The “Left” & Libya

The last time we met Michael Bérubé was back in 2007, and he was up to his neck in a rubbish dump, where I’d placed him, in the company of other promoters of the 2003 war on Iraq: where, I asked, are those parlor warriors now? Had any of them reconsidered their illu­sions…

“… that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Bérubé had dark nights, asking themselves just how much respon­sibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging? Sometimes I dream of them… like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Bagh­dad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son.”

Who’s this Bérubé, you ask. Well, for starters he’s the Paterno Family Professor in Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University. Penn State’s website informs us that “named professorships provide support for a focused area and are funded by gifts from individ­ual donors,” which means that Bérubé has long been on Joe Paterno’s payroll — as things have turned out an ironic status for someone who’s spent a fair slice of his time barking and snapping his jaws at “the left” for innu­merable failures stemming from moral equivocation and blindness to reality. Now that famed football coach Joe Paterno has been fired from Penn State for protecting one of his assistants, Jerry Sandusky, suspected of raping a ten-year old boy, amidst many other suspected assaults on youths under Sandusky’s supervision, we must await Bérubé’s assessment of how it feels to have been the kept man of this fallen idol. Does the title “Paterno Fam­ily Professor” remain ensconced on Bérubé’s letterhead?

Down the years Bérubé has fostered a niche special­ity in trashing what he’s pleased to call “the left,” some­what in the manner of Todd Gitlin, who — perched on the credential of having once been an SDS president — wrote so many worthy articles bashing this same left in the 60s and issuing stentorian warnings against any such lapses amid the youth of later epochs that eventually he parlayed his services to decorous establishment thinking into a professorship of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.

Now Bérubé has launched an attack on the “left” for its anti-NATO conduct during the recent upheavals in Libya, during which the current National Transitional Council of Libya has been installed under the supervi­sion of this same NATO. On CounterPunch last weekend David Gibbs deals capably with some of the major fol­lies in Bérubé’s critique, but since the latter inscribes me in his roster of shame, I think a few comments are in order, starting with the obvious fact that Bérubé, eager to preserve his cred as thoughtful progressive critic of Left Excess, has had recourse to wholesale invention. The most obvious fact about what passes for the Left in the US and Europe regarding the entire Libyan saga was that it was only a few notches short of unanimity in endors­ing the entire NATO-backed enterprise.

What consistent voices were raised in questioning the premises and applications of the two Security Coun­cil resolutions enabling NATO, the factual basis for the reporting coming out of Libya that enabled the near 100% agreement in the press that the UN resolutions jus­tified NATO’s bombing campaign, to avoid “genocide” by Gadhafi “against his own people,” that the credentials and conduct of the rebels, later renamed “revolutionar­ies” were beyond reproach? Here at CounterPunch some of our contributors such as Vijay Prashad were, initially at least, enthusiastic supporters of the Benghazi rebels. Others, such as myself or Patrick Cockburn, in Libya for the UK Independent, or Diana Johnstone in Paris or Jean Bricmont in Brussels, or Tariq Ali (passim) were critical, raised questions concerning the stentorian pro-NATO chorus. This role is usually regarded as one of the man­dates of left journalism.

I do not recall CounterPunch as being part of a sub­stantial chorus in this worthy enterprise. In fact I recall us as being among a mere handful on the left, more in concert with a libertarian site like antiwar.com. This is born out by scrutiny of Bérubé’s attack, which is mark­edly short on names and publications on which to lavish his reprobations of “the left” which, at least prior to the welcome rise of the Occupiers, has been a scrawny thing in recent years. On Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now one was far more likely to hear CIA-consultant Juan Cole issuing fervent support for the entire intervention than rather any vigorous interviewing of informed sources about what was actually happening on the ground in Libya.

Failure as concerns Libya’s history this year belongs not to the virtually non-existent left, but to the entire political spectrum from progressives and the whole arc rightwards. A substantial measure of blame must be allo­cated here to the press, both here and in the UK. Could it be that the press coverage of NATO’s Libyan onslaught was actually worse than the reporting on NATO’s attacks on the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, or on Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 invasion by the U.S.A. and its coa­lition partners? The answer is yes.

In the case of both of the earlier NATO interventions, the debates pro and con were accompanied by many jour­nalistic and official or semi-official investigations, most of them blatantly partisan, but some offering sub­stantive claims about such issues as war crimes, weapons of mass destruction, the actual as opposed to self-pro­claimed motives of the assailants, and kindred issues.

