The Libyan War did not take place

The media and politicians have done all within their power to convince us that the Libyan situation is a civil war and a popular uprising.   By Jonas Thomsen Sekyere In 1991, during the historic events commonly referred to as the ”Gulf War”, the French intellectual Jean Baudrillard wrote an essay titled ”The Gulf War did not take place”. Baudrillard’s contention was that the UN-authorised mission in the Gulf was not an actual war, despite it being portrayed as such. According to Baudrillard, the kind of actions that normally fall within the ambit of war did not really take place. Instead, the conflict was monitored on maps and radar, and the use of force was decided far away from the battlefield. There was no real or grave risk involved for the US-led coalition, and there was never any doubt of an inevitable victory. Baudrillard called it an ”asexual surgical war, a matter of war-processing in which the enemy only appears as a computerised target”. As he provocatively noted, it was safer for the US soldiers to go to war than it was to stay at home due to the fact that more of the soldiers would statistically have died in traffic accidents in the US than by participating in Operation Desert Storm. Moreover, he argued it was an attempt by the West to rediscover and reinvent itself, to find and create a mission rather than remain stifled from the West’s lack of political vision and purpose. Notwithstanding the unwarlike operation, the media and the Western powers did all they could to try to show their populations that what was going on was actually dangerous, that it had an actual political purpose and that it was an actual war. Information dissemination By the same token, it could be argued that the Libyan Uprising did not take place. The media and politicians have done all within their power to convince us that the Libyan situation is in fact a civil war, a popular revolution and a battle between the good and the bad, the despots and the revolutionaries, the regime and the freedom fighters.  If we examine the role of media and information in the conflict, the picture might not turn out as black and white as it is portrayed. Libya became a matter of international urgency when it was reported that Gaddafi had used airstrikes against his own population. This information was presented both as fact and as an action to which the international community was required to respond. The widespread news of Gaddafi’s brutal and disproportionate use of air force against peaceful civilians gave rise to a no-fly zone over Libya, and thus the Western intervention commenced. What the media forgot to spread around just as vividly as the news of a massacre, were comments on March 1 by US Secretary of Defence Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen that the had seen "no confirmation whatsoever" of Gaddafi's aerial assualt on his own people.  Indeed, Russian military satellite monitoring concurred with the high-ranking American officials. What has been referred to as the “media war” by Libyans and foreign journalists had begun, and conflicting information has seemed to characterise the conflict ever since. A continuation of the Arab Spring? Initially, the Libyan conflict was coupled with the Arab spring and reported as a natural consequence and identical to the movements in Tunisia and Egypt. This was questionable on two counts. Firstly, because the Tunisian and Egyptian protestors were mainly peaceful. The Libyan rebels, on the other hand, initiated their campaign to topple Gaddafi by burning and attacking government buildings and by taking up arms immediately - for example by breaking into military barracks and supplying themselves with heavy weaponry, making it hard to categorically affirm that this so-called popular uprising was ever really “civilian”. Secondly, the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have been identified as being caused by socio-economic factors such as unemployment, rising food prices and poverty. In Libya, arguably one of the most independent countries in post-colonial Africa, education is free, the GDP per capita is one of the highest on the continent, the country has no debt whatsoever (unlike European powers and the US), and offers fully-subsidised healthcare to all Libyan citizens. This is, among other things, a consequence of Libya getting amongst the most revenue globally out of its own oil resources in part due to the late Muammar Gaddafi’s policies. The comparison the media and governments have made is thus difficult to justify and misleading to say the least. The disingenuous portrayal of the events does not stop there. To name just a few other misleading media stories, “credible Western intelligence reports” claimed that Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela and Gaddafi was accused of bombing the “Mizda habour”. Aside from the (now obvious) truth that nothing indicated that Gaddafi had or was intending to leave Libya and the fact that Mizda does not have a harbour, other strange stories that are yet to be confirmed have emerged. In late August, NATO claimed that it had shot down four scud missiles fired by Gaddafi directed at the rebels. Other reports, however, state that shooting down a raging scud missile is a technical impossibility