Zimpapers Logo

Another 9/11
Of course the trigger to this leader was the death on 9/11 of one Christopher Stevens, the policeman’s ambassador to Benghazi. Or is it US ambassador to the whole of Libya? He died in an attack on the US compound, died alongside three of his compatriots. The deaths have been described variously: slain, murdered, assassinated, etc, etc, with each verb calculated to convey a moral statement, alongside the actual action.
The details have been sparse, something expected in such an action taken amid tumultuous demonstrations triggered by a sacrilegious amateur video calculated to ignite and inflame Moslem religious sensibilities. As in many such instances, the butt of the video was the Prophet Mohammad. As always, the authors were Western, American in this instance.
Belatedly, the American government distanced itself from the production, condemning it even as reflecting religious intolerance. Belated because this condemnation only came after the death of the four Americans.

Caught napping
Details have always been sparse. Deliberately so. As always, the neat propaganda around the deaths, buried crucial information on the dead. Who were they? You needed good tools and a bit of perseverance to get these crucial details. First Stevens’ companions. Only one is identified as Sean Smith, an information management officer. Is this a roundabout way of saying a communications officer?
The other two are not known to this day, and continue to be reported as unidentified. But we now know a little more. Far from being ordinary American diplomats, these two were in fact members of the desert seals, the American military’s deadly elite unit which took out Osama bin Laden.
Their presence in Benghazi, in the US compound on that fateful day, presence in Libya, post-Gaddafi Libya of that fateful year, on that fateful marker of the attack on America more than a decade ago, while deeply foreboding, has not attracted comment. But it does redefine the whole attack, and of course those that suffered from it, does it not?
These were soldiers — elite soldiers — not on holiday of course. They were on a mission for their country, for their cause. Is that not a fair assessment?
If it is, immediately we see the loud misnomer in deploying verbs we use to describe deadly actions against defenceless civilians, don’t we? When men of arms are caught unawares, that does not make them civilians. Let’s take the whole narrative a little further.

No ordinary diplomat
Who was Christopher Stevens? Again, you struggle to find the real biography outside the sanitised one well calculated to elicit pity for the dead man, to cull sympathy for America. Discreetly embedded is a seemingly innocuous detail. The 52-year-old Stevens had joined the US Peace Corps in North Africa way before he joined the foreign service.
He had taught English in Morocco; had mastered Arabic, in the process understanding the Moslem mind which, we are told, he respected. He lived with Arabs up the Atlas Mountains, became a part of them.
At the time of his death, he had done 21 years with the US Foreign Service, a detail which suggests he would have joined the service in his early 30s, with his experience and knowledge of North Africa and the Middle East putting him in very good stead. After all, he was known “for walking the streets of the cities where he worked . . . tasting the local food, meeting as many people as he could, speaking Arabic, listening with a broad smile”. As a US diplomat he worked from Egypt to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Libya.

A state-sponsored stowaway
Another crucial detail on the late departed. Chris was posted to the Libyan capital Tripoli in 2007. He spent two years there, with those two years amounting to the “best possible preparation for what was about to come”, according to an American journalist who worked closely with him. What was about to come?
Why was Chris its most suitable agent? Chris went back to Libya at the start of the Arab spring. He did not go to Tripoli. He went to Benghazi instead. He did not get there as an accredited diplomat. He never got there as an ordinary passenger. He got there more or less like a state-sponsored stowaway, America’s stowaway. He smuggled himself aboard a Greek cargo ship, before vanishing into the edgy multitudes of rebellious Benghazi.
Later he would reveal his escapades: “It was difficult to get there at the time. There weren’t any flights. So we came in by a Greek cargo ship and unloaded our gear and our cars and set up our office there . . . My mandate was to go out and meet as many members of the rebel leadership as I could in the Transitional National Council (TNC).”
The ordinary term for this kind of work is intelligence and those performing it are aptly called covert operators. They are part of the security apparatus of the American state.

