Inkwell Institute

North African Desk

There you go….a new week and we have not managed to destroy all life….well not yet….but we keep trying.

I have said just about everything I wanted to say on our cracker jack political system so as usual I will move on to more important issues and more important places……..

The US and its allies have done their part brilliantly…..we hve managed to pretty much destroy all opponents……and we did it with a smile and pat on the back…..we showed up to save them from themselves…..and in doing so we have created some of the most dangerous spots in the world……..oh I don’t know Iraq, Syria, and now we are condemning Libya…….been a helluva century so far.

What are talking about Professor……Qadahfi is gone and all is right with the world,……..ain’t it?

All is right….only if you have the attention span of a rabbit in heat.

Eastern Libya hates Tripoli….Southern Libya is just pissed….and then there are the militias (Militias?  Where have I heard the term before?)…..every megalomaniac has a militia (again that sounds vaguely familiar) and the militias do what militias do….they fight whoever is the bad guy of the day.

Recently there was a coup, only we do not call it a coup these days, that put the entire country in a tizzy…….all this stems from the area that Americans know all too well….only they have no idea they know it….Benghazi.

What do the separatists want? They demand not mere autonomy but something close to independence. The territory of Cyrenaica (Barqa, in Arabic) followed concrete steps in this sense: it first established a shadow government, after advocating for a loose federal system of government sharing power for months with Fezzan, the south western region of Libya and in June 2013, Sheikh Ahmed Zubair Senussi, head of the Cyrenaica Transitional Council, declared self-government.

On November 4 2013, it unilaterally declared its condition of “semi-autonomous state.” The separatist region even announced the establishment of an independent oil company after taking over several commercial seaports, a step prior to the creation of a Cyrenaican Defense Force.

The self-proclaimed government of Cyrenaica insists it is not defying the government or Congress, but rather claim their right to export. It has been complaining for decades of being sidelined from the political arena. The east is where most of the country’s wealth lies, in form of oil reserves. It made sense that the uprising started there, as the city has become a hub for intellectuals, dissenters, unsatisfied youth and political activists. Contrary to Tripoli, the city has grown from the meddling of different identities. Cyrenaica has forged its identity on a strong sense of tribal membership that today remains present even among the urban youth.

All this violence makes me think of a country we know all too well…..Somalia.  Libya is looking at a situation that is playing out today….in Syria….In Somalia….and to a lesser extent in Iraq.  all the violence…..all human rights violations……all the lawlessness……tribe against tribe…..clan against clan…..and eventually all against the US.

Libya is flirting with a civil war…..and won’t that be just peachy?

All these countries are countries that our congressional war hawks have made the US a part of the violence………and that will bite us in the butt……..any day now.  These war hawks in their rush to assist the military-industrial complex have lost sight of the consequences of their positions.  And as soon as something goes wrong, and it will go wrong, these hawks are the first to assign blame and it is never their fault.

Time for the US to re-think their failing foreign policy…….19th century answers will not work in the 21st century.