Right click on the above video then right click on the third line. I re-post this from time to time to remind you what a slime "Upchuck" Schumer is and to also remind you that Feinstein is one of his most senior handmaidens. She in turn, connected Ms. Ford with her anti-Trump lawyer friends.;
WALSH: The Real Reason Why Democrats Want An FBI Investigation Into Brett Kavanaugh | Daily Wire
And:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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I have no doubt Ms. Ford might have been abused by someone. I want to think it was some one other than Kavanaugh based on what I have seen and heard to date. Ms. Ford's own distaste for Trump, mixed with her own mental issues, probably made her an approachable target for the liberals. When I offer this as my view, my liberal friends tell me I am conspiratorial yet, deny their own culpability that they are as well. But that is what liberals do, bless their hearts.
Also who is Ms Ford. (See 1 below.)
Two diametrically opposed views. (See 1a below.)
On the other hand, though I am glad Kavanaugh made a vigorous defense of his and his family's integrity there is one thing that I cannot deny. Kavanaugh was a "DEKE." Members of DKE are often referred to as the "Drunken Dekes." That is worrisome. (See 1b below which was written before Flake flaked, if he did..)
Meanwhile, liberals live in a world, I call "denial cocoon." By this, I believe they project on others that of which they are guilty.. It is a neat psychological trick that allows them to blame shift. I also recently re-posted an op ed piece explaining why liberals are an angry lot. I have had my own reasons why I believe this to be so and now I seem to have found a supporter. ( Christopher DeGroot.)
Speaking of support, I have frequently said we should leave The U.N. or force it to move elsewhere. Now Martin Peretz has suggested as much. (See 2 below.)
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Since old white males are a dying breed and anything we say and do will be held against us and anything said about us is deemed factual and no evidence need be presented and I am no longer employed and my wife still loves, understands and tolerates me, I thought I would post this joke that should offend all feminists, all Me Too'ers and everyone in the PC crowd.
But then, I am not running for anything, nor am I committing a federal crime and The FBI is too busy investigating reasons to destroy Kavanaugh or Trump, and thus I feel shielded.
Finally, those who know me either love me and if they know me and do not love me then they are missing out on a lot of fun.
She politely replies drinking liquor bothers her legs.
The man replies he is sorry to hear that and asks does it cause them to swell.
She then replies, no it causes them to spread.
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Libya a mess. (See 3 below.)
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Libya a mess. (See 3 below.)
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Once again I urge all to see 5 to 7 - a Netflix Movie.
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Dick
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1)WHO IS DR BLASEY FORD?
This week, New York City observed an annual ritual. As the United Nations opens its General Assembly, large parts of Manhattan shut down. Each September, as a lifelong New Yorker, I listen to the minor complaints, think about fifty-plus years of my own human-rights activism and corresponding U.N. disappointments, and grit my teeth: what are a few disappointments, and some traffic jams, next to world peace?
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1)WHO IS DR BLASEY FORD?
WELL, BESIDES BEING A “PROFESSOR” AT THE OFF BRAND UNIVERSITY, SHE ALSO WORKS AT A MAJOR UNIVERSITY DOWN THE STREET FROM PALO ALTO. SHE JUST SO HAPPENS TO HEAD UP THE CIA UNDERGRADUATE INTERNSHIP PROGRAM AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
CHRISTINE BLASEY’S BROTHER, RALPH THE THIRD, USED TO WORK FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LAW FIRM OF BAKER, HOSTETLER. THE FIRM CREATED FUSION GPS, THE COMPANY WHO WROTE THE RUSSIAN “DOSSIER”. THEY LATER ADMITTED IT WAS ONLY A COLLECTION OF FIELD INTERVIEWS.
BAKER HOSTETLER IS LOCATED IN THE SAME BUILDING WHERE THE CIA OPERATES THREE COMPANIES CALLED:
RED COATS INC.
ADMIRAL SECURITY SERVICES AND
DATAWATCH
THEY ARE OPERATED BY RALPH BLASEY II. HE IS THE FATHER OF CHRISTINE AND RALPH III.
RED COATS INC.
ADMIRAL SECURITY SERVICES AND
DATAWATCH
THEY ARE OPERATED BY RALPH BLASEY II. HE IS THE FATHER OF CHRISTINE AND RALPH III.
CHRISTINE AND RALPH III’S GRANDFATHER WAS NICHOLAS DEAK. FORMER CIA DIRECTOR WILLIAM CASEY ACKNOWLEDGED DEAK’S DECADES OF SERVICE TO THE CIA.
