http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MJ22Ak03.html
Oct 22, 2011
THE ROVING EY
How the West won Libya
By Pepe Escobar
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 Globalistan: How the Globalized World is
Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot
of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan
(Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at [email protected].
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing)
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