When the US and its allies went into Libya five years ago we were told this was a humanitarian intervention to help “the people”. We were told the same in Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and many other places.
What would the politicians do without the help of MSM and the CNN effect? Now in retrospect we know different and when mirrored to what is happening in the rest of the world, including the US, it is clear that R2P and humanitarian interventions is but a guise to further the interests of those closest to oil interests. One only has to look back and compare, “would we be, as George Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control?
We all see what is happening in Syria and Iraq every day. In the sort of liberal democracy Western nations think themselves to be the current situation would never exist, as no one would vote for ISIS or give anyone a mandate to support what is happening is these countries.
Similarly Libya is now on the rink of economic collapse as a result of the civil war the US declared preferable to continued Gaddafi rule. Like every country the US enters, it produces thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons whose problems are then largely ignored by the Western countries a small number of them are lucky to flee too, even when their asylum applications are based on the same abuses the US allegedly went in to stop.
Furthermore, the Western powers make every effort to undermine the concept of “the people”, despite the fact they use it to justify their own actions. The leaders of all the main religious groups in Syria routinely tell journalists that the entire population of the country are members of their flock, as they believe the West is trying to exploit existing divisions by saying that every member of each religion must have this or that political position, rather than being Syrians first. This process does of course divide groups of people into “friends” and “enemies” of the US – one group are “the people”, the other not.
So does the opposite. The various groups in Syria called “Christian” have been socially and politically different for 1,500 years, but are being lumped together under one label for convenience and the told what position they must have to fit that picture. If individuals disagree with the position ascribed to them they are regarded as not representative, and therefore having no view worth considering. The number of “the people” thus gets ever smaller; the justification for war ever smaller, but the phrase is used all the more to justify it.
So we might well ask – who are “the people” being protected by US actions? Do they themselves know who they are? If they don’t, what are the Western powers supposed to do to help them?
We are now seeing a very good example of who “the people” really are. A group of Native Americans, which seems to be getting larger by the day and supplemented by other supporters, is trying to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline project going ahead. Native Americans of course inhabited what is now called the United States long before the white men came and took their land without asking. So any definition of “We the people” would have to include this indigenous population.
How are these people being treated? Armed police and military are moving in to break up their peaceful protest. Those Americans who watch the mainstream news are largely unaware of this, because a media blackout has been imposed on anything concerning this action. They are also unaware of why the Native Americans are protesting, seeing it as special pleading by a group of defeated enemies.
The various Native American nations signed treaties with the white men who occupied their country which guaranteed their sovereignty, just as various states the US invades have also done at various times. Technically, the various lands “granted” to the Native Americans remain independent countries. Consequently these treaties form part of international law, and take precedence over US law. The Native Americans have every right to demand, through their tribal leaders, that the US stops routing pipelines through its sovereign territory, and taking and polluting its water, and legally the US must respect that.
But now the US wants to build a new energy pipeline, all that is being ignored. As we see in all the oil rich counties, sovereignty means nothing when faced with US energy imperatives because sovereignty only applies to people, and the Native Americans are not “We the people”.
No Native American signed the US Declaration of Independence or its Constitution because they were held to belong to foreign countries; these documents were nothing to do with them. But now the US wants to build a pipeline the land is suddenly American, subject to US court rulings despite the court having no jurisdiction there, even though the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, and the U.S. Army issued a rare joint statement which said in part, “Construction of the pipeline on Army Corps land bordering or under Lake Oahe will not go forward at this time.”
As commentators are pointing out, “Obviously it is the will of the Obama administration to trample the rights and sovereignty of Native Americans and their ancestral lands … on par with what it does in faraway countries. Legally the government is arguing that a combination of private land rights and eminent domain actions form the basis for installing this behemoth oil pipeline across the American Heartland.”
Chief Black Hawk, ancestor of the current protesters, described this situation succinctly in one of his famous quotes: “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right like look like wrong, and wrong look like right.”
If this is how the US is treating people it is now conveniently insisting are US citizens, occupying US land – and therefore part of “We the people” – who are “the people” it is invading other countries to protect? The native population, with sovereign rights, which ‘should’ supersede US energy interests? A certain part of that population, whose rights are being violated by those sovereign states are now on par with enemy countries.
