I wrote fairly recently a fourth update on Libya, thinking it would be the last update for a while. But having read this morning’s New York Times, I can’t resist a short comment.
An article by Suliman Ali Alzawy and David D. Kirkpatrick reports that Libyans in the eastern province, centered on Benghazi, have declared their intention of creating what they call autonomy for themselves within a loose federal structure—apparently very loose. The fact that they already have a name for this so-called autonomous region, Barqa, gives away the real game. We may look back on this meeting of Cyrenaicans in an abandoned soap factory as the beginning of the formal end of a unified Libyan state.
The article also happens to be one of the most subtly disingenuous efforts at post hoc self-protection I have read in the Times in a while, and that is really saying something. At one point the article states, “The specter of partition has hung over the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi from the start, in part because of the country’s long history of division in its relatively short history of national unity.”
This is true, of course. As I wrote nearly a year ago:
[T]here is a regional and tribal element to the fight in Libya. It is unlikely that the Benghazi-based rebels could by themselves establish stable control over the whole country. It is almost as unlikely that the Tripolitanian tribes could re-establish firm control over Cyrenaica. . . . We are therefore looking into the maw of a Libya that may well be divided. . . .But I challenge anyone, including the authors of today’s New York Times article, to go back to the February, March and April 2011 editions of that paper and find any abundance of warnings about the “specter of partition.” I might have missed something back then. I was on a U.S. Navy ship sailing from San Diego to Pearl Harbor for part of that period and did not have access, but I am willing to wager actual dough that you won’t find many. Indeed, it took the New York Times and most of the rest of the elite press in the United States months even to mention the word “tribe” in relation to what was going on in Libya.
Alzawy and Kirkpatrick toss off a thumbnail history of the country as though the Times had been on to all this from the get-go. We thus have a new journalists’ form of what I call bullshistory, the invention, explicit or suggested, of a usable past for present purposes.
I wonder what the official flag and coat of arms of Barqa will look like...
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