The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter-Spring 2011)


The pseudo-revolution in Libya and the Degenerate “Left”

PART  I : The pseudo-revolution in Libya

 

TAKIS FOTOPOULOS

 

...also read  Part II: The role of the degenerate "Left"

 

 

1. Introduction

 

To avoid any misconceptions or deliberate distortions of the stand taken by this paper (there have already been accusations by what I call the present degenerate “Left” statist and libertarian alike that I am a “pro-Caddafist,” a “plot theorist,” a “supporter of dictatorial regimes,” etc., particularly since I was also against the transnational elite’s[1] criminal attacks on Yugoslavia,[2] Afghanistan[3] and Iraq[4]), I think it is necessary to state, explicitly and in advance, the principles guiding this paper. The reader will, then, have a clear opportunity to assess its conclusions against these principles and draw his/her own conclusions.

Basic principles guiding this paper

  1. Fundamental to this analysis is the libertarian principle of peoples’ self determination, which should never be violated for supposedly humanitarian reasons (like those invoked by the arch-criminals of the transnational elite) or pseudo-“anarchist” reasons, according to which states are not sacrosanct (see Chomsky-Part II).
  2. Although it is true that states are not sacred, and social liberation is impossible unless peoples live in free confederations of their own communities securing the equal distribution of political and economic power among all citizens, national liberation is a precondition for any social liberation.
  3. Neither national nor social liberation can ever be achieved with the help of the very elites against whom both types of struggle are fought. This is why any direct or indirect cooperation of the struggling peoples (and the Left in general) with the transnational elite and its client regimes, in order to overthrow a domestic authoritarian regime, is inconceivable. Historically, there have been cases where peoples who have resisted against an occupying power have asked for the help of other powers in securing their national liberation (e.g. during the national liberation wars against the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, or against the fascist axis in the 20th century). However, the Libyan “revolution” was never part of a national liberation struggle against a foreign occupying power, but a civil war, which can, in fact, be shown that it was instigated by the transnational elite!
  4. It is always up to the peoples themselves to fight for their own liberation, and the only international help they can ever count on is the solidarity of other peoples (never their elites!), which could be expressed, for example, through the formation of international brigades of volunteers to help the suppressed peoples (as in the classic example of the Spanish Civil War).
  5. Therefore, siding with the Libyan revolutionaries (who are voluntarily financed, armed and militarily supported by the transnational elite and their client regimes) against the Gaddafi regime, as suggested by most of the “Left” today, is a blatant betrayal of the above principles and a clear indication of the degeneration of this “Left” into an acolyte of the transnational elite.

The Libyan “revolution” and the “Left”

It is now clear that the new war against Libya being carried out by the transnational elite and their client regimes in the Arab world (with the full support, as we shall see, of the Zionist elite from the sidelines, for obvious reasons) is, in fact, a new criminal campaign for regime change, which may well end in the destruction of yet another people, in addition to the peoples of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq always, of course, for their own good, i.e. to “save” them from a tyrant!

 

It is also clear that this campaign may well secure the first real victory for the transnational elite because, unlike the previous campaigns, the present one has not only united the entire transnational elite (with France, under Sarkozy, now leading the criminal campaign, unlike what happened during the Iraq war), but it has also succeeded in creating an unholy alliance between the transnational elite and those aspiring to become its members (China, part of the Russian elite etc) who abstained in the crucial UN vote “legalizing” the criminal campaign as well as the Arab client regimes (mainly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states) and, significantly, the revolutionary regimes of Egypt and Tunisia which are still, in fact, client states despite the cosmetic changes brought about as a result of the mass insurrections that took place in these countries. Crucially, however, the non-client Iranian Islamic regime, through its support for the Libyan revolutionaries and notwithstanding its rhetorical opposition to the military campaign, indirectly, also supports the new campaign. In fact, Lebanon, whose new government is directly influenced by Hezbollah (controlled, like Hamas, by the Iranian regime), played a leading role in passing the UNSC resolution which paved the way for the military campaign itself. It is this broad alliance of various regimes (and for different reasons, as we shall see) that has created this false impression of a unanimous world community, usually a euphemism for the transnational elite and their acolytes (see Section 4).

 

The world mass media controlled by the transnational and Zionist elites, crucially assisted this time by the “alternative” world media (from Aljazeera which has become the unofficial channel of the revolutionaries and the transnational elite to the Iranian Press TV), have played a very important role in creating the illusion of a monolithic “world against the tyrant”, which was not created during all the previous criminal wars of the transnational elite (see Section 4).

 

This has had very important implications as regards the stand of the Left (statist, libertarian, Green, etc.), who have mostly sided with the revolutionaries, if not with the criminal campaign itself! Furthermore, it has not just been the reformist Left who have sided with the new criminal campaign, as they have done in the past. This time, a very significant part of the anti-systemic Left have also indirectly been in favour of this war, through their support for the so-called revolutionaries in Libya. This has created (or perhaps revealed) a new kind of degenerate “Left” who, instead of demystifying the systemic propaganda, as used to be their traditional role, have directly or indirectly been supporting it, justifying the conclusion I derived ten years ago about the end of the traditional antisystemic movements[5] (see Section 5-Part II).

The stages of the criminal campaign against Libya

The first stage of this campaign was that of instigating the civil war. In Libya, unlike Tunisia and Egypt previously, we do not have a case of a mass popular uprising that has spread all over the country against a tyrannical regime personified by its formal leader (Ben Ali or Mubarak respectively). Instead, we have a case of a tribal society in which such a mass popular uprising, uniting everybody apart from the local elites and the privileged social groups supporting them, is almost impossible, by definition. It is no wonder that the Libyan uprising has been concentrated in only one part of the country (Eastern Libya), in which the leaders of the prevailing tribes there have been in contact with the western secret services for many years so as to organize an armed insurrection against the Gaddafi regime. The transnational elite timed this insurrection  to coincide with the genuine mass insurrections in Tunisia and Egypt, so that the false impression could be created that it was also a part of the general democratic uprising of the Arab world (see Sections 3-4).

 

As soon as the supposed mass insurrection in Libya started with the events in Benghazi, following the overthrow of the Egyptian tyrant, a massive media campaign of misinformation began, which constituted the second stage of the criminal attack against Libya. The media campaign was led by Al Jazeera and the BBC, and with people all over the world being brainwashed to believe that what they were witnessing in Libya was the next act in the epic play, “the people against the tyrant”. This was a play that started to be enacted in Tunisia and Egypt and has since continued in Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere[6], with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful tyrannical client regime of the transnational elite in the area, currently remaining unaffected as a result of the massive suppression of even the idea of resistance, let alone its materialization. In fact, the Saudi Arabian repression mechanism has even been exported to neighbouring Bahrain, with the obvious tacit approval of the transnational elite, in order to carry out the violent suppression of the massive insurrection occurring in this island-state, which hosts a huge naval base for the US Fifth Fleet! (see Sections 2-3).

 

The third stage was the approval of the criminal campaign by the UNSC, following the Arab League’s approval of a resolution supporting the no-fly zone (see Section 4).

 

The final stage was the launch of the NATO war itself initially by NATO countries and a handful of Arab client regimes, followed by a pure NATO campaign (see Section 4).

2. Client and non-client Arab states and “regime change”

Although it is true that the first acts of the Arab revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt had a relatively happy ending with the overthrow of the tyrants (but not of the corresponding regimes, apart from some cosmetic changes in the security apparatuses and the promise of fair elections), this development was ensured by the fact that the decisive factor in their overthrow was the tolerance of the army, which is controlled by the USA! On the other hand, in cases such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, which are critical for the transnational elite due to their plentiful energy sources, it is even doubtful whether the overthrow of the tyrants themselves is possible, at least at this stage and before the transnational elite have achieved their second aim, following the overthrow of the Libyan regime: regime changes in Syria and, finally, the big apple: Iran! The present massacre of the people of Bahrain, with the decisive help of the Saudi Arabian army literally in front of thousands of US soldiers whose biggest military base in the Gulf is located a few kilometres from Manama, the capital of Bahrain, where the demonstrations have been taking place is proof of this. The similar massacre going on in Yemen has also failed to attract the interest of the transnational elite, their media and of course the “world Left”, as Wallerstein calls it (or, as I would prefer, the degenerate Left), i.e. all those “Left” theoreticians, analysts and so on, who only notice some popular revolutions and massacres (those which, coincidentally, also attract the keen interest of the transnational elite) and not others!

 

In other words, there are fundamental differences between, on the one hand, the massive revolts in Tunisia and Egypt and, on the other, the supposedly "revolutionary" uprising in Libya which has been supported not only by the degenerate Green movement of Cohn-Bendit et. al. who have also backed all the other “wars” of the transnational criminal elite, directly or indirectly but by most of the antisystemic Left as well, both statist and “libertarian”! This “Left” not only “does not see” the historical differences (see Section 3), but also the huge similarities between some regimes and the related uprisings. Thus, it “does not see” that:

  • the regimes of Egypt and Tunisia are client regimes, directly dependent on the transnational elite who even control their armies a fact that allowed this elite to effect a change of political personnel in these countries (without, of course, removing the regimes themselves!) under their new policy of “democratizing” the Arab world (similar to the policy they adopted for Latin America in the 1990s). Tomorrow, a similar fate may befall the client regime of Yemen but not that of Saudi Arabia (where all public protests were banned and protesters were shot even before protesting![7]), given the present crucial dependence of the transnational elite on its oil. In both post-insurrection Tunisia and Egypt, a struggle has developed between, on the one hand, the radical elements involved in the insurrections who are pressing for drastic changes not only at the political but also at the economic level and, on the other hand, the post-dictatorial elites and the privileged social groups who are trying to bring about superficial political changes, with the “discreet” backing of the transnational elite in a repeat of the familiar historical process expressed by the motto: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”.[8]
  • the regimes of Libya, Iran and Syria (or, yesterday, of Iraq) are not client regimes and are only indirectly dependent on the west, i.e. to the extent  that they are integrated into the internationalized market economy. That is why, when they become sufficiently “annoying” to the transnational elite, the latter have no other way of getting rid of them than by going through the process of “regime change” a goal that is easily achievable through the use of the brutal military machine at the hands of this elite, which mainly relies on the mercenaries of the American and British armies.
  • as a rule, the revolts against client regimes consist of genuine mass popular uprisings, given that  these corrupt regimes exclusively rely on the favour of the transnational elite and on that of a small local elite, accompanied by the mechanism of state repression.
  • the revolts against non-client regimes are mainly not genuine mass popular uprisings, since such regimes have either succeeded a popular revolution (Iran), or they express national-liberation movements, such as in Libya or in the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria. This implies that they usually enjoy very significant popular support and, therefore, their overthrow by the transnational elite can only be achieved through the exploitation of a civil war that is usually instigated by the transnational elite via the tried-and-tested method employed by any elite, i.e. “divide and rule” (Iraq, Libya, etc.).

