Nine months took to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led by the United States, to destroy the Libyan society.
In such a short time the richest country in the African continent, became a failed state plunged into a civil war that continues since 2011. Before the new imperial offensive against Venezuela, this case should be seen as a warning for the future of the region .
While oil seems to be the casual intervention, and not the ‘humanitarian’ justifications that characterize the US government, this reading of the situation remains superficial. In both cases, the motive to intervene implies more than simply taking over resources, modus operandi of traditional American imperialism.
This model was based on the concept of nation-building, through which the Americans appropriated resources and with a «guided» institutionalization satisfying their private and political interests. An example is Chile in the 70s.
In 1973, the United States financed and led the coup d’état against Salvador Allende and then tutored the nation towards neoliberalism based on the interests of private companies and geopolitical strategies for the region. This model, and many others in the region and the world, were protected by false values such as order, justice, progress and development.
However, everything changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York. Under the administration of George W. Bush, the neoconservatives, a little-known faction of the American right, took control of foreign policy and defense, giving way to a new phase of imperial domination.
After developing its global strategy for decades, with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 marked the end of the traditional model and the beginning of neo-imperialism. Order, progress and development are replaced by security / militarization; internal division based on ethnic, religious, and / or historical differentiators; and especially the chaos.
A strategy that was not born in the Pentagon but in the classrooms of the University of Chicago with the writings of Leo Strauss. As Professor Shadia Drury explains, the Jewish philosopher (1899-1973) reintroduced the notion of chaos as a tool of domination by a «chosen elite» to subdue uneducated masses based on the «natural» hierarchy; ergo his obsession with classics such as Plato and Aristotle and contemporaries Nietzsche and Heidegger.
But what does a twentieth-century political philosopher have to do with 21st-century imperialism?
First of all, Straussianism is the main influence of the neoconservatives, who include figures like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Arthur Cebrowksi and John Bolton, Trump’s current National Security Adviser, among others. .
It was Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense (2001-2006), who incorporated the doctrine of Cebrowksi, Vice Admiral of the Navy, on a war centered on networks, which restructures the strategy of total dominance (full spectrum dominance) with the era of information to achieve a hegemony in the field of social, linguistic, cognitive, informative and physical.
For the purpose one of the most used tools is the use of lies (currently fake news or alternative truths) through the media and communication networks, with the aim of manipulating the collective feeling. This instrument of social engineering was something that Strauss considered necessary to protect the upper elite from the persecution of the ‘vulgar masses’.
The use of language and lies was seen with the alleged weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq, the supposed terrorist connection in Afghanistan, the discursive construction of Muammar Gaddafi as a bloodthirsty dictator, the media «Axis of Evil», and now a replica to present Venezuela as a failed state, including it in the ‘Troika of Tyranny’ with Nicaragua and Cuba.
Another of the key elements of Strauss’s theory applied to US military strategy is the aforementioned chaos. In the new imperialist model, the goal is not to ‘build nations’, not even under neoliberalism, but to sink the dominated societies.
The geopolitical strategist of the Department of Defense and Cebrowski’s assistant, Thomas P. M. Barnet, gave the model to the military high command in the Pentagon in 2003, summarizing it in a new world map. The map divides the globe between countries what it calls the «functional core» and the «non-integrated gap». (See map)
The nations in this second group are no longer seen as independent and sovereign but as a homogeneous block with no possibility of integration. Thus Bush denominated from the Great Middle East Arab nations of North Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Persian, sub-Saharan countries and Caucasus countries; with the objective to justify systematic and parallel wars.
In these territorial blocks wars become endless and recurrent. A controlled transition with a friendly dictator or a submissive government is no longer necessary; Disorder and misgovernment are the objective.
As the analyst Thierry Meyssan explains, this idea does not consider that access to resources is crucial for Washington, but that the states of the «functional nucleus» would only have access to those resources by resorting to the Americans. For this, it is necessary to destroy the state structure and institutionality of the invaded countries, in a way that when they need it, these resources are easily accessible.
In this sense the fact that Libya and Iraq, at present, produce less barrels of oil than they did with deposed governments and many wells passed into the hands of organizations foreign to US interests is not an unforeseen effect. Nor is it that the conditions of the population are well below international standards of welfare and safety; with civil death figures over the hundreds of thousands.
Thus, before the self-proclamation of Juan Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela on January 23, and almost two decades later, the time seems to have come for a similar intervention in Latin America.
The script revealed it, the Argentine journalist, Stella Calloni, with a document from the Southern Command (SouthCom) signed by Kurt Tidd, former commander in chief until November 2018, under the name of ‘Masterstroke’ (Master Strike) that details the direct and indirect actions to destabilize the country and plunge it into chaos.
Among the plans suggest «increasing the internal instability to critical levels, intensifying the decapitalization of the country, the flight of foreign capital and the deterioration of the national currency, contribute to make more critical the situation of the population, cause casualties and indicate as responsible the Government of Venezuela «.
With the justification of ‘humanitarianism’ the text proposes «to establish a military operation under international flag, sponsored by the Conference of Latin American Armies, under the protection of the OAS and the supervision, in the legal and media context, of Secretary General Luis Almagro » Actions identical to those carried out in Libya eight years ago with NATO and members of the European Union.
This is not a coincidence, nor are acts disconnected since with Bush, Obama and Trump the neoconservatives continue to exert their influence and power in the White House and the military spheres of the United States; something that should worry all Latin Americans.
The situation in Venezuela is not about the defense of a political regime but about the sovereignty, democracy and stability of the entire region and its future. Otherwise we will witness a Libya in Latin America and the triumphant control of the American neo-imperialism.
Written by Martín Pastor
Bureau d 'information Alba Granada North Africa 