Colonel Gaddafi was always a controversial ruler in Libya, and did engage in repression and human rights abuses. So there were groups of people who wanted protection from him, just as some want protection from Assad. Furthermore there are significant ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities in all the countries the US has recently engaged in, who often support anyone who will help them against the ruling group. For example, Christians in Iraq supported the British against their own country during World War Two, and have been reminded of it by the various governments there ever since.
But to answer who “the people” are we need to ask one question. Throughout the Soviet period the Russian people knew who Tsar Nicholas II was, even if he was seen wholly negatively, and his public rehabilitation and ultimate canonisation when the Soviet regime fell were generally welcomed. But who remembers who ran Libya before Gaddafi? Who remembers the government system in place then, or is clamouring for its return?
Even those who were victims of Gaddafi, and bitterly opposed him, tacitly accept much of which he did in Libya -the country which had the highest standard of living in its region and provided social protection for the vast majority of the population. Few wanted to overthrow the basic system he instituted, however much they hated the man himself. No matter how much the West complained about him they didn’t overthrow it either, largely because they could see that he had a great deal of popular support – which mattered, until he tried to create a new currency to supersede the dollar and franc.
Currencies don’t cause civil wars, as we saw when the Euro was introduced. The ongoing civil war in Libya, and rival governments in different parts of the country, demonstrates that somewhere along the line “the people” have ceased being interested, if they ever were, in what “the people” actually think. “The people” are a small group of interested individuals who are afraid that they can only support their argument by saying that “the people” are behind them. If someone doesn’t have “the people” behind them, or doesn’t claim to have, their view is irrelevant; they are not one of “the people”.
This is what lies behind the peculiarity we will witness in the US presidential elections – even if a candidate wins the popular vote in a given state by a very small margin, as often happens, they will receive 100% of that state’s Electoral College votes in all but two cases. This protects the independence of the individual states, as institutions, but means that a significant minority of voters in that state have no view. You are only one of “the people” if you agree with the majority, and if the majority says too many things those in charge don’t like the system will be changed.
When the West conducts these interventions in the name of protecting “the people” there is always some small justification. Western forces and defense contractors often welcomed by some group or other in the country concerned, or by the people as a whole. The US invasion of Iraq united the various religious and political groups in that country in a way nothing else had ever done, and continued to for as long as removing Saddam was the goal.
However no one ever reads the small print. Time and again the people being “helped” by these actions fail to understand that the West can’t just move in, help the afflicted and go home.
If the locals make their own decisions they will start doing things the West doesn’t like. That cannot be tolerated because the West has to believe that its own decisions are those of “We the people”, and therefore of higher value than any made independently. In order to justify the ideology of “We the people”, Western countries have no choice but to occupy others and impose their own ideas upon them. The “people” they enter those countries to protect are the first to be neutralised, because they were never “people” to begin with.
No matter how many times they see it happen, different countries think that if the US and its allies intervene to help them their case will be different. They might like to be reminded that the Dakota protest site is also the site of Wounded Knee. This is regarded as the place where the Indian wars ended, in 1890 – wars against the native population waged for over a century. The Wounded Knee massacre left 300 unarmed men, women and children dead – while 20 brave US soldiers were awarded Congressional medals of Honor for their part in the bloodletting.
Not only has the US not changed, it is prepared to do the same things in the very same place in a willful affront to those it now maintains are its “people”. This might be remembered in Ukraine, where the war against those Ukrainians declared to be pro-Russian cannot end even if the Chocolate soldiers win an overwhelming victory. The first action has to be justified by doing the same thing again in the same place, to make it normal, and the cycle begins again.
What is going on in Libya, Syria and Iraq is not merely a struggle for influence and natural resources. It is another attempt to justify the basis of all Western policy, by any means possible.
This is one of the reasons why Islamic fundamentalism has taken a hold in these countries, and others. If the ideology of “the people” being paramount is a con, some higher value which cannot be disobeyed must replace it, and radical Islam fits the bill.
Who “the people” are varies from day to day in public. In Syria it includes IS, in Iraq it is everyone who isn’t IS. But what still happens to Native Americans in their own land for not being “the people” is everything which “the people” of today, whoever they may be, can expect sooner or later. It isn’t the US bombing them out of their homes, it is “the people” – and as long as this con is allowed to persist, only war and the criminality which funds it will flourish, at the expense of “the people”.
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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