Both the powerfully seductive myth of American Exceptionalism and the loudly proclaimed goal of “humanitarian intervention” in Libya’s civil war appear to be driving the narrative in US media and from the US Government.

But the history of US involvement and war in Vietnam and in the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and occupations, historically illustrate quite clearly the level of “concern” the US Government has for civilian populations, and US domestic policies the past few years at least illustrate the same level of “concern” re the American people. Why anyone would think developments in Libya will be different from those of any other US foreign “intervention” is somewhat of a mystery.

On Tuesday morning Paul Jay of The Real News spoke with Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi about the Libyan situation and US intentions there.

   JAY: So, Hamid, you have been studying the Libyan situation for years, and you’ve written about the Iranian situation. You teach at Columbia. So, first of all, what’s your take on what’s happening as we speak?

   DABASHI: Well, there are two takes. One is to take everything on face value that United States and its European allies are in this to protect the civilians and establish a no-fly zone.

   But we, given the history of United States and its European allies, have every reason to doubt that this indeed is the agenda.

   What has happened is–and for this difficulty, Muammar al-Gaddafi himself is the principal culprit–a peaceful, by-and-large peaceful revolutionary uprising in North Africa that has come to conclusion, perfect conclusion, peaceful conclusion in Tunisia and in Egypt, has been bloodied.

   And what we are witnessing today in the aftermath of this military operation by US and its European allies is further bloodying of a peaceful revolutionary uprising.

   In other words, what Muammar al-Gaddafi has done, the last and lasting contribution of Muammar al-Gaddafi to these revolutionary uprising, is to give United States and European allies a military foothold in the revolutionary uprising in North Africa.

   I see the events in Libya, the military operation on the eighth anniversary of US-led invasion of Iraq, in tandem with Secretary of State Clinton telling in effect the Egyptians that you had a peaceful revolution because of your military, and your military is our military, and then going to Tunisia to tell the Tunisians that she’s there to help them.

   In other words, what the US and its European allies are doing are trying to use and abuse the criminal atrocities of Gaddafi to get a foothold, diplomatic and military foothold, in the peaceful revolutionary uprising that we are witnessing in North Africa.

   …

   The United States and European allies had already intervened in the battle between Muammar al-Gaddafi and Libyan people on the side of Gaddafi, by arming Gaddafi to his teeth, both United Kingdom and United States.

   Also, professors from Harvard University to Princeton to Johns Hopkins, etc., were on the payroll of Muammar al-Gaddafi to whitewash his criminal atrocities and present him as something pleasant and acceptable. These are the contexts. So, suddenly, from the same political culture, from the same military culture, you cannot expect a situation that they are going in with shining armor to defend the civilians.

AjJazeera Live Feed (h/t Momcat) 4:45PM PST:

Early Saturday Morning:

The UN Security Council gives the go-ahead for outside military intervention in Libya, but who will lead the operation and where will be the centre of command and control? Western diplomats insist that Arab League forces must be part of the offensive. Meanwhile, the Gaddafi regime has declared an immediate ceasefire, but will words become action? Inside Story discusses.

AlJazeeraEnglish – 19 Mar 2011

[UPDATES 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 below the fold]

If you’ve eaten in the past few years…

From David Edwards at RawStory:

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter joined Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly Thursday night to discuss her new piece titled “A Glowing Report on Radiation.”

“At some level-much higher than the minimums set by the U.S. government – radiation is good for you,” she told O’Reilly.

This video is from Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, broadcast March 17, 2011.

Some days, I have no idea what to say.

Some days, it looks like the….

I have always liked the myth and metaphor that Alan Watts in the mid sixties used in his “The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are“:

   “There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can’t have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn’t be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black.

   “In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn’t, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don’t. So because it doesn’t get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It’s like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It’s also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it’s always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn’t always hide in the same place.

   “God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

   “Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it-just what he wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self-the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.

   …

   “God is the Self of the world, but you can’t see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can’t see your own eyes, and you certainly can’t bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

   “You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.”

   “The Ultimate Ground of Being” is Paul Tillich’s decontaminated term for God” and would also do for “the Self of the world” as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or “pretending” to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it’s always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos. You’re It!

I highly recommend Watts’ book.

Jeff Cohen, media critic and lecturer, according the bio posted on his site jeffcohen.org, “is founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, where he is an associate professor of journalism.  His latest book is Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.  He has been a TV commentator at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and was senior producer of MSNBC’s Phil Donahue primetime show until it was terminated three weeks before the Iraq invasion.  Cohen founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986.”

Cohen’s columns on media issues have been widely published online at sites including HuffingtonPost, CommonDreams and Alternet, as well as in many media dailies, including USA Today, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Atlanta Constitution, and Miami Herald”.

Here Cohen talks with The Real News Network’s Paul Jay about founding a new netroots organization called RootsAction to be a separate independent force in US politics, saying that most current net based organizing groups are too connected to a corporatized Democratic Party that ties their hands – and that:

RootsAction was launched to be a totally independent force online for action, the idea being that the independent media have boomed–Democracy Now! Real News, Common Dreams, Truthout, Laura Flanders and GRITtv – yet people – there’s millions of people now getting their news every day, and they understand that the problem in this country isn’t just the fanatical, anti-science, anti-intellectual right wing, but another aspect of the problem is the corporatization of the Democratic Party.

So for those millions of people that get their news that’s pretty complete, there’s not an action group online that is mobilizing those millions of people, because the existing liberal netroots, many of the groups are just too close to the Democratic Party and Democratic Party leadership. So the idea behind RootsAction was to mobilize millions of people online who get the news every day from independent media and would like an independent politics to match their independent media.