Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Found By USA ???!!!!

Iraq All Over Again!

By William Blum

04 September, 2013

@ Williamblum.org

Found at last! After searching for 10 years, the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have finally been found – in Syria!

Secretary of State John Kerry: “There is no doubt that Saddam al-Assad has crossed the red line. … Sorry, did I just say ‘Saddam’?”

A US drone has just taken a photo of Mullah Omar riding on a motorcycle through the streets of Damascus. 1

So what do we have as the United States refuses to rule out an attack on Syria and keeps five warships loaded with missiles in the eastern Mediterranean?

    >> Only 9 percent of Americans support a US military intervention in Syria. 2

    >> Only 11% of the British supported a UK military intervention; this increased to 25% after the announcement of the alleged chemical attack. 3

    >> British Prime Minister David Cameron lost a parliamentary vote August 29 endorsing military action against Syria 285-272

    >> 64% of the French people oppose an intervention by the French Army. 4 “Before acting we need proof,” said a French government spokesperson. 5

    >> Former and current high-ranking US military officers question the use of military force as a punitive measure and suggest that the White House lacks a coherent strategy. “If the administration is ambivalent about the wisdom of defeating or crippling the Syrian leader, possibly setting the stage for Damascus to fall to Islamic fundamentalist rebels, they say, the military objective of strikes on Assad’s military targets is at best ambiguous.” 6

    >> President Obama has no United Nations approval for intervention. (In February a massive bombing attack in Damascus left 100 dead and 250 wounded; in all likelihood the work of Islamic terrorists. The United States blocked a Russian resolution condemning the attack from moving through the UN Security Council)

    >> None of NATO’s 28 members has proposed an alliance with the United States in an attack against Syria. NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that he saw “no NATO role in an international reaction to the [Syrian] regime.” 7

    >> The Arab League has not publicly endorsed support of US military action in Syria; nor have key regional players Saudi Arabia and Qatar, concerned about a possible public backlash from open support for US intervention. 8

    >> We don’t even know for sure that there was a real chemical attack. Where does that accusation come from? The United States? The al-Qaeda rebels? Or if there was such an attack, where is the evidence that the Syrian government was the perpetrator? The Assad regime has accused the rebels of the act, releasing a video showing a cave with alleged chemical-weapon equipment as well as claiming to have captured rebels possessing sarin gas. Whoever dispensed the poison gas – why, in this age of ubiquitous cameras, are there no photos of anyone wearing a gas mask? The UN inspection team was originally dispatched to Syria to investigate allegations of earlier chemical weapons use: two allegations made by the rebels and one by the government.

    >> The United States insists that Syria refused to allow the UN investigators access to the site of the attack. However, the UN request was made Saturday, August 24; the Syrian government agreed the next day. 9

    >> In rejecting allegations that Syria deployed poison gas, Russian officials have argued that the rebels had a clear motivation: to spur a Western-led attack on Syrian forces; while Assad had every reason to avoid any action that could spur international intervention at a time when his forces were winning the war and the rebels are increasingly losing world support because of their uncivilized and ultra-cruel behavior.

    >> President George W. Bush misled the world on Iraq’s WMD, but Bush’s bogus case for war at least had details that could be checked, unlike what the Obama administration released August 29 on Syria’s alleged chemical attacks – no direct quotes, no photographic evidence, no named sources, nothing but “trust us,” points out Robert Parry, intrepid Washington journalist.

So, in light of all of the above, the path for Mr. Obama to take – as a rational, humane being – is of course clear. Is it not? N’est-ce pas? Nicht wahr? – Bombs Away!

Pretty discouraging it is. No, I actually find much to be rather encouraging. So many people seem to have really learned something from the Iraqi pile of lies and horror and from decades of other American interventions. Skepticism – good ol’ healthy skepticism – amongst the American, British and French people. It was stirring to watch the British Parliament in a debate of the kind rarely, if ever, seen in the 21st-century US Congress. And American military officers asking some of the right questions. The Arab League not supporting a US attack, surprising for an organization not enamored of the secular Syrian government. And NATO – even NATO! – refusing so far to blindly fall in line with the White House. When did that last happen? I thought it was against international law.

Secretary of State John Kerry said that if the United States did not respond to the use of chemical weapons the country would become an international “laughingstock”. Yes, that’s really what America and its people have to worry about – not that their country is viewed as a lawless, mass-murdering repeat offender. Other American officials have expressed concern that a lack of a US response might incite threats from Iran and North Korea. 10

Now that is indeed something to laugh at. It’s comforting to think that the world might be finally losing the stars in their eyes about US foreign policy partly because of countless ridiculous remarks such as these.

United States bombings, which can be just as indiscriminate and cruel as poison gas. (A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have an air force.)

The glorious bombing list of our glorious country, which our glorious schools don’t teach, our glorious media don’t remember, and our glorious leaders glorify.

    Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)

    Guatemala 1954

    Indonesia 1958

    Cuba 1959-1961

    Guatemala 1960

    Congo 1964

    Laos 1964-73

    Vietnam 1961-73

    Cambodia 1969-70

    Guatemala 1967-69

    Grenada 1983

    Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)

    Libya 1986

    El Salvador 1980s

    Nicaragua 1980s

    Iran 1987

    Panama 1989

    Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)

    Kuwait 1991

    Somalia 1993

    Bosnia 1994, 1995

    Sudan 1998

    Afghanistan 1998

    Yugoslavia 1999

    Yemen 2002

    Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular no-fly-zone basis)

    Iraq 2003-2011 (Second Gulf War)

    Afghanistan 2001 to present

    Pakistan 2007 to present

    Somalia 2007-8, 2011 to present

    Yemen 2009, 2011 to present

    Libya 2011

    Syria 2013?

The above list doesn’t include the repeated use by the United States of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and other charming inventions of the Pentagon mad scientists; also not included: chemical and biological weapons abroad, chemical and biological weapons in the United States (sic), and encouraging the use of chemical and biological weapons by other nations; all these lists can be found in William Blum’s book “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower”.

A story just released by Foreign Policy magazine, based on newly-discovered classified documents, reports how, in 1988, the last year of the 8-year Iraq-Iran War, America’s military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks by Iraq far more devastating than anything Syria has seen. 11 Indeed, during that war the United States was the primary supplier to Iraq of the chemicals and hardware necessary to provide the Saddam Hussein regime with a chemical-warfare capability. 12

Now, apparently, the United States has discovered how horrible chemical warfare is, even if only of the “alleged” variety.

Humanitarian intervention

Some of those currently advocating bombing Syria turn for justification to their old faithful friend “humanitarian intervention”, one of the earliest examples of which was the 1999 US and NATO bombing campaign to stop ethnic cleansing and drive Serbian forces from Kosovo. However, a collective amnesia appears to have afflicted countless intelligent, well-meaning people, who are convinced that the US/NATO bombing took place after the mass forced deportation of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was well underway; which is to say that the bombing was launched to stop this “ethnic cleansing”. In actuality, the systematic forced deportations of large numbers of people from Kosovo did not begin until a few days after the bombing began, and was clearly a Serbian reaction to it, born of extreme anger and powerlessness. This is easily verified by looking at a daily newspaper for the few days before the bombing began the night of March 23/24, and the few days after. Or simply look at the New York Times of March 26, page 1, which reads:

    … with the NATO bombing already begun, a deepening sense of fear took hold in Pristina [the main city of Kosovo] that the Serbs would NOW vent their rage against ethnic Albanian civilians in retaliation.

On March 27, we find the first reference to a “forced march” or anything of that sort.

But the propaganda version is already set in marble.

    If you see something, say something. Unless it’s US war crimes.

“When you sign a security clearance and swear oaths, you actually have to abide by that. It is not optional.” – Steven Bucci, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, speaking of Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley) 13

Really? No matter what an individual with security clearance is asked to do? No matter what he sees and knows of, he still has to ignore his conscience and follow orders? But Steven, my lad, you must know that following World War II many Germans of course used “following orders” as an excuse. The victorious Allies of course executed many of them.

Their death sentences were laid down by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, which declared that “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

Nuremberg Principle IV moreover states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

Manning, and Edward Snowden as well, did have moral choices, and they chose them.

It should be noted that Barack Obama has refused to prosecute those under the Bush administration involved in torture specifically – he declares – because they were following orders. Has this “educated” man never heard of the Nuremberg Tribunal? Why isn’t he embarrassed to make this argument again and again?

I imagine that in the past three years that Manning has had to live with solitary confinement, torture and humiliation, adding mightily to her already existing personal difficulties, the thought of suicide has crossed her mind on a number of occasions. It certainly would have with me if I had been in her position. In the coming thousands and thousands of days and long nights of incarceration such thoughts may be Manning’s frequent companion. If the thoughts become desire, and the desire becomes unbearable, I hope the brave young woman can find a way to carry it out. Every person has that right, including heroes.

The United States and its European poodles may have gone too far for their own good in their attempts to control all dissenting communication – demanding total information from companies engaged in encrypted messaging, forcing the closure of several such firms, obliging the plane carrying the Bolivian president to land, smashing the computers at a leading newspaper, holding a whistle-blowing journalist’s partner in custody for nine hours at an airport, seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists, threatening to send a New York Times reporter to jail if he doesn’t disclose the source of a leak, shameless lying at high levels, bugging the European Union and the United Nations, surveillance without known limits … Where will it end? Will it backfire at some point and allow America to return to its normal level of police state? On July 24, a bill that would have curtailed the power of the NSA was only narrowly defeated by 217 to 205 votes in the US House of Representatives.

