Humanitarian Neo-Colonialism: Framing Libya and Reframing War

Meet Gareth Evans.  He is one of the leading figures behind a new technique of forcible regime change, that of "humanitarian intervention" (or the more Orwellian appellation "responsibility to protect" (R2P)).  These new concepts redefine the decades-old legal standards limiting the use of military force in international affairs.  At issue here is a challenge to national sovereignty, and pressure toward centralized global control. Humanitarian Neo-Colonialism: Framing Libya and Reframing War By F. William Engdahl Originally published in Global Research May 4, 2011 Images and captions added by Color Revolutions and Geopolitics

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 Samantha Power 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   Responsibility to Protect The coup represented by the NATO intervention into events in Libya has been years in assiduous preparation. The first to publicize the concept, “The Responsibility to Protect,” was Gareth Evans, a former Australian Foreign Minister and CEO of the International Crisis Group. In 2002, one year before the illegal US-UK aggression against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Evans published a seminal paper in Foreign Affairs, the elite foreign policy journal of the New York Council on Foreign Relations.6 In his article Evans called for the debate on whether or not to intervene into a given country on human rights grounds, even if the events are strictly internal to that country, to be "reframed not as an argument about the 'right to intervene' but about the 'responsibility to protect.' "7 That clever linguistic  "reframing" created a necessary blurring of lines of the original UN Charter Principle of sovereign equality of states, of Article 2, Section 1 of the Charter. There was a very sound reason that the founding nations signing the UN Charter in 1946 decided to exclude UN police intervention into internal disputes of a sovereign state. Who should now decide which side in a given conflict is right? Under "responsibility to protect" essentially the United States and a few select allies could potentially define China as in violation of the human rights of its Tibetan or other ethnic minority citizens and order NATO troops to intervene in a humanitarian action. Or NATO might decide to intervene into the internal unrest in Chechnya, an integral part of the Russian Federation, because Moscow troops are attempting to enforce order over insurgents being secretly armed by NATO via Al Qaeda or Mujahideen networks in Central Asia. Or a similar "humanitarian" excusemight be used to call for a NATO no-fly zone over Belarus or Ukraine or Venezuela or Bolivia or perhaps at some point, Brazil. The so-called humanitarian "responsibility to protect" doctrine opens a Pandora's Box of possibilities for those powers controlling world opinion via CNN or BBC or key media such as the New York Times, to justify a de facto neo-colonial policy of military intervention. This is the real significance of what Gareth Evans blithely terms "reframing." Framing as deliberate manipulation In mass media framing is a very well-researched subject. The technique refers to a technique of manipulating an individual's emotional reaction or more accurately, his or her perception of meanings of words or phrases. When the Republican Party sought to get support for a huge tax cut for the wealthy on inheritances, something people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett found relevant to keeping their billions, the Bush Administration reframed the term inheritance taxes to become "death taxes," making it subtly seem like something everyone who ultimately dies should support—only the wealthy inherit, but everyone dies became the subtle reframed message. A rhetorical phrase is packaged thus to encourage a certain interpretation and to discourage others. Two authorities on framing, Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor identify why framing is so remarkably powerful as a tool to manipulate perception. It creates a mental "shortcut." According to them, human beings are by nature “cognitive misers”, meaning they prefer to do as little thinking as possible. Frames give us a quick and easy way to process information. Hence, people will use the previously mentioned mental filters to make sense of incoming messages. As Fiske and Taylor note, this gives the sender and framer of the information enormous power to use these schemas to influence how the receivers will interpret the message. 8 What is emerging, with the aggression against Libya as a major test case in the reframing of military intervention as responsibility to protect, is acceptance of radical new forms of US-orchestrated military intervention, with or without UN Security Council sanction, a radical new form of neo-colonialism, a major new step on the road to a New World Order, the Pentagon's much-sought Full Spectrum Dominance. Those ever-present NGOs The steering organization for embedding the nebulous notion of responsibility to protect is another of the ever-present Non-Governmental Organizations, this one called the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. It in turn, much like the famous wooden Russian dolls, was created by other human rights NGOs including by the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, Refugees International, typically financed by a small network of donors.9 Gareth Evans is co-chair of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect's International Advisory Board, as well as being President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group which he led from 2000 to 2009. Evans' International Crisis Group which once described itself humbly as "widely regarded as the world's leading independent, non-government source of information, analysis and advice to governments and international organisations on conflict issues,” is hardly a voice of independence or democracy. It is a creation of the leading Washington policy circles pledged to advance an agenda the Pentagon calls Full Spectrum Dominance, which I referred to in an earlier book as "Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order." 