3. The nature of the Libyan regime

Libya vs. Egypt and Tunisia 

Libya does not have a history of intense social struggles emanating from socio-economic issues, like Tunisia does, nor have there been repeated acts of terrorism like in Egypt, and the only major attempt to overthrow the regime was the 1996 coup which was organized by the western secret services (see below)! In this sense, Libya is far from being a case of another act in the same epic play, as international public opinion would suggest, after systematic deception not only by the media of the transnational elite, but also by the reformist “Left” and the Green movement (which played a similar role in the attack on Yugoslavia by NATO), now assisted by some “Marxists” who, objectively, play the role of the transnational elite’s lackeys supposedly for the sake of the Libyan proletariat! (see section 5-Part II). The nature of the Libyan regime is very different from that of the neighbouring regimes (Tunisia, Egypt) for the following reasons:

First, the Libyan regime owes its origin to a Nasserite military coup in 1969, when a group of young, low-ranking Libyan officers overthrew the British puppet King Idris I and established a new administration, headed by the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), which abolished the monarchy and the constitution and proclaimed the new Libyan Arab Republic. The Libyan officers, led by Gaddafi among others, had the overwhelming support of the people of Libya (apart from some pockets of resistance mostly in areas controlled by the rebels today) in overthrowing the monarchy a corrupt regime which had been controlled by the West and particularly Britain, and had been accused of being responsible for the increased concentration of the nation’s wealth in the hands of King Idris, similar to the corresponding client monarchical regime in Egypt, which Nasser’s officers had overthrown earlier, with massive popular support. The aim in both Egypt and Libya was the same: to create a national-liberation regime which, however, in Libya subsequently became a personalized parody of direct democracy (see below), and in Egypt, under Sadat and Mubarak, degenerated into a brutal personal dictatorship and a client regime of the West, which betrayed the Palestinian struggle for the sake of the Zionists and allowed the local and foreign elites to impoverish the Egyptian people through the integration of the country into neoliberal globalization. A similar case was Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia (succeeding that of Bourguiba), under which the country was integrated into the internationalized market economy. This met with the approval of the IMF, who congratulated the regime on account of its success in bringing about  structural reforms that led to high growth rates, as well as to a massive rise in unemployment, particularly among the young.[9]

 

Second, from 1969 until the beginning of the last decade, the Libyan regime overtly continued to play a national-liberation role in its support of similar movements ranging from the Pan-African movement to the IRA in Ireland, and from anti-nuclear movements to Australian trade unions and, recently, the Iraqi resistance movement against the US invasion of Iraq (see Part II). In fact, this was enough to convince Reagan’s criminal regime not to hesitate in bombing Libya in 1986, with the aim of assassinating Gaddafi an act which was followed by the British regime’s own attempt on Gaddafi’s life ten years later. During the last decade, however, the regime seemed to be making an opportunistic about-turn towards the West, opening up the economy to multinationals (to a certain extent), and allying itself with the criminal transnational elite in its war against “terrorism”. However, as we shall see in below, there are now strong indications that this was a superficial, rather than a real, about-turn by a regime which was desperate to avoid the fate of Iraq and which, secretly, continued to fight imperialism. This would also explain the paradox that the transnational elite found it necessary to amass their huge armada and start a new war in the middle of the greatest economic crisis since the Depression of the 1930s, and with an open military front in Afghanistan and a very unstable situation in Iraq, despite the invasion and long occupation of this country. Therefore, the transnational elite’s present campaign for regime change, without any obvious provocation from Gaddafi whatsoever, makes it abundantly clear that, despite the good relations that Gaddafi established with some of the major criminal representatives of the transnational elite like Tony Blair, he never managed to become one of their reliable allies like, for instance, Mubarak or Ben Ali. In other words, his regime never became a client regime but, instead, it remained (informally) a rogue regime for the transnational elite with which, however, they could do business. The same applied to his relations with the Zionist elite, particularly so as Gaddafi was the only Arab leader to adopt the one-state solution (which the Inclusive Democracy Project also adopted several years ago as the only just and non-racist solution for all the peoples of Palestine[10]), inevitably provoking the rage of the Zionist regime.

 

Third, despite the supposed about-turn in the lat decade, the regime not only refused to sell the nation’s wealth to multinationals, but it also lately considered fully re-nationalizing the country’s oil! Thus, as Forbes the “Home Page for the World’s Business Leaders” revealed, Gaddafi, during a discussion with Georgetown University students via satellite in January 2009,[11] stated that oil prices ($43/barrel at the time) were “unbearable” and that Libyan oil “maybe should be owned by national companies or the public sector at this point, in order to control the oil prices, the oil production or maybe to stop it”, while in November 2008 “he made his first visit to Moscow since the Soviet era; discussions with Putin and President Dimitri Medvedev reportedly involved visions of a gas cartel that would include Russia, Libya, Iran, Algeria and some Central Asian nations”. As the same report concluded, “U.S. oil companies should brace themselves to leave Libya yet again”. Exactly two years later the “humanist” NATO attack on Libya began!

 

Fourth, the regime, far from causing the deterioration of the Libyan people’s standard of living, was responsible for its significant improvement. In fact, it did this to a far greater extent than the regimes of other similar, oil-producing client states (like Saudi Arabia and Nigeria) although, of course, Gaddafi’s regime never managed to create the foundations for a self-reliant type of development, which could have allowed the country to cut every link to its economic dependence on the transnational elite. Indicatively, Libya, despite having lower per capita income than the much richer Saudi Arabia, has since the 1990s shown longer life expectancy and higher literacy rates, as well as enrolment ratios (and, as a result of those, a higher Human development index according to the UN definition) than Saudi Arabia and, of course, the neighbouring (non-oil producing) countries of Tunisia and Egypt.[12] In fact, the progress of the Libyan people as revealed by the relevant statistical data (which are, of course, being hidden away by the international mass media that prefer to talk of hunger and poverty in Libya instead, similar to that of neighbouring countries in insurrection!) is spectacular. Life expectancy in Libya increased by 39% from 1970-75 and from 2000-05 (compared, for example, to 8% in Greece and a decrease of 6% in Russia following the collapse of actually existing socialism’). Also, the rate of adult literacy rose from 68% in 1990 to 82% in 2003 and 88% in 2005-08,[13] while the infant mortality rate fell dramatically during the same period, so that by 2003 it was 12% of that in 1970 (versus 11% in Greece).[14] Finally, “poverty-stricken” Libya ranks 33rd in the UN human poverty index, while Tunisia is in 43rd place, Algeria in 48th, Egypt in 55th and India (the “economic miracle” of neoliberal globalization) in 58th![15]

 

Fifth, in Libya, as in all North African countries, the tribal system has played a central role in safeguarding local cultures and fighting for independence. Therefore, despite the efforts of Gaddafi’s regime to weaken the significance of tribalism through the institutions of Jamahiriya (the government of the masses see below), tribes still play an important social and political role. When Gaddafi introduced Jamahiriya, he declared that tribalism had failed, along with parliamentary democracy and class politics. He stated that all these must be scrapped and replaced by “popular conferences and the peoples committees”.[16] But, as former British ambassador, Sir Richard Dalton, recently stressed: “Tribal origins have no existence in Libyan institutions or in public affairs…but tribal identity comes into play in the resolution of problems, marriage considerations, and so on; when families get into trouble they can turn to the tribe for support. Tribal identity is important in times of crisis.”[17] So, when the popular uprisings of neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt broke out in January and February, and demonstrations which Gaddafi’s regime tried to suppress erupted in Benghazi (a well-known anti-Gaddafi stronghold) in mid-February, the tribes that were hostile to Jamahiriya and Gaddafi’s regime rose up. As Ali Chibani[18] describes the process, “in late February the tribes intervened by calling on the military to support the people. The advisory council of the Zouaya tribe, which lives near the oil pipeline in eastern Libya, threatened to cut off oil exports to Europe if repression continued. The Warfalla, one of the biggest tribes and traditionally an ally of the regime, urged Gaddafi to leave the country. And the Tuaregs quickly joined in the demonstrations”. Several officers and soldiers, presumably from the same tribes, joined the rebels. No wonder that the key players of the rebel council come from the north-eastern Harabi confederation of tribes, whereas, as the Wall Street Journal reported from Benghazi, Western tribes loyal to Gaddafi, such as the Hasoony, flourished at the expense of the Harabi and other easterners as a result of the fact that Gaddafi, “early in his reign, targeted powerful eastern tribes, redistributing their land to others and awarding them few influential posts”.[19]  This is how the Libyan revolution, in actual fact a civil war instigated by the transnational elite, began (see Section 4).

Jamahiriya: a parody of Direct Democracy

Gaddafi renamed the Libyan Arab Republic as Jamahiriya (government of the masses) in 1977, on the basis of his political philosophy of Arab socialism and, in 1979, he relinquished the title of prime minister and was, thereafter, called “The Brother Leader” or “The Guide” of Libyas Socialist Revolution. The Libyan government states that Libya is a direct democracy without any political parties, governed by its people through local popular councils and communes (named Local People’s Congresses). Although the idea of a nation-state is disdained, giving the impression that this is a genuine stateless direct democracy, it is clear that the nation-state is rejected more because of the tribal character of Libyan society than because of a libertarian hostility towards the state as such, which is clearly thriving. This impression is also confirmed by the fact that tribal bonds remain primary even within the ranks of the military of Libya — something that could explain why the members of the military originating from the tribes, which turned against Gaddafi during the “revolution,” left the army and joined the “revolutionaries”.

Therefore, although, in theory, Jamahiriya is supposed to be a direct democracy managed by the people through local popular councils and communes (called Local Peoples Congresses), this does not mean that the Libyan regime is a genuinely democratic regime, in which people directly express their will through general assemblies. As I will try to show briefly below, Jamahiriya is neither direct political democracy nor economic democracy in the sense of the equal distribution of political and economic power among all citizens, as defined by the Inclusive Democracy project.[20]

 

First, it is not a genuine direct political democracy because, although the Jamahiriya sector provides for a legislative sector comprising Local Peoples Congresses in each of the 1,500 urban wards, 32 Sha’biyat People’s Congresses for the regions and the National General Peoples Congress (GPC)  (consisting of circa 2700 representatives from the Local Peoples Congresses), the power of these congresses is, nevertheless, circumvented by the “Revolutionary Sector”. In other words, the Jamahiriya sector is complemented by a “Revolutionary Sector” consisting of the Revolutionary Command Council, i.e. a 12-person executive and legislative cabinet founded in 1969 in which Gaddafi plays a leading role, and the Revolutionary Committees, which were introduced in 1977 and were assigned the task of “absolute revolutionary supervision of peoples power”. Therefore, these committees were assigned the role of guiding the peoples committees with the aim of “raising the general level of political consciousness and devotion to revolutionary ideals". Clearly, the institutions of direct democracy are not the only source of political power and, even more importantly, they are guided by the Revolutionary Sector, in a kind of “Guided Direct Democracy”. Needless to say that, as in the case of actually existing socialism, the guidance of the Revolutionary Sector can easily degenerate into guidance by the Revolutionary Command Council and, finally, guidance by the “Guide of the Revolution”, Gaddafi himself. Not surprisingly, Gaddafi named his son, Saif, “Coordinator of the People’s Leadership last October, effectively making him head of state, in charge of the main branches of power: the General People’s Congress (parliament), the General People’s Committee (government), and the security forces.[21]

 

Second, it is not, of course, an economic democracy, which presupposes the equal distribution of economic power through the common ownership and control of the means of production so that, ultimately, the people’s assemblies can determine what is to be produced, how and for whom such are the elementary economic decisions that the people of any scarcity economy need to take. In Libya, although most of the economic resources belong to and are controlled by the state, since there is no genuine political (direct) democracy to control the state machine, the main economic decisions are inevitably taken by the new elites comprised of state functionaries, technocrats, etc., rather than by the delegates of the citizens’ general assemblies and of the workers’ assemblies, as would happen in an economic democracy. On the other hand, the part of the economy controlled by the private sector, which has been growing since 2003, also bears no relation to an economic democracy, since the all-important economic decisions are not by definition taken by the demotic and workers’ assemblies. In fact, over the last decade or so, more than 100 government-owned companies have been privatized 29 of which are now 100% foreign-owned in industries including oil-refining, tourism and real estate. Furthermore, many international oil companies have returned to the country, including oil giants Shell and ExxonMobil.

 

Yet, the state sector still plays a much more significant role in Libya than in the countries fully integrated into the internationalized market economy and, in fact, this is one of the main reasons for the present attempt by the transnational elite to bring about regime change. Thus, even after Gaddafi’s about-turn during the last decade, he continued to play the role of protecting the Libyan people’s wealth: as a cable from U.S. Ambassador Gene Kretz to the State Department on June 4, 2009 (made public by WikiLeaks) shows, Libya was able, even more recently, to force foreign oil firms, especially France’s Total, to agree to take a much smaller percentage of the oil and gas yielded by the country’s wells, under the threat of renationalization. Thus, in reference to Libya’s National Oil Corporation, Kretz wrote:[22]

The renegotiation of Total’s contract is of a piece with the NOC’s effort to renegotiate existing contracts to increase Libya’s share of crude oil production. (...) Each consortium will take 27 percent of oil production, down from the 50 percent take they had under the previous agreement. For gas, the consortium will take a 40 percent share (down from 50 percent), which will be reduced in the future to 30 percent. For the Mabruk field, which is located in the Sirte basin and produces some 20,000 barrels of oil per day, the new production share is 73 percent for the NOC, 20.25 percent for Total and 6.75 percent for StatoilHydro.

As Deirdre Griswold[23] rightly points out,the U.S. ambassador well understood [that] this effort by the Libyan government to get more control over its most valuable resource would antagonize the imperialist oil companies and their rich capitalist owners. No wonder that France was the first country to recognize the rebel regime in Benghazi!”

