Here we go again! It's Iraqi-style shock and awe for Libya.
Let's get that nasty Saracen, Muammar Gadaffi, the man we love to hate.
As in the case of Iraq, the assault on Libya was preceded by a huge barrage
of anti-Gadaffi propaganda and steaming moral outrage by western media and
politicians. American TV crews rushed to Libya to witness the wicked colonel
get his comeuppance. None went to Bahrain or Yemen.
The attack was led by France. President Nicholas Sarkozy just suffered his
own bout of shock and awe when polls showed his conservative party trailing
the hard right National Front of Marine LePen. Blasting Arabs is a
sure-fire way to win back the hearts of France's rightwing voters. So "aux
armes, citoyens!"
Bien sure, the French attack had nothing, nothing at all to do with
unsubstantiated claims by Gadaffi's number one son, Saif, that Libya has
secretly financed Sarkozy's last election campaign.
The ever-bumbling Arab League had first given a tepid ok to a no fly zone to
stop Gadaffi bombing rebels civilians, but then recoiled as western
warplanes began attacking Libyan ground targets and civilians - including
Gadaffi's compound in Tripoli.
The fireworks were most impressive. To no surprise, Libya proved a total
pushover. Its feeble military was routed.
But the nasty question then surfaced: what is the objective of this
operation? Washington's crusaders lacked a cogent answer.
Wars are waged to attain political objectives. Killing enemy forces is
merely the means to this objective. The UN mandate is only to protect
civilians, not to remove the Gadaffi regime. The US is targeting Gadaffi
but claims - wink, nudge - that it is only after command and control
targets.
But Gadaffi has been through many attempts to kill him. In 1987, he took me
by the hand and led me through the ruins of his residence which had been
demolished a year earlier by a US bomb that killed his two-year old
daughter.
For the moment, the most likely scenario is that Libya will end up split
into warring western and eastern camps. The western powers - minus Germany
and Turkey who wisely refused to join the Libya attack - are likely to arm
and support the Benghazi rebels. It's also noteworthy that the African Union
failed to endorse the anti-Gadaffi operation.
Gadaffi still retains some support in western Libya and from important
tribes. So welcome to a Libyan civil war. Shades of Afghanistan and
Iraq, where the US intervened to support rebelling minorities and ended up
stuck in the middle of maddeningly complex civil wars.
Little is known about the rag-tag Benghazi rebels, now adopted by the
western powers. Britain's MI6 intelligence service has maintained some
links with them for over a decade. . . .
America would be hailed as genuine liberator of long-suffering Libyans if it
also intervened in Bahrain and Yemen - and perhaps Saudi Arabia - to protect
civilians from the ferocity of their despotic governments and promote real
democracy.
But it's only oil-rich Libya that is getting the “humanitarian” treatment
from the US and oil-hungry western European former colonial powers. . . .
SIGN
PETITION opposing no-fly zone -- just click and send. Results will be
automatically tabulated.
[Labelled by the international press as the 8th Wonder of The World . . .
The Great Man-Made River--Enver Masud, "Libya CW Factory(?) U.S. Threatened To Nuke
Opens," The Wisdom Fund, September 4, 1996]
[All companies operating in Libya must have Libyan partners, entitled to 35%
of profits. Trading is via the Libyan Central Bank, in the Libyan Dinar,
not US$s. The Libyan Central Bank is also independently outside the IMF and
the World Bank.
There are only 5 nations without a Rothschild model central bank: North
Korea, Iran, Sudan, Cuba and Libya.
There were two others: Afghanistan and Iraq, but they were gobbled up by the
international banking system within a heartbeat of the invasions.--Felicity
Arbuthnot, "Libya:
Oil, Banks, the United Nations and America's Holy Crusade," Global
Research, April 5, 2011]
[ . . . the future of Libya is decreasingly likely to be determined by
Libyans. Foreign intervention is turning into an old-style imperial venture.
Much the same thing happened in Iraq in 2003 and in Afghanistan in the past
few years. In Iraq, the US invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a ruler
detested by most Iraqis, soon turned into what many Iraqis saw as a foreign
occupation.--Patrick Cockburn, "What NATO is
Doing to Libya," counterpunch.org, May 23, 2011]