Why Libya?

By Robert Barsocchini 

Following the standard US playbook, the Obama regime and its accomplices made up crimes to propagandize their populations into accepting illegal aggression and terrorism against Libya in 2011, and now ignore the actual crimes being committed in the Libya shoved, by the West, into “the abyss”.

Journalist Patrick Cockburn yesterday  noted  the fabrications “that were used to fuel popular support for the air war in the US, Britain, France and elsewhere”:

Human rights organisations … discovered that there was  no evidence  for several highly publicised atrocities supposedly carried out by Gaddafi's forces…

These included the story of the mass rape of women by Gaddafi's troops that Amnesty International exposed as being  without foundation . [Not to mention the US military protects its own rapists and supports other regimes that  do use rape as a weapon.]

The uniformed bodies of government soldiers were described by rebel spokesmen as being men shot because they were about to defect to the opposition. Video film showed the soldiers still alive as rebel prisoners so  it must have been the rebels who had executed them and put the blame on the government.

Cockburn further notes that, after lying to fabricate the pretext for aggression, the Western governments and media outlets have fallen mysteriously silent on Libya as the country has spiraled into oblivion.  The West thus again all but insists we notice that humanitarian crises play no role in drawing their attention, and that they only trumpet – or invent – human rights violations to cover Western aggression, which is carried out, Cockburn notes, “always in the interests of the country intervening.”

The West immediately lost its feigned concern over the “human rights” violations it exaggerated or simply made up regarding Libya because they were never of concern to begin with, and the West made things much worse: the illegal US-led attack instantly killed or led to the deaths of up to  hundreds of thousands .

Since then, Cockburn documents,

[W]arring militias [have] reduce[d] Libya to primal anarchy in which nobody is safe…

Of these “militias”, Washington's Blog  noted  in April that they were:

… largely comprised of Al Qaeda terrorists .

And:

The United States …  knowingly facilitat[ed] the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures ,' Clare Lopez …  former CIA officer , told MailOnline.

Cockburn continues:

The majority of Libyans are demonstrably worse off today than they were under Gaddafi…

Foreign governments and media alike have good reason to forget what they said and did in Libya in 2011, because  the aftermath of the overthrow of Gaddafi has been so appalling . The extent of the calamity is made clear by two reports on the present state of the country, one by Amnesty International called “Libya: Rule of the gun –  abductions, torture and other militia abuses in western Libya ” and a second by Human Rights Watch, focusing on the east of the country, called “Libya: Assassinations May Be Crimes Against Humanity”.

Amnesty says that  torture has become commonplace  with victims being “beaten with plastic tubes, sticks, metal bars or cables, given electric shocks, suspended in stress positions for hours, kept blindfolded and shackled for days.”

It is well known that the Obama regime simply continued the leaked Bush Jr. agenda to “take out” Libya and six other countries.

But the Bush agenda was also a continuation of longstanding US policy.  The US, immediately after World War II, made  internal plans  to try to dominate the resources of the Middle East.

Specifically, for a few examples, the US commenced terrorist operations to try to overthrow and install a puppet in Syria in  1948 , Iran in 1953 (which it did successfully until 1979), and since the  1930s  has been closely partnered with the terrorist organization ruling Saudi Arabia.

The US has been engaged in terrorist operations against Libya since at least 1986, when the US  carried out  “ the major single terrorist act” of the year when it planted and detonated explosives there, attempting to assassinate Gaddafi but succeeding only in killing his daughter and many others.

With the “ leading terrorist state “, the US, caging more women than any other country,  cracking  down on speech,  supporting the mass rapist Mubarak of Egypt for thirty years, through 2011, then transitioning to supporting the new mass rapist Sisi in Egypt now, along with scores of other terrorist regimes, one must look beyond official propaganda to determine why the US overthrew Gaddafi.

Taking into account that the US decided long ago to try to dominate the largely Mid East-based and global oil economy (as it earlier had decided to dominate cotton), US actions can be understood by using Syria's Assad as an analogy.

In trying to control Syria, what would Assad prefer: for any existing opposition to be strong and united against him, or for it to consist of disparate, disorganized, weak factions mostly battling and killing each other, if anyone?

The answer is obvious.  We can then extend the analogy to the US (while remembering that the US formerly used Assad as an ally in the  US global torture network ).

