In These New Times

NATO’s “strategic blunder”

Cailean Bochanan

4th August, 2011

“Strategic blunder”: this is how Denis MacShane, Labour MP and ardent neo-con of the “Scoop” Jackson school correctly characterizes NATO’s Libya fiasco. This is not just a stupid adventure gone wrong, it is the collapse of grand strategy for the Middle East and Africa whose contours, to me, at least, are only now becoming clear.

Of course, whereas a successful strategy soon reveals its goals and the motives and thinking behind it, a failed one tends to be obscured by the mess it has left. Even more is it obscured by the remorseless workings of the law of unintended consequences. Who could have recognised the workings of a plan which strengthened the rule of two leading bogeymen of the West, Gaddafi and Assad; which strengthened democracy and sovereignty rather than further fragmenting the region’s nations: which strengthened tolerance in the face of the CIA’s obscurantists: which  strengthened the hand of Iran and, more especially, Russia: which left Israel exposed and which threatens to bring revolution to the heart of the empire’s regional policemen Saudi Arabia and Bahrain? But such is indeed the outcome of NATO’s misguided and plainly criminal enterprise.

The idea, supposedly being aired in Libya, that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were a necessary prelude to the assault on Libya in that they removed leaders sympathetic to Gaddafi, cannot be dismissed. The CIA could then very well have had a hand in starting those revolts believing that any revolutionary process could be derailed by giving support to the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood who also seem to be at the heart of the armed struggle against Assad. I initially dismissed this idea since I didn’t see how it would work: I still don’t but perhaps this only goes to show just how much the CIA has lost it’s touch. But, as Thierry Meyssan has pointed out, the whole plan was posited on simultaneous displays of regime change in Libya and Syria. Had that worked out then perhaps the rest of the pieces would have fallen into place.

That has most decisively not worked out. In Libya what looks like the collapse of the TNC has been received with the most eerie silence apart from a few interventionist stalwarts lamenting the ineptitude of it all. In Syria, Russia has not deceived this time by failing to check the empire in the Security Council and without western intervention the West’s forces on the ground look too weak.

This can and must become a turning point in West’s post-Soviet NATO rampage. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the West won the ultimate ideological victory. To borrow from Baudelaire’s witticism, the devil, western imperialism, triumphed by managing to convince the world that he no longer existed. From then on he appeared in  humanitarian guise only: NATO was almost a charity although unable to conceal the cloven-hoof of its ever burgeoning arsenal. But those, it was claimed, were only to help his friends in the military-industrial complex and by no means for actual use. Endlessly intervening on behalf of the oppressed you could almost have said that he was doing God’s work and some, indeed, did say that.

That particular charade must now be exposed. A five year old could successfully identify the Evil One and if a chorus of thousands continue to sing his praises it only shows how many must go down with NATO.