Mark the contrast with the Libyan intervention. In less than a month, from mid-February to mid-March, we moved from vague allegations of Gaddafi’s supposed “genocide” or “crimes against humanity” to two separate votes in the UN Security Council, which permitted a NATO mission to establish a “no-fly” zone to protect civilians, this latter protection to be achieved by “all nec­essary measures.”

By the time UN Security Council resolution 1973 had been voted through on March 17, France had already formally recognized the jerry-rigged rebel committee in Benghazi as the legitimate government of Libya. By the end of May, it was being openly stated by senior figures in the relevant NATO governments that “regime change” was the objective and the eviction of Gaddafi a sine qua non of the mission.

Also, by late May, it was apparent that the rebels’ military capacities were modest in the extreme, that Gha­dafi’s eviction was not going to be the overnight affair confidently predicted in western capitals and in Ben­ghazi, also that NATO’s bombardments were not having the requisite effect.

In the crucial February 15 — March 17 time slot, there was no determined effort to investigate the charges against Ghadafi, leveled in the UN Security Council Resolutions and by NATO principals such as Obama and Clinton, the UK’s prime minister Cameron, or French President Sarkozy and his foreign minister.

The amazing vagueness of news stories of this — or indeed any — topic coming out of Libya has been con­spicuous. Here, remember, we had a regime accused in UN Security Council Resolution 1973 of “widespread and systematic attacks … against the civilian population [that] may amount to crimes against humanity.”

Yet since mid-February the reporting out of Libya dis­played a striking lack of persuasive documentation of butcheries or abuses commensurate with the language lavished on the regime’s presumptive conduct. Time and again one read vague phrases like “thousands reportedly killed by Gaddafi’s mercenaries” or Gaddafi “massa­cring his own people,” delivered without the slightest effort to furnish supporting evidence. It was the second­hand allegation of massacres that drove both news cover­age and UN activities — particularly in the early stage, when UN Resolution 1970 was adopted, calling for sanc­tions and the referral of Gaddafi’s closest circle to the International Criminal Court.

News reports in mid-March, such as those by the McClatchy news chain’s reporters Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and Shashank Bengali, contained no claims of anything approaching a “crime against human­ity,” the allegation in Resolution 1973. Yet by February 23 the propaganda blitz was in full spate, with Clinton denouncing Gaddafi and with Reagan’s “mad dog of the Middle East” exhumed as the preferred way of describ­ing the Libyan leader.

The UN commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, started denouncing the Libyan government as early as February 18; UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon joined Pillay on February 21. The UN News Center reported that Ban was “outraged at press reports that the Libyan authorities have been firing at demonstrators from war planes and helicopters” (our italics). In these early days, no one who represented the Libyan government was per­mitted to address the council. Only defectors speaking on behalf of Libya were given the floor.

Now, remember that on March 10 French President Sarkozy, a major player in NATO’s coalition of the will­ing against Libya, declared the Libyan National Transi­tion Council the only legitimate representative of the Lib­yan people. So, Gaddafi was facing a formal armed insurrection — not a protest movement demanding “democracy” — led by a shadowy entity based in Ben­ghazi. Seven days later, Resolution 1973 made clear that attempts to suppress this insurrection would elicit armed intervention by NATO.

The political complexion and origins of the rebel lead­ership and its backers received only fleeting atten­tion. Topics such as the rivalry between the French and Italian oil companies, or the input of other international oil majors, and major US banks and financial institutions were rarely touched upon.

The coverage of any fighting was often laughable. The press corps in Benghazi breathlessly described minor skirmishes involving a tank or two, or some armed vehicles, as mighty engagements.

In fact, the mighty armies contending along the high­way west of Benghazi would melt into the bleachers at a college baseball game. News stories suggest mobile war­fare on the scale of the epic dramas of the Kursk salient or the battle for Stalingrad in World War Two.

By the end of June the “no-fly zone” prompted some 12,000-plus NATO sorties. As with any bombing, civil­ians died. Since the beginning of NATO operations, a total of 12,887 sorties, including 4,850 strike sorties, were conducted up to June 27.

