[News] How the West won Libya

[Anti-Imperialist News]

THE ROVING EYE
How the West won Libya
By Pepe Escobar

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MJ22Ak03.html

They are fighting over the carcass as vultures. The French Ministry 
of Defense said they got him with a Rafale fighter jet firing over 
his convoy. The Pentagon said they got him with a Predator firing a 
Hellfire missile. After a wounded Colonel Muammar Gaddafi sought 
refuge in a filthy drain underneath a highway - an eerie echo of 
Saddam Hussein's "hole" - he was found by Transitional National 
Council (TNC) "rebels". And then duly executed.

Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a Libyan doctor who accompanied Gaddafi's 
body in an ambulance and examined it, said he died from two bullets, 
one to the chest, one to the head.

The TNC - which has peddled lies, lies and more lies for months - 
swears he died in "crossfire". It may have been a mob. It may

have been Mohammad al-Bibi, a 20-year-old sporting a New York Yankees 
baseball cap who posed to the whole world brandishing Gaddafi's 
golden pistol; his ticket perhaps to collect the hefty $20 million 
dangled as the bounty for Gaddafi "dead or alive".

It gets curioser and curioser when one remembers that this is exactly 
what US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her lightning visit to 
Tripoli, had announced less than 48 hours before; Gaddafi should be 
"captured or killed". The Fairy Queenie satisfied Clinton's wishes, 
who learned about it by watching the screen of a BlackBerry - and 
reacting with the semantic earthquake "Wow!"

To the winners, the spoils. They all did it; the North Atlantic 
Treaty Organization (NATO), the Pentagon and the TNC. From the minute 
a United Nations resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya became 
a green card to regime change, plan A was always to capture and kill 
him. Targeted assassination; that's Barack Obama administration 
official policy. There was no plan B.

Let me bomb you to protection
As for how R2P ("responsibility to protect" civilians), any doubters 
should cling to the explanation by NATO's secretary general Anders 
Fogh Rasmussen; "NATO and our partners have successfully implemented 
the historic mandate of the United Nations to protect the people of 
Libya." Anyone who wants to check NATO's protection of civilians just 
needs to jump on a pick-up truck and go to Sirte - the new Fallujah.

Reactions have been quite instructive. TNC bureaucrat Abdel Ghoga 
went Colosseum in the Roman Empire, saying, "The revolutionaries have 
got the head of the tyrant."

United States President Barack Obama said the death of Gaddafi means 
"we are seeing the strength of American leadership across the world". 
That's as "we got him" as one can possibly expect, also considering 
that Washington paid no less than 80% of the operating costs of those 
dimwits at NATO (over $1 billion - which Occupy Wall Street could 
well denounce would be more helpful creating jobs in the US). 
Strange, now, to say "we did it", because the White House always said 
this was not a war; it was a "kinetic" something. And they were not in charge.

It was up to that majestic foreign policy strategist, US Vice 
President Joe Biden, to be starkly more enlightening than Obama; "In 
this case, America spent $2 billion and didn't lose a single life. 
This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go 
forward than it has in the past."

World, you have been warned; this is how the empire will deal with 
you from now on.

Feel my humanitarian love
So congratulations to the "international community" - which as 
everyone knows is composed of Washington, a few washed-up NATO 
members, and the democratic Persian Gulf powerhouses of Qatar and the 
United Arab Emirates (UAE). This community, at least, loved the 
outcome. The European Union (EU) hailed "the end of an era of 
despotism" - when up to virtually Thursday they were caressing the 
helm of Gaddafi's gowns; now they are falling over themselves in 
editorials about the 42-year reign of a "buffoon".

Gaddafi would have been a most inconvenient guest of the 
International Criminal Court in The Hague, as he would have relished 
recalling all the hand-kissing, the warm embraces and the juicy deals 
the West was begging to clinch after he was promoted from "Mad Dog" 
(Ronald Reagan) to "our bastard". He would also relish detailing all 
the shady backgrounds of those opportunists now posing as 
"revolutionaries" and "democrats".

As for the concept of international law, it lies in a drain as filthy 
as the one Gaddafi was holed up in. Iraqi dictator Saddam at least 
got a fake trial in a kangaroo court before meeting the executioner. 
Osama bin Laden was simply snuffed out, assassination-style, after a 
territorial invasion of Pakistan. Gaddafi went one up, snuffed out 
with a mix of air war and assassination.

Power vultures are congesting the skies. London-based Mohammed El 
Senussi, the heir to the Libyan throne (King Idris was overthrown in 
1969) is ready for his close-up, having already established that he 
"is a servant to Libyan people, and they decide what they want". 
Translation; I want the throne. He's obviously the favorite candidate 
of the counter-revolutionary House of Saud.

And what about those Washington think-tank donkeys mumbling that this 
was the Arab Spring's "Ceausescu moment"? If only the Romanian 
dictator had improved his country's standard of living - in terms of 
free healthcare, free education, incentives for the newlywed, etc - 
by a fraction of what Gaddafi did in Libya. Plus the fact that 
Nicolae Ceausescu was not deposed by NATO "humanitarian" bombing. v 
Only the brain dead may have swallowed the propaganda of NATO's 
"humanitarian" 40,000-plus bombing - which devastated Libya's 
infrastructure back to the Stone Age (Shock and Awe in slow motion, 
anyone?). This never had anything to do with R2P - the relentless 
bombing of civilians in Sirte proves it.

As the top four BRIC members knew it even before the voting of UN 
Resolution 1973, it was about NATO ruling the Mediterranean as a NATO 
lake, it was about Africom's war against China and setting up a key 
strategic base, it was about the French and the Brits getting juicy 
contracts to exploit Libya's natural resources to their benefit, it 
was about the West setting the narrative of the Arab Spring after 
they had been caught napping in Tunisia and Egypt.

Listen to the barbaric whimpers
Welcome to the new Libya. Intolerant Islamist militias will turn the 
lives of Libyan women into a living hell. Hundreds of thousands of 
Sub-Saharan Africans - those who could not escape - will be 
ruthlessly persecuted. Libya's natural wealth will be plundered. That 
collection of anti-aircraft missiles appropriated by Islamists will 
be a supremely convincing reason for the "war on terror" in northern 
Africa to become eternal. There will be blood - civil war blood, 
because Tripolitania will refuse to be ruled by backward Cyrenaica.

As for remaining dictators everywhere, get a life insurance policy 
from NATO Inc; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben 
Ali and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh were clever enough to do it. We 
all know there will never be R2P to liberate the Tibetans and 
Uyghurs, or the people in that monster gulag Myanmar, or the people 
in Uzbekistan, or the Kurds in Turkey, or the Pashtuns on both sides 
of the imperially drawn Durand Line.

We also know that change the world can believe in will be the day 
NATO enforces a no-fly one over Saudi Arabia to protect the Shi'ites 
in the eastern province, with the Pentagon launching a Hellfire 
carpet over those thousands of medieval, corrupt House of Saud princes.

It won't happen. Meanwhile, this is the way the West ends; with a 
NATO bang, and a thousand barbaric, lawless whimpers. Disgusted? Get 
a Guy Fawkes mask and raise hell.

Pepe Escobar is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0978813820/simpleproduction/ref=nosim>Globalistan: 
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 
2007) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/Red-Zone-Blues-snapshot-Baghdad/dp/0978813898>Red 
Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, 
just out, is 
<http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Does-Globalistan-Pepe-Escobar/dp/1934840831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233698286&sr=8-1>Obama 
does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com.




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