The rebels’ quartermaster
Expectedly, the American government won’t say much on and about Stevens and his core team for the duration of the rebellion. But we always rely on the indiscretions of those close to Stevens, those moved to delirium by his violent end. One such person is Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher who played a drumming role to Nato, against the Gaddafi regime.
In an impassioned tribute, he dismisses Stevens’ killers as “imbeciles” who “have won”. He says more that enlightens us on Stevens: “He was among those who were pushing for a stronger commitment by the United States, both in the air and, through special forces, on the ground.” The philosopher also tells us that Stevens was among those pushing for a situation where “Libya would be divided into a confederation of autonomous regions . . .” We have more than enough to make a representative impression of the late Stevens, and the impression we have is not one of an ordinary, civilian diplomat.
He could summon America’s deadly ordinance against Libya. He was a direct player on Libya, a critical factor in precipitating its bloody phase, indeed in securing an outcome in which America would have a pride of place, a pride of interests. Or so America thought.
He had the power even to dismember Libya. Such a role makes the humanitarian, pity-eliciting register so copiously deployed in the news coverage of these deaths quite, so merrily deployed by Obama and his officials, quite incongruous, obscene in fact.

Vindicating the enemy
Something else. CNN laid its restless hand on Stevens’ diary. It published excerpts from it, triggering a furious ethical debate in newsrooms. The diary clearly revealed that Stevens knew he was a marked man, top on the list of Al Qaeda’s hit list, thanks to the growing Islamic extremism in post-Gaddafi Libya.
By the way, as the rebellion escalated, Gaddafi’s mantra was to warn that the rebellion was being pushed by extremists linked to Al Qaeda. No one believed him, listened to him even.
Everyone thought this was a ruse by a man desperate to save his skin, a man hoping to defeat a “just” rebellion by playing up Western fears.
The great irony of Stevens’ diary is that it vindicates and validates this warning from and by a man he helped kill. What he was inclined to deny during the rebellion finally came to bite him lethally.

Depicting the Arab mind?
Let us digest what we already have, lest we constipate. It does not matter which publication you pick on this one story, the general drift in Western reportage is to treat the killing of the four Americans as part of the broader mindless mayhem that typify “Arab dysfunction”.
I draw from the Economist: “Just take the seven days prior to the killing: in Iraq scores of people were killed in bombings on one day and the vice-president was sentenced to death in absentia for alleged murder; in Yemen the defence minister survived an assassination attempt; in Gaza Strip Israel killed six militants; in Tunisia extremist Salafists smashed up a bar that serves alcohol to the town where the Arab Spring began and most graphically of all, in Syria the death toll in the gruesome civil war continued to rise exponentially — to over 25 000.”
This is quite graphic, is it not? Arab dysfunction include “Israel killing six militants” in the Gaza Strip? Includes the failing justice system in an Iraq which the Anglo-Saxons have rebuilt? Includes religious extremism overtaking normalcy in post-Arab spring societies, all of them with a US imprimatur? That includes Yemen which America settled in its usual inimitable way?
The very obvious and inevitable bloody ramifications of the West’s mindless interventions are blamed and explained away in terms of the Arab dysfunction. That dysfunction include denying Moslems a religion worth respecting, condoning its disparagement in the name of freedom of expression. It is called blaming the victim, itself a second assassination of a people already prostrated by occupation.

Mind your own grief
What is worse, America’s global diplomacy degenerates to open fraud. This last Wednesday, president Barak Obama went on and on about the death of Christopher Stevens, itself not quite a problem. It is no sin for an American to grieve the death of a countryman. Indeed it very well passes for great compassion if that grief is expressed from on high, if that grief comes from the scepter.
But president Obama was not giving a state of the union address. He was addressing the UN, addressing a world audience. Stevens was an American public servant.
His death was an American issue. And as is quite apparent, only an issue for high America. For broad America, life went on unnoticed, unnoticing. Was it not extraordinary that this death — quite normal, inevitable and mundane for a superpower seeking to subdue the whole world militarily — became, in the eyes of America’s high society, a tragedy for humankind?
Much like 9/11. Why does America seek to invest its  little tragedies, most of them self-courted and a normal reaction to its actions across the globe, invest them with cosmic meaning? We have our little tragedies here.
We don’t climb the rooftop to yell the world to attention. We don’t drown the village still to have its supper with our little griefs. No we don’t. Stevens was not the theme of this year’s UNGA and it is not bad diplomacy to remind America to mind its own grief.