And how long will Amnesty International continue to tarnish its image by refusing to state the obvious? That Cheleas Manning is a Prisoner of Conscience. If you go to Amnesty’s website and search “prisoner of conscience” you’ll find many names given, including several Cubans prominently featured. Can there be any connection to Manning’s omission with the fact that the executive director of Amnesty International USA, Suzanne Nossel, came to her position from the US Department of State, where she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organizations?

A phone call to Amnesty’s office in New York was unable to provide me with any explanation for Manning’s omission. I suggest that those of you living in the UK try the AI headquarters in London.

Meanwhile, at the other pre-eminent international human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski, the director of HRW’s Washington office, has been nominated by Obama to be Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Is it really expecting too much that a high official of a human rights organization should not go to work for a government that has been the world’s leading violator of human rights for more than half a century? And if that designation is too much for you to swallow just consider torture, the worst example of mankind’s inhumanity to man. What government has been intimately involved with that horror more than the United States? Teaching it, supplying the manuals, supplying the equipment, creation of torture centers in much of the world, kidnaping people to these places (“rendition”), solitary confinement, forced feeding, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Chicago … Lord forgive us!

Surrounding Russia

One of the reactions of the United States to Russia granting asylum to Edward Snowden was reported thus: “There was a blistering response on Capitol Hill and calls for retaliatory measures certain to infuriate the Kremlin. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), long one of the Senate’s leading critics of Moscow, blasted the asylum decision as ‘a slap in the face of all Americans’ and called on the administration to turn up the pressure on Moscow on a variety of fronts, including a renewed push for NATO expansion and new missile-defense programs in Europe.” 14

But we’ve long been told that NATO expansion and its missiles in Europe have nothing to do with Russia. And Russia has been told the same, much to Moscow’s continuous skepticism. “Look,” said Russian president Vladimir Putin about NATO in 2001, “this is a military organization. It’s moving towards our border. Why?” 15 He subsequently described NATO as “the stinking corpse of the cold war.” 16

We’ve been told repeatedly by the US government that the missiles are for protection against an Iranian attack. Is it (choke) possible that the Bush and Obama administrations have been (gasp) lying to us?

America’s love affair with Guns

Adam Kokesh is a veteran of the war in Iraq who lives in the Washington, DC area. He’s one of the countless Americans who’s big on guns, guns that will be needed to protect Americans from their oppressive government, guns that will be needed for “the revolution”.

On July 4 the 31-year-old Kokesh had a video made of himself holding a shotgun and loading shells into it while speaking into the camera as he stood in Freedom Plaza, a federal plot of land in between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. This led to a police raid of his home and his being arrested on the 25th for carrying a firearm outside his home or office. The 23-second video can be seen on YouTube. 17

I sent Kokesh the following email:

    “Adam: All your weapons apparently didn’t help you at all when the police raided your house. But supposedly, people like you advocate an armed populace to protect the public from an oppressive government. I’ve never thought that that made much sense because of the huge imbalance between the military power of the public vs. that of the government. And it seems that I was correct.”

I received no reply, although his still being in jail may explain that.

Kokesh, incidentally, had a program on RT (Russia Today) for a short while last year.

Notes

1. The three preceding jokes are courtesy of my friend Viktor Dedaj of Paris

2. Reuters/Ipsos poll, August 26, 2013

3. Sunday Times (UK), YouGov poll, August 25

4. Le Parisien, August 30, 2012

5. Christian Science Monitor, August 29, 2013

6. Washington Post, August 29, 2013

7. The Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2013

8. Washington Post, August 31, 2013

9. UN Web TV, August 27, 2013 (starting at minute 12:00)

10. The Washington Post, August 31, 2013

11. Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid, “CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran”, Foreign Policy, August 26, 2013

12. William Blum, “Anthrax for Export”, The Progressive (Madison, Wisconsin), April 1998

13. Washington Post, August 22, 2013

14. Washington Post, July 31, 2013

15. Associated Press, June 16, 2001

16. Time magazine, December 2007

17. Washington Post, August 13, 2013

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, atwww.williamblum.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

A Saudi conspiracy?

Prem Shankar Jha, September 2, 2013, DHNs:

The US and France are about to unleash an attack upon Syria  that will open the way for 10,000 to 20,000 jihadis who form a ‘floating army of Islam’ to invade Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. 

None of this seems to bother the Obama administration, because its purpose in destroying Syria, if we are to believe him and his Secretary of State, is to uphold a moral principle no matter what its political cost. This is not realpolitik, simply necessary punishment. But shouldn’t punishment follow conviction, and shouldn’t conviction be based on proof beyond reasonable doubt ? Even as the US readies for war two other far more plausible explanations have emerged for the alleged  gas attack. The first is what the Syrian government and many others are  asserting — that the rebels launched it to force Nato into the attack on Assad. The second is that it was an accident — a horrible consequence of a Machiavellian plan that went wrong.  