 

So, although it is true that Gaddafi’s regime is not a genuine democracy in the sense defined above, it is much better at protecting the interests of the Libyan people than a typical client regime of the transnational elite would be; indeed, such is the kind of regime that this elite are now attempting to impose on the country through their acolytes among the revolutionaries. However, those who call themselves “anarchists” or “libertarians” in the West and who support the Libyan “revolutionaries” and indirectly the criminal NATO campaign itself, pretend to be ignorant of the fact that, when the international media criticize the Libyan regime for being non-democratic, they are, in fact, criticizing it for the wrong reasons, at least from the libertarian viewpoint.

 

It is true that there are no political parties in Libya, but political parties are, of course, an integral part of the pseudo-democracy in the West called representative “democracy”, where all political power is concentrated in the hands of political elites who are funded by the economic elites and supported by the mass media controlled by them, and who manipulate the public to vote, every four years or so, for those candidates and parties preferred by the elites. It is also true that there are no free media in Libya, but the same applies to the West, of course, where it is the likes of Murdoch and Berlusconi who own the free media and determine how people should think. Finally, the lack of “civil society” resulting, for instance, from the absence of NGOs in Libya (whose role in supporting the “orange” revolutions in Eastern Europe and now the “revolutionaries” in Libya has been well established), in no way defines the lack of democracy in the country unless, by this term, we mean what passes as “democracy” in the West. Similar considerations apply to the other freedoms enjoyed by peoples in the west, like the freedoms to hold assemblies and demonstrations (so long as the elites can afford to ignore them and use the security services to beat people to the ground when they become annoying to them), the freedom to strike (so long as strikes do not raise overtly political demands against the rulings of the elites despite such rulings being in no way legitimized by the people in which case striking is banned through the judicial process, also controlled by the elites), etc. It is no wonder that even in the country regarded as “the mother of parliamentary democracy”, Britain, the police have recently been accused of being at the forefront of a campaign to criminalize and intimidate protesters, and a new movement has just been created entitled, “Defend the Right to Protest [24] a right which has effectively been undermined lately through preemptive arrests, the kettling of thousands of demonstrators for hours, etc. Of course, this right to protest, as well as all the other rights mentioned above, are the very rights for the protection of which the transnational elite have launched a war in Libya and are ready to launch another one in Syria! So, the transnational and Zionist elites are the last people on earth who are in a position to talk about democracy (or the lack of it) in Libya or anywhere else.

 

Having said this, Gaddafi’s son Saif completed his “Manifesto” to have been published by Oxford University Press just a year ago, in which he called for civil society and participatory democracy in Libya! Furthermore, during a speech to the Libyan National Youth Conference as early as 2006, he said: “Does Libya have people’s authority and a direct democracy really? (…) All of you know that the democratic system that we dreamed of does not exist in the realm of reality.”[25] Furthermore, it seems that the only condition being demanded by the regime at the moment is that “Gaddafi should not go” and that, if this condition were met, the regime would raise no objection even to discussing reforms which would eventually lead to the creation of a form of representative “democracy” in Libya, similar to the one currently being imposed willy-nilly by the transnational elite all over the world to complement the full integration of each country into the internationalized market economy — which the Benghazi revolutionaries would also see (together with their “democracy”), if they were to win!

Who are the “revolutionaries”?

The fact that we never saw any mass demonstrations in favour of the “revolution” (which the world media would have been all too keen to film in order to justify their utterly biased stand in this civil war), like the ones we saw in Tunisia and Egypt, and the fact that the armed “revolutionaries” were only a few thousand in number and, despite the misinformation to the contrary from the transnational elite and its media, there were never any mass defections from the army to the rebel side, make it clear that the social basis for the “revolutionaries” is very small and localized geographically around Benghazi and the isolated “island” of Misurata, which is being protected by NATO through their massive bombardments of the militias loyal to the regime, who have encircled it.

 

This social basis consists of : the main tribes in this area, who were traditionally against Gaddafi; the “youth of the internet” (who have been playing a particularly important role in all the Arab insurrections, since “the US perceives the internet and social networking platforms as major tools for spreading democracy”[26]); and, especially, the Islamists, who start every rally and battle with the “revolutionary” slogan, “God is great”. The example of the rebel-held Derna, an East Libya town with a history of opposition to the Gaddafi regime dating back to 1970, (a year after he took power), is characteristic. Derna, as the Guardian correspondent points out, has a history as a fertile recruiting ground for Islamist groups, given that “along with other cities in eastern Libya, supplied men to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an anti-Gaddafi movement that sprang up in the camps of Afghanistan in the early 90s”.[27] No wonder the regime has repeatedly said that al-Qaida militants seeking to create an Islamist state are spearheading Libya’s revolution. But it is precisely such support for the “revolution” by this kind of “unholy alliance”, cantered around Islamists opposed to the secular regime of Gaddafi, which has united everybody, from the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran and Iran’s partners in Lebanon (Hezbollah — who control the newly-formed government of the country—  played a leading role in passing resolution 1973 at the UNSC) to Hamas in Palestine and the emirate of Qatar with its influential TV channel Al Jazeera. In fact, the Libyan Interim National Council explicitly specify “a constitutional civil state which respects the sanctity of religious doctrine”[28] as one of the values they support, in their statement, “A vision of a democratic Libya”, where they set out their basic principles.

 

Even so, as I mentioned above, this does not imply that all those who participated in the Benghazi insurrection were al-Qaida fundamentalists, let alone CIA agents. Although it is now definite that al-Qaida fundamentalists did take part in the battles and that CIA agents do, indeed, participate in the National Provisional Council, a more accurate analysis of the social structure of the insurgents is needed, which would take into account all the social categories described above. However, it has now been shown conclusively that the Libyan insurrection in Benghazi had nothing to do with the mass popular insurrections in Tunisia and Egypt but that, instead, it represented the first battle in a civil war in which both sides were armed. As the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov (in no way a Gaddafi supporter!) caustically asked:[29]

When we see on TV that representatives of the so-called opposition are engaged in combat and carry bazookas and Kalashnikov rifles then we have a question: is this the civilian population we are talking about?”

One basic characteristic of the Libyan “revolution” is that, unlike the mass insurrections in Tunisia and Egypt, where some of the main demands of the insurrectionists clearly comprising the unemployed, poor and marginalized social strata among others were socio-economic, i.e. relating to unemployment, poverty, etc., in Libya, the only demand uniting the so-called revolutionaries is that Gaddafi and his regime should be ousted. This is not surprising if one takes into account the welfare system that the Gaddafi regime built over the years, as evidenced by the UN data given above but also by reports that the regime, apart from providing free education, also made sure that “every Libyan of working age received the equivalent of $US 1,000 a month and it was up to them whether they worked or not.”[30] All this points to the implicitly bourgeois character of most of the “revolutionaries” (perhaps leaving aside some of the Islamists who have been taking part in the “revolution”). The information given on this by the western media is sparse, for obvious reasons, but reports like the following are indicative of both the nature of the regime and the kind of “revolutionaries” fighting it:[31]

Gaddafi’s insistence that no Libyan should own more than one home led to the confiscation of buildings and offices built by wealthier families some of which were handed to favoured supporters or transferred to squatters. With the revolution have come claims from aggrieved landowners hoping that the opposition government will eventually return the buildings, or offer compensation.

Meanwhile, the sparse information that we have on real life in “liberated” areas like Benghazi is revealing, as it hardly paints the picture of a liberated city celebrating its “liberation” every night — a picture that even Left journalists (including some supposed supporters of the anti-systemic Left who, however, have been functioning as mouthpieces for the propaganda of the “revolutionaries” throughout) have helped to create!  One could, therefore, learn more about what life in “free” Benghazi is really like from honest journalists embedded with the “revolutionaries,” rather than from members of the “world Left”. Here is how Rob Crilly of the Telegraph described it in a report whose title says it all “it wasn’t supposed to be like this in free Benghazi”:[32]

It wasnt supposed to be like this in free Benghazi. After throwing off the shackles of Gaddafis brutal rule, Libya’s young opposition movement is rounding up suspected opponents and delivering its own brutal form of justice in a city living in fear that they have been penetrated by a fifth column of government loyalists. Rebel leaders admit that dozens of Gaddafi supporters have been arrested or killed (…) Foreign workers fled the city long ago in fear of being mistaken for a government-hired mercenary. Many residents are now too frightened to drive through the dark streets at night, fearing a shakedown or worse at the proliferating checkpoints (…) The rebels interim government is made up of professionals academics, businessmen and lawyers often educated in the UK or US who make all the right noises about democracy, human rights and the rule of law. But they are far removed from the excitable volunteers who man roadblocks through the night, stopping cars they believe may have been stolen or dragging suspected Gaddafi loyalists into the street.

Needless to say that the human rights NGOs which are directly or indirectly financed by the transnational and Zionist elites (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc.) and which, during the entire criminal campaign, very enthusiastically reported the “enforced disappearances” of opponents of the Gaddafi regime[33], “forgot” to report the similar disappearances of Gaddafi supporters at the hands of their opponents! Here is another report demonstrating the kind of fate that anyone not supporting the “revolution” may expect to have, once NATO have finished the “job” and brought about regime change in Libya:[34]

But even as western backing grows for the rebels the purge is continuing and raising some uncomfortable issues for the Transitional National Council, the rebel leadership. Locals speak of youths organising “rat-hunting” expeditions in Benghazi to root out the last remnants of Col Gaddafi’s regime, and shots still ring out across town at regular intervals. Though the opposition insists that only Gaddafi supporters “with blood on their hands” will be arrested, there have been reports of spontaneous roadside executions, and many associated with the regime have reportedly been harassed, attacked or forced to flee (…) The opposition remains fearful of cells of Gaddafi loyalists that may remain in the east. But the purges may also hurt its effort to win the loyalties of moderate Gaddafi supporters and some fear the anger is getting out of hand, and leading to an unchecked witch-hunt and spurious accusations.

At the same time, the evidence keeps growing that many among the leadership of the “revolutionaries” have been working for the secret services of the transnational elite for many years: Thus, first, we heard that “the rebels” have been backed for over 30 years by the secret services of western countries, as was revealed by an indisputable source (Annie Machon, the ex-head of the British Secret Service):[35]

I think, [the west] were torn for a long time and it is only really over the last weekend that they did a bit of a rush job to take the violence to the next stage and protect the rebels that they have been backing secretly for a couple of decades in the east of Libya.

Then, another indisputable source, Patrick Cockburn, the well-known Middle-East correspondent for The Independent for many years who has been following the wars of the transnational elite and has written several books on the matter, confirmed:[36]

But the new military leadership, which Britain, France and to a decreasing extent the US, will be supporting, inspires even less confidence than their men. The careers of several make them sound like characters out of the more sinister Graham Greene novels. They include men such as Colonel Khalifa Haftar, former commander of the Libyan army in Chad who was captured and changed sides in 1988, setting up the anti-Gaddafi Libyan National Army reportedly with CIA and Saudi backing. For the last 20 years, he has been living quietly in Virginia before returning to Benghazi to lead the fight against Gaddafi. Even shadier is the background of Abdul Hakeen al-Hassadi, a Libyan who fought against the US in Afghanistan, was arrested in Pakistan, imprisoned probably at Bagram, Afghanistan, and then mysteriously released. The US Deputy Secretary of State, James Steinberg, told Congressmen he would speak of Mr Hassadis career only in a closed session.

John Pilger[37], the well-known liberal independent journalist, has adopted a contradictory approach to the war in his condemnation of both sides,(i.e. both the “dictator” and those of the “rebels” who are “corrupted by foreign demands”)  presumably because of his close connections with the Znet empire accusing the West that it has been undermining efforts by Libya’s “genuine democrats and nationalists” (people who obviously exist only in his imagination, at the moment!) “to free their country from both a dictator and those corrupted by foreign demands”. However, even he has also confirmed that:

The Libyan “pro-democracy rebels” are reportedly commanded by Colonel Khalifa Haftar who, according to a study by the US Jamestown Foundation, set up the Libyan National Army in 1988 “with strong backing from the Central Intelligence Agency”. For 20 years, Colonel Haftar has lived not far from Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA, which also provides him with a training camp. The mujahedin, which produced al-Qaeda, and the Iraqi National Congress, which scripted the Bush/Blair lies about Iraq, were sponsored in the same time-honoured way, in leafy Langley.

