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On 2011-02-28, at 6:03 PM, Fred Feldman wrote: > > US-British-French military intervention is becoming seems to be becoming > more a fact than a speculation, and fairly quickly. The imperialists hope to > sell themselves as the organizers of victory in the struggle against > Gadhafi, and a more than adequate substitute for the people of Libya in > reorganizing the country. In fact, military intervention may have already > begun, if we can believe the Pakistan Observer > http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=78009. I am not sure we can, > however. > > Arguments that the imperialists have no need for intervene because the > leadership is bourgeois forget that Gadhafi crew was a bourgeois leadership > and they were virtually at war with him for many years. The imperialists > need to get control of this process in the Middle East and North Africa, The > idea that they are happy as clams as long as there is a bourgeois leadership > is a leftist fantasy. I expect any military intervention will depend on a) whether the US and the other members of the UN Security Council, who have already imposed economic sanctions on the regime, conclude that control is slipping away from the current bourgeois reformist leadership of the movement to more radical Islamist or secular forces and/or b) whether such intervention aimed at forcing Ghaddafi's removal and cobbling together a new government in the event of a military stalemate between the two sides is supported or resisted by the opposition and, by extension, the peoples of the region. So far, there is no evidence that the political character of the opposition poses a threat to Western interests, nor that the latter would reject military aid, whether in the form of military advisors as reported by the Pakistan Observer or air strikes aimed at the regime. I agree a large scale military intervention, even one welcomed by the population, would forestall any further development of the revolutionary process for the reasons you suggest - "the imperialists (would) sell themselves as the organizers of victory in the struggle against Gadhafi, and a more than adequate substitute for the people of Libya in reorganizing the country" - but such an operation is fraught with risk, and, unless the situation suddenly turns against them, there are many other avenues open to the US and the Europeans to influence the outcome and aftermath of the conflict. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