1a) Mitch Albom: Kavanaugh sparks questions of both guilt and forgiveness
Do you remember “Animal House?" At the end of that movie, about a wild fraternity in the 1960s, the frat brothers are frozen, one by one, above a sentence that shows where each ends up. The last character, everybody’s favorite, is John Belushi’s perpetually drunk and unkempt troublemaker, John "Bluto Blutarsky," who rides off in a convertible with a pretty sorority girl, above the final words of the film:
“Senator and Mrs. John Blutarsky.”
It got a huge laugh when I saw the movie in 1978, a time when getting seriously drunk in college was cool, and a frat slob becoming a senator was believable, and a young man named Brett Kavanaugh was 13 years old and entering his adolescence in Maryland.
I thought about that movie, and those years, and what passed for acceptable behavior back then, as I watched last Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a hearing filled with real senators, some of whom grew up during the Animal House 1960s, and who may have done who knows what during that hazy, crazy decade.
But they weren’t on the hot seat. They were doing the grilling. And no one was laughing. Getting drunk was actually a contentious part of the Kavanaugh questioning, how much he drank, did he drink until he couldn’t remember? At one point he actually defended himself with the unlikely sentence, “I like beer.”
And of course, the reason for those questions, the great debate of the week, was whether Kavanaugh sexually groped, grinded against, and tried to silence Ford in a locked bedroom at a teen party in 1982, an assault, as she detailed in her testimony — or if such an event never happened, as Kavanaugh insisted in his.
There is another part of “Animal House” that I recall, when the frat is called in front of a school hearing for its bad behavior at a wild, alcohol-soaked party. Eric “Otter” Stratton, the handsome playboy type, stands up and proudly declares, “The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests.”
He winks. “We did.”
Might have been funny then.
No one is winking now.
Two opinions ripping us apart
“This country is being ripped apart,” said Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, in calling for the FBI investigation into the Ford-Kavanaugh claims. In saying that, he summed up the feelings of many uncomfortable Americans, who watched that hearing with red-faced outrage.
But I disagree with Flake on his use of the present tense. Being ripped apart? We are already apart. Kavanaugh’s nomination began with “apart.” There were senators insisting they wouldn’t vote for him less than an hour after he was nominated. His predicted supporters and detractors — like the country — were all but split directly “apart” down party lines. And once the nuclear word “abortion” was thrown into the arguments, “apart” was a permanent state of affairs.
So it should surprise no one that, in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh/Ford hearing, the new ripped apart looks much like the old ripped apart.
Consider two op-ed pieces written after that event, one in the New York Times, one in the Wall Street Journal, two major, respected newspapers that are often, editorially, as apart as you can get.
In the New York Times, a columnist named Roger Cohen wrote that Kavanaugh had no place on the Supreme Court. He labeled him “an angry brat veering from fury to sniveling sobs.” He said Kavanaugh was a “product of white male privilege.”
He later wrote: “Kavanaugh’s bleating about due process and presumption of innocence — his rage at a supposed 'national disgrace' — misses the point. He failed the job interview. Who would want this spoiled man pieced together on a foundation of repressed anger and circumscribed privilege…occupying a place for life on the highest court in the land?”
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal columnist, Kimberly Strassel, saw it this way:
“A 'no' vote (on Kavanaugh) now equals public approval of every underhanded tactic deployed by the left in recent weeks. It’s a green light to send coat hangers and rape threats to Sen. Susan Collins and her staff. It is a sanction to the mob that drove Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife out of a restaurant. … It’s authorization for a now thoroughly unprofessional press corps to continue crafting stories that rest on anonymous accusers and that twist innuendo into gang rapes. ...
“To vote against Judge Kavanaugh now is to overthrow due process….Under due process, the accuser has the burden of proof. Ms. Ford has not met the evidentiary standard even of a civil proceeding, the preponderance of evidence …
“This goes beyond the question of one man and a Supreme Court seat. It goes to basic principles.”
Now remember, these two respected columnists presumably watched the same hearing, yet wrote such vastly different conclusions.
Something tells me they didn’t begin to form their opinions Friday morning.
So the ripping apart is not exactly new.
Can allegations as a teen be forgiven?
Let’s agree on this: Sexual assault is a serious charge. It shouldn’t have been OK back then. It isn’t OK now. It has been endured in silence for far too long by women the world over. And their suffering, which should have ended a long time ago, deserves to end now.