The 1,300 word US intelligence assessment that the White House on August 30 added little to what he had said on the August 26. Its main contribution was to flesh out Assad’s possible motive for such a heinous act. “The regime has failed to clear dozens of Damascus neighbourhoods of opposition elements, including neighbourhoods targeted on August 21, despite employing nearly all of its conventional weapons systems. We assess that the regime's frustration ….may have contributed to its decision. ”

On the surface this is not implausible. Dale Gavlak, an Amman-based correspondent of the Associated Press who speaks fluent Arabic, and is one of the very few western journalists to have visited the site of the atrocity, reported that the rebels told him they had built tunnels in which they hid from bombardments, stored their weapons and moved from one building to another, but would sleep in mosques and peoples’ house at night. So trying to penetrate the tunnels with gas would be a sound military, even though politically suicidal, strategy. 

The assessment also describes the attack in greater detail. It “began at 2:30 am local time and within the next four hours there were thousands of social media reports from at least 12 different locations in the Damascus area. Among “multiple streams of intelligence” it specifically noted “the detection of rocket launches from regime controlled territory early in the morning, approximately 90 minutes before the first report of a chemical attack appeared in social media”.

Anomalies revealed

The report does not explain what it means by ‘detection’, or how many launches but the rebels uploaded at least one video which, they claimed, captured the launch of the chemical rocket. Repeated viewings of this video, however,  reveal several anomalies:
uThis video was shot at around 1.00 am. That meant that there was someone on a balcony looking towards the launch site at this unearthly hour with his phone, or a camera in hand. Could this be mere coincidence ?

uThe video starts four seconds before the rocket launch. That suggests the man knew when it would happen and had started shooting at the appointed time.  

uThe video reveals that the man also knew the exact spot from which the rocket would rise, for when it rose, it was only slightly to the left of centre of his screen. By reflex, he corrected the camera angle to get it into the centre of the frame.

uThe time the sound took to follow the flash was between six and seven seconds. That placed the cameraman almost exactly a mile away from the launch site — an optimum safe distance for filming. 

u Contrary to the White House claim,  the rocket launch does not seem to have been a part of a salvo. The video is 34 seconds long and there is absolute silence the rest of the time. 

Foreknowledge, if confirmed, will be conclusive proof that it was the rebels who launched this particular rocket. But there is another possible explanation. In the same article (August 29) Dale Gavlak and a young Jordanian colleague Yahya Ababneh, reported “from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the gas attack.” 

“My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry,” said Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta. Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion”.

The conspiracy between the Saudi secret service, headed by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and the CIA has already been thoroughly exposed by the Wall Street Journal (August 25). Gavlak’s story therefore opens up a third possibility:  that the intense Syrian bombardment of the area (which began on August 19) penetrated a tunnel that was being used by Saudi backed jihadis to store chemical weapons supplied by Prince Bandar’s men. This would explain the panic heard in a high Syrian army official’s voice in the allegedly intercepted phone call that is the most concrete evidence that US sources have (unofficially) revealed.

Saudi supply of chemical weapons is not as far-fetched as it sounds, because onDecember 29 the London Daily Mail had published the hacked emails of a British ‘security contracting’ firm, Britam defence, which revealed that Qatar had offered it an ‘enormous’ sum of money to obtain a chemical warhead from Russian stock, ‘similar to what Syria has’, to supply to the rebels. 

These disclosures show that there are at least two other explanations for the gas attack fatalities that are far more plausible than the one the Americans have chosen to believe. 

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/354924/a-saudi-conspiracy.html

Everywhere is War: European Warlords Strike Again - This Time in Mali

By Gerald A. Perreira

Until the philosophy
that holds one race superior
and another inferior
is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war

Anyone listening to the imperialists and corporate media reports/analyses of what is taking place in Mali,   will be left feeling confused. But we know that confusion and commotion are an integral part of the imperialists’ game plan.

Both the Bible and the Quran warn us that the devil is the author of lies and confusion.

The Hon Elijah Muhammad taught us to recognize the nature of the devil and how the devil operates in the contemporary context. He taught us to see the devil not as some mythical figure, but as a reality, a   living force moving amongst us, who knows its time is up and will do anything to maintain its rule upon the earth. This worldview is way outside the bounds of Western discourse, but integral to an understanding of what is really taking place in Mali and across the region.  

The situation in Mali is not that confusing – actually it’s as simple as this:

Go back many years. Imagine you are the Brother Leader, Muammar Qaddafi. Your goal is one of a unified, strong Africa, able to throw off the yoke of imperialism and neo-colonialism. You know that Africa’s liberation cannot be realized without unity, and also that the first step on this long journey is to rid Africa of its remaining inept, neo-colonial regimes.

