Hillary Backs New Allied War in Libya

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

29 February 16

 

s Paris, London, and Washington send special forces and covert agents into Libya to set the stage for a new allied intervention, Hillary backs the coming war.

Secretary of State in 2011, she led the earlier effort to convince a wary President Obama to intervene against Gadhafi, defeating her usual ally, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who saw no core American interest in Libya. Like George W. Bush’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, Hillary’s intervention in Libya was a war of choice that the United States had no good reason to fight – and a lot of good reasons not to, as her eagerness for a second war now confirms.

The New York Times on Sunday gave a detailed account of how she convinced Obama in “what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state.” It is, said the authors, “a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.”

Having skillfully won the earlier battle in Washington, Hillary ultimately lost the war in Libya. The fall of Gadhafi “seemed to vindicate Hillary Clinton,” the Times wrote. “Then militias refused to disarm, neighbors fanned a civil war, and the Islamic State found refuge.” Add the destabilizing spread of Gadhafi’s enormous store of weapons to Syrian and sub-Saharan Africa, and Libya’s role in helping promote the refugee crisis in Europe, and no one can avoid the big question: Did Hillary screw up? To which she has found the perfect dodge. It’s too early to tell, she told a Congressional committee in October.

Or, as she told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, we intervened at the time to prevent the dictator from massacring the people, and now we’re going in “to try to help the Libyan people realize the dream that they had when they went after Gadhafi.”

“You know, the United States was in Korea, and still is, for many years,” she explained, channeling a favorite argument of Republican senator John McCain. “We are still in Germany. We are still in Japan. We have a presence in a lot of places in the world that started out as a result of conflict. And if you think about South Korea, there were coups, there were assassinations, there was a lot of problems for the Koreans to build their economy, to create their democracy.”

Remembering myriad details of her much-vaunted foreign policy experience, Hillary appears never to have asked why intervening in the former colonies of North Africa and the Middle East so consistently fails. The best answer I can find comes in Delphic fashion from oft-quoted Washington cynics. In Iraq, they tell us, the United States intervened and occupied – and things went to hell. In Libya, the United States intervened but did not occupy – and things went to hell. And in Syria, the United States neither intervened nor occupied – and things still went to hell.

In other words, the problem is not in in how we intervened, but that we intervened. This puts Hillary on the wrong side of history, at least as seen by large numbers of people in the region’s former European colonies. The anti-colonial sentiment appears less fervent in sub-Saharan Africa, where US Special Forces are often seen working closely with their French counterparts. But no one doubts that al-Qaeda and Daesh-affiliated groups gain strength by being the only groups truly willing to fight against a return of Western colonialism. Having failed to learn these lessons, Hillary remains the have-gun, will-travel paladin of liberal imperialism.

The new war in Libya, which she now supports, seems largely invisible to American media. But, it became headline news here in France on Thursday, when Le Monde broke through official secrecy and revealed that French special forces and clandestine agents were operating in Libya in close cooperation with their Americans and British allies.

The French Minister of Defense was furious and launched a secret investigation into who leaked the secret information to Le Monde. My guess is that the major leaks came from within the French military, where many officers feel over-extended by their current interventions in Syria and Africa.

“Things are on the way now for a major operation in Libya,” explained Gen. Dominique Trinquand, the former head of the French Military Mission to the United Nations and a frequent commentator on the government-owned France 24. “You prepare an operation. So you send either special forces or people under cover into the country…. They are mainly spotting important targets for the future” and “establishing liaison with people who will fight against Daesh.”

Some of these troops – French, British, or American – called in the drone attack on the Libyan city of Sabrathan, which reportedly killed up to 40 people. The target, now claimed by a Pentagon spokesman, was a Tunisian national, Noureddine Chouchane, whom authorities in Tunis accused of masterminding murderous attacks last year at the Bardo museum (22 deaths) and a tourist resort (38 deaths).

Also part of the build-up to war, Italy has given the Americans the go-ahead to fly their drones into Libya and against Daesh targets elsewhere in Northern Africa from an Italian base in Sicily.

No one has said exactly when the new war will move into the open, but as Marine Corps general Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joints Chief of Staff, said back on January 22, the decision on whether and when to begin decisive military action would probably come in weeks, but not hours. Meeting with the French military chief Gen. Pierre de Villiers, Dunford publicly declared that President Obama had given authorization for military action. At least officially, the justification was to stem the growth in power of the Islamic State in Libya before it spread throughout North Africa and the sub-Saharan countries.

It will be fascinating to see how a new war with Hillary’s blessing will affect the presidential primaries.

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A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Trade Deals Like the TPP Are Murdering American Manufacturing

By Leo Gerard, In These Times

29 February 16

 

n the week before Valentine’s Day, United Technologies expressed its love for its devoted Indiana employees, workers whose labor had kept the corporation profitable, by informing 2,100 of them at two facilities that it was shipping their factories, their jobs, their communities’ resources to Mexico.

A few workers shouted obscenities at the corporate official. Some walked out. Others openly wept as United Technologies shattered their hopes, their dreams, their means to pay middle-class mortgages.