A team of Russian doctors wrote to the president of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, as follows:

“Today, 24 March, 2011, NATO aircraft and the U.S. all night and all morning bombed a suburb of Tripoli — Tajhura (where, in particular, is Libya’s Nuclear Research Center). Air Defense and Air Force facilities in Tajhura were destroyed back in the first 2 days of strikes and more active military facilities in the city remained, but today the object of bombing are barracks of the Lib­yan army, around which are densely populated residen­tial areas, and, next to it, the largest of Libya’s Heart Cen­ters. Civilians and the doctors could not assume that common residential quarters will be about to become destroyed, so none of the residents or hospital patients was evacuated.

“Bombs and rockets struck residential houses and fell near the hospital. The glass of the Cardiac Center building was broken, and in the building of the maternity ward for pregnant women with heart disease a wall col­lapsed and part of the roof. This resulted in ten miscar­riages whereby babies died, the women are in intensive care, doctors are fighting for their lives. Our colleagues and we are working seven days a week, to save people. This is a direct consequence of falling bombs and mis­siles in residential buildings, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries, which are operated and reviewed now by our doctors. Such a large number of wounded and killed, as during today, did not occur during the total of all the riots in Libya. And this is called ‘protecting’ the civilian population?”

With the Libyan intervention, everything was out of proportion. Gaddafi was scarcely the acme of monstros­ity conjured up by Obama or Mrs. Clinton or Sarkozy. In 4 decades, Libyans rose from being among the most wretched in Africa to considerable elevation in social amenities. In a detailed fairly recent report (“The Situation of Children & Women in Libya,” UNICEF Middle East & North Africa Regional Office, November 2010), UNICEF noted that Libya had important socio-economic achievements to its credit. In 2009 it enjoyed:

• a buoyant growth rate, with GDP having risen from $27.3 billion in 1998 to $93.2 billion by 2009, according to the World Bank;

• high per capita income (estimated by the World Bank at $16,430);high literacy rates (95% for males and 78% for females, aged 15 and above);

• high life expectancy at birth (74 years overall; 77 for females and 72 for males)

• and a consequent ranking of 55 out of 182 countries in terms of overall “Human Development”

In terms of the distribution of oil revenues it would be instructive to compare Libya’s record to those of other oil-producing nations.

Gaddafi’s alleged slaughter of his own people, and alleged ordering of mass rapes, formed the sharp edge of the interventionist crusade and of the Security Council resolutions, draped with the imprimatur of the collusive International Criminal Court. These charges were end­lessly recycled by the press, without any serious attempt at verification.

By mid-to-late June, human rights organizations were casting doubt on claims of mass rape and other abuses perpetrated by forces loyal to Gaddafi. An investi­gation by Amnesty International failed to find evi­dence for these human rights violations and in many cases has discredited or cast doubt on them. It also found indications that, on several occasions, the rebels in Ben­ghazi appeared to have knowingly made false claims or manufactured evidence.

The findings by the investigators were sharply at odds with the views of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who told a press conference that “we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the gov­ernment. Apparently he [Colonel Gaddafi] used it to pun­ish people.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was “deeply concerned” that Gaddafi’s troops were participat­ing in widespread rape in Libya. “Rape, physi­cal intimidation, sexual harassment, and even so-called virginity tests have taken place in countries throughout the region,” she said.

Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty, who was in Libya for three months after the start of the uprising, said to Patrick Cockburn in late June that “we have not found any evidence or a single vic­tim of rape, or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped.” She stressed this does not prove that mass rape did not occur, but there is no evidence to show that it did. Liesel Gerntholtz, head of women’s rights at Human Rights Watch, which also investigated the charge of mass rape, said, “We have not been able to find evi­dence.”

In one instance, two captured pro-Gaddafi soldiers pre­sented to the international media by the rebels claimed that [added] their officers, and later themselves, had raped a family with four daughters. Ms. Rovera says that when she and a colleague, both fluent in Arabic, inter­viewed the two detainees, one 17 years old and one 21, alone and in separate rooms, they changed their sto­ries and gave differing accounts of what had happened. “They both said they had not participated in the rape and just heard about it,” she said. “They told different stories about whether or not the girls’ hands were tied, whether their parents were present, and about how they were dressed.”

Seemingly the strongest evidence for mass rape appeared to come from a Libyan psychologist, Dr. Seham Sergewa, who says she distributed 70,000 ques­tionnaires in rebel-controlled areas and along the Tuni­sian border, of which over 60,000 were returned. Some 259 women volunteered that they had been raped, of whom Dr. Sergewa said she interviewed 140 victims.

