Canadian Dogs of War - would the Tories lie about Libya ?

As war's go, this new one in Libya is not so unique. The preamble involved the usual pattern of lying and doubletalk. While Gaddafi's opponents were winning they were "revolutionaries" and "freedom fighters". When they started losing they became "innocent civilians" who were, according to Stephen Harper, about to be "massacred". By Sunday the British Defense Secretary Liam Fox was boldly talking about a "decapitation strike". He means the assassination of Gaddafi using precision guided munitions. Will a Canadian CF-18 pilot do the dirty work? Probably not, because according to a report by Tom Blackwell in the NATIONAL POST : Canadian "military lawyers will screen all possible targets to lessen civilian deaths and try to ensure international law is obeyed." How surreal is that!? Our lawyers sign off on the strike targets! You can't make this stuff up. Read more in Canada may take on large share of Libya MissionOn Saturday Peter Mackay, Canada's Defence Minister, was interviewed on the street in his Nova Scotia riding. Canada's JTF2 commandos have been made available to the coalition, and he was asked if they would join the British S.A.S. which is already on the ground in Libya calling in air strikes on Gaddafi's tanks and missilie launchers. Mackay never answers questions about our Special Forces of course. He did though mention HMCS CHARLOTTETOWN, which he claimed was holding station off Gibralter, far from Libyan waters.

According to this graphic prepared by the U.S. Military, and available a few days ago, HMCS Charlottetown is just off the coast of Tripoli. [Of course the Yanks managed to misspell her name.] On Sunday Peter Mackay re-asserted the idea that our warship was holding a non-hostile position near Gibraltar. He was being interviewed on CTV's QUESTION PERIOD. Our frigate has a giant Canadian flag painted on each side of its superstructure, making it the easiest ship for Libyan's to identify from a distance.

I don't trust what Canada is doing in Libya, any more than I trust what they are telling us about present and future military operations in Afghanistan.

Russian An-124 landing at McChord field, near Tacoma, Washington on March 20, 2011. Three of the giant transports flew in during the weekend to load cargo for the "Allied" assault on Libya.

It's interesting that Russia didn't use its Security Council veto at the United Nations to stop the "so-called "NO FLY ZONE", but Moscow has now condemned the massive air and sea bombardment. Early Monday media followed Vladimir Putin to a ballistic missile factory where he gave a speech. He said the UN Resolution on Libya is licence for the Allies to do as much as they please... "It allows everything. It resembles medieval calls for crusades."

On that first night three U.S. submarines and a half dozen surface vessels fired 120 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Gaddafi's country. Wow. That's $750,000 Barack bucks per missile! I find Russia to be super-hypocritical in all of this. Moscow condemns America's every military move and yet is a war profiteer, of critical importance to moving vital equipment directly from America to the war zones. American taxpayers are footing an enormous bill for the purchase of Russian machine guns and helicopters being delivered to Kabul, and also to charter huge Russian Antonov transport aircraft which regularly fly into neighboring Washington State. Previous An-124 flights out of McChord AFB carried loads of military helicopters, including UH60s, OH58s and CH47s. The Antonovs regularly fly to the US Superbase at Kandahar, Afghanistan. There are websites where (if interested) you can follow aircraft movements worldwide, and I note that two Antonov's which loaded at McChord today flew directly to an airbase in the U.K. No doubt they were carrying ordnance to be dropped on Libya later this week.

Muammar Gaddafi - Lion of the Desert

One of the nice things about Blogging on Google's Blogspot is that your material is never really buried. Events can and do, make old stories relevant again, and Google points to your work. This past week I was surprised to see a surge of readers for a DVD Review I wrote three years ago. [Read Article] The film is a delicious mix of history and filmmakers craft - LION OF THE DESERT. The article is actually a shorter version of a piece which is archived elsewhere on the Net, but serious readers are digging. Though my January 2008 article discusses Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi, I was slow catching the relevance.

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Then I saw Matt Drudge's header yesterday. Note the black and white photo pinned to Gaddafi's right breast. There is a wonderful story behind that photo, and it's in my Blog. As it happens Canada's MACLEAN'S magazine features Gaddafi on its cover this week, because he topical. They use this same image without bothering to inform readers of the significance of the photo he chose to wear on his chest. Again, it's in my review of LION OF THE DESERT.

LION OF THE DESERT- a DVD backgrounder

This 1981 bio-pic pits the "lion," famed Senussi guerrilla leader Omar Mukhtar against the Italian bull, 6' 4" tall General Rodolfo Graziani.

The vast majority of war movies produced in the 20th Century focus on less than a dozen wars, and the result is a distortion of the past. Very few African wars, for example, have been filmed. Niche films, those which tell a good story while offering glimpses of limited conflicts, are particularly scarce. I missed out on adding a good one, LION OF THE DESERT, to my DVD collection when it was released in 1998, and the primary DVD sellers in my area - Futureshop, HMV and Best Buy, have never stocked it. All the more reason to pounce when the 2-Disc Special Edition turned up in a post-Christmas sale bin at Walmart. It's a fact of life that some of the most elusive titles turn up in delete bins, which is why I stay alert for them.