whilst others find that it is theoretically possible, but that it has never been done before in live conflict, let alone to four scud missiles. In the midst of this conflicting information, there have been instances in which the reality of the events have revealed themselves to great confusion to spectators. After Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to name some regional occurrences, one would think that there would be no doubt if a civil war was taking place. That is also why the sudden appearance of Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al-Islam, standing in a crowd of supporters as big as any shown of the rebels was an almost disturbing scene. He was supposed to be caught, defeated and under rebel authority. The International Criminal Court had issued an official statement confirming that they were discussing his transfer to the Court. Instead, he rolled up in an armored white limousine claiming that all the allegations were part of an “electronic and media war”. In the same manner, the final rebel campaign to take over Sirte was billed as a final and classic showdown with guns blazing in urban warfare. Besides so-called “pockets of resistance”, there was hardly any fighting - maybe because NATO had already cleared the way. And all in one day, within nine hours on October 20, Gaddafi allegedly assembled 12,000 fighters to take back the country and reignite the war (that never took place) and hide in a drainage culvert wounded and defenseless in his last hours. Real combatants So why do the media have such a success with these stories? It could stem from the Western public having been taught that Gaddafi was a madman for decades. Why would he not slaughter his own people? After all, he wears strange clothes, brings tents to New York and is accompanied by Eastern European nurses. But while the conflict in the media and by governments have been reduced to a map with arrows pointing from Benghazi to Tripoli in the typical old good guy/bad guy fashion, with “frontlines” and percentage of control over cities constantly shifting on the TV screen, the actual combatants have been glossed over: Gaddafi and the NATO-coalition. While it is difficult to substantiate that the rebels were ever peaceful citizens, and while we have been led to believe that the conflict consists of “Gaddafi-loyalists” and “rebels”, disregarding that Libya is a nation with multiple interests: tribal, regional, political and so on: and that resistance towards the “rebels” does not automatically make you loyal towards or under the command of Gaddafi, NATO has been surprisingly honest towards the Libyan people. Then again, how do you fool those who are actually on the ground? You can’t. And that might be why, as the viewers in the West have been shown pictures of a civil war, the leaflets published by NATO and dropped over Tripoli showed the conflict as it really was. As the leaflet shows, this is an operation of computerised drones and Gaddafi’s army, not between civilians and the government. Another leaflet claims that Gaddafi has been indicted by the International Criminal Court. That was not true. The prosecutor had requested an indictment, something that must be decided on by the judges, who have refused to confirm charges before, for instance in the case of Sudanese president Al-Bashir. Future identities A civil war or popular uprising as seen in other parts of the Arab World did not take place. There was no risk on the part of the West and no question of defeat. The conflict may very well be the West’s attempt to reinvent itself. After the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the human rights abuses in the “war on terror” and the declining financial power of the “free world”, the governments of Europe and the U.S. may have wanted to remind the people that they are still the world's arbiters. Because if that is not the identity and the role of the West, what is? Libya was quick and easy, and the Western populations were given a fairytale including dictators, human rights, rape, civil war, revolution and concerned Western leaders. The West is no longer reluctant to go into Africa if they feel that they need to, warnings of Western presence as neocolonialism has been replaced by the new principle of the Responsibility to Protect. US drone operations in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and Uganda seems to support this new presence. What the scenario has also shown is that even Nigeria, South Africa, China and Russia combined in the Security Council are not able to withstand the pressure of Western diplomacy and media as in the end they provided the necessary support to initiate the mission in Libya. The limits of the Security Council, NATO and international law have been expanded, and this reignited self-understanding of the West could mean that the decade we thought would be marked by Africa’s growing influence in the world will instead be replaced by renewed Western presence in Africa. As for Libya, just as the, now former, 'Interim Prime Minister' Mahmoud Jibril expressed recently, the risk of chaos breaking loose is very real, especially due to the spread of weapons among the public. Just because there has been no civil war does not mean that one is not waiting under the surface. Only time will tell.