Asked by Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s specialist on Libya, if it would be possible to meet any of these women, Dr. Sergewa replied that “she had lost con­tact with them,” and was unable to provide documentary evidence.

The accusation that Viagra had been distributed to Gaddafi’s troops to encourage them to rape women in rebel areas first surfaced in March, after NATO had destroyed tanks advancing on Benghazi. Ms. Rovera says that rebels dealing with the foreign media in Ben­ghazi started showing journalists packets of Viagra, claiming they came from burned-out tanks, though it is unclear why the packets were not charred.

Rebels repeatedly charged that mercenary troops from Central and West Africa had been used against them. The Amnesty investigation found there was no evi­dence for this. “Those shown to journalists as foreign mer­cenaries were later quietly released,” says Ms. Rovera. “Most were sub-Saharan migrants working in Libya without documents.” Others were not so lucky and were lynched or executed. Ms. Rovera found two bodies of migrants in the Benghazi morgue, and others were dumped on the outskirts of the city. She says, “The politi­cians kept talking about mercenaries, which inflamed public opinion, and the myth has continued because they were released without publicity.”

One story, to which credence was given by the for­eign media early on in Benghazi, was that eight to ten government troops who refused to shoot protesters were executed by their own side. Their bodies were shown on TV. But Ms. Rovera, says there is strong evidence for a different explanation. She says amateur video shows them alive after they had been captured, suggesting it was the rebels who killed them.

NATO intervention started on March 19 with air attacks to “protect” people in Benghazi from massacre by advancing pro-Gaddafi troops. There is no doubt that civilians did expect to be killed after threats of venge­ance from Gaddafi. During the first days of the uprising in eastern Libya, security forces shot and killed demon­strators and people attending their funerals, but there is no proof of mass killing of civilians on the scale of Syria or Yemen.

Most of the fighting during the first days of the upris­ing was in Benghazi, where 100 to 110 people were killed, and in the city of Baida to the east, where 59 to 64 were killed, says Amnesty. Most of these were probably protesters, though some may have obtained weapons. There is no evidence that aircraft or heavy anti-aircraft machine guns were used against crowds. Spent car­tridges picked up after protesters were shot at came from Kalashnikovs or similar caliber weapons.

The Amnesty findings confirmed a report by the Inter­national Crisis Group, which found that while the Gaddafi regime had a history of brutally repressing oppo­nents, there was no question of “genocide.”

The report adds that “much Western media coverage has from the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of events, portraying the protest movement as entirely peaceful and repeatedly suggesting that the regime’s security forces were unaccountably massacring unarmed demonstrators who presented no security chal­lenge.”

With so many countries out of bounds, journalists flocked to Benghazi, in Libya, which can be reached from Egypt without a visa. Alternatively they went to Tripoli, where the government allows a carefully moni­tored press corps to operate under strict supervision. Hav­ing arrived in these two cities, the ways in which the journalists report diverged sharply. Everybody reporting out of Tripoli expressed understandable skepticism about what government minders seek to show them as regards civilian casualties caused by NATO air strikes or demon­strations of support for Gaddafi. By way of contrast, the foreign press corps in Benghazi, capital of the rebel-held territory, shows surprising credulity toward more subtle but equally self-serving stories from the rebel govern­ment or its sympathizers.

The Libyan insurgents were adept at dealing with the press early on, and this included skillful propa­ganda to put the blame for unexplained killings on the other side. It is a weakness of journalists that they give wide publicity to atrocities, evidence for which may be shaky when first revealed. But when the stories turn out to be untrue or exaggerated, they rate scarcely a mention.

It is all credit to Amnesty Int’l and Human Rights Watch that they took a skeptical attitude to atrocities until proven. Contrast this responsible attitude with that of Hillary Clinton or the prosecutor of the Inter­national Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who blithely suggested that Gaddafi was using rape as a weapon of war to punish the rebels This system­atic demonization of Gaddafi — a brutal despot he may be, but not a monster on the scale of Saddam Hussein — also made it difficult to negotiate a ceasefire with him.

There is nothing particularly surprising about the rebels in Benghazi making things up or producing dubi­ous witnesses to Gaddafi’s crimes. They were fighting a war against a despot whom they feared and hated, and they understandably used propaganda as a weapon of war. But it did show naivety on the part of the foreign media, who almost universally sympathize with the rebels, to the extent that they swallowed whole so many atrocity stories fed to them by the rebel authorities and their sympathizers.