Interestingly enough, John Pilger also revealed, in the same report, how the only rational attempt to solve the Libyan crisis was thwarted by the transnational elite, who had in fact pre-planned the crisis and the war, as we shall see below. Thus, as Pilger[38] wrote:

History suggests nothing less than the kind of machinations exposed by two senior diplomats at the UN who spoke to the Asia Times. Demanding to know why the UN never ordered a fact-finding mission to Libya instead of an attack, they were told that a deal had been done between the White House and Saudi Arabia. If the Saudis would back a US “coalition” to “take out” the recalcitrant Gaddafi, they could put down the popular uprising in Bahrain. The latter has been accomplished, and the bloodied king of Bahrain will be a guest at the royal wedding in London.

Then, as Francis Boyle[39], Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, concluded from his analysis, the Libyan conflict has been a well-planned mission with the next phase almost being set in stone:

“Clearly what we see unfolding in Libya is a pre-existing war plan, by NATO, by the British, by the French, by the Americans to attack Libya. There is no way this amount of military force could have been put together in such a short period of time unless there was a war plan that was activated the moment there were disturbances in Benghazi,” he said. “And now everything is going according to plan, which is why I believe that since they have failed to depose Gaddafi so far, the next stage will be moving to the ground invasion.”

Yet, Wallerstein’s “world Left” in full accordance with the transnational elite’s propaganda, did not have any qualms about justifying this criminal campaign against Libya, directly or indirectly, because of the “massacre” that Gaddafi’s forces were supposedly about to commit upon entering Benghazi, as we shall see in Part II!

 

On the other hand, there are several factors indicating a strong social basis for the regime. The fact that this “dictatorial” regime which is supposedly based solely on Gaddafi’s family and mercenaries, as the media’s ruthless propaganda reproduced by the degenerate “Left” asserts, did not hesitate to distribute weapons to the people (something that no dictatorial regime has ever dared to do in history, as the oppressed peoples could easily turn their weapons against the regime), is one such indication.

 

Another indication is that, despite the relentless and brutal NATO bombings, not only did a revolution against the regime never materialize, as the mouthpieces of the transnational elite kept on claiming from the first day, but also its supporters continued to fight without any substantial reinforcements, despite the fact that their replenishment routes were being systematically destroyed by these bombings and they were themselves being subjected to them on a daily basis — when they could easily have defected to the other side. On the contrary, as acknowledged by a “minister"” of the “revolutionary” government (who had taught for 35 years in the U.S. and had just returned to Benghazi!)[40], the “thousands” of soldiers belonging to Gaddafi’s army who had supposedly defected at the beginning of the uprising, eventually turned out to be no more than hundreds, as they, together with the trained rebels, amounted to 1,000 at most, presumably because the deserters had chosen to go home (if they had not, indeed, returned to the army!).

 

This does not, of course, imply that all those who continued to fight under such harsh conditions necessarily admired the Gaddafi regime (although, according to a Spanish national residing in Libya for years, 80% of the people support it[41]), but simply that they did not wish to suffer the fate of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan — which, as they know, will befall them if the “revolutionaries” win. It is no wonder that the “rebels” themselves now regularly state: “We will try to fight [the Gaddafi militias] if they come but without NATO we will all be killed”,[42] admitting, in effect, that were NATO to withdraw their massive support for them, the entire “revolution” would collapse the next day!

 

4. The stages of the criminal campaign

 

I shall examine below the four main stages of the criminal campaign against Libya as I described them briefly in the Introduction.

Stage I: instigating a civil war in Libya

As should be obvious from the above, in Libya we are not witnessing a people who are turning against their tyrant in almost total harmony as, for example, in the aforementioned revolts in Tunisia and Egypt with demands that unite the poorer social strata of the working class with peasants and the “internet youth”. In Libya, by contrast, we have been seeing a civil war from the earliest days which, as in Yugoslavia, has been supported by the transnational elite in every way possible: through financial and other assistance over many years, as the ex-head of MI5 has revealed, through the dirty and massive media campaign and, finally, through both indirect and direct military assistance. The goal has been the effective dismantling of the country which would lead to “regime change”, replacing the non-client present  regime with a pure client regime and allowing for the oil, the nation’s wealth, to be transferred into the hands of the multinationals of the transnational elite. It is no wonder that the biggest battles during this civil war have been fought around the oil-producing areas of the country!

 

In this civil war, the class structure of the two sides can be roughly described as follows. On the one side, we have:

  • an alliance of major tribes who are mainly based in Eastern Libya and have usually been hostile to the regime;
  • the Islamists, who have always been against the regime because of its secular character and the fact that Gaddafi began a campaign against Islamic Fundamentalism during the late 1980s, which culminated in the late 1990s, following the Islamist attempt — with  the crucial help of the British secret services[43] — assassinate him in 1996;
  • the internet youth, which, in these countries, consists mainly of middle-class youngsters inspired by western consumerism, individualism and culture.

And, on the other side, we have:

  • an alliance of the tribes supporting Gaddafi who are mainly based in Western Libya;
  • the lower social strata who have benefited significantly from the regime, through free education, the social wage, etc.;
  • supporters of Jamahiriya because they are inspired by national-liberation ideals, Pan-Africanism et al.

Stage II: launching a huge media mythology

Once the first demonstrations had erupted in Benghazi, a huge and deceptive media campaign was set up to prepare international public opinion for regime change in Libya. A campaign in which apparently all international channels have been involved[44] (with the honorary exception of Russia Today something which evoked the wrath of the US secretary of state, the miserable Hillary Clinton, because it spoiled the consensus of deception) as well as international newspapers, led (as with Iraq!) by the “serious” flagship of deception, the New York Times. It is also characteristic that, in this particular media campaign of deception, all Islamic channels have also been involved, from the Iranian Press TV, which has now forgotten its anti-imperialist zeal (presumably because Islam is more important than imperialism!), to Al Jazeera (which is funded, through donations, "loans", etc., by the Emir of Qatar, who was also the first to recognize the rebel government in Benghazi and who offered to send weapons to “insurgents”![45] Qatar was also one of the handful of client Arab states that has taken part in the coalition of the willing to set up the no-fly zone. It is no wonder that, as soon as the revolutionaries briefly managed to occupy the oil-producing areas, they made an agreement with Qatar to exploit the oil! Thus, as Ali Tarhouni, a rebel official in charge of economic and oil matters, stated, Libya’s opposition could return to the global market within weeks: “We contacted the oil company of Qatar and thankfully they agreed to take all the oil that we wish to export and market this oil for us,” he told reporters in Benghazi[46].

 

Indicatively, I refer below to some of the myths used by the international media to support their contemptible campaign for “regime change” in Libya, with the main aim, as I mentioned above, of exploiting the social wealth of the country through the full integration of the country’s economy with the internationalized market economy, under the pretext of protecting Libya’s citizens from a brutal dictator.

  • The myth that the regime decimated unarmed civilians through air strikes from the first day of their grand demonstrations (of which we never saw a single film, as we did in Tunisia or Egypt!). As evidenced, however, by the Russian satellites, and consequently admitted by the U.S. Pentagon, such bombardments of civilians never took place![47] In fact, as serious Western correspondents concede, these air strikes do not target civilians: “contrary to claims by some in the protest movement, there is little evidence to show that civilians are being targeted deliberately.”[48] Yet the arch-crook, Obama, had no qualms about repeating all these blatant lies (which he, himself, created as part of his own propaganda!) in his major speech on the Arab Spring:[49]in Libya, we saw the prospect of imminent massacre, had a mandate for action, and heard the Libyan people’s call for help. Had we not acted along with our NATO allies and regional coalition partners, thousands would have been killed”. Even worse, the same lies are being repeated by leading representatives of the degenerate “Left” (Wallerstein, Chomsky, Albert, Achcar et al.) to justify their despicable stand on the NATO attack against the Libyan people!
  • The myth that thousands of unarmed people were killed by Gaddafi’s “mercenaries” in a widespread “slaughter”—if not genocide. However, even the original indictment of the international kangaroo-court to which Gaddafi was referred for possible “crimes against humanity” (and to which, of course, the Zionist criminals were never referred for their proven slaughter of around 1,500 civilians in Gaza in 2009) mentions the deaths of fewer than 300 people who, as it explicitly states, were not killed by air strikes![50] It is no wonder that even a liberal British analyst writes that “unless we redefine words, Gaddafi is not committing genocide and his brutality is hardly exceptional.[51] And, of course, the transnational and Zionist elites did not even think for a moment to impose sanctions on the tyrannical regime of their close associate in Egypt, Mubarak let alone bomb his country! despite the fact that this regime has been officially accused of killing 360 people, with rights groups bringing this figure up to about 800 in addition to hundreds more being wounded, when police opened fire and cracked down on the crowds![52]
  • The myth that the Gaddafi regime, due to a lack of popular support and the mass desertion of soldiers, is forced to use mercenaries to carry out the “massacre” of Libyans. But, first, as it was stressed by Gerald A. Perreira of the Pan-African Left (for whom the conflict in Libya is, actually, a counter-revolution by reactionary racist Libyan Arab forces who reject Gaddafi’s vision of Libya as part of a united Africa — a movement which is also supported by the South African regime and others), the so-called “mercenaries” are simply members of African “international battalions which are part of the Libyan armed forces”.[53] Similarly, Gamal Nkrumah[54] who, writing in the influential Al Ahram, emphasised  that “the Libyan uprising has emerged as the spark for the biggest single outbreak of racial violence in North Africa. The sight, as the New York-based Human Rights Watch and London-based Amnesty International have rightly forewarned, of Libyan anti-Gaddafi forces wielding weapons and shouting racist slogans and lashing out against innocent Black Africans in Libya is alarming (…) Permitting such chauvinist racism rather visibly and quite audibly to roam freely in "liberated" areas is hazardous (…) The parading of Black Africans as soldiers of fortune on Pan-Arab satellite television channels was a warning signal that racial war may be close.” Second, as even the well-known NGO Human Rights Watch (which, like all international NGOs, is financed and supported by the transnational, political and economic, elites) admits, there is no evidence that the regime uses mercenaries.[55] Finally, the very fact that the regime’s militias put the rebel forces to rout within a matter of a few days following the launch of the criminal NATO attack is another indication of the popular support that his regime enjoys.
  • The myth that the rebels have no weapons other than those they steal or take from military units that join them. The TV channels frequently show youngsters with light weapons but, in reality, as even the BBC (which had frantically been preparing public opinion for an attack on Libya) now admit on their website, the insurgents have tanks, multiple rocket launchers, heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft guns, wire-guided anti-tank missiles, etc.[56] Libyan rebels, for instance, have deployed tanks, artillery and a helicopter to repel an attack by pro-Gaddafi forces on the key town of Ajdabiya.[57]  Furthermore, this myth was contradicted early on in the conflict by the arrest of a group of British SAS operatives who were found to possess quantities of arms and explosives (certainly not for their own personal protection!),[58] while, as it was revealed by Robert Fisk, the Americans secretly asked the Saudi regime to supply weapons to the rebels.[59] In fact, even before the NATO attack began, according to the Wall Street Journal, the new “progressive” Egyptian regime “has begun shipping arms over the border to Libyan rebels with Washingtons knowledge,” as Libyan rebel officials said.[60] Later on, as Igor Khokhlov from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations stressed, there were “strong suspicions” that NATO was supporting the rebels with arms: “We can see [on television] lots of new weapons, we now see people who don’t look like Libyans, possibly instructors, working there with the rebels”[61]. On top of all his, the US Congress was set to discuss how to unfreeze part of Libya’s frozen assets to “help” the rebels (in other words, to steal Libyan people’s assets and hand them over to the “rebels”, in order to continue their attacks against the Libyan people!).[62]
  • The myth that it is only a matter of time before the “revolution” against Gaddafi prevails, as he is left only with the security forces and his “mercenaries”. However, early on in the battle, the rebel leaders realised that without western military support their "revolution" was doomed. That is why the “rebels”, through their National Council, did not hesitate to carry out the despicable act of asking the UN (i.e. the transnational elite-controlled Security Council) to create a no-fly zone (which the American Secretary of Defence himself described as “a euphemism for war”), resulting in the concentration of a massive military force off the coast of Libya. Of course, no real revolutionaries throughout history ever requested the help of the Great Powers of the time to defeat their opponent in a civil war. And it is an indication of the deviousness, as well as the degeneracy, of certain parts of the “Left”, that they compare a civil war to a national liberation war against an occupying power, in order to justify the despicable Libyan revolutionaries, who did not have any qualms about requesting the military intervention of the criminals of the transnational elite in this war! A comparison with the Spanish civil war reveals the degree of degeneracy among today’s “Left”. In that war, the real revolutionaries, who were supporting the legitimate government (anarchists, communists, republicans and others) against the military coup of the Francoists who enjoyed the full support of the much better-armed and organized fascists, as well as of the German Nazis who were destroying entire cities in massive air bombardments (Guernica) only received material help from the USSR, and it was the International Brigades of volunteers from all over the world, together with the Spanish revolutionaries, who really fought the fascists.

