s “dirty war” on Nicaragua, which later led to the Iran-Contras scandal. The CIA’s secret sale of weapons to Iran to fund Latin American militants was exposed in 1986.

Patrushev made the remarks at a meeting with fellow security officials from former Soviet nations.

“It appears to be necessary to coordinate our effort to expose the masterminds and executors of this crime, setting a good example for effective cooperation,” he told his counterparts.

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 Ex-Polish FM deletes tweet implying US sabotaged gas pipeline

He noted that the US goal was “ensuring strategic and economic superiority over alternative centers of power” even though Washington’s ally the EU has been suffering from its policies. The US is replacing Russian natural gas with its more expensive liquified natural gas, as the bloc moves to decouple its economy from Russian energy sources.

The leaks in the two Nord Stream pipelines were first detected on Monday, when pressure in the undersea links connecting Russia directly to Germany drastically dropped. The pipelines were apparently breached with explosives, with the blasts detected by earthquake sensors in Sweden.

Moscow called the incident an international terrorist attack against civilian infrastructure, while some Western officials described it as an act of sabotage.

Some critics of Russia speculated that Moscow decided to blow up its own gas links with Germany to put pressure on the EU.

Polish MEP and former Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski thanked the US for the incident, but later deleted the tweet, calling his implied assertion of Washington’s involvement a personal working theory.

https://www.rt.com/russia/563777-patrushev-beneficiary-pipelines-attack/