ARAB SPRING, LIBYAN WINTER
By VIJAY PRASHAD
AK Press, 2012, 198 pages, $14.95 (USD) (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
The decision of the West to militarily intervene in Libya but not elsewhere “tells us something” about the ‘Arab Spring’ revolts as viewed from the office suites of the Atlantic capitals, writes Vijay Prasad in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter.
Qaddafi, unlike the region’s other autocrats, was deemed an obstacle to the Atlantic powers’ desire for oil and influence and his removal, under the West’s bomb-enhanced terms, would allow Europe and the US to restore a much-prized ‘regional stability’ of Western-friendly political rule in the Middle East and North Africa.
The dictators of Tunisia (Ben Ali) and Egypt (Mubarak) had been important guarantors of such ‘stability’ and had long been praised by Washington and the International Monetary Fund for opening up their countries to “the Atlantic world’s economic needs” but in both cases “the pain of the IMF-led policies pushed the needle of distress beyond the bearable” with soaring global wheat prices, “astronomic poverty rates” and poorly-paid informal work (street vendors, etc.) for the working class, and oil wealth for the wealthy local elite and the Atlantic world.
Revolts erupted in 2011 against this economic inequality, an inequality unbreachable by any democratic channels. This explosion “was not the inauguration of a new history but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old”, writes Prashad of the long record of strikes and protests, which had met with the usual repression – in Mubarak’s Egypt, there was one police officer for every 37 Egyptians, a “national security state” subsidised by an annual $1.3 billion from Washington.
The Arab Spring alarmed Washington which feared a crumbling of the “architecture of US power in the region” which rested on the pillars of Washington’s Middle East guard dogs (Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates), a regional front against Iran, and a chorus of allies in Washington’s ‘War on Terror’ (a broad brush, dipped in Islamic fundamentalism, used to routinely tar Arab democratic ventures).
This “power equation” kept the flow of the region’s oil affordable, as the region’s elite well understood. Although most of the oil the US consumes is not from the Middle East, oil production in the region significantly affects global oil prices “which must be kept low to allow the West’s exponential growth”.
Libya had the largest supply of, high quality, oil in Africa but Qaddafi would erratically raise fees and taxes from its export to deliver social wage subsidies to Libyans. Slow to react, half-hearted and unsupportive of the Arab Spring elsewhere, Libya gave the US and NATO their chance to restore their bruised standing with the Arab people and to hijack the Arab Spring to Western-friendly ends.
Bombs were the immediate means and Libya’s neo-liberal ‘reformers’ the strategic agents. For not only were democratic Libyans alienated from an authoritarian Qaddafi but the neo-liberals were increasingly disgruntled. They wanted less of the oil-subsidised economic pie going to the people, more foreign investment and more privatisation. In their way stood Qaddafi’s regime whose Old Guard still felt compelled to play to anti-imperialist and statist welfare sentiment in the population.
These neo-liberals formed the leadership of the National Transitional Council (NTC), the political arm of the Libyan revolt. They were primed by Washington, including the CIA who had their Libyan point man in charge of the rebels’ military wing. The US and NATO then stitched up a deal with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab states (led by Qatar) to quell dissent in their patch (starting with Bahrain and Yemen) if they would get the Arab League and the UN to provide the diplomatic and political cover for a NATO-led military intervention in Libya.
After the disaster of the invasion of Iraq, the West’s appetite for military re-engagement in the region was re-badged under the logo of “humanitarian intervention”. Prashad acknowledges that NATO’s intervention sped the rebels to victory thus saving many rebels’ lives but NATO’s posing of the Libyan options as ‘massacre or intervention’ was “a false dilemma” because the rebels were stronger, and Qaddafi’s forces weaker, than the NATO apologists made out. Libyan rebels’ supporters in the West were, very dishonestly, sold a pup.
It was also “essential to control the narrative about the war”, to disarm NATO’s critics. In both the Western and Arab press (including al-Jazeera, whose paymasters are the Qatari royals) the propaganda machine swung into action with uncorroborated reports of Qaddafi troop atrocities and loose talk of ‘genocide’, but shrugged shoulders at NATO’s civilian deaths and possible rebel war crimes.
NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ bombs delivered Libya to the neo-liberals, the West receiving in return ‘special consideration’ in future oil contracts, as an NTC spokesperson judiciously phrased it. In the post-Qaddafi “scramble for oil”, western oil executives “flooded in on the arms of the diplomats whose aerial power had to be translated into commercial benefits”. Italy, France, the UK and the US were shown the welcome mat, whilst Russia, China and other ditherers like Brazil received the cold shoulder.
Despite the Libyan winter, and the mixed outcomes of the Arab spring, Prashad takes the long view. Although Tunisia and Egypt are poised for only modest electoral democracy, this is “a major social shift in the Arab world” and although the rule of “property and power” has not been dislodged, their figure-heads have been overthrown, raising the confidence of the people for further struggles, argues Prashad. Even in the other uprisings, which were brutally repressed, the cost has been a further ebbing of the hegemony of the region’s autocrats. Fear of the security state is never enough to ensure autocratic rule, which requires some degree of popular acceptance to survive.
To capitalise on this new arena for hope, Prashad believes that it is imperative to reconstruct “a left pole” for future struggles, especially in relation to “the parties of God” which “need a scrupulous and forthright criticism of their shortcomings even when they are allies in the political fight against autocratic states and imperialism”.
Prashad’s analytical framework is colourfully informed by Marxism (the causes and dynamic of revolution) and supported by a detailed scholarly dissection of diplomatic negotiations and strategic plans, and an acute investigation of the personnel of the Arab revolutions and counter-revolutions. Prashad has written an important book, and a very good one.