Three days later, 1,336 workers at Philadelphia’s largest remaining manufacturer, Cardone, learned that company planned to throw them out too and build brake calipers in Mexico instead. Two weeks earlier, a Grand Rapids, Mich., company called Dematic did the same thing to its 300 workers.

No surprise. In the first decade of this century, America lost 56,190 factories, 15 a day.

Republican presidential candidates talk incessantly of building a physical wall to keep impoverished Mexican immigrants out of America. What they fail to offer is an economic barrier to prevent the likes of United Technologies and Cardone and Dematic from impoverishing American workers by exporting their jobs to Mexico.

The president of Carrier, owned by United Technologies, gathered the Indianapolis factory employees, skilled workers who earn an average of $20 an hour, and informed them that the corporation planned to kick them to the curb but expected them to perform to the highest standards until Carrier opened a new plant in Monterrey, Mexico, where workers will be paid $3 an hour.

Carrier President Chris Nelson told the group, “This was an extremely difficult decision.”

Such difficulties for poor, poor United Technologies! It was making a nice profit at its Indianapolis and Huntington factories. But it was not the big fat profit it could pocket by paying Mexican workers a mere $3 an hour, providing $3 an hour in health and pension benefits, and doing it all in the nation with the longest work weeks among the 36 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

It would be “extremely difficult” for United Technologies to abandon Indiana after the corporation grabbed $530,000 from the pockets of hard-working Hoosiers over the past nine years as the state’s economic development agency forked over taxpayer cash to the corporation.

It would be even more “difficult” to turn its back on America considering that United Technologies grabbed $121 million from a federal tax credit program established specifically to ensure that green manufacturing jobs remained in the United States. Carrier took $5.1 million of those tax credits in 2013.

“This is strictly a business decision,” Nelson told the jeering workers. It wasn’t because of anything they had done. It was just that Mexico allows corporations to exploit its people in ways that America does not. Its minimum wage is 58 cents an hour, while the United States requires at least $7.25. For now, at least. Some GOP president candidates (Donald Trump) have said they think that’s too high.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ensnared Mexican and American workers in a race to the bottom. And the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade deal among 12 countries instead of just three, would place American and Mexican workers in an even worse competition. They’d vie for jobs with forced and child labor in places like Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Under NAFTA, cheap American grain shipped to Mexico without tariffs destroyed peasant farming. And that prompted migration north. Meanwhile, American factories saw desperate Mexicans willing to work for a pittance, a government unwilling to pass or enforce environmental laws, and because of NAFTA, no tariffs when the goods were shipped back to the United States. That propelled factory migration south.

Before NAFTA, the United States had a small trade surplus with Mexico. That disappeared within a year, and now the annual trade deficit is approximately $50 billion.

Though it has been 22 years since NAFTA took effect, a report issued last week by the AFL-CIO says, “Labor abuses in many cases are worse now than before NAFTA ... In short, NAFTA has contributed to labor abuses, not improvements.”

The report says the Mexican government fails to enforce labor laws and refuses to ensure that workers can form independent labor unions to try to protect their own rights. In fact, the report says, “The human and labor rights situation in Mexico is rapidly deteriorating.” 

As a result, workers are powerless and completely at the mercy of corporations. So corporations like United Technologies can pay them $3 an hour and get away with it. This is not good for Mexican workers. And it’s not good for American workers.

The AFL-CIO report makes it clear that the TPP would worsen the situation because it would give corporations like United Technologies the option of moving to places like Vietnam where they could pay trafficked workers and child laborers $1 an hour. Or less.

Just like with NAFTA, there’s nothing enforceable in the TPP that would stop the labor abuses. It would facilitate corporations forcing workers from Indianapolis, Philadelphia and Monterrey, Mexico, into competition with 14-year-olds laboring 60-hour-weeks for $1-an-hour in Malaysia.

Just like United Technologies, these corporate CEOs would say it was “strictly business” to offshore American mills, industry that had served as city centers for decades, even centuries, factories so synonymous with towns that the communities took their names like Ambridge (American Bridge) and Hershey, which, by the way, laid off workers at its Pennsylvania home in 2007 and opened a chocolate plant in Monterrey, Mexico.

The AFL-CIO investigation of the TPP determined that it would do nothing more than increase corporate profits while sticking workers—in the United States and elsewhere—with lost jobs, lower wages and repressed rights.

For 22 years NAFTA has destroyed subsistence farming in Mexico and good, middle class factory jobs in the United States. Maybe corporations have made out like bandits. But the banditry should be stopped for the heartache it has caused on both sides of the border.  

As Carrier President Nelson told the Indianapolis workers, members of my union, the United Steelworkers, that he was taking their jobs from them so that shareholders and corporate executives could make a few extra bucks, the workers protested. Nelson kept saying, “Quiet down. Let’s quiet down.”

That’s exactly the opposite of what American workers and communities should be doing. They should shouting from rooftops, “No TPP!”  For the love of American manufacturing, they should be yelling bloody murder.