10 The most parasitic class of people--those literally feeding off of you--are also those that love you and want to protect you?  That we even entertain this laughable notion illustrates the deceptive power of language and the value of a good public relations campaign.  George Soros (left) and David Rockefeller (second from left) are two of the most visible individuals behind the destruction of national sovereignty on the path toward global governance, and so it makes sense that their private foundations also helped create the concepts of "humanitarian intervention" and "responsibility to protect." In addition to getting government funds from the US and UK governments, Evans' International Crisis Group also gets generous support from the Rockefeller, Ford and MacArthur foundations.11 George Soros, founder of the Open Society Institute sits on the ICG Board of Trustees.12 Until he made his dramatic and well-timed return to Egypt in January 2011, Mohamed El Baradei also sat on the board of the Brussels-based ICG. 13 The ICG was previously headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to US presidents and long-time associate of David Rockefeller. Among other leading figures linked to Evans' International Crisis Group have been founder, Morton Abramowitz, former board member of  the National Endowment for Democracy.14 The present chair of ICG is Thomas Pickering, former US Ambassador to Moscow and to El Salvator where he was accused of backing creation of death squads. ICG's board also includes General Wesley Clark, former NATO-commander who led the destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999 and Samuel Berger, former US National Security Advisor. Former NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen is also a member.15 This should cause at least some perceptive readers to rethink what Evans' agenda of Responsibility to Protect is really about. Evans' Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, in addition to being active in North Africa and the Middle East, is also directly active in Asia from their center in Australia. In short they are making major efforts to propandagize the notion of responsibility to protect under the guize of protecting various populations from what they define as "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity..." 16 The world community is being subtly brainwashed to accept the radical new proposition with nary a peep of serious opposition. As Michael Barker, an Australian analyst of the use of humanitarian rhetoric and US-based NGOs to advance a Washington agenda noted, "Perhaps if  'evil' Qaddafi had been a bona fide US-backed dictator...the US government could have exerted more influence over Qaddafi’s political choices, and encouraged him to back down and allow himself to be replaced with a suitably US friendly leader. However, it is precisely because Qaddafi is not a Western-backed dictator that external powers cannot force his hand so easily: this helps explain why the world’s leading...elites were so keen to use the humanitarian pretext to support his opponents in the civil war." 17 It sets a dangerous precedent indeed, as many nations are now beginning to realize. F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order         Notes 1 Ban Ki-Moon, cited in Omri Ceren, “Responsibility To Protect,” Not Remotely New, March 20, 2011, Commentary. 2 Bonney Kapp, Obama's Libya Speech: The Highlights, March 28, 2011, CNN, accessed in http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/28/obamas-libya-speech-the-highlights/. 3 Hillary Clinton, 2008 Presidential Aide Questionnaire, accessed in http://globalsolutions.org/08orbust/pcq/clinton. 4 Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and Hans Nichols, Samantha Power Brings Activist Role Inside to Help Persuade Obama on Libya, Bloomberg News, March 25, 2011. 5  George Soros, The Peoples' Sovereignty: How a new twist on an old idea can protect the world's most vulnerable populations, New York, Foreign Policy, January 1, 2004, accessed in http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2004/01/01/the_peoples_sovereignty. 6 Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, The Responsibility to Protect, Foreign Affairs, Vol.81, no.6, November/December 2002. pp. 99-110. 7 Ibid.  8 S.T. Fiske, and S.E. Taylor,  Social Cognition (2nd ed.), 1991, New York, McGraw-Hill. 9  Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Who We Are, accessed in http://globalr2p.org/whoweare/index.php 10 F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, Wiesbaden, 2009, edition.engdahl. 11 Jan Oberg, The International Crisis Group: Who Pays the Piper?, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Press Info #219, 15 April 2005, accessed in http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27a/201.html 12 International Crisis Group Website, accessed in http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/about/board.aspx 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. [xv] Ibid. [xvi] Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Who We Are, accessed in http://globalr2p.org/whoweare/index.php. [xvii] Michael Barker, Stephen Zunes, Libya, and Seemingly Moral Imperatives, March 31, 2011, accessed in http://wagingnonviolence.org/2011/03/zunes-critiques-war-on-libya-offers-nonviolent-alternatives/comment-page-1/#comment-24720.

Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups (1991)

The paternal smiles of a benevolent democracy: National Endowment for Democracy (NED) President Carl Gershman (left), standing with former NED board members Morton Abramowitz (right) and Stephen J. Solarz (center).  The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 as a funding conduit for U.S. government financed regime change worldwide.  The following article, published by the Washington Post in 1991, touches upon some of the history of how this organization came into existence.

Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups
By David Ignatius 
The Washington Post
September 22, 1991

Images and captions added by Color Revolutions and Geopolitics

NOBODY WAS rude enough to say so during last week's confirmation hearings for Robert M. Gates to head the CIA, but the old era of covert action is dead. The world doesn't run in secret anymore. We are now living in the Age of Overt Action.

The great democratic revolution that has swept the globe over the past few years has been a triumph of overt action. The CIA old boys spent a generation fantasizing about this sort of global anti-communist putsch. But when it finally happened, it was in the open. There were no secret paramilitary armies, and there was almost no bloodshed. The key operatives in the conspiracy turned out to be telephones, televisions and fax machines.

Working in broad daylight, the United States and its allies were able to do things that would have been unthinkably dangerous had they been done in the shadows. Consider:

When Boris Yeltsin's aides were trying to rally support for their resistance in Moscow on Aug. 19, the first day of the coup, they needed to broadcast their defiant message to Russia and the world. One of them sent a fax to Allen Weinstein, a pro-democracy activist who heads a think tank in Washington.

"Did Mr. Bush make any comments upon the situation in this country?" implored the handwritten fax message. "If he did, make it known by all means of communication to the people of this country. The Russian government has no NO ways to address the people. All radio stations are under control. The following is [Boris Yeltsin's] address to the Army. Submit it to USIA. Broadcast it over the country. Maybe 'Voice of America.' Do it! Urgent!"

And it was done, in the open.

Next, it was time for the leader of the free world to contact the Kremlin rebel who was seeking to dismantle the Soviet empire and destroy the Communist Party. And how was this contact, arguably the most sensitive and delicate in the history of the Cold War, handled? George Bush called Boris Yeltsin on the telephone. And then he went on television and described his conversation.

We didn't need the CIA to support Yeltsin's countercoup. We just needed a telephone operator.

Preparing the ground for last month's triumph of overt action was a network of overt operatives who during the last 10 years have quietly been changing the rules of international politics. They have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private -- providing money and moral support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist rule. And, in contrast to many of the CIA's superannuated Cold Warriors, who tended to get tangled in their webs of secrecy, these overt operatives have been immensely successful.

There's an obvious lesson here for Gates, or whoever ends up heading the CIA. The old concept of covert action, which has gotten the agency into such trouble during the past 40 years, may be obsolete. Nowadays, sensible activities to support America's friends abroad (or undermine its enemies) are probably best done openly. That includes paramilitary operations such as supporting freedom fighters, which can be managed overtly by the Pentagon. And it includes political-support operations for pro-democracy activists, which may be best left to the new network of overt operators.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) thus has it half-right when he urges that the CIA be abolished. The main problem, contrary to what Moynihan says, is not with intelligence collection -- "spying," in its purest form. That part of the CIA needs to be strengthened, not cut.

What may need abolishing is the covert-action role that was awkwardly grafted onto the CIA's basic spying mission when the agency was created in 1947. The covert-action boys were known back then as the Office of Policy Coordination. It may be time, at last, to bid them adieu. They're obsolete. They've been privatized.

That's especially true in the realm of what used to be called "propaganda" and can now simply be called information. The CIA worked hard in the old days to draw foreign newspapers and magazines into its web, so as to counter Soviet disinformation. Frank Wisner, the head of CIA covert operations during the mid-1950s, once remarked that he could play his media assets like a "mighty Wurlitzer."

Today the mighty Wurlitzer actually exists. It's called CNN. But it doesn't need playing by anybody but the independent journalists who work there. CNN's objective, omnipresent, real-time coverage of the news helps America's interests more than all the besotted Third World "media assets" of old could ever have imagined. And the bar bills are less.

Allen Weinstein [pictured below], the recipient of Yeltsin's faxes, is probably the dean of the new overt operatives. Like many of the people running the new nations of Eastern Europe, he's an ex-professor. He taught history at Smith College for 15 years and even worked for several months writing editorials for The Washington Post.

Weinstein's career as an overt operator dates back to 1980, when he joined Soviet dissidents in organizing a citizens' committee to monitor the Helsinki Accords on Human Rights. He quickly became connected with the network of pro-democracy activists who were then beginning to challenge anti-democratic regimes around the world. Soon he was sponsoring conferences for dissidents, arranging visits for them to the United States and otherwise making trouble.

"The networking phenomenon is one of the things we've specialized in," explains Weinstein. His visitors in those early days included some of the insurgents who were later to lead protest movements across Eastern Europe in 1989.

"People wander through your office," he says. "They become family."