Stage III: passing resolutions in the Arab League and the UNSC

 

The ideological basis of the new NATO attack

 

As I tried to show elsewhere[63] with respect to the other wars of the transnational elite in the last decade or so, the ideological basis of all these wars constitutes also the ideology of globalization, i.e. the ideology of the New World Order (NWO) which allows the unashamed restriction of national sovereignty of any state that the transnational elite declares a “rogue” or an “illegitimate” state. In other words, the ideological globalization’ is a transnational ideology used to justify the decrease of national sovereignty, which complements the corresponding decrease of economic sovereignty following economic globalization.

 

The core of this new ideology is the doctrine of limited sovereignty, which is used to justify military interventions/attacks against any rogue regimes or even political organizations and movements. Robert Cooper, Tony Blairs foreign policy guru, expressed clearly the new ideological globalization when he argued that what is needed is a new kind of imperialism, one compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values: an imperialism which aims to bring order and organization but which rests today on the voluntary principle.[64] According to this doctrine, there are certain universal values that should take priority over other values, like that of national sovereignty. The five centuries-old culture of unlimited sovereignty, which nations that participated in the drafting of the UN charter agreed to limit only as regards their right to wage war in case of an attack, in exchange for a promise that the Security Council provide collective security on their behalf, is therefore completely abolished in the NWO. In cases where universal values are violated, international organizations expressing the will of the international community (i.e. the UN Security Council, NATO, etc.) should enforce them by any means necessary, irrespective of national sovereignty concerns that should never override the primary significance of these universal values. Tony Blair, the well-known war criminal, in a Chicago speech, just before the Washington NATO summit, formally expressed this new doctrine. The upshot of this speech was that democratic states should be allowed to intervene in the internal affairs of other states so long as human rights are at stake — a principle fully endorsed by the new NATO.[65]

 

Clearly, given the huge asymmetry of power in the present world order, it is not the sovereignty of the powerful states which is going to suffer because of this new doctrine but only that of the weak ones. Therefore, it can easily be used by the transnational elite to oppress any state or movement that might try to establish an alternative kind of society which aims to abolish the unequal distribution of political and economic power. So, this new doctrine of limited sovereignty plays the ideological role of legitimizing political and military interventions of the transnational elite in order to guarantee the stability of the NWO.

 

The new development with respect to this doctrine is that the World Summit of the UN General Assembly in September 2005 backed calls for the elaboration of it into a UN resolution that could be used in future interventions of the transnational elite. It is called “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) — an idea for protecting civilian populations from atrocities by their own leaders that was pushed by Bernard Kouchner, until recently Frances foreign minister. Kouchner is a well known stooge of the transnational elite and a Zionist who supported all wars of this elite, from the NATO attack on Kosovo, to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and now the attack on Libya—always of course for “humanitarian reasons”! Naturally, Kouchner is presently full in favour of intervention in Libya[66] (as well as in Iran and Syria). As Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, the co-editor of Pulse, writes about him and his friend Sarkozy (who “is considered more pro-United States and pro-Israeli than most French politicians”), who appointed him as Foreign Minister:[67]

Sylvain Semhoun, the representative of Sarkozy’s Union for Popular Movement (UMP), told the Jerusalem Post Israel got lucky [with Kouchner]. Israelis should thank God it’s him and not Vedrine”. Far from getting lucky however, it was the very heavy-handed approach of the Israel Lobby that brought about this change (…) So what makes Kouchner so much more appealing to Israel? Kouchner, who was born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, is close to right-wing Jewish MP Pierre Lellouche, who advises Sarkozy on international issues. And Kouchner received an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba at the height of the second intifada (…)  Meanwhile in Israel, some have already registered their satisfaction: Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu has said that with the coming to power of his friend Sarkozy, he expects French Middle East policy “will no longer be characterized by reflective anti-Israelism.”

Back to the R2P doctrine, in January 2009, the UN Secretary General issued a document relating to its implementation. As Robert Hunter, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and currently a Senior Advisor to the RAND Corporation (a think tank of the transnational elite) writes about R2P, which he describes as a new paradigm for intervention:[68]

This is the latest phase of a long process of nibbling away at the classic notion of state sovereignty, which was codified following the end of the 30 Years War in 1648. The doctrine is named after Westphalia, Germany, where much of the diplomacy took place. The Westphalian Doctrine — that states are responsible for events inside their frontiers, with no basis for intervention in their domestic affairs by other states — still governs most interstate behavior regarding civil wars. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights began cutting into Westphalia. For Europe, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 sanctioned some limited interference by outsiders in its signatory states. Indeed, the Final Act and the organization set up under it, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, arguably hastened the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the Soviet Union

Passing the UNSC resolution legitimising the attack on Libya

 

On the basis of the above, it is obvious that the UN Security Council’s decision to sanction a new criminal campaign by the transnational elite, ostensibly for the protection of the Libyans who, according to this elite’s mythology (directly reproduced by the degenerate “Left”) were about to be massacred by Gaddafi, was, in fact, made with the aim of achieving regime change. Indeed, the spokesmen of the transnational elite Obama, Clinton, Sarkozy, Cameron, et.al. enjoy repeating the words, “Gaddafi must go”, openly and continually, despite the fact that the UN resolution itself in no way sets forth such a goal! But let us examine the procedure that was used to pass this resolution, which is almost identical to the procedure adopted by the transnational elite to pass the resolution on Iraq (through similarly deceptive methods and blackmail), which however proved eventually impossible to be approved because of the veto power of Russia and others, forcing Bush to create a “coalition of the willing” to launch the invasion against this country.[69]  The foundations of this resolution were two:

a)   The first foundation of the UNSC resolution was the request made by the “revolutionaries” of Libya to the UN (as well as directly to the transnational elite) for the imposition of a “no-fly zone,” supposedly to protect civilians from being bombarded by Gaddafi’s planes but, in fact, in order to destroy the infrastructure as well as the personnel of the opposing side in this civil war. The transnational elite were, of course, keen to oblige! Thus, for the first time in History, we saw “revolutionaries” seeking the help of NATO and the brutal military machine of the transnational elite in order to secure victory in a civil war. It is characteristic, however, of the deception attempted by the so-called “revolutionaries” that, while they demanded the military intervention of the transnational elite, they kept misleading fellow Arabs all over the world (who, after Afghanistan and Iraq, were well aware of the real significance of such intervention) by plastering the walls of Benghazi with the slogan, “no to foreign intervention!” Yet, the same “revolutionaries” danced in the Benghazi streets all night, in a frenzy of celebration, on the day on which this foreign intervention, sanctioned by the transnational elite-controlled UNSC, was announced. Next, these “revolutionaries” raised the French, American, British, EU and NATO flags everywhere in Benghazi beside the old flag of the previous monarchical regime.[70] All the same, the degenerate “Left” and the calamity Marxists seem to have no problem with taking their side (in order to bring down imperialism, of course!) Finally, when NATO airplanes began the turkey shoot (as in Iraq, previously) at the easily-targetable regime forces in the middle of the desert, pulverizing them in the process, the same “revolutionaries” celebrated “their” victory (the ironic quotation marks were added by the British correspondent describing the event[71]) among the charred corpses of soldiers and burnt-out vehicles. However, when the real revolutionaries of the Spanish Civil War, for example, were up against not only the fascist war machine (as opposed to the Gaddafian semblance of an army!) but also the murderous German air force, they continued to fight bravely with light weaponry, in stark contrast to the Benghazi “revolutionaries” who have been running in panic at the sight of anyone shooting at them and are now demanding more advanced weapons and communication devices from the transnational elite to continue their fight! Here is how a British correspondent, far from being unsympathetic to them, described what happened when Gaddafi’s forces began a guerrilla war which, in effect, put the “revolutionaries” to rout, given that their protectors could do very little to help them from the air: “The rebels don’t have a great will to fight. Gaddafi’s forces seem to be more resilient when it comes to fighting pitch battles.”[72]

 

b)    The second foundation of the UNSC resolution was the request made by the Arab League. However, this is just another fraud! Not only because, out of the League’s 22 members, only 9 took part in the voting and 2 of them (Syria and Algeria) voted against the resolution. It is also because, among the leaders who voted for it were all those who had been busy slaughtering their own peoples at the time and, indeed, in a much more brutal way than the Libyan regime had been doing!  Even the best-paid of western journalists would not dare to assert that Gaddafi’s forces occupied hospitals and beat up medical personnel on the roads while they were collecting those injured in demonstrations and then arrested and tortured them. Yet, this is exactly what happened in Bahrain, when the regime there called upon the brutal army of Saudi Arabia to suppress the insurrection.[73] However, the transnational elite did not feel the need to intervene as this flagrant violation of international law took place (which even the UN has condemned![74]), despite the fact that the Americans could easily have acted to prevent the massacre, since their largest military base in the region is situated in Bahrain! Another member of the Arab League who voted in favour of the request was the government of Yemen, who also engaged in slaughtering their citizens en masse.[75] Of course, neither the new “revolutionary” regime of Egypt, nor that of Tunisia, voted against the intervention of the transnational elite, despite the fact that it was this same elite that kept Mubarak and Ben Ali in power, respectively, for the past 30 years or so!

Lastly, it should be noted that, without Russia and China forfeiting their right to veto, the UNSC resolution would never have passed and the transnational elite would have been obliged to show yet again its contempt of the UN making life much more difficult for the degenerate “Left”. What can explain this stand which is inconsistent with the stand of these two countries on Iraq? As regards China, this is not surprising, given its huge economic dependence on foreign trade and also on its assets invested in western banks (a major cause of the capitalist crisis which began in 2007-8).[76] However, Russia’s stand is peculiar and particularly significant because had she used its veto China would have followed.

 

The only explanation one could give to this critical development is in terms of the split that I described elsewhere,[77] which arose in the last ten years or so between, on the one hand, an economic elite which mainly aimed at the external market and foreign capital (subsidiaries of multinationals, investors in the West, importers and exporters, etc.) and, on the other, an economic elite that, mainly, aimed at the domestic market, having invested its capital mostly within Russia. The political elite around Putin, which rose at the beginning of the last decade, made a systematic effort to reconcile the general interests of the economic elite with the aspirations of a rising “national-liberation” movement that is pushing towards de-integration from the internationalized market economy and the transnational elite. It seems however, that this compromise is failing and at present the elite under Putin expresses clearly more the national interest than that of the internationalized market economy, whereas the opposite seems to be the case with the elite under Medvedev, which  expresses mainly the interests of the internationalized part of the Russian economic elite that is more dependent on the transnational elite. This could explain the reported division as regards the Russian vote on the UNSC resolution 1973, when the Medvedev part of the elite was in favour of the motion of the transnational elite against Libya, whereas the part of it expressed by Putin wanted to exercise the Russian veto, with the abstention reflecting just a compromise between the two parts of the elite. In fact, the clash between the two factions of the elite over Libya, expressed by Putin and Medvedev respectively, came out into the open lately, giving rise to a growing hope that the transnational elite’s present extremely aggressive policy for absolute control of the Middle East, combined with the fear within parts of the Russian elite that the same elite pursues also a hidden agenda to encircle Russia, might enhance the nationalistic part of the Russian elite versus the internationalised part of it and lead to the creation of a genuine bipolar world, which is the only development at this moment of time that could thwart the imperialist plans of  the transnational and Zionist elites .  

