THE WISDOM FUND: News & Views
March 21, 2011
ericmargolis.com

Libya: A New Crusade

by Eric Margolis

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. . . .

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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]

Enver Masud, "A Clash Between Justice and Greed, Not Islam and the West," The Wisdom Fund, September 2, 2002

"Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing Over Lockerbie, Scotland: Megrahi Was Framed," The Wisdom Fund, August 15, 2003

"C R U S A D E," The Wisdom Fund, October 16, 2003

Enver Masud, "Revealed: America's Hidden Hand Behind The UN Resolution For A No-fly Zone Over Libya," The Wisdom Fund, March 19, 2011

Enver Masud, "Reply to CSID's Open Letter Opposing the No-fly Zone," The Wisdom Fund, March 22, 2011

Pepe Escobar, "Libya Endgame: Divide, Rule And Get The Oil," Asia Times, March 25, 2011

[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]

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