Thursday, June 07, 2018

The Libyan Civil War

The pretext for the Western Powers disposing of Libya's Gaddafi was to protect a city. There is now a silence on the threat to the 125,000 inhabitants of Derna. Violence has reached unprecedented levels, according to the UN. Heavy ground fighting and widespread destruction of houses by airstrikes and shelling is exacerbating severe shortages of water, food, medicine, and electricity. The UN Support Mission in Libya, UNSMIL, has urged restraint on all sides, and called for parties to ensure “unimpeded humanitarian access and facilitate the safe exit of civilians wishing to leave the city”.

The assault on Derna by the forces of renegade General Khalifa Haftar, known as the Libyan National Army (LNA), is the latest episode in the internecine warfare which has torn Libya apart since the NATO-backed overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011. Haftar is one of the most powerful of the many players in Libya, controlling most of the east of the country after capturing Benghazi last year.

1 comment:

Tim Hart said...

It was asinine at the outset for the war machine of the ‘International Community’ to claim that its intervention in Libya was ‘humanitarian’ in order to prevent a massacre in Benghazi. It would be perverse to do so now. The killing and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Libyans and the migration of millions more from surrounding countries was not an humanitarian project gone wrong; it was not a mistake, a mis-judgement, or any of those other weasel words that are trotted out by the pundits and media to placate a restless domestic public. The carnage, chaos and destruction that has been Libya’s fate - and is continuing now in places like Derna - is a success story judged by its real motives. Ghadafi had the temerity to signal his intention to abandon the petro-dollar, as did Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Once this heresy was proclaimed their fate, and that of their countries, was sealed. The United States government will wait as long as necessary until it can successfully install a docile proxy government more favourably disposed to the dollar. Iran is the latest to challenge US hegemony by trading its oil in Euros which is why it is in the crosshairs of the US government and its corporate clients; seemingly intending to trot out the same old lazy justification of ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ this time in the form of the nuclear bomb. And of course there will be the obligatory ‘humanitarian’ angle as well; claiming to save the Iranian people from its despotic government. In their supreme mendacity you would think these warmongering governments would apply a little more imagination in seeking to bamboozle their domestic audiences.