In trying to dominate the world's oil market – and the world in general – what would the “leading terrorist state” prefer: unified, strong opposition or weak, small, disparate, warring factions killing and wiping each other out?

Again, the answer is obvious, so we can move on to asking: since “Gaddafi's overthrow was very much Nato's doing” (Cockburn), what was Libya before 2011 when it was destroyed by the US-led NATO terrorist network?

Harvard research scholar Garikai Chengu, on October 19, published a  report  called “Libya: From Africa's Richest State  Under Gaddafi, to Failed State After NATO Intervention”.

Chengu:

In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated,  Gaddafi had turned Libya into Africa's wealthiest nation .

Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.

[Libya is now plagued by] widespread rape, assassinations and torture…

America… is now backing… long-time CIA asset, General Khalifa Hifter, who aims to set himself up as Libya's new dictator.

[Hifter] has taken part in numerous American regime change efforts, including the aborted attempt to overthrow Gaddafi in 1996.

Hifter is currently receiving logistical and air support from the U.S. because his faction envision a mostly secular Libya open to Western financiers, speculators, and capital.

Perhaps, Gaddafi's greatest crime, in the eyes of NATO, was his desire to put the interests of local labour above foreign capital and  his quest for a strong and truly United States of Africa . In fact, in August 2011, President Obama confiscated $30 billion from Libya's Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of the African IMF and African Central Bank .

In 2011, the West's objective was clearly not to help the Libyan people,  who already had the highest standard of living in Africa , but to oust Gaddafi, install a puppet regime, and gain control of Libya's natural resources.

For over 40 years, Gaddafi promoted economic democracy and used the nationalized oil wealth to sustain progressive social welfare programs for all Libyans. Under Gaddafi's rule, Libyans enjoyed not only free health-care and free education, but also free electricity and interest-free loans.

One group that has suffered immensely  from NATO's bombing campaign is the nation's women . Unlike many other Arab nations, women in Gaddafi's Libya had the right to education, hold jobs, divorce, hold property and have an income. The United Nations Human Rights Council praised Gaddafi for his promotion of women's rights.

When the colonel seized power in 1969, few women went to university. Today, more than half of Libya's university students are women. One of the first laws Gaddafi passed in 1970 was an equal pay for equal work law.

[Libya is now] clamping down on women's rights.

Given that Libya sits atop the strategic intersection of the African, Middle Eastern and European worlds, Western control of the nation, has always been a remarkably effective way to project power into these three regions and beyond.

Libya, it appears, was, indeed, an outstandingly strong source of opposition to Western domination of the region, as well as a “threat of a good example” for successfully carrying out policies  hated  by the USA, such as free healthcare, electricity, and education.

In one particularly egregious move, Gaddafi had even  allied with Nelson Mandela  in the fight against Apartheid, while the US, particularly Ronald Reagan,  strongly  supported and  fought  hard to maintain Apartheid, including by  imprisoning  Mandela and putting him on the US “terrorist” list (while taking Saddam Hussein off) until Bush Jr. finally changed Mandela's classification in 2008.  Reagan and US efforts to topple Gaddafi were thus integral to the US white supremacist jihad to maintain Apartheid.

Indeed, to ask “Why Libya?” is to ask “Why anywhere?”

Chengu notes of “Western intervention in … Libya, Iraq, and Syria”:

…prior to western military involvement in these three nations,  they were the most modern and secular states in the Middle East and North Africa with the highest regional women's rights and standards of living.

As confirmation, the  2014 UN Development Report  also  found , as Patrick Martin notes:

The steepest decline in living conditions during 2013 occurred in Central African Republic, Libya and Syria—three countries targeted by US and French imperialism for military intervention and political subversion.

…

When we mute Western government and  integrated  corporate propaganda (what they  say ) and look at what they actually  do , what is left?  The bare reality of a brutal Western terror axis butchering, as it always has, any group of people that could potentially deter Western domination and thus cut into the percentage of global wealth captured by Western predators.

Depressing, but Carl Herman nicely  expresses  how we can deal with this.

Robert Barsocchini is a researcher focusing on global force dynamics.  He also writes professionally for the film industry.   Here  is his blog.  Also see his free e-book,  Whatever it Takes – Hillary Clinton's Record of Support for War and other Depravities .   Click here  to follow Robert and his UK-based colleague, Dean Robinson, on Twitter.

http://www.countercurrents.org/barsocchini051114.htm