Leading the African Union meant that Qaddafi had to deal at a state to state level with the very neo-colonial regimes that he also knew had to be removed. To further complicate the matter, Qaddafi had long-standing and strong relationships with a number of liberation movements, revolutionary organizations and parties throughout Africa, that were opposing the neo-colonial regimes in some of these countries.

All sides of the political and ideological divide knew this about Qaddafi – that he had assisted liberation struggles throughout Africa, and for that matter throughout the world, with the sole intention of achieving African liberation and the victory of the oppressed worldwide. That his intentions were genuine was clear, since in many instances, under his leadership, Libya provided assistance to groups which definitely did more harm than good to Libya’s geo-political interests, simply complicating things for this often beleaguered nation.

I recently heard a National Geographic travel writer, trying to pass himself off as an expert on North Africa, and in particular, Libya and Mali, saying that Qaddafi played one tribe off against the other. What nonsense!

When I hear European journalists and some African factotums talking about Qaddafi playing one tribe off against the other, then I realize that we have to tell this story. Muammar Qaddafi was listened to by all sides, which is why he was so often asked to mediate in negotiations to resolve conflicts. Only someone who had not been at these meetings, and did not understand the ancient and complex nature of the African environment, could dismiss what Qaddafi was doing as ‘playing one off against the other’.

On Our Own Terms – African Solutions to African ProblemsThose involved in the struggle for African unity know that mediating in the affairs of tribes cannot be achieved within the confines of the Westminster model of governance. Qaddafi was struggling to make peace in Africa in order to lay the groundwork for real development and liberation. As already mentioned, he understood that the only way for Africa to be free was for Africa and Africans, on the continent and in the Diaspora, to unite into a power bloc, and he also knew that it was imperative to apply African solutions to African problems.

The Libyan Jamahiriya, emerging as it did out of an African-Arab cultural environment, does not separate the individual from the community, but rather sees both as interdependent and part of an integral whole. In such a worldview, values which solidify and integrate the community are emphasized, while at the same time recognizing the rights, responsibility and role of the individual. This is in contrast to the liberal democratic tradition of the European community of nations or so-called ‘developed world’, where the individual is considered ‘absolute’ and where rugged individualism is encouraged.

In this framework of inter-connectedness, the prosperity of one means the prosperity of the other. Instead of pitting the interests of the individual and the community against one another, as is found in both capitalist and communist states, African communalism, or what Qaddafi refers to as ‘natural socialism’, recognizes the interests of all.

African philosopher, Polycarp Ikuenobe points out that:

‘While Africans recognize that individuals have natural rights, which derive from their natural individuality, interests and desires, these rights and individuality would be abstract and meaningless except when they are contextualized, made substantive, given material contents, and made meaningful in the context of a community.’

The detached, atomized individual is a European concept and is alien to the African traditions of Ubuntu, Ujamaa and Ishtirakiyah, principles which form the foundation of  systems of governance based on African communalism  or what was referred to in the Libyan Jamahiriya as ‘natural socialism’.

Where the multiparty system, emerging as it did out of the European cultural and historical context tends to fragment and divide, the Jamahiriyan system seeks to build social cohesion, unity and partnership.

In the Green Book, Qaddafi outlines clearly the social architecture that derives from what he understands to be a ‘natural order’:

The tribe is an extended family that has grown as a result of procreation. The tribe is in effect, a large extended family, and it then follows that the nation is the tribe that has also grown as a result of procreation. The nation is a large extended tribe; and the world is the nation that has diversified into a multitude of nations. The world therefore is an enlarged nation.

The relationship that binds a family together is the same relationship which binds the tribe together, the nation and the world. Nevertheless, the larger the multitude of people, the weaker this bond becomes… This is a sociological fact, denied only by the ignorant.

…This is why it is very important for the human community to preserve the cohesion of the family, the tribe, the nation and the world, in order to profit from the advantages, benefits, values and ideals yielded by the solidarity, cohesion, unity, familiarity and love of the family, tribe, nation and humanity...the tribe provides its members with the natural benefits and social advantages that the family provides for its members, for the tribe is a secondary family. It is worth mentioning here that an individual may sometimes behave in a dishonorable manner that a family will not condone: yet because the family is relatively small in size, this individual will not be aware of its supervision. In contrast, individuals, as members of the tribe, cannot be free of its watchful eyes.’

Qaddafi understood the primacy of ‘culture’ and that the cultural context is the foundation out of which all ideologies and social systems emerge.  He agreed with the view of Afrocentric psychologist, Wade Nobles, that culture is ‘a general design for living and patterns for interpreting reality’. That is why he chose to work so closely with traditional leaders/chiefs throughout Africa and the Tuaregs of the Sahel. Both groups had managed to keep their African traditions/culture alive, despite having been marginalized under colonialism and by successive neo-colonial regimes. This conception of culture is also why, from the outset of the Al Fateh revolution in 1969, Qaddafi necessarily rejected the Western multi-party parliamentary system and Western ideologies.