Weinstein founded the Center for Democracy in 1984 as an umbrella for his global meddling. He dispatched election-monitoring teams to the Philippines, Panama and Nicaragua that are credited with having helped topple undemocratic regimes in those countries through the ballot box. By 1990, he was hosting meetings for newly elected Polish parliamentarians; for legislative clerks from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland; and for constitution-drafters from those three countries.

Trenchcoats and tradecraft were irrelevant to these gatherings. The key man in Weinstein's overt operation was the rapporteur.

Boris Yeltsin and his aides were soon drawn into this transatlantic hospitality suite. They attended Weinstein's conferences, including one on environmental problems held in Moscow in early August, which was co-sponsored by Weinstein's center and the Russian republic. When the hard-liners launched their putsch a few days later, the Yeltsin aides naturally enough began sending faxes to their friend, Weinstein. The first one read simply: "It is military coup. Tanks are everywhere."

Now, with the KGB in retreat from Prague to Vladivostok, Weinstein has scheduled a conference in Sofia, Bulgaria on the topic: "The Proper Role of Intelligence Agencies in a Democracy." That may be rubbing it in.

Amazingly enough, these simple pro-democracy activities were once the exclusive province of the CIA. Back in the heyday of the Cold War, the wizards of Langley seemed to think it necessary to "recruit" the world's democrats and give them code names.

The covert mentality penetrated nearly every aspect of American life. The mandarins decided that American students should attend international conferences and youth festivals to counteract Soviet propaganda. So the CIA secretly began funding the National Student Association. Anti-communist intellectuals in Europe were deemed worthy of aid, so the CIA subsidized the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter magazine. It was decided that we should help democratic parties in Europe resist communist pressure. The CIA did it covertly.

No activity was so innocent that the CIA didn't think it could be improved by secrecy.

Even Gloria Steinem [pictured right], now a feminist leader, was drawn into the CIA covert web. According to CIA historian John Ranelagh, she was involved in a CIA operation to send American students to World Youth festivals in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki in 1962.

When these covert activities surfaced (as they inevitably did), the fallout was devastating. The CIA connection, intended to protect people and organizations from public embarrassment, had precisely the opposite effect.

A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA," agrees Weinstein. The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection.

Allen Weinstein is just one of many overt operatives who helped prepare the way for the political miracles of the past two years by sponsoring exchanges and other contacts with liberal reformers from the East. It's worth naming a few more of them, to show the breadth of this movement for democracy: William Miller of the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations; financier George Soros of the Soros Foundation [pictured below]; John Mroz of the Center for East-West Security Studies; John Baker of the Atlantic Council; and Harriett Crosby of the Institute for Soviet-American Relations. This has truly been a revolution by committee.

The AFL-CIO also deserves a healthy pat on the back. Working mostly in the open, it helped keep the Polish trade union Solidarity alive in the dark days of martial law during the early 1980s. As the AFL-CIO's Adrian Karatnycky wrote in these pages two years ago, American trade unions and the U.S. Congress provided millions of dollars to the Solidarity underground.

"The money underwrote shipments of scores of printing presses, dozens of computers, hundreds of mimeograph machines, thousands of gallons of printers' ink, hundreds of thousands of stencils, video cameras and radio broadcasting equipment," according to Karatnycky.

The sugar daddy of overt operations has been the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-private group headed by Carl Gershman that is funded by the U.S. Congress. Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been unspeakably covert -- dispensing money to anti-communist forces behind the Iron Curtain.

To read through the NED's grant list (a public document) is to take a stroll down the democracy movement's memory lane: In Czechoslovakia, the endowment began aiding democratic forces in 1984, including support for Civic Forum; in Hungary, the aid began in 1986 and included election help and funding for Hungary's first independent public-opinion survey; in Romania and Bulgaria, the endowment has supported new intellectual journals and other tools of democracy. Among its many activities in Poland, the endowment has backed the Gdansk Video Center, which helped produce and distribute pro-democracy videos throughout Eastern Europe during the 1980s. And through the Free Trade Union Institute and the Center for International Private Enterprise, the endowment helped support new unions and employers' associations across Eastern Europe -- building the infrastructure of a free economy.

The endowment has also been active inside the Soviet Union. It has given money to Soviet trade unions; to the liberal "Interregional Group" in the Congress of Peoples Deputies; to a foundation headed by Russian activist Ilya Zaslavsky; to an Oral History Project headed by Soviet historian Yuri Afanasyev; to the Ukrainian independence movement known as Rukh, and to many other projects.

Covert funding for these groups would have been the kiss of death, if discovered. Overt funding, it would seem, has been a kiss of life.

David Ignatius is foreign editor of The Washington Post and author of "Siro," a spy novel.