The only massacre by the Gaddafi regime, involving hundreds of victims, which is so far well attested, is the killings at Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in 1996, when up to 1,200 prisoners died, according to a credible witness who survived.

Battlefronts are always awash with rumors of impending massacre or rape, which spread rapidly among terrified people who may be the intended victims. Understandably enough, they do not want to wait to find out how true these stories are. Earlier this year, Patrick Cockburn was in Ajdabiyah, a front-line town 1.5 hour’s drive south of Benghazi, when he saw car loads of panic-stricken refugees fleeing up the road. They had just heard an entirely untrue report via al-Jazeera Arabic that pro-Gaddafi forces had broken through.

Likewise, al-Jazeera was producing uncorroborated reports of hospitals being attacked, blood banks destroyed, women raped, and the injured executed.

This toxic mixture of cheerleading and willful blind­ness persisted through to the end — though now stories do appear about the summary executions, revenge kill­ings and mass imprisonments that are occurring.

These are the real failures, to which Bérubé is indifferent, just as he is indifferent to and entirely igno­rant of Libyan history, past & present. His mandate is to issue his pro-forma denunciation of “the left,” an excerise in data-free ranting. By way of an antidote I strongly recommend a fine piece in the London Review by Hugh Roberts, who was the director of the International Crisis Group’s North Africa Project from 2002-2007 and from Feb. to July 2011. Roberts is about to take up the post of Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts Uni­versity.

A couple of samples:

“The claim that the ‘international community’ had no choice but to intervene militarily and that the alternative was to do nothing is false. An active, practical, non-vio­lent alternative was proposed, and deliberately rejected. The argument for a no-fly zone and then for a military in­tervention employing ‘all necessary measures’ was that only this could stop the regime’s repression and protect civilians. Yet many argued that the way to protect civil­ians was not to intensify the conflict by intervening on one side or the other, but to end it by securing a ceasefire followed by political negotiations. A number of propos­als were put forward. The International Crisis Group, for instance, where I worked at the time, published a state­ment on 10 March arguing for a two-point initiative: (i) the formation of a contact group or committee drawn from Libya’s North African neighbours and other Afri­can states with a mandate to broker an immediate cease­fire; (ii) negotiations between the protagonists to be initi­ated by the contact group and aimed at replacing the cur­rent regime with a more accountable, representative and law-abiding government. This proposal was echoed by the African Union and was consistent with the views of many major non-African states — Russia, China, Brazil and India, not to mention Germany and Turkey. It was restated by the ICG in more detail (adding provision for the deployment under a UN mandate of an international peacekeeping force to secure the ceasefire) in an open let­ter to the UN Security Council on 16 March, the eve of the debate which concluded with the adoption of UNSC Resolution 1973. In short, before the Security Council voted to approve the military intervention, a worked-out proposal had been put forward which addressed the need to protect civilians by seeking a rapid end to the fighting, and set out the main elements of an orderly transition to a more legitimate form of govern­ment, one that would avoid the danger of an abrupt col­lapse into anarchy, with all it might mean for Tunisia’s revolution, the security of Libya’s other neighbors and the wider region. The imposition of a no-fly zone would be an act of war: as the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress on 2 March, it required the dis­abling of Libya’s air defenses as an indispensable prelimi­nary. In authorizing this and ‘all necessary meas­ures’, the Security Council was choosing war when no other policy had even been tried. Why?

“Resolution 1973 was passed in New York late in the evening of 17 March. The next day, Gaddafi, whose forces were camped on the southern edge of Benghazi, announced a ceasefire in conformity with Article 1 and proposed a political dialogue in line with Article 2. What the Security Council demanded and suggested, he pro­vided in a matter of hours. His ceasefire was immedi­ately rejected on behalf of the NTC by a senior rebel commander, Khalifa Haftar, and dismissed by Western governments. ‘We will judge him by his actions not his words,’ David Cameron declared, implying that Gaddafi was expected to deliver a complete ceasefire by himself: that is, not only order his troops to cease fire but ensure this ceasefire was maintained indefinitely despite the fact that the NTC was refusing to reciprocate. Cameron’s comment also took no account of the fact that Article 1 of Resolution 1973 did not of course place the burden of a ceasefire exclusively on Gaddafi. No sooner had Cam­eron covered for the NTC’s unmistakable violation of Resolution 1973 than Obama weighed in, insisting that for Gaddafi’s ceasefire to count for anything he would (in addition to sustaining it indefinitely, single-handed, irrespective of the NTC) have to withdraw his forces not only from Benghazi but also from Misrata and from the most important towns his troops had retaken from the rebellion, Ajdabiya in the east and Zawiya in the west — in other words, he had to accept strategic defeat in advance. These conditions, which were impossible for Gaddafi to accept, were absent from Article 1. (1) Demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians;…”