Stage IV: launching the war against the people of Libya

As if the financial crimes of the transnational elite against their own peoples were not enough, the same elites did not have any qualms about engaging them in war, without asking them, of course as has always been the case in western “democracies”. In fact, when almost half a million people demonstrated in London on March 26th against the savage cuts imposed by the British political elite (at present, the Tory-led side of it but, until a few months ago, the “socialist” Labour side), the mechanism of state repression welcomed them with police brutality and the mass arrests of over 200 people, when they dared to express their anger beyond the usual “cosy” march, so greatly loved by the elites and the media, as it further facilitates their dismissive stand with respect to popular reaction to their criminal policies. This stand was clearly demonstrated by the fact that the masses of protesting citizens who did march “peacefully” were completely ignored by the present British government, as confirmed in their recent statement that “the government is listening to the trade unions but will not change its deficit-cutting strategy because of Saturday's march”.[78] Of course, such a statement brings to mind that of Tony Blair’s government in the aftermath of the huge march of February 2003, when more than a million people protested against the invasion of Iraq: “This changes nothing at all”.[79]

 

It is, therefore, clear that the basic difference between western “democracies” and regimes in other parts of the world, as far as the free expression of people’s will is concerned, is that, although the will of the people is ignored in both cases, in the latter case the elites do not hesitate to shoot and kill demonstrators when they become annoying to them, whereas in the former case they just baton-charge them or suffocate them with chemicals. Yet, the bad treatment of peoples by certain regimes considered to be rogue states by the transnational elite did not prevent the destruction of such peoples by this same elite — as in the case of the Iraqi people previously, or the Libyan people at present! In fact, leaving aside the mass disinformation that has been created in support of the present war, which has far surpassed any previous similar propaganda in its totalitarian nature, this war is, in reality, one more crime against the Arab nation, as it could possibly lead, in the short to medium term, to the dismemberment of Libya and the creation of a client emirate that will control most of the oil in the East, next to a “rogue regime” in the West (until, in the long term, “regime change” has eliminated this as well). However, it will also represent a crucial step in the neoliberal “democratization” of the entire Middle East; in other words, its integration into neoliberal globalization and its political complement, representative “democracy”, as Obama put it in his recent speech on the “Arab Spring”:[80]

America’s support for democracy will therefore be based on ensuring financial stability; promoting reform; and integrating competitive markets with each other and the global economy starting with Tunisia and Egypt.

Or, as Shimon Peres, the head of the criminal Zionist regime, aptly put it in an article welcoming the “Arab Spring”:[81]The Middle East has to make a historic choice: to join the new global age of democratic peace and liberal economy”.

 

So, on the very day that the Nobel prize-winner for peace and first ever black US President launched his first war (ironically against the people of an African country!), he ordered a massive attack on Libya through a large-scale bombing campaign, with more than 100 cruise missiles, stealth bombers and other aircraft leaving an unknown number of people, civilians as well as young conscripts, dead. Here is how even the BBC, the systemic voice of the British establishment, described the action of this President who has proved himself to be as much a criminal as his predecessor:[82]

It probably wasnt what the Nobel committee had in mind when it awarded the Peace Prize to President Barack Obama two years ago. Two months later he ramped up the war in Afghanistan, sending in 30,000 extra US troops. Now he has ordered massive air strikes on Libya - with United Nations backing, but still with the United States in the lead. Judged by his actions, this supposedly anti-war president looks almost as warlike as President George W Bush. If you include Mr Obamas increased use of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, hes got the US involved in more conflicts than his much-criticised predecessor.

Rightly, Paul Craig Roberts[83] stressed thatthere is no doubt whatsoever that the current US president and the predecessor Bush/Cheney regime have murdered many times more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than Gadhafi has murdered in Libya. Moreover, Gadhafi is putting down a rebellion against state authority as presently constituted, but Obama and Bush/Cheney initiated wars of aggression based entirely on lies and deception.” In fact, Obama alone may yet prove to be the greatest criminal among US Presidents since Johnson and Nixon, who massacred the Vietnamese people (as well as the peoples of Laos and Cambodia) in the 1960s and 1970s, if he goes on to destroy Syria and Iran after Libya, so that the transnational elite may acquire exclusive control of all the energy resources in the area while integrating it into the internationalized market economy.

 

The first phase of the war: the massive NATO bombing creates victories for the revolutionaries”.

 

At the time of writing, the crime of the transnational elite which began on March 20th, eight years to the day since the same elite (minus France, now led by the mini-Napoleon, Sarkozy!) launched the criminal invasion of Iraq, continues to unfold. One may reasonably assume, therefore, that the hecatomb, of which we can only catch a glimpse, is still growing with hundreds of NATO attacks daily. However, incidents revealing the criminal nature of the campaign are buried by the world media, as both sides, for opposite reasons, wish to underplay the number of casualties. In fact, the impression has been created by the blatantly lying world media that the thousands of bombs and cruise missiles dropped on Libya have been bloodless, as the only casualties we hear about are those who truly represent “collateral damage” (such as the transnational elite’s own troops and those of the “revolutionaries,” as well as the civilians supporting them, killed through aerial bombardment!).[84]

 

Of course, as in all the other wars of the transnational elite, apart from the obvious hecatombs there are also the “silent killers,” like the depleted uranium bombs used by the criminals of NATO. As a report on Russia Today pointed out,[85] “though the western coalition denies using depleted uranium in bombings in the country, others say there is a good chance weapons with the highly poisonous radioactive element have been used.” Thus, as depleted-uranium expert Melissa Sterry (who served in the US military during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, clearing up battlefields in Kuwait) stressed, after watching film material on the effects of the barbaric aerial bombing:

With that kind of damage, there is a pretty good chance it was a DU [depleted uranium] round. I am about 80-90 per cent sure it was a DU round.

The blatant lies by NATO on the matter are, of course, nothing new. It was always after the event that they admitted their crime. Thus, as the same report points out, the US and British militaries admitted the widespread use of depleted uranium in the bombing of Bosnia in 1995 a legacy that continues today with cancer and leukaemia rates being several times higher than normal among locals. Also, in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, where the US army dropped thousands of depleted uranium rounds after the 2003 invasion, a quarter of all babies are born with a range of horrendous abnormalities. Higher rates of cancer, leukaemia and infant mortality have been found there than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki since the atomic bombs were dropped. The reason, of course, is that depleted uranium in military terms is highly efficient: it is relatively cheap and powerful enough to penetrate the heaviest armour. It is no wonder that all members of the transnational and Zionist elites, including the US, the UK, France and Israel, have refused to sign up to the ban on depleted uranium called for by the UN human rights commission. Yet, these criminals insist on referring to their humanitarian mission to “protect civilians”, even though depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years  hence its description by some as the silent killer that will never stop killing. Furthermore, it is well known that the smallest particles of uranium, nanoparticles, are the most dangerous as, once inhaled, they enter the bloodstream and can spread to any organ, including the heart, brain, and liver, and once the particles penetrate cell tissue, all kinds of genetic mutations can develop.

 

Not surprisingly, the international Non-Government Organizations have been playing a supporting role in this issue, having conclusively proven themselves to be mouthpieces of the transnational and Zionist elites (who fund them directly or indirectly) in this war as well as in all other previous wars waged by these elites. Thus, the NGOs “failed” to acknowledge the use of depleted uranium bombs by the NATO criminals in Libya, but were the first to accuse the Libyan regime of using cluster bombs, thereby echoing the “revolutionaries” (whom even the transnational-elite-controlled media have repeatedly accused of producing “exaggerated” reports — a euphemism for blatant lies). And of course, it was the US-based NGO, Human Rights Watch, who immediately confirmed the rebels’ accusations on the basis of scant “evidence”.[86] It should be noted that this particular organization is famous for its bias against the Palestinian resistance movement, whom it condemns as much as the Zionist state terrorists (even though the latter killed 1300 Gazans in the 2009 Israeli attack on the region, as opposed to the 13 Israelis killed by Hamas)[87] — something that did not deter the Zionists from accusing Human Rights Watch of being biased against the state of Israel, creating the impression that the organization was unbiased after all![88]

Once the transnational elite, through the savage bombing by their brutal military machine, had managed to destroy the Libyan regime’s military infrastructure (airports, airplanes on the ground, military depots, etc.) within a few days, and the no-fly zone had clearly been established, they then proceeded, in clear violation of the UNSC resolution, to support the “revolutionaries” in every way possible in their fight against the regime and the people supporting it, blatantly supporting one side against the other in this civil war!  In fact, the UNSC resolution, which the transnational elite managed to pass using “every trick in the book”, only states that it:[89]

  • Authorizes Member States (…) to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (par. 4),

  • Decides to establish a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in order to help protect civilians (par. 6) and,

  • Authorizes Member States (…) to take all necessary measures to enforce compliance with the ban on flights imposed by paragraph 6 (par. 8). 

Yet, although the official mission of the criminal military machine effectively ended swiftly and, by March 23rd, the commander of the (British) Royal Air Force was declaring that the Libyan air force “no longer exists as a fighting force”[90], the savage bombardment did not end accordingly. The aim was clearly twofold:

  • first, to terrorize the people who were against the transnational elite and their acolytes on the ground (as happened in their previous criminal wars) and,
  • second, to destroy the militias and every other popular armed force given  that the army was effectively phased out by the regime long ago and replaced by such popular militias’. In accordance with this aim, the NATO air force began shooting down every ‘moving target’ on the road towards Eastern Libya, clearing the road for the ‘revolutionaries’ to move forward and to reoccupy the areas from which they had been evicted by the militias a few days earlier.

This blatantly illegal activity forced even the client regimes of the Arab League to condemn it initially, through their chairman Amr Moussa, who declared on March 21st that military operations had gone beyond the no-fly zone that the organization had called for, insisting that the Arab League wanted “civilians’ protection, not shelling more civilians.”[91] This caused significant embarrassment for the transnational elite, who promptly forced Moussa to endorse their campaign again the very next day! At the same time, the split in the Russian elite that I mentioned above was clearly exposed, with Putin saying as he recalled the US air strikes against Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan that attacks on foreign states had become an “established trend”[92] in US foreign policy, while Medvedev reproduced the transnational elite’s propaganda, that Gaddafi was to blame for everything going on in Libya!

 

One of the rare reports on what was really going on during the first phase of the war, which was marked by the brutal aerial bombardment and the consequent “victories” of the “revolutionaries” sometimes going terribly wrong afterwards - was given by a Guardian correspondent[93]:

By morning, the revolutionaries’ advance was halted outside Ajdabiya, where Gaddafi’s army was still dug in around the town, suggesting that the air campaign has yet to break its will to fight (…) Then planes were heard overhead (…) The sound of several deep explosions in the direction of Gaddafi’s forces persuaded the rebels that the aircraft had knocked out the enemy’s tanks and rockets. A cry went up to charge forward. The mechanical cavalry surged along the road certain that the planes had done the job and the government soldiers would be dead or fleeing in terror of more missiles. But within a couple of minutes a rain of shells came down around them, and the charge swiftly broke up. Drivers tore off across the sand shouting in alarm. Some stopped to pick up the wounded. Others flung their cars into U-turns and hit the accelerator. The advance was quickly consumed by panic and chaos as the rebels fled as fast as they could. No one stood and fought or continued to press forward (…) The day’s events around Ajdabiya provided further evidence that the rebels stand little hope of defeating Gaddafi’s forces militarily on their own and are relying on coalition air strikes to destroy, or at least greatly weaken, the ability of the government’s army to fight. Some of the rebels mistake the air strikes for their own victories. They dance on the burned out tanks, wave V for victory signs and declare that they are beating Gaddafi. But the revolutionaries outside Ajdabiya only advanced because they expected to move into the town with little resistance.

As a result, the transnational elite’s hope that the removal of Gaddafi’s air power would clear the way for the rebels to advance to the areas still under his control was not borne out and, in fact, the ‘revolutionaries’ have even failed to retake towns that they had originally captured, such as Ajdabiya and the oil towns of Brega and Ras Lanuf.

 

It is no wonder that, as another British correspondent stressed:[94]

Despite the destruction of the regimes tanks and artillery by pulverizing Western air strikes and the terrified retreat of its troops, the rebels, not for the first time in this war, failed to press home their advantage and retake the city. Instead, they had fled in abject panic at the first sign of a counter-attack.

Furthermore, Libyan army units that had turned their back on the Gaddafi regime in the early days of the rebellion, notably the Sa’iqa special forces brigade based in Benghazi, appear to have shed their uniforms and vanished, instead of joining the rebel armed forces.[95] Even official statements by the transnational elite’s spokesmen have made the contradictions inherent in the supposedly ‘humanitarian intervention’ blatantly obvious for all to see. Thus, as Mark Mardell of the BBC reported[96]:

The man in charge of Operation Odyssey Dawn, Adm Samuel Locklear, has just given a briefing saying the no-fly zone is now in place. He was asked why it seemed air cover was being given to rebels attacking Col Gaddafis forces. After all, that has little to do with protecting civilians, if both sides are fighting. “Great question”, he replied. The answer was the president had demanded that Libyan government forces retreat from Ajdabiya, Misrata and Zawiya.