In 2010, at a meeting in Tripoli, Qaddafi addressed 175 traditional leaders from across the African continent. He told them that ‘African traditions were being replaced with Western culture and that multi party politics was destroying Africa’.   The chiefs agreed, accusing Africa’s political leaders of ‘neglecting traditional values and marginalizing Africa’s indigenous institutions.’

Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu, leader of Nigeria’s African Renaissance Party and Chairperson of the newly formed Pan-African international, ARM, in a recent interview, quoted Professor Catherine Achaolonu-Olumba, when he warned Africans that if they failed to recognize the importance of their own culture and cultural institutions, they would never achieve liberation:

‘To all Africans, Blacks and all deprived peoples all over the world, we say culture is everything! Those who took your cultures from you took everything from you. Your culture is your life, your past, your present, your science, your religion, your closest link to the One True God. You are your culture and your culture is all you have – it is your link to all knowledge available in the Universal Mind of the Creator. Your culture is you…’

Ndu went on to say:

‘Most of the problems confronting Africans are traceable to inappropriate governance systems. The Western World, led by the United States, has been forcing electocracy down the throat of Africans, claiming that it is ‘democracy’, while in fact, the United States does not experience, and has never experienced true democracy’.

There are over 100 tribes in Libya alone innumerable tribal groups throughout Africa. The concept of the ‘tribe’ is misunderstood in European political discourse, and tribal forms of organization are automatically dismissed as being backward and having no merit. However, as Qaddafi rightfully acknowledges, family and tribe are the basis of all African societies and tribal forms of organization will never be relinquished. The current nation-state borders in Africa are colonial constructs, and often secondary to indigenous concepts of tribe and tribal nations. That is why tribes do not always recognize nation-state boundaries drawn up and left by the colonizers, and furthermore why some tribes, even if they exist across a number of ‘nation-state’ borders, can be considered as constituting a nation in and of themselves.

This is one of the reasons why the imposition of the alien system of multi-partyism into Africa, where tribal loyalties are so honored, has led to disaster. Political parties can never demand the loyalty and support that one’s tribe can. Eventually, the multi-party system exacerbates any tribal conflict that exists and even creates tribal conflict where it did not previously exist. It actually works against the existing indigenous forms of social organization, creating chaos and failed states.

Abd-l Alkalimat points out the contradiction of importing the very systems which have been used to destroy us:

‘The basis for our social, political and economic systems can better be found among the communal traditions of our people rather than among those who have used their systems to oppress if not annihilate us.’

The success of a given system is entirely dependent on whether the particular system in place is in tune with and meets the needs of the people it is meant to serve.

As Africans, our struggle must be focused on achieving our inalienable right to self-determination – to develop our own political and economic systems and put in place our own political structures, free of interference from the outside world. Only we can turn the tables – only we can achieve our own liberation from systems that continue to keep us in a state of dependency and disarray. 

Talk is cheap…
Bringing about the kind of unity, prosperity, and dignity that could lead to an independent and democratic United States of Africa is a long and tumultuous journey, which not everyone would have the courage to embark on. Theory is one thing, and a vital component, however, concrete action has to start somewhere. Qaddafi and the revolutionary Libyan Jamahiriya put Libya’s wealth where their mouth was and began to work with others to support the coming together of Africa, by upgrading telecommunications systems, enhancing infrastructural development, engaging in joint commercial projects, building educational institutions, providing healthcare, advancing  loans to African governments, and the setting up of African based lending institutions with plans for an African currency, which would have put an end to our continued dependency on the Euro/American Empire and their financial institutions.

Much analysis is produced by those who are not actively engaged in the struggle to change the world, but engaged only in interpreting it. They provide us with endless academic critiques of those who are active, finding fault with everything.  The late African revolutionary, Kwame Ture, always said, ‘never to waste our energies in lengthy conversation or debate with anyone who was not actively involved in the struggle for liberation in one way or other, since they would never be able to fully understand the issues at stake and would necessarily be dealing only with abstraction.’

Anyone who is engaged in struggle knows that the world is a brutal and complex arena. African unity is a journey that is fraught with overwhelming challenges that cannot always be resolved the way we would wish. This is not to act as an apologist for mistakes made, but simply to acknowledge that if criticism is to be constructive then it must be part of a discourse that is anchored in the reality of what it means to fight imperialism and injustice on all its fronts in 2013.  

The intellectual warrior, Franz Fanon understood this, based on his own involvement in the Algerian struggle for liberation, when he boldly claimed,

'Everybody will have to be compromised in the fight for the common good. No one has clean hands; there are no innocents and no onlookers. We all have dirty hands; we are all soiling them in the swamps of our country and in the terrifying emptiness of our brains. Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor'.