But having said that, I don’t know if Kavanaugh did it or not. I don’t know if Ford is remembering it exactly as it happened or is getting it wrong. I don’t know and, be honest, you don’t know. Emphasize the word “know.” We only have our feelings or, as in the case of Ana Maria Archila, the woman who confronted Flake in an elevator and yelled passionately about her own assault, our personal experiences that shape our views.
So since I can add little to this already over-stoked debate, I’d like to throw out some slightly different questions:
At what age is someone forgiven?
At what stage is someone redeemed?
At what point is the distance between youth and adulthood viewed as vast enough not to conflate the acts of one with the character of the other? Is it college? High school? Grade school?
Here’s a hypothetical: Suppose Kavanaugh, when initially accused by Ford, did not vehemently deny it, but instead said something like this:
“I vaguely remember that night. I believe I was inebriated and sexually aggressive in a stupid, drunken, teenaged manner that I should not have been — and certainly never have been once I reached adulthood. As a man, I am deeply saddened to learn that my foolish, immature actions have affected Dr. Ford so significantly, something I never knew until this week. I am truly sorry. I have lived my adult life in an upright fashion, thanks partly to learning from earlier mistakes I made. And I vow going forward, to continue to be a watchdog for any form of human violation or assault, sexual or otherwise.”
If he’d said this, would his critics still be vilifying him — and demanding he go away?
If you answered no, then I’d pose the question, “Why not? He still did it. Isn’t admitting you did something more damning than people merely suspecting you did it?”
If you answered yes, he should still be vilified, then I’d also ask, “Why? Don’t we forgive people's youthful offenses all the time? Don’t we celebrate drug dealers who have embraced a clean life? Don't we say "amen" to preachers who once were incarcerated? Don’t we elect leaders who have admitted infidelities, and have been accused of lewd and lascivious behavior, sometimes by more than one person? (Or are we ignoring the current President?)
Remember, while the words make us squirm, the definition of “sexual assault” can be broadly defined. It is hardly just rape or even penetration. In some cases sexual assault can be contact with a breast or a buttock.
All these acts, if unwelcome, are wrong. But are they all the same? And are they unforgivable now and forever?
I don’t know the answer. I am not here to judge. It seems apparent — and I say “seems” because at any moment, something else could break — that if Kavanaugh did behave a certain way in high school, or even, as a woman claimed, in college, he hasn’t behaved that way once he entered the adult work world. There, he has been investigated many times. And given the current climate, and his politically charged nomination, if he even came close to a sexual harassment act in his three decades of professional life — an inappropriate comment, a touch, an unwanted kiss — let alone any kind of assault, wouldn’t we have heard about it by now?
There have been no accusations against him since he stopped being a student. If this is truly an accurate reflection of the man, then again, the question of when do young sins stop shading the older person is one perhaps we should examine. Is age 17 the cutoff? Age 15? Puberty?
None of this should minimize or ignore the pain that Ford and Archila clearly still feel. Or the pain of anyone who has endured the trauma of unwanted sexual advances and assaults. That pain is real. It’s haunting. And it's not for us — or any elected officials — to measure.
But if any positive soul-searching can come out of this difficult week, perhaps it lies not just in where we come down on guilt, but also where we come down on time and forgiveness, if not in Kavanaugh’s specific case, then in general.
I’m not sure myself. I’m struggling with it. All I know is this is not 1978, or 1982, this is not a movie, and things we once laughed or winked at in “Animal House” feel very real and very serious now.
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Download “The Sports Reporters” podcast each Monday and Friday on-demand through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify and more. Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom.
1b) Feinstein’s Big Error Gives Republicans Wins On Three Fronts
(Big League Politics) – Dianne Feinstein strategically blew the whole confirmation process involving Judge Brett Kavanaugh by mistakenly believing polling showing Democrats could take the Senate in November. This, I argued, led her to hold the letter from Christine Ford until the last minute hoping to delay Judge K’s confirmation until after the midterms instead of, in the summer, launching a bid to defeat him outright.
Feinstein’s horrific blunder soon came down to one extremely unlikely scenario: getting two of three wobbly RINO Republicans—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, or Jeff Flake—to vote against Judge K while Chuck Schumer held the Democrat caucus entirely in lock step. This included keeping endangered Democrat senators Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, and Heidi Heitkamp as “nos” even though the close nature of their races might mean they would lose their seats come November.
Before thinking this is an absurd expectation, remember Obamacare. There was not a single Democrat defection on Obamacare when it came to critical votes, and all of the so-called “pro-life” Democrats willingly sacrificed themselves that November to pass the abomination.
