The Libya policy reversal
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The Libya policy reversal is John Kiriakou's assessment of the American decision to help remove Muammar Gaddafi, and of the argument that the resulting chaos was intentional.

The relationship that existed

Kiriakou does not defend Gaddafi personally, calling him a very bad guy. But he says the United States actually had a very healthy working relationship with him, and that Gaddafi hated al-Qaeda as much as the Americans did.

On that basis he calls flipping sides at the last minute to overthrow him a terrible policy error, and points at the result: the country is now, in his words, literally anarchy and chaos.

The Wesley Clark objection

His interviewer countered that, according to General Wesley Clark, causing destabilisation had been the plan all along. Kiriakou treated the source seriously, Clark was a four-star general and ought to know what he is talking about, but not the policy.

If that is the policy, he said, then he thinks it is an incredibly shortsighted one, because invariably where there is a power vacuum the United States gets dragged in; and when it is dragged into something of that kind, as it was in Lebanon in the 1980s, it cannot get itself back out again.

Where the argument leads

Pressed on whether defence contractors have a motive to keep such conflicts going, Kiriakou conceded the point and dated his own conversion to it. He says he never believed it until the last four or five years, and has come to the conclusion that the United States economically needs war to be a permanent thing. He develops the argument at length elsewhere as the permanent wartime economy.

He adds an explanation for the absence of protest: the American people are numb to the idea of war, in part because of the all-volunteer military, which is why he says there are no demonstrations in the streets even though Afghanistan is the longest war in American history, by his reckoning three times as long as the Second World War, and nobody is really upset about it.

See also

- Permanent wartime economy
- The Libyan constitution unveiling
- The Benghazi Hearings Critique
- Renting Afghan warlords