Clearly, the transnational elite and their client regimes were unequivocally intervening in a civil war by attacking regime troops who were fighting rebel forces on the ground and were, thus, tilting the balance in favour of the Benghazi-based armed insurrection as  Seumas Milne also pointed out in an article revealing the profound immorality of the military intervention, demolishing the case put forward by the “world Left” and the Cohn-Bendits of this world in the process![97]

 

However, with ‘a little help’ from the world’s most powerful (and brutal) military machine, the “heroic” rebels unsurprisingly proceeded from “victory” to “victory” in this first phase of the war. As Chris McGreal and Ian Black of the Guardian described the process:[98]

Libyan rebels are advancing on Muammar Gaddafis home city, Sirte, after retaking all the ground lost in earlier fighting as government forces broke up and fled under western air strikes. Revolutionary forces rapidly moved more than 150 miles west along Libyas coastal road, seizing several towns without resistance, as the first witness accounts emerged of the devastating effect on Gaddafis army and militia of the aerial bombardment that broke their resistance at Ajdabiya on Saturday (…) Control of the oil terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf is in itself a major gain because it could bring the rebel administration significant revenue from exports if production resumes. Rebels moved unchallenged along a road littered with evidence of the air campaign and the speed of their enemies retreat. The blackened carcasses of tanks, armoured vehicles and military trucks were pushed to the side of the road (…) A doctor at the hospital in Ras Lanuf, which treated most of the government soldiers wounded in the coalition air raids on Ajdabiya and the road from Benghazi, described hundreds of casualties, breaking morale and many soldiers faking injuries to escape the assault (…) “The first days, Gaddafis forces had very high morale and they came in large numbers, thousands. There were the army soldiers and then the volunteers in the militia,” he said. “They were fighting the rebels, no problem, and winning. But then came the bombing [by coalition air strikes]. The first day we had 56 seriously wounded. To the head, the brain, lost arms and legs. Soldiers with a lot of shrapnel in them. It was like that every day after.”

Completing the first phase of the war thanks to the pulverization of Gaddafi’s forces from the air, the “revolutionaries” retook a number of coastal communities and important oil installations including Ras Lanuf, Brega, Uqayla and Bin Jawad after retaking control of Ajdabiya almost without a shot being fired. The process of retaking these places was aptly described by the BBCs correspondent in Benghazi, Kevin Connolly, who explained that “when rebels say they have “taken” a city it is far likelier that they are turning up to find Gaddafis forces so damaged, demoralised and defeated that they are not fighting!”[99] Naturally, this presupposed a significant degree of co-ordination between the NATO forces and the revolutionaries — something that the US state department were forced to admit when stating that they were “in contact with them constantly”, while Rear Admiral Gerard Hueber went further at a Pentagon briefing, saying that the coalition had informed “the opposition forces of how to manoeuvre”. This immediately caused Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, to express his indignation (mildly, so as not to disturb the fragile balance between the two sides of the Russian elite that we have seen) at this blatant contravention of the UNSC resolution: [100]

There are reports and nobody denies them of coalition strikes on columns of Gaddafi’s forces; reports about support for actions by the armed insurgents…We consider that intervention by the coalition in what is essentially an internal civil war is not sanctioned by the UN Security Council resolution.

The second phase of the war: the armed Libyan people launch a guerrilla war

 

Αll this changed in the second phase of the war when the criminal invasion persuaded many Libyan people, not necessarily all Gaddafi supporters, to volunteer to join the regime’s militias after the regime had offered to distribute arms freely to anyone wishing to resist against the NATO attackers and their acolytes on the ground. These militias, who reorganized themselves as guerrilla units, launched a guerrilla war after the lessons they had learned during the first phase which proved to be highly successful, under the circumstances. Of course, this was only possible, in the first place, because Gaddafi’s forces were not a “normal’ centralized army but, mainly, an “army” of highly decentralized militias, who were particularly amenable to this sort of organization.

 

This is how a well-known systemic BBC correspondent described the process, stressing, in relation to the problems that the first phase created, that:[101]

There is another problem for the rebels. After the big advances which the pro-Gaddafi forces started making towards Benghazi 10 days ago, intervention by the coalition turned things round. But it was fairly easy to destroy tanks and artillery from the air, even though, as we now know, the coalitions aircraft and missiles had difficulty dealing with tanks that had been well camouflaged or were stationed in narrow streets between houses, where ordinary civilians live.

He then went on to describe the new tactics employed by the militias:

Colonel Gaddafis forces have changed their tactics…(His) men are racing forward in the ordinary flat-bed trucks known elsewhere in Africa as technicals, with heavy machine-guns or anti-aircraft guns mounted on the back. Others are equipped with mortars. Though these are quite light, they often cause great panic among the rebels, and are quick and easy to move forward. (...) Now the pro-Gaddafi forces have largely switched to the use of “technicals” of the kind the rebels use, the coalition will have much more difficulty identifying which ones belong on which side.

The outcome of this new tactics on the battlefield was immediate. Here is how a reporter for The Independent described both the defeat of the “revolutionaries” and the resilience of the militias, which was heroic in the face of their pulverization by the most powerful and brutal military machine on Earth:[102]

After 12 nights of Western military intervention that had been seen as irreversibly changing the course of this conflict, the revolutionary forces had been pushed back by yesterday evening to the last city before Benghazi, the capital of the opposition provisional government, seemingly with their confidence drained and showing little will to continue the fight. The collapse by the revolutionary forces in the space of 48 hours was spectacular. On Monday they had been within 40 miles of Sirte, the birthplace of Muammar Gaddafi, already celebrating the capture of the loyalist stronghold and key staging post to the capital, Tripoli. They are now 100 miles back along the coast in Ajdabiya, one of two important oil ports in the area. The other, Brega, was left undefended as the rebels fled through it without stopping (…) Ominously, Gaddafis forces were continuing to push forward on the eastern front in an organised and deliberate pattern, despite two weeks of attacks by the worlds most powerful military forces. An illustration of this resilience could be seen yesterday afternoon outside the town of Al Aghayla, where regime troops pursuing rebels were pounded by warplanes from the international coalition with at least eight missile strikes. The revolutionary forces, known as the Shabaab, responded with prolonged cheering and cries of "Allah hu Akhbar", some charged back up the road in their cars and pick-up trucks. But soon they were fleeing again, as the loyalists, instead of melting away, fanned out across the desert to outflank their quarry.

However, even more important than the defeat of the “revolutionaries” and the heroic resilience of the militias is the support that these militias enjoy among the local population, which seems to indicate contrary to the distortions of the degenerate “Left” that the true people of Libya are represented by all those who fight against the aggression of NATO, rather than by the CIA-led “revolutionaries” of the National Council and their supporters in Benghazi with their NATO flags! Thus, as the same correspondent (far from being pro-Gaddafi) reported:[103]

The conduct of those who should be allies nearer home is also causing problems for the rebels. At some towns and villages, residents turned against them and fought alongside loyalist troops. Awad Abu Tawib was shot in the leg in Bin Jawad yesterday. “It came from one of the houses. We know the Gaddafi group were not there and it was someone who lived there,” he said. The houses were searched and some people have been arrested. The opposition maintains that these men had been paid by the regime to take up arms. But it is also the case that allegiances vary. Some local resentment has also been fuelled by the rebels hunt for "fifth columnists” supposedly colluding with the Gaddafi forces. In Bin Jawad, The Independent witnessed around 220 men, either members of the Hosseini clan or people associated with them, being dragged out of their homes, beaten up and taken away. The “arrests” took place as the rebels traded fire at the gates of the town with regime troops. Residents, already frightened, saw doors being kicked down by Shabaab fighters who also fired at windows where they claimed to have seen snipers.

And, of course, despite the official pretence that civilians are being “protected,” the NATO campaign involves covert aid to the “revolutionaries,” as well as direct bombing from the air. Thus, as the BBC reported:[104]

[Obama] recently signed a document known as a “finding”, allowing support to the rebel groups, Reuters news agency and ABC News said. Such "findings" are a common way for the president to authorise covert operations by the CIA… The New York Times, citing American officials, said on Wednesday that the CIA has had operatives on the ground in Libya for several weeks. They are said to be gathering intelligence for air strikes and making contact with the forces fighting Col Gaddafi.

This information has been confirmed by other reports which have shown the extent to which NATO have been “assisting” the revolutionaries, obviously with the full support of the rank and file! Thus, as Sengupta, the Independent correspondent, stresses:[105]In several places around Benghazi, there were palpable signs that Western “assistance” was active on the ground. Military and diplomatic operatives from the US and Western Europe usually described as experts, consultants and advisers turned up in the rebel capital, Benghazi”. In fact, it is not just NATO but also the post-insurrection army regime in Egypt which has significantly been helping the Libyan “rebels” by providing them with both arms and training, as Al Jazeera the channel of the Emir of Qatar, which has played a crucial role in the “Arab revolutions” reported:[106]

US and Egyptian special forces have reportedly been providing covert training to rebel fighters in the battle for Libya, Al Jazeera has been told… An unnamed rebel source related how he had undergone training in military techniques at a “secret facility” in eastern Libya… “He told us that on Thursday night a new shipment of Katyusha rockets had been sent into eastern Libya from Egypt… He said these were state-of-the-art, heat-seeking rockets and that they needed to be trained on how to use them, which was one of the things the American and Egyptian special forces were there to do…” The intriguing development raises several questions, about Egypt's private involvement and what the arms embargo exactly means, said our correspondent. “There is also the question of whether or not the outside world should arm the rebels, when in fact they [rebels] are already being armed covertly.” Our correspondent added that since the rebels appear to be receiving covert support in terms of weaponry and training, it is not surprising that they are not inclined to criticise NATO openly.

This clearly dispels the myth that has been propagated ad nauseam by the systemic media and those of the degenerate “Left” about the poor, mostly unarmed (or lightly-armed) “revolutionaries” fighting the highly-organized and heavily-armed Gaddafi army! In fact, as Patrick Cockburn aptly stressed, the other media myth is that this is some kind of regular military campaign when, in fact, it is just a series of skirmishes:[107]

It is a bizarre little war. For several weeks, the world has watched a motley force of rebel militiamen and a so-far-unseen, but probably quite small, government force, race to-and-fro on the main road south of Benghazi. The frontline reporting is brave but gives the impression that this is a regular military campaign. In television studios and in newspapers, arrows on maps show the advance and retreat of pocket-sized forces over vast distances (the Libyan coastline is 2,000km long) as if the Afrika Corps and the 8th Army were battling it out. They capture and recapture "strategic oil ports" and places that are just a scattering of houses.

Yet, the “revolutionaries” of Benghazi (who, as the degenerate “Left” argues, are against foreign intervention and it is only their “bourgeois” leadership in the National Council who are in favour of it!) did not hesitate to demonstrate in the streets of Benghazi in support of their leader, General Abdul Fattah Younis, who has accused NATO of not providing enough support for them, so as to “protect civilians” (the official NATO mantra) which, in reality, means killing Gaddafi militias from the air, as the heroic “revolutionaries” have no intention of risking their own lives to fight them![108]

 

In fact, General Abdul Fattah Younis went a step further and threatened that the UN Security Council would be asked to suspend its mission unless it “did its job properly”, claiming that it took Western powers up to eight hours to launch air strikes after being notified of targets by the rebels, whereas it took the revolutionary’s own air force three minutes to carry out such attacks[109]. Thus, the General unwittingly revealed that the “lightly armed (if not unarmed)” revolutionaries even have military planes at their disposal for which the no-fly zone does not, of course, apply whereas the regime’s air force has either been destroyed or grounded, and yet the hypocritical transnational elite still talk about “protecting civilians” and not about a shameless campaign for “regime change”! It is, therefore, obvious, as Sengupta stresses in another report, that the relationship between the allies in Libya’s civil war is currently a fraught one, with the opposition government “accusing their US and European sponsors of not doing enough, yet the evidence on the ground suggests the rebels are capable of doing little against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi without the help of the international coalition”[110].