So back to our current situation: The Republicans now have the votes to confirm Judge K. Earlier today, Jeff Flake and Joe Manchin both said they would be yes votes. Now, even if Collins and Murkowski defected, it would be a tie, and Mike Pence would cast the deciding vote. Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a done deal. He has suffered immeasurably, but in the end his 4+ hours of testimony sealed the Senate’s vote.
Everyone has commented on what a remarkable job he did, so I will not belabor that point now. Instead, I want to point out that this was about far more than Kavanaugh’s confirmation and what is now a decisive 5-4 conservative majority. Indeed, ponder this: John Roberts is now the least conservative member of the court!
Kavanaugh’s confirmation process has led to two other significant, possibly titanic shifts.
First, it galvanized and united Republicans in a frenzy of enthusiasm that was the only missing ingredient from strong GOP gains in November. For two years, I have tracked GOP net gains in voter registrations in key battleground states. Richard Baris, of People’s Pundit Daily, has kept a similar scorecard, but always with the caution that up til now his polling has shown a lingering “enthusiasm gap” in which Republicans trailed Democrats.
That has vanished in the wake of the Kavanaugh hearings. Even before the hearings were over, Gallup reported the Republicans now had an astonishing one-point lead—being down in some surveys by as much as 19 points. That 20-point turnaround is staggering, and suggests that, to quote the great Clark Griswold in “Christmas Vacation” as he watched Cousin Eddie empty his mobile home’s septic tank into the sewer, “Sh*!!er’s full!” Apparently, this is now the view of the vast majority of Republicans and many independents. The “Sh*!!er” is indeed full.
Baris has found in state polling that Republicans are now jazzed, even before yesterday’s antics. A casual look at Twitter shows indies and Democrats seeing a full toilet as well. The #WalkAway movement appears to have exploded.
But the second, somewhat unexpected result of Kavanaugh’s hearing may well be the widespread demoralization of the Democrats. Not only will they be losing some members—people who think the Ford allegations were a bridge too far in terms of slime—but having thrown everything but Kavanaugh’s baptistry at him, and still had him survive, they truly are for the time being out of tricks. Now they have been beaten by Trump repeatedly, and failed an all-out campaign to stop a Supreme Court nominee.
As Bill Clinton told Juanita Broaddrick, according to Broaddrick, “You might want to put some ice on that.”
Then there is the totally unexpected emergence of Senate leadership. Mitch McConnell has for months steadfastly pushed Trump’s judges through at a record clip. Yertle moves much faster than his nickname when it comes to Trump-izing the judiciary. Charles Grassley not only has been good when it came to using the Judiciary Committee’s powers in the FBI’s abuse-of-powers investigations, but has handled the Kavanaugh hearings perfectly. I know many Republicans were outraged over the pace and the delays, but these were necessary to achieve the goal of obtaining Jeff Flake’s vote and that of the other two holdouts. Grassley played it masterfully, even allowing Flake to select Ford’s questioner, a female lawyer from Arizona who, to the consternation of many, appeared to be playing softball with Ford. In fact, she was operating on a set of directives from Flake, all designed to assuage his concerns about Ford’s allegations. But at no time was Rachel Mitchell, the questioner, to ever allow Ford to whip up massive sympathy by “bullying” her or seeming “intimidating.” Mitchell was 100% successful in her questioning, as Flake’s yes vote demonstrates.
Above all, though, the central Senate leader to emerge (God help me, I’m going to say this) was South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. His fire-breathing expose of the near criminal tactics of the Democrats was a moment to behold. He has been so staunch in the Kavanaugh affair I have had to rename Grahamnesty Lindsey Granite.
This three-fer marks a massive, titanic shift in American politics. It may well be the Democrats’ ELE moment. The Wolf-Biederman Comet bears down on them, and they are bereft of a Robert Duvall.
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2)Let’s Get the U.N. Out of the U.S.
As the General Assembly convenes in New York, the world body’s historic failures to protect human rights can no longer be ignored
By Martin Peretz
This week, New York City observed an annual ritual. As the United Nations opens its General Assembly, large parts of Manhattan shut down. Each September, as a lifelong New Yorker, I listen to the minor complaints, think about fifty-plus years of my own human-rights activism and corresponding U.N. disappointments, and grit my teeth: what are a few disappointments, and some traffic jams, next to world peace?
