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Meddling and Blundering

Meddling and Blundering
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The Daily Tribune, Tuesday, November 18, 2014

It would be a mistake to think that Washington, preoccupied with Russia or with Obama's "pivot to Asia," has ceased meddling in other parts of the world. As it reduces one area of the globe after another to chaos and terror, it shows no interest in learning from its own mistakes - or from those of its allies, and a recent UK experience is instructive in this regard.

Meddling and Blundering
Occupying headlines this year has been the flow of child emigrants arriving on the USA's southern border (although, in fact, this phenomenon started three years ago). It should come as no surprise that a large proportion of these kids have come from Honduras, where they have fled an orgy of civil rights violations in which Washington has played an important role.

When democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a 2009 coup, the newly-installed Barack Obama, despite his election promises of "change we can believe in," turned a deaf ear to calls for the isolation of the coup leaders and embarked on a course of "business as usual," swiftly recognizing Porfirio Lobo after he was elected president amid widespread electoral irregularities, intimidation and violence.

According to Human Rights Watch, in 2013 Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world. The country's security forces have been disabled by corruption and abuse. In a 23-month period from January 2011, the police killed 249 civilians. Since Lobo took office, 29 journalists have been killed. Since 2009, scores have been killed in rural disputes, many involving disputes between foreign agro-industrial corporations and peasant organizations.

The Honduran Congress has legislated its right to remove Supreme Court Justices and the attorney general, in addition to an emergency decree permitting the use of the military for public security duties. Many officers in the Honduran armed forces were trained in the USA's "School of the Americas - long an academy for coup leaders.

Although there were calls at the time for the aid tap to be turned off, since 2009 Honduras has received $350 million in US assistance, $50 million of which has gone to the military.

Meanwhile, Washington's push against the progressive government of Venezuela is ongoing. In July, Hannah Dreier of Associated Press (AP) reported that, despite a Venezuelan law of 2010 barring foreign funding of political and certain civil society groups, in 2013 the so-called National Endowment for Democracy (NED, which is congressionally funded) and the State Department budgeted $7.6 million for such support.

The NED has been involved in the "color revolutions" in Europe... and had previously been involved in the attempt to topple Hugo Chavez. At the time of the AP report, the US Senate was considering a bill to increase the State Department contribution to the destabilization of the Nicolas Maduro government to $15 million.

Not surprisingly, Africa remains a focus of attention. This May, the New York Times reported that US special operations forces were forming "counter-terrorism" units in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali, spending $70 million in Niger and Mauritania alone.

Training in Libya had been suspended last year after a militia group attacked a training base in what was suspected to be an inside job, making off with hundreds of automatic weapons and other US-supplied equipment. Now, however, $16 million was budgeted to train four companies of elite troops to "counter terrorist and extremist threats."

Since the Times story, of course, Libya has descended into even greater chaos, and earlier this year exemplars of that chaos were exported to the UK.

In July last year, it was announced that the British army would train up to 2,000 Libyan troops. Adopting an apparently more cautious approach than their American cousins, the Brits intended to conduct the training in the UK, part of a proposal to provide training to over 7,000 Libyan troops. William Hague, then Foreign Secretary, told Parliament on July 9, 2013: "Trainees who do not pass the vetting or immigration assurance processes will not be allowed to travel to the UK." That vetting has - to put it mildly - been found wanting.

The first batch arrived at Bassingbourn Barracks, Cambridgeshire this June, but earlier this month hundreds of trainees were repatriated to Libya and the scheme was wound up after disciplinary problems and instances of...assault and rape were encountered. On Nov. 5, the London Guardian newspaper reported that almost a third of the batch that had commenced training in June had withdrawn and a further 20 had claimed asylum. In one incident, after three Libyans were detained for making an unauthorized trip to the local supermarket, 15 to 20 trainees stormed the British corporal standing guard over them, forcing their release.

A Briton who worked at the base for several months told Channel 4 News that Bassingbourn was controlled by "a bunch of militiamen." The trainees "did whatever they wanted, and instead of being an army to train them, the British were reduced to babysitting them to limit the damage."

The Libyan military attaché in London said that inter-factional tensions accounted for some of the problems. The opposition Labour Party's defense spokesman scoffed that the UK training had "collapsed in disarray and scandal." But this sort of thing is not new, as in mid-2012 Libyan police trainees in Jordan were arrested for riot and arson.

What no one is saying, however, is that these farcical experiences are but further consequences of imperialist blundering by US, UK and NATO leaders who, knowing little about the societies in question, continue to encourage and fund "regime change" in pursuit of their own economic and geopolitical agendas, and in so doing let loose forces that are both inimical to the interests of the peoples concerned and uncontrollable by those who have conjured them into existence.

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