Hubris and poetic justice
I called US public diplomacy fraudulent. That it is. Obama has no reason to call Chris and his colleagues “civilians”. That they were not, and great conclusions by, and exhortations from America cannot issue from a lie.
This was a case of American covert staff that met its comeuppance. That happens in high risk operations and those upon whom death finally catches up must embrace their fate with equanimity. As indeed should those who sent them on such dangerous missions. Stevens was working for his country, represented “best in America”, as his president correctly said.
But that is for America to mind, not the rest of us, less so for those of us from Africa in whose minds these grisly deaths instantly play up a recall, an equally bloody recall. Africa lost a country, lost a people, lost lives in that so-called Libyan revolution which Stevens triggered and mustered. Above all, Africa lost sovereignty.
The gory images of Stevens and his colleagues compare favourably with the bloodied remains of Gaddafi and his slain family members. When it was Gaddafi’s turn, US did not bat an eyelid; it celebrated, forgetting a new ethic had been commissioned in the Libyan sense of political change and justice, a bloody ethic which, once legitimised by the so-called Libyan revolution, could be visited on anyone in the future.
As with Shylock, the villainy which the American-minded revolution condoned, the Libyan people would one day execute on America itself. And when that finally happened, the rest of the world saw hubris, read poetic justice, not villainy. No one should seek to give us heroes, least of all in the form and name of men who do America’s dirty work abroad.

A new Twin Towers in Arabia
I called it fraud. That it is. For president Obama to tell us that “the attacks of the last two weeks were . . . an assault on the very ideas upon which the United Nations was founded”, including the idea that “diplomacy can take the place of war”, is to deploy savage irony against a traumatised continent and region.
Stevens and his American government did not seek diplomacy on Libya. America is not seeking diplomacy on Syria.
Quite the contrary, it has deployed Stevens into that country in industrial quantities. Quite the contrary, it has been arming Syrian rebels, while telling the world that it is giving non-lethal weapons.
Even if we were willing to suspend disbelief — and we are not — we would still have to reckon with the fact that such assistance is known to be a deadly multiplier in situations of conflict.
Recently rebels of the Free Syrian Army detonated massive bombs in Damascus, bringing down buildings. How does a country which suffered a Twin Towers attack ever condone such methods of war, in fact ever find itself associated with a campaign within which such happens?
What happens to those skills when the conflict in Syria is over? Who is being mindless, dysfunctional?

Reverses on foreign policy campaign
Does anyone in White House honestly believe that the world agrees with Obama when he says: “Today, we must affirm that our future will be determined by people like Chris Stevens . . . and not by his killers”?
Quite the contrary, we draw our swords in self-defence at the mention of Stevens, himself a deadly operator who beguiles his would-be victims as a Peace Corp.
The whole thing was one gigantic fraud. Obama appeared to be addressing us. In reality he was addressing an American electoral audiences, only abusing the UN platform to do so. Given his attack line which portrayed Mitt Romney as a novice on foreign policy, this deadly attack in Libya gave the Romney campaign team a deadly attack line against Obama.
Obama could no longer brag about Osama being dead. Osama had struck America from the grave.
Obama’s foreign policy had imperiled America, the Romney team stated repeatedly, slowly nudging the whole debate from foreign policy issues to home politics characterised by a sprawling deficit and shrinking economy.
At home, Obama is on thin ice.
And hence the spectacular abuse of the UN platform for domestic politics. It was open fraud.

Resting America on peace
The Obama administration is angry that President Mugabe drew a sarcastic comparison between the death of Stevens and that of Gaddafi.
One Erin Pelton for the US mission to the UN described the President’s comparison as “ridiculous and abhorrent”.
“Ambassador Stevens represented the finest of America and spent his life connecting people, not dividing them.
“Even for President Mugabe, this is a new low.”
It is the thing about Americans which gets them to expect the rest of the world not just to agree with them, but also to endorse and amplify on their fraudulent diplomacy which one finds staggering.
People who cause invasions and bring wars upon societies able or with a duty to liberate themselves, do not connect people.
They may represent “the finest” of imperial America, but they amount to the basest for those of us who cherish genuine freedom and sovereignty, those of us unhappily positioned on the receiving end of American adventurism. Across the globe, all those societies which America has moulded are failing.
Across the globe, all those “revolutions” which America has supported have since developed deadly gnarled fangs that have already bitten, or are ready to bite her.
What is more, we children of a lesser god can never grieve with America when she gets bitten. Quite the contrary we vainly hope the second, third, fourth bite will one day make it twice shy. We cannot grieve with an aggressor nation. After all, freedom for the lion means death for the cow. May America rest on peace so more Stevens won’t have to die. Icho!

For feedback email:
[email protected]