Alain Badiou, Jean-​Luc Nancy, France, Libya and Me

In Alain Badiou’s open reply to Jean-​Luc Nancy, he chides Nancy for fall­ing into the trap that the NATO attacks on Libya were in any way designed to res­cue the insur­gents of Benghazi. Badiou is amazed that someone so informed about geo­pol­it­ics, and the cov­ert agenda of the French gov­ern­ment along with the other NATO allies should appear so naïve:

How can you of all people fall into this trap? How can you accept any kind of ‘res­cue’ mis­sion being entrus­ted to those very people for whom the old situ­ation was the good one, and who abso­lutely want to get back into the game, by for­cible means, from motiv­a­tions of oil and hege­mony? Can you simply accept the ‘human­it­arian’ umbrella, the obscene black­mail­ing in the name of vic­tims? But our armies kill more people in more coun­tries than the local boss Gad­dafi is cap­able of doing in his.

And he also asks: “Didn’t you know that the French and Brit­ish secret ser­vices have been organ­ising the fall of Gad­dafi since last autumn?”

Per­haps Nancy doesn’t read Voltairen​et​work​.org, or read the Italian news­pa­per Libero. How­ever, without wish­ing to appear as shocked as Badiou at this lack of under­stand­ing of inform­a­tion that has been hand­somely spread across the inter­net I have to admit that I had no idea either. As I ima­gine I’m not the only one I think its worth provid­ing some links and snippets.

First, for back­ground is this piece by Dr Richard Keeble on the secret war against Libya provides some detail about the cov­ert war that was staged behind the scenes, oper­ated by the CIA and French secret ser­vice. Here’s a Reu­ters report which says that Barack Obama gave the CIA the green light to under­take cov­ert actions in sup­port of Libyan rebels before the vote on Res­ol­u­tion 1973.

The Guard­ian reports today that:

Italy is only the third coun­try, after France and Qatar, to recog­nize the rebel-​led Libyan National Trans­itional Coun­cil as Libya’s only legit­im­ate gov­ern­ing body.

But accord­ing to a report in Voltairenet​.org, the attendees of the Lon­don Con­fer­ence on Libya (29 March 2011) which was restric­ted to those States that upheld Res­ol­u­tion 1973, (plus Ger­many) “decided to give the Libyan Trans­itional National Coun­cil (LTNC) access to some of Libya’s frozen assets and to author­ize it to sell Libyan oil. In addi­tion, they con­sidered the pos­sib­il­ity of arm­ing the CNLT, without how­ever reach­ing a decision.”

The report continues:

These arrange­ments run counter to Res­ol­u­tion 1973 and one can eas­ily ima­gine the inter­na­tional out­cry if Venezuela or Iran, for example, were to release frozen assets and give them to the Nas­ser­ist or Khomein­ist insur­gents or, worse, buy Libyan oil from them. Not to speak of a viol­a­tion of the UN embargo on arms for the bene­fit of the “bad” insurgents.

If it were still neces­sary, the author­iz­a­tion to sell oil shows that the divi­sion of the country’s resources has begun. Thanks to NATO’s mil­it­ary sup­port, the LTNC has seized con­trol of vast swathes of the oil fields and two key refiner­ies. The author­iz­a­tion extends to 400 000 bar­rils per day, which at cur­rent rates rep­res­ents 1,4 bil­lion dol­lars per month.

At the end of two side meet­ings that took place between State Sec­ret­ary Hil­lary Clin­ton and LTNC envoy Mah­moud Jib­ril [see photo, repos­ted on ILR above], the United States pondered to unlock 3,3 bil­lion dol­lars belong­ing to the State of Libya to be fun­nelled to the “good” insurgents.”

But Italy’s move to join the alli­ance runs counter to recent policy, as this inter­est­ing piece illus­trates. In 2009 Italian Prime Min­is­ter Silvio Ber­lusconi signed a Friend­ship, Part­ner­ship and Cooper­a­tion Treaty, but the deal was res­ult­ing ‘from nego­ti­ations con­duc­ted by former gov­ern­ments, includ­ing left­ist gov­ern­ments’. Because of geo­graphy and trade Italy is Tripoli’s largest trad­ing partner:

Italy buys almost 40% of Libya’s exports (its second main buyer, Ger­many, gets only 10%) while selling to Libya 18,9% of its total imports (the second main seller, China, provides not much more than 10%). Libya’s trade depend­ence on Italy is strong, but this rela­tion­ship rep­res­ents an even greater stra­tegic value for Rome than for Tripoli.

How­ever, the treaty con­tained a num­ber of oblig­a­tions, includ­ing, and I quote

the agree­ment «to not resort to threat or the use of strength against the ter­rit­orial integ­rity or the polit­ical inde­pend­ence of the other Part» (art. 3);

the absten­tion from «any form of intru­sion, dir­ect or indir­ect, in the national or for­eign affairs that fall within the other Part’s jur­is­dic­tion» (art. 4.1);

the assur­ance that Italy «won’t use, nor author­ize the use of its ter­rit­ory in any hos­tile action against Libya» and vice versa (art. 4.2);

Of course, Italy is a former colony, but the rela­tion­ship has been bang up to date.

Other use­ful pieces from Voltairenet​.org, which Sarkozy’s secur­ity advisor wants shut down, includes the sug­ges­tion that Al Jaz­eera is per­haps not the most object­ive when it comes to report­ing on Libya, as it oper­ates out of Qatar (the Lon­don Con­fer­ence on Libya decided that Qatar will be in charge of admin­is­ter­ing Libya’s oil). In this report it points to Rus­sian news sources, which cite the Rus­sian military’s claim that they were mon­it­or­ing the unrest in Benghazi via satel­lite from the very begin­ning, and air­strikes against the Libyan people were not going on on the ground, as repor­ted by Al Jaz­eera and the BBC.

But the reports that Badiou is refer­ring to, I think, is the one that was repor­ted in the right-​wing Libero news­pa­per, who received a French Secret Ser­vice doc­u­ment leaked to them with the bless­ing Italian secret ser­vice, about the use of inform­a­tion from former Gad­dafi cohort, Nouri Mas­soud El-​Mesmari.

In the doc­u­ments, the French secret ser­vices refer to Mes­mari as ‘The Libyan Wikileak’ because he gave them all the inside inform­a­tion about the régime as well as an account of who’s who in Libya and who they should or should not contact.

With all the inside inform­a­tion, the Itali­ans claim that by mid-​January the French had paved the way for the begin­ning of the revolu­tion against Gad­dafi. Per­haps it is just me and Nancy who have not heard all this stuff before. Now you know.

Irish Left Review

Tags: Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy

This entry was posted on 5 April 2011 at 6:53 am and is filed under Political Philosophy, Radical Politics, Series: Philosophers at War. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.