The director/producer, Moustapha Akkad, a Syrian-American who is most most famous for making the eight HALLOWEEN horror movies, went to great lengths and expense to build detailed sets and replicate military equipment, which I found a real joy. Enthused, I did a little post-viewing research in order to check the facts behind this film treatment. (It's an old habit.) The film's researcher is said to be one "Michael Starkey" and I tried to determine if he was an historian. He could not be found so perhaps the name was just a pseudonym.

Make no mistake, this is a propaganda movie intended to showcase a Muslim "martyr" hanged by Italian fascism. Most of the $35 million dollars in production costs (filming started in 1979) was Libyan oil money. Specifically it came from strongman Muammar Gaddafi , the dictator who still holds power nearly 30 years later. Gaddafi had earlier bankrolled Akkad's film THE MESSAGE, which also starred Anthony Quinn.

Islamic polemics aside, LION is still a fabulous movie with plenty of action, Hollywood style stunts, and three engaging lead characters. Oliver Reed is masterful as General Rodolfo Graziani and Rod Steiger did a superlative job portraying Mussolini. Anthony Quinn stars as Omar Mukhtar, a guerrilla fighter of more than twenty years experience, whom we are told was a teacher before he took up the gun. Quinn played him as a reticent wise-man type, and here the screenplay is at fault, not the actor. Still the Muslim world went gagga for this movie (as Gaddafi intended) and most Muslim websites today use a still photo of actor Quinn playing Omar Mukhtar, rather than a photo of the real man. (He's on Wiki)

Omar Mukhtar, age 73, in shackles outside Italian courthouse in 1931. Note the man in the white shoes. He too appears in the movie, below.

This is a movie and not a history video, but the director was very clever in his use of old Italian newsreel footage, which goes a long way toward convincing us to accept the major premises of the story. Still, in most of the battle scenes the Italian troops are a bit too inept for my taste. At least three times we witness armoured columns totally annihilated by Mukhtar's horsemen, but most problematic is the telescoping of events to make it appear that Graziani was outwitted endlessly. The Fascist officer, already with a long service in Libya, was promoted General of Division and appointed Vice Governor of Cyrenaica (province) in 1930. Many other officers had failed to quash tribal resistance and Graziani assumed his new duties with a frenzy. Within a year he had taken the Senussi "capital", Kufra (Feb. 20, 1931) and scooped up Mukhtar (Sept. 12, 1931).

You don't have to know the history of Libya or more specifically Cyrenaica, to enjoy the film, but it does help one sort through the premises we are being exposed to. During World War I the Senussi were our enemy. The Germans supplied them with several shiploads of arms and the Ottoman Turks trained hundreds of tribesmen to infiltrate into Egypt and report back on Allied troop movements and fortifications. The R.F.C. bombed the Senussi and the Brits raided their villages. The Italians hanged Mukhtar in 1931 but the Senussi spiritual leader escaped into British controlled Egypt and was given sanctuary. More, the British gave arms to his militia, the so-called "Free Libya Force", which had a tiny role in the North Africa Campaign in WW2.

Most egregious is the extended scene which has the Italians defeating the Muslims before Kufra by resorting to the use of mustard gas released from pressurized tanks, in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on war gases. (Mussolini authorized use of gas in 1929.) Aircraft had dropped mustard bombs on at least two missions, but they were not operations conducted by Graziani. The general certainly used poison gases in his later campaign in Italian Eritrea, and with that war crime on his record, the director felt entitled to add it to his Libyan tale of anti-fascist warfare. More to the point, at the time Muammar Gaddafi was funding this movie, 1979-81, he had full scale production underway of choking and blistering agents, as well as nerve gas. He later used it offensively, against his neighbor Chad.

The second DVD disc contains the Arabic version of the film and an Arabic version of the "making of" featurette. It is significantly different in content, and contains lengthier interview segments with Director Akkad in which he repeatedly describes Omar Mukhtar's resistance campaign as a "Jihad".
One irony associated with this bio-pic is that it was originally General Graziani who was the "Lion," and not his Muslim opponent. When he died in 1955, TIME magazine dubbed Graziani the "Desert Lion".
One of several replica tanks built by British production designers in 1979. Because turrets were not well bolted to the hulls, they shake or rattle in some closeups of armour on the move.

Two film extras, out of uniform, mug for a private photo between takes. Site is of an ambush on a mountain road - the best scene in the movie. Supporting material on the DVD includes an interesting "making of" film, with emphasis on the weaponry.
The greatest irony associated with this movie is that its well intentioned Director was consumed by the very forces of Islamic militance and faction fighting which he has tried to portray as purely anti-colonialist in nature. In November of 2005 Akkad was in Amman, Jordan on the day terrorists launched a coordinated attack on three American owned luxury hotels. He was standing in the lobby talking to his daughter when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest. They were both killed. Akkad's next project was to be a historical drama about Saladin; perhaps one more cinematic attempt to put a heroic or benign face on today's armed Islamic resurgence.
Director/producer Moustapha Akkad and his daughter Rima Akkad at her marriage. The two were murdered in Amman, Jordan by terrorist bomb.