by F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL
President Barack Obama confers with Samantha Power, left, and Susan E. Rice, U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. PHOTO/ Peter Souza, The White House.
The most remarkable facet of NATO’s war against Libya is the fact that “world opinion,” that ever so nebulous thing, has accepted an act of overt military aggression against a sovereign country guilty of no violation of the UN Charter in an act of de facto neo-colonialism, a ’humanitarian’ war in violation of basic precepts of the laws of nations. The world has accepted it without realizing the implications if the war against Gaddafi’s Libya is allowed to succeed in forced regime change. At issue is not whether or not Gaddafi is good or evil. At issue is the very concept of the civilized law of nations and of just or unjust wars.
The Libya campaign represents the attempt to force application of a dangerous new concept into the norms of accepted international law. That concept is what is termed by its creators, “Responsibility to Protect.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has stated that the justification for the use of force in Libya was based on humanitarian grounds, and referred to the principle known as Responsibility to Protect, “a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” [1]
An American President, Barack Obama, has invoked this novel new concept as justification for what is de facto an unlawful US-led military war of aggression and acquisition. [2] Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as Presidential candidate in 2008 said about the concept: “In adopting the principle of the responsibilty to protect, the United Nations accepted the principle that mass atrocities that take place in one state are the concern of all states.” [3] Nice words and highly dangerous.
According to White House insider reports, the key person driving Obama to move to military action in Libya, citing a nebulous “Responsibility to Protect” as the basis was Presidential Adviser, Samantha Power. [4]
In effect, via the instrument of a controlled NATO propaganda barrage, the US government with no verifiable proof claimed Gaddafi’s air force slaughtered innocent civilians. That in turn has been the basis on which Amr Moussa and members of the Arab League bowed down before heavy Washington pressure to give Washington and London the quasi-legal fig leaf it needed. That unproven slaughter of allegedly innocent civilians was why a “humanitarian” war was necessary. On that basis, we might ask why not put a no-fly NATO bombardment operation as well on Bahrain, or Yemen, or Syria? Who decides the criteria in this new terrain of Responsibility to Protect?
There has been no serious effort on the side of Washington or London or Paris to negotiate a ceasefire inside Libya, no effort to find a compromise as in other countries. This is the marvelous flexibility of the new doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. Washington gets to define who is responsible for what. National sovereignty becomes a relic.
Back in 2004 George Soros authored a little-noted article in Foreign Policy magazine on the notion of national sovereignty. He wrote,
“Sovereignty is an anachronistic concept originating in bygone times when society consisted of rulers and subjects, not citizens. It became the cornerstone of international relations with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648…Today, though not all nation-states are democratically accountable to their citizens, the principle of sovereignty stands in the way of outside intervention in the internal affairs of nation-states. But true sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments. If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified.” [5]
Voltaire for more