And here’s Roberts concerning the influential charge that Gadhafi had ordered the slaughtering of his fellow Libyans from the air, plus his conclusion:

“In the days that followed I made efforts to check the al-Jazeera story [about Ghadafi bombing Libyans] for myself. One source I consulted was the well-regarded blog Informed Comment, maintained and updated every day by Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the Univer­sity of Michigan. This carried a post on 21 February enti­tled ‘Qaddafi’s bombardments recall Mussolini’s’, which made the point that ‘in 1933-40, Italo Balbo championed aerial warfare as the best means to deal with uppity colo­nial populations.’ The post began: ‘The strafing and bom­bardment in Tripoli of civilian demonstrators by Muammar Gaddafi’s fighter jets on Monday …’, with the underlined words linking to an article by Sarah El Deeb and Maggie Michael for Associated Press pub­lished at 9 p.m. on 21 February. This article provided no corroboration of Cole’s claim that Gaddafi’s fighter jets (or any other aircraft) had strafed or bombed anyone in Tripoli or anywhere else. The same is true of every source indicated in the other items on Libya relaying the aerial onslaught story which Cole posted that same day.

“I was in Egypt for most of the time, but since many journalists visiting Libya were transiting through Cairo, I made a point of asking those I could get hold of what they had picked up in the field. None of them had found any corroboration of the story. I especially remember on 18 March asking the British North Africa expert Jon Marks, just back from an extended tour of Cyrenaica (taking in Ajdabiya, Benghazi, Brega, Derna and Ras Lanuf), what he had heard about the story. He told me that no one he had spoken to had mentioned it. Four days later, on 22 March, USA Today carried a striking article by Alan Kuperman, the author of The Limits of Humani­tarian Intervention and coeditor of Gambling on Humani­tarian Intervention. The article, ‘Five Things the US Should Consider in Libya’, provided a powerful cri­tique of the Nato intervention as violating the conditions that needed to be observed for a humanitarian interven­tion to be justified or successful. But what interested me most was his statement that ‘despite ubiquitous cell­phone cameras, there are no images of genocidal vio­lence, a claim that smacks of rebel propaganda.’ So, four weeks on, I was not alone in finding no evidence for the aerial slaughter story. I subsequently discovered that the issue had come up more than a fortnight earlier, on 2 March, in hearings in the US Congress when Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were testifying. They told Congress that they had no confirmation of reports of aircraft controlled by Gad­dafi firing on citizens…”

The idea that Gaddafi represented nothing in Libyan society, that he was taking on his entire people and his people were all against him was another distortion of the facts. As we now know from the length of the war, the huge pro-Gaddafi demonstration in Tripoli on July 1, the fierce resistance Gaddafi’s forces put up, the month it took the rebels to get anywhere at all at Bani Walid and the further month at Sirte, Gaddafi’s regime enjoyed a substantial measure of support, as the NTC did. Libyan society was divided and political division was in itself a hopeful development since it signified the end of the old political unanimity enjoined and maintained by the Jamahiriyya. In this light, the Western governments’ por­trayal of ‘the Libyan people’ as uniformly against Gaddafi had a sinister implication, precisely because it insinuated a new Western-sponsored unanimity back into Libyan life. This profoundly undemocratic idea followed naturally from the equally undemocratic idea that, in the absence of electoral consultation or even an opinion poll to ascertain the Libyans’ actual views, the British, French and American governments had the right and authority to determine who was part of the Libyan peo­ple and who wasn’t. No one supporting the Gaddafi regime counted. Because they were not part of ‘the Lib­yan people’ they could not be among the civilians to be protected, even if they were civilians as a matter of mere fact. They were not protected; they were killed by NATO air strikes and by uncontrolled rebel units. The number of such civilian victims on the wrong side of the war must be many times the total death toll as of Feb. 21.

But they don’t count, any more than the thousands of young men in Gaddafi’s army who innocently imagined that they too were part of “the Libyan people” and were only doing their duty to the state counted when they were incinerated by NATO’S planes or extra-judicially executed en masse after capture, as in Sirte.