As we say in the Caribbean – ‘yuh think it easy?’

The Mali story…When the progressive leader, Amadou Toure, was elected president of Mali in 2002, Muammar Qaddafi welcomed him onto the scene. Toure believed that African conflicts/problems should be resolved within the framework of the African Union and he supported the vision of a United States of Africa. In such an environment, Qaddafi was able to broker a peace agreement between the Tuaregs and the Toure administration. Qaddafi had offered the Tuaregs what no one else had – to live in Libya with all of the benefits that that brought – free healthcare, education, housing etc. This was a gift to the Tuareg people and also in line with Qaddafi’s understanding of this part of the world outside of the boundaries of the artificial borders created by colonialism. In fact, the Libyan Jamahiriya had authorized Africans from all over the continent to cross its borders freely.

Once Qaddafi was murdered and Libya was handed over to the current barbaric alliance of Arab supremacists, monarchists and Al-Qaeda affiliated Wahabi-Salafi heretics, the Tuaregs, many of whom had been integrated into the Jamahiriyan military since the early 70s, had no choice but to return home.

What happened next?The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), largely made up of Tuareg returnees, laid claim to a land mass in Northern Mali which they call Azawad. They claimed Azawad as their ancestral homeland and it came under their jurisdiction with little opposition from the Malian army.

In 2009, there was a major Tuareg uprising against the Malian government and Muammar Qaddafi was asked by both sides to play a mediating role. During these negotiations, President Toure made a number of concessions, promising to address the legitimate long term grievances of the Tuareg. These promises were not honored, and with Qaddafi no longer there to guide and mediate, and the Tuaregs now being forced to return to Mali, they had no choice but to claim their homeland. 

  

Muammar Qaddafi inspects troops wearing  traditional Tuareg dress

President Toure quickly realized that a military solution was not possible and agreed to enter into negotiations with representatives of the MNLA. Days later, seemingly from out of nowhere, we saw a full blown coup in Mali. The US trained coup leader, Captain Amadou Sanogo, opposed the idea of Tuareg autonomy. At the time of the coup he claimed that President Toure was benefitting financially from the drug trade, suggesting that this was why he was ready to make concessions to the MNLA. This was untrue. For one thing the MNLA are not the ones who are involved in the expansive and lucrative drug trade in the Sahel – in fact they oppose it. It is well documented that the drug traffickers are Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and their front organizations across the region. That is why Qaddafi said that the so-called rebels in Benghazi were not only Al-Qaeda affiliated but were on drugs. It is interesting to note that Captain Sanogo was photographed recently with US ambassador, John Price, and the two were said to be laughing and talking like long lost friends. President Toure ended up in Senegal.

Next Move…
Also, from out of nowhere - Salafi militias enter Mali - Ansar Al Dine and the Movement for Unity and Jihad. Groups never before seen or heard of in Mali – made up primarily of non Malians and backed by guess who? Correct, the Gulf State Pretenders to Islam and NATO. They had one shared objective – to crush the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), since they shared Qaddafi’s vision for a united Africa and would have set up a Jamahiriya type state - Azawad style. The MNLA also adhere to an Islamic theology of liberation, rather than the Wahabi aberration parading as Islam, that the Gulf States and their imperialist backers depend on for their continued repression and plunder. The setting up of such a liberated zone would have provided a refuge for those loyal to Qaddafi and his ideas.

And so, they got rid of Toure and all hope of a peaceful solution to the issue of an autonomous Azawad and they unleashed their dogs of war, the Islamists, into Mali to beat back the progressive National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). The MNLA, however, were too clever to be seduced into an all out war with these foreign and reactionary Islamist forces, financed by one of the biggest sponsors of terrorism, the Qatari ruling elite, so they melted into the population, as only a liberation force with the backing of the people can do.

The MNLA had made it abundantly clear from the outset that they had no interest in seizing any territory outside of Azawad, including the capital Bamako, or causing havoc in Mali. This further ruffled the imperialists, since there is nothing they dislike more than the prospect of peaceful, progressive African based solutions to African conflicts.

With no MNLA to fight, the Islamists then proceeded to wreck havoc in Mali as they do everywhere they are deployed, and went on a killing spree and the French invaded to reign in their own proxy army,   definitely not to save Malians from the brutality of the Islamists.  The French realized that they had better reign in the dogs of war they themselves had unleashed, lest, unsuspectingly, while using the Islamists to prevent the huge deposits of uranium, which France depends on for their continued energy supply, from falling into MNLA hands, the Islamists themselves stole Mali from under France’s nose.

European Warlords in Re-scramble for African ResourcesUnfortunately for Africa, we have everything that the US and Europe want and need. The story is not as complex in Mali, or for that matter throughout Africa, as they would have us believe - actually it is quite simple – the lifestyle enjoyed by Europeans on this earth – life as only they know it - is over without unfettered access to African resources.