But this year the General Assembly corresponds with something bigger than a traffic jam: the end of the Syrian civil war, the first state-sponsored genocide of the 21st century, with over 400,000 souls held to the accounting of a world that failed to stop the slaughter. This year, it’s time for a modest proposal—a substantive move that would pack a symbolic punch. Let’s get the United Nations out of the United States.
Questioning the U.N. is a tricky business, especially in the Trump era. The most common criticisms— a reflexive, sometimes paranoid concern over the U.N.’s encroachments on American sovereignty, or a smug dismissal of cooperation between states as a utopian pipe dream—are easy to rebut. In a world where different peoples are deeply interconnected, and where we face the perils of nuclear war and climate change together, there’s clearly a need for communication and cooperation between governments.
There’s also a need for the U.N.’s brave first responders to manage crises in places like the Sudan and Colombia, keeping these situations from spiraling into even more chaos. And there’s irreplaceable value in the behind-the-scenes work of U.N. affiliates: the World Health Organization, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization.
But what if the existence of the U.N. as it’s currently constituted is actually making peace in the world less, not more, likely? Increasingly, its debates and resolutions bury urgent questions of life and death beneath a welter of words. In the process, the U.N. gives the U.S. cover for abdicating its role as the world’s most powerful democratic state, handing its responsibilities over to what is vaguely called “the international community”: a world of under-taxed venture capital turned to philanthropy, of good deeds that can improve people’s lives, but can’t protect them when worst comes to worst.
It wasn’t always this way. When the U.N. was founded in 1945, it was based on the premise that universal rules of human rights could only effectively be upheld by state power, because no other entity held the necessary monopoly on force. Pioneering human rights figures like Hersch Lauterpacht, who presided at the International Court of Justice, and Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” were on the left, because rightism in Europe at that time was synonymous with tribalism. But they were leftists who respected the role of democratic superpowers, first Britain and then the U.S., as global guarantors: ensuring a minimum level of good conduct by states to allow for a peaceful, liberal order.
By the 1960s, however, the U.N.’s commitment to representation had superseded the necessity of humanitarian enforcement. In the face of protests from bad state actors, the developing humanitarian community was letting issues of life and death lie. This became clear in 1966, when pogroms by northern Nigerians against the minority Igbo tribe killed up to 100,000 people. The next year, the Igbo declared their own state, Biafra, and the rest of Nigeria went to war against them.
To many people, this seemed like an obvious case of right and wrong. I was personally involved in an organization called Keep Biafra Alive, and, at age 28, was sure the world would rally to our cause. But African leaders at the U.N. were socialist and anti-imperialist, and didn’t want Western states to get involved even for a peacekeeping mission—a stand backed by the USSR. The early nongovernmental organizations, sponsored by Quakers, socialist groups and charitable foundations, were reflexively wary of any use of force in defense of the Igbo, and they felt guilty about calling out even despotic leaders of peoples who had long been oppressed.
Thanks to this general disinterest, American politicians could shrug the issue off. And without American power, the U.N. was helpless. This pattern would be repeated over the next 25 years, as the U.N. failed to act in defense of Kurds, Tutsis, Bosnians and Kosovars facing slaughter, and actually served as an excuse for inaction, as when Boris Yeltsin blamed America for going into Kosovo in 1999 to stop the killing there without a U.N. resolution. (Never mind that Russia was blocking the resolution in the first place.)
In the 21st century, the U.N. has continued to offer a stage for both well-meaning denizens of global society, from Bill Gates to Bono, and opportunistic autocrats who used the body as cover for crimes. Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a star attraction in Turtle Bay even after he murdered protesters in the streets of Tehran—while President Barack Obama, himself heavily influenced by academic universalists and global capitalists, stood calmly by. This May, Syria assumed the rotating presidency of the Conference on Disarmament—five years after Mr. Obama failed to act against Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people.Even when NATO succeeded in stabilizing Kosovo, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited refugee camps there to proclaim that, in the future, “the Security Council should be the sole source of the legitimate use of force.” He was backed by voices from the academy and the global financial class—everyone from Jürgen Habermas to George Soros—for whom the importance of international markets went hand in hand with the universalist perspective on the state as an anachronism.
Today, with President Donald Trump in office and some countries embracing explicitly nationalist policies, the U.N. has become the symbol of the fading internationalist dream. The choice between “America First” and “the international community” could hardly be starker. But are particularism and universalism our only options? Not if we return to the liberalism of those early human rights activists, who recognized that aiming for any single ideal, state or global society, was letting ourselves off the hook.