With Qaddafi out of the way, one of the biggest remaining threats to their free reign in Africa is African resistance movements which are loyal to his vision. Groups such as the MNLA and JEM are high priority targets for imperialist military operations and their killer drones, a weapon straight out of their own Sci-Fi, which enables them to kill by remote control.  The US, imposing itself as the judge, jury and executioner, has killed thousands of human persons this way, while at the same time posturing as the world’s leading democrats. Their world is undeniably bizarre and Orwellian. 

Unmanned Predator Drone firing missile

It is estimated that there are over 60 Drone bases in the US alone and more than 60 across the globe.  The most recently installed Drone base is in Niger, Northwest Africa. The plan is for such bases to be installed throughout the continent. US president, Barack Hussein Obama, has shown himself to be little more than a warlord and black only in color. Mentally incarcerated, he is the perfect candidate for the role of first black US president – and what a public relations coup: to have a black man at the helm when re-colonizing Africa.

While the Euro-American ruling elite plunder the world’s resources, cynically paying lip service to the ‘American Dream’, the tragedy is that Barak Obama seems to believe in it. He has taken it upon himself to target for execution, at whim, anyone, anywhere in the world, whom the Empire deems necessary to exterminate, in order to maintain White Supremacy. Make no mistake: the White House is still the White House.

 Licensed to Kill

 It is reported that John Brennan, whose official title is Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and Assistant to the President, draws up the weekly list of those targeted for assassination by drones. These lists are then signed off by the President at a meeting of ‘counterterrorism security officials’ (War Council) held every Tuesday, now dubbed ‘kill list Tuesdays’ in White House circles.

Last year one of those targeted for assassination was Dr Khalid Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), one of the largest groups within the Sudanese Revolutionary Front. He and some senior members of JEM had also been forced to leave Libya and were working to establish a liberated zone in Kordofan.

Only days ago, Tahir El-Faki, a spokesperson for the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), accused the Bashir regime in Khartoum of transporting Salafi jihadists from Mali to North Darfur. He added that some of them had already been in Darfur before being moved to Mali last year. It was reported that the ‘Jihadists’, who are from different countries in the region, including Niger, Chad and Algeria, had been transported using Qatari airplanes. Africa is up for grabs.

And finally, there is the hugely threatening factor of China’s rise as an economic superpower on the global stage. However, China, which is also completely dependent on African resources for its continued economic growth, has an entirely different approach. Not interested in military expansion, they pursue economic and commercial expansion instead. In contrast to the Euro/American Empire, China is willing to negotiate a fair deal within a win-win framework, and is therefore becoming a preferred trading partner for many African states, especially those who want to free themselves from their dependence on economic relations with the unjust and hypocritical Empire. To disrupt the increasingly closer ties between China and Africa is a priority for the imperialists, and so an already crumbling Empire, threatened with its own extinction, is now in full military swing.

Malcolm X knew the enemy well:

‘…when you and I begin to look at him and see the language he speaks, the language of a brute, the language of someone who has no sense of morality, who absolutely ignores law – when you and I learn how to speak his language, then we can communicate. But we will never communicate talking one language while he’s talking another language. He’s talking the language of violence.’  

Fact is they will never stop warring for Africa’s resources until we Africans put an end to the fight ourselves. That is why imperialism can only be buried once and for all in Africa…

And until that day,
The African continent
Will not know peace,
We Africans will fight - we find it necessary -
And we know we shall win
As we are confident
In the victory
Of good over evil

ReferencesIkuenobe Polycarp, Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Traditions, Lexington Books, OX, UK, 2006

Ndu, Yahaya Ezemoo, Africa’s Role in the Global World, African Executive Magazine, Online Edition, February, 2011

Nobles, Wade, Africanity and the Black Family, Black Family Institute Publications CA, USA, 1985

Qaddafi, Muammar, The Green Book Ithaca Press, UK, 2005 (first published 1975)

Shabazz, Malik (Malcolm X), By Any Means Necessary, Pathfinder, NY, USA, 1970

Title, opening and closing remarks from a speech delivered to the United Nations General Assembly by Haile Selassie in 1963, and later put to music by Robert Nesta Marley. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gerald A. Perreira is a founding member of the Guyanese organizations Joint Initiative for Human Advancement and Dignity and Black Consciousness Movement Guyana (BCMG). He lived in Libya for many years, served in the Green March, an international battalion for the defense of the Al Fateh revolution and was an executive member of the World Mathaba based in Tripoli. He is the International Secretary for the newly formed, Afrocentric Pan-African International – ARM (African Revolutionary Movement).

This article originally appeared at BayView, National Black Newspaper at this website: http://sfbayview.com/2013/everywhere-is-war-european-warlords-strike-again-this-time-in-mali/