In that spirit, maybe a compromise is in order. Move the U.N. out of New York and the U.S., so we don’t have to help host and legitimize the pernicious showmanship of autocrats and killers. Continue to support the U.N. as the first responder to global crises, as the sponsor of humanitarian initiatives to fight poverty and hunger. Let global civil society continue its work.
At the same time, realize, again, that only the U.S. has the power to maintain basic global norms. Unilateralism should generally be avoided—that’s the lesson of Iraq—but it becomes necessary in the face of the worst humanitarian offenses: the use of chemical weapons and the crime of genocide. If Americans don’t rediscover this truth, the Syrian genocide will be the harbinger of a long, inhumane and maybe unimaginable century to come.
—Martin Peretz is the former editor-in-chief of The New Republic.
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3) Libya in Chaos: Where To?
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 962, September 30, 2018
3) Libya in Chaos: Where To?
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 962, September 30, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Post-Qaddafi Libya is divided between two governments, and the consequence of that division is mounting chaos. Europe, the US, Canada, and the UN will have to decide at what point it will be necessary to go back into Libya to restore order.
On August 15, 2018, Tripoli’s Appeals Court sentenced 45 convicts to death by firing squad for opening fire on August 21, 2011 on residents abandoning Tripoli while it was falling into the hands of anti-government insurgents. The 45 are all ex-members of Muammar Qaddafi’s security forces.
On the same day, August 15, 2018, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Mahmoud Werfalli, a senior commander in the Libya National Army (LNA). According to the indictment, Werfalli “appears to be directly responsible for the killing of, in total, 33 persons in Benghazi or surrounding areas, between on or before 3 June 2016 and on or around 17 July 2017, either by personally killing them or by ordering their execution.”
Armed groups have been executing civilians in Libya with almost complete impunity ever since the toppling of Qaddafi’s government in 2011.
As of 2018, after the demise of ISIS in Libya due to its defeats at both Sirte and Benghazi (an unknown number of currently inactive ex-ISIS fighters remain in Bani Walid and south of Sirte), the country remains divided between two governments: 1) the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord, which is backed by the UN and headed by Fayez Sirraj; and 2) the Benghazi government, which is based on Libya’s national army, headed by General Khalifa Haftar, and backed by some Arab governments (Egypt, the UAE).
Oil plays a dominant role in the competition between the two rival governments. The UN and its affiliate in Libya, UNSMIL (UN Support Mission in Libya), arranged for Libya’s oil to be re-exported through the Tripoli-based National Oil Corporation, oil exports being the main pillar of Libya’s exports.
In the last year of Qaddafi’s government, 1.6 million barrels of oil per day were exported. Oil exports were heavily slashed due to the conflict in Libya, but by the end of 2017, they had regained a level of 1.2 million barrels per day.
But through an understanding between the Haftar government and the UAE, 850,000 barrels per day are exported directly by the Benghazi government through UAE companies based in the Benghazi part of the country. (In 2017, the UN accused the UAE of supplying military equipment to Haftar’s forces in violation of an international arms embargo.)
In June 2018, the Ras Lanuf and Sidra oil fields were seized by Haftar’s forces and their production taken away from the national oil company of Tripoli. As a consequence, oil exports from the ports of Zweitina and Harija were stopped.
An attempt in July 2018, supported by the UN, to reconcile the two rival governments failed over Haftar’s demand that he remain chief commander of the united army. The conflict continues.
The consequences of all this are detrimental to the chances of finding any reconciliation between the two governments in Libya. The state is divided, and there are no prospects of a solution in the foreseeable future.
The chaotic situation enables the emergence of enclaves of terror, inspired by the ideology of ISIS and al-Qaeda. The world should make sure that Libya does not turn into another pre-2001 Afghanistan-like state on the doorstep of Europe.
Since there is almost no power on the ground in Libya with which the EU can come to an agreement to stop the influx of illegal migrants from the sub-Saharan states through Libya to Europe, this migration route will probably continue to be a gateway for many more thousands of Africans into Europe. The consequences for the EU are complex and difficult.
The question that Europe, the US, Canada, and the UN should deal with is this: in what situation will the world intervene in Libya once again to contain the domestic chaos before it spills out to other parts of the world? The sooner this question is answered, the better.
Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served for 25 years in IDF military intelligence specializing in Syria, Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups, and Israeli Arabs, and is an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.
Col. (res.) Dr. Dan Gottlieb is a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Bar-Ilan University law faculty. He served four rounds of service in different parts of Africa and is a leading authority on African issues within the Israel Medical Association.
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