 

Indeed, the following exchange between Sengupta and a Shabaab fighter is characteristic of how prepared the “revolutionaries” are to give their own lives fighting for their cause:[111]

Captain Jawad was cautious about backing General Younis’s attacks on Nato. “We have not seen many air strikes in the last few days,” he said. “But they are the only things we have to protect [the rebels] from the Gaddafi soldiers. We are helpless without them.” A little later, black plumes of smoke rose near Brega following the air strikes. Abdullah Yassin Ali, a 23-year-old Shabaab fighter was not satisfied. “I think they only dropped two bombs, that is not enough.” He looked surprised when asked why he and his comrades were not going forward to engage the enemy. “Because it is dangerous, we might get shot. It is for Nato to clear the Gaddafi men,” he explained.

It is, therefore, no wonder that even the most systemic of correspondents, the BBC’s John Simpson, recognized the strong social base supporting the regime:[112]

When the trouble began in Benghazi last month, it looked as though the best comparison might be with President Nicolae Ceausescus Romania, back in December 1989. But Ceausescus regime crumbled into pieces directly he was challenged. Col Gaddafis rule has been remarkably resilient under pressure… There have been uprisings in various towns and cities in the west, including Tripoli itself. But they have largely failed - and not simply because the regime could call on one of the nastiest secret police forces in North Africa. It is because there is sufficient tribal and ideological support for Col Gaddafis system to keep it going. But when the chips were down, an important section - not the majority, but a strong and determined minority - showed it was prepared to back Col Gaddafi. And that support keeps him going.

Yet, Hillary Clinton, like the Gauleiter of a Nazi-occupied region, unashamedly stated:[113]I don’t think there is any mystery about what is expected from Mr. Gaddafi at this time. There needs to be a cease-fire, his forces need to withdraw from the cities that they have forcibly taken at great violence and human cost …and there needs to be a decision made about his departure from power and... his departure from Libya.”

 

In summary, this second phase of the war was characterized by the almost total retreat of the “revolutionary” forces to where they were at the beginning of their armed insurrection in Benghazi, despite the pulverization of the regime’s military infrastructure by the combined air and naval forces of 34 NATO states and a couple of client Arab states, boasting that they have already destroyed one third of the regime’s military capability. The key to this huge success on the part of Gaddafi’s forces was the conversion of the initial and (from the military viewpoint) foolishly open war, which the greatest military power on earth had tried to wage against the people of Libya (as it had successfully done against the peoples of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan, destroying them in the process), into a guerrilla war, which no power on earth can fight successfully while the guerrillas are supported by a determined people. And this is a major lesson to all peoples resisting against the most brutal economic and political World Order in History, which is currently being imposed everywhere on earth with the crucial, direct or indirect, assistance of the world media controlled by the elites and the degenerate “Left”, whose role we shall consider in Part II.

 

So, despite the huge victory of the transnational and Zionist elites on the political and propaganda fronts (thanks to the unprecedented united front I mentioned at the beginning of this article), in this second phase, the armed people of Libya managed, on the ground, to defeat both them and their acolytes who pretend to be social revolutionaries while actually playing the same role as that of the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam war! And it proved to be enough for the people of a small peripheral country to be armed with light weapons in order to achieve this, as no air force, naval force or even tanks were available to them, given that the overwhelming military power of the elites had destroyed or grounded the regime’s own air and naval forces.

 

The third phase of the war: stalemate

 

The second phase of the war created a situation on the ground which has led to the “rebel” side now being better armed than the “regime’s forces”. This was confirmed after the incident of 7th April, in which NATO planes accidentally attacked and destroyed an entire column of tanks, armoured vehicles and rocket launchers, killing up to 13 “revolutionaries” in the process. Thus, in this third phase of the war as revealed by the explanation given by NATO headquarters as to what happened it is not the forces fighting NATO but the so-called revolutionaries who have heavy armour at their disposal, as well as the huge military power of the transnational elite. This is how a BBC report described the incident:[114]

Earlier on Friday, Rear Adm Russell Harding said “At that point, Nato did not know that rebel troops had begun to bring out their tanks”. The rebels hit in Thursdays air strike had been moving a group of tanks, armoured vehicles and rocket launchers near the front line between the towns of Ajdabiya and Brega in more than 30 transporters.

Later on, NATO tried to cover up this admission that the “rebels” had been using “their” tanks by stating that they had taken them over from the regime’s forces. This would not, of course, explain the massive take-over of 30 transporters, which would have required the total defeat of the regime’s militias a  feat which no journalist has ever reported! However, this did not prevent the “revolutionaries’’ and their supporters in the “world left” from using the incident as “proof” that NATO deliberately attacked the “rebels” because they are, in fact, true revolutionaries who are not controlled by the transnational elite! This monstrous propaganda was completely contradicted in a statement by the “rebel” spokesman, General Younis who, despite calling on NATO to give a "rational and convincing explanation" for what had happened, “stressed the incident would not lead to tensions with the allied force”.[115]

 

So, as Patrick Cockburn points out with regard to the present third phase of the war, the present stalemate is simply set to continue because of the huge backing of the rebels by the transnational elite and their clients:[116]

Air strikes by the US, France and Britain aimed at stopping Gaddafis tanks and troops taking Benghazi have had success. The burnt-out carcasses of armoured vehicles litter the sides of the road between Benghazi and Ajdabiya. But the situation has not changed since this early success. It is still only the threat of Nato air strikes that is preventing Gaddafis men capturing Benghazi today just as they almost did a few weeks ago (…) For the moment Libya is effectively partitioned with the dividing line running along the old frontier between the historic provinces of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Gaddafis troops may not be able to advance in the face of air strikes, but they also have not retreated pell-mell after heavy losses. They have adapted to the air threat by driving around in dirt-covered pick-ups which look exactly the same as those driven by rebels and civilians.

The same journalist aptly described those representing the real source of power behind the so-called “revolutionaries,” who will eventually define the outcome of this “revolution”:

The strength of the Transitional National Council is its international political and military support. It is less good at organising a functioning government. As with other Arab uprisings, the opposition is particularly effective at mobilising demonstrations and winning the sympathy of the international media. Benghazis old town hall, from the balcony of which Mussolini, Rommel and King Idris addressed crowds in the square below at different times, is now, very appropriately, occupied by the immensely influential satellite television channel al-Jazeera. When an African Union delegation visited here this week to propose ceasefire terms (…) banners in Arabic, English and French demanded that the dictator should go and asserted that Libya would not be partitioned. Protesters denied there would be any civil war in Libya because the struggle was between the Libyan people on one side and a hated dictator on the other. Unfortunately, the situation is not so clear cut...Libya is effectively divided into two halves. Gaddafi has a core of supporters fighting for him and they cannot all be dismissed as foreign mercenaries. The longer the conflict goes on, and Libyans are forced to take sides, the more it becomes a civil war. The outcome of this conflict, moreover, will be decided by foreign powers, potentially enabling Gaddafi to present himself as a Libyan nationalist defending his country against imperial control.

In this third phase of the war, it seems that the elites tried to counter the stalemate created on the ground in the second phase, through the intensive arming and training of the “revolutionaries” — which was being done mostly behind the scenes so as to avoid friction within the UNSC. In fact, some systemic analysts have even optimistically drawn parallels between this and “the Northern Alliance’s toppling of the Taliban in 2001 when there was open US air assistance, Northern Alliance activity on the ground, and CIA-backed special forces providing logistics support”.

 

It is interesting to note the similarities, here, between the tactics employed by the transnational elite in their wars against both Yugoslavia and Iraq, and those being employed in Libya now. Since the transnational elite’s decision was to bring about “regime change” in all these cases, no amount of concessions offered by these regimes was ever enough to stop the transnational elite from launching or continuing their criminal attacks. Specifically in the case of Libya, when an African Union delegation, headed by the South African President, attempted to achieve a ceasefire on April 10th as a basis for further negotiations and the regime immediately accepted the conditions of the ceasefire that were proposed, both the “revolutionaries” and their western patrons rejected on the spot any such possibility by making demands that no regime on earth could ever accept: for example, the “revolutionaries” stated that “they would negotiate only on the condition that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his family give up power,” while their boss, Hillary Clinton, shamelessly declared that Washington "have made it very clear that we want to see a ceasefire. We want to see the Libyan regime forces pull back from the areas that they have forcibly entered!” Yet the following day, the NATO crooks immediately accused the regimes forces of only “talking about a ceasefire", because they had shelled the western town of Misurata in full knowledge of the fact that a ceasefire would need the agreement of both sides and, obviously, such an agreement was never made between the transnational elite and their acolytes and the Gaddafi regime. Indeed, such an agreement would be impossible before the transnational elite and their acolytes were fully able to dictate the terms on which the regime should surrender!

It is therefore obvious that in the third phase the “rebel” forces, despite the massive bombing of the regime militias, were not able to retake their lost ground and, particularly, the oil-producing towns on the coastline. This means that the elites and their acolytes did not manage to assume complete control of the oil-producing coastline east of Sirte and west of Benghazi, so that at least they could divide Libya in the form of “a de facto recognition of two areas under separate control [which] might be the optimum interim solution”.[117] Optimum, in the sense that it would have paved the way for long-term “regime change”, which still remains the ultimate goal of this criminal campaign.

As Patrick Cockburn, once again, stressed:[118]

When this Libyan war started I was struck by the parallels with foreign intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, at close range, I find the similarities even more ominous. We have joined somebody elses civil war, and it is a war in which Britain, France and the US must inevitably play a leading role. Without our support, the local partner would be defeated within 24 hours.

A fourth and final phase: forward all the way to regime change

 

There are several indications at the time of writing that we are entering the fourth and final phase of the latest crime of the transnational elite. It seems that as a new UN resolution authorising a ground attack will face a certain veto by Russia and China, an invasion by a coalition of the willing will become inevitable, as US Army General Carter Ham recently stressed at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing: [119]

The U.S. may consider sending troops into Libya with a possible international ground force that could aid the rebels, the former U.S. commander of the military mission said (…) The use of an international ground force is a possible plan to bolster the Libyan rebels.

Such indications are, first, the call by NATO criminal officers to intensify the bombing, so that the goal of eliminating Gaddafi and his regime (which by no way is included in the UNSC resolution itself passed through deception) is achieved. Thus, the head of the British Armed forces, who presumably expresses the views of the Anglo-American part of the transnational elite, came out strongly in favour of drastically intensifying the air attack to include the country’s infrastructure exactly as they did in their criminal attack against Yugoslavia:[120]

If we do not up the ante now there is a risk that the conflict could result in Gaddafi clinging to power, (…) if we want to increase the pressure on Gaddafis regime then we need to give serious consideration to increasing the range of targets we can hit (…) The Prime Minister and I are on the same page. We are in total agreement that the only solution to this conflict is for Gaddafi to go.

In fact, some criminal academics were even blunter than the military, like Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, who unashamedly stated: “The way out seems pretty clear - taking Col. Gaddafi out of the equation will probably take the fight out of Libyas forces.” And he added —another indication of the blatant lie used by some in the degenerate “Left” that Gaddafi has always been a man of imperialism: “Since Gaddafi probably can’t be bought, he’s going to have to be killed.”[121]

 

Then, came the announcement that the kangaroo International Criminal Court (ICC) and its chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, are about to issue arrest warrants for Gaddafi and two others on account of crimes against humanity because of their responsibility for “widespread and systematic attacks” on civilians. Needless to add that their evidence is based exclusively on testimonies by the acolytes of the transnational elite, as they never bothered of course to take any testimonies from the people accused, or from Libya citizens at large. But then, again, Luis Moreno-Ocampo is a well known stooge of the transnational elite with all the required credentials (a visiting professor at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, etc.) who specializes in pursuing  crimes against humanity committed only by enemies of the transnational elite like FARC, the Colombia guerrilla group, or the Libyan regime, but cannot see any similar crimes being committed by his paymasters, the NATO criminals, and the transnational and Zionist elites!

 

Yet, the very fact of starting a procedure to arrest and try Gaddafi means that the transnational elite would like to prevent any compromise procedure through negotiations, like the one proposed by the African Union, or today by Russia. Starting such a procedure is a clear indication of its will to go all the way to either kill or arrest Gaddafi (any alternative solution would make a mockery of the ICC) and replace the present regime by a client regime. It is therefore clear that the transnational elite’s plan for the fourth phase is, following a criminal NATO campaign to destroy the country’s infrastructure and return the Libyan people several generations back (exactly as they did in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan) to launch a ground attack, until they democratize Libya, i.e. until they can establish a client regime. Their hope is that, given the long preparatory work they have done all these years, they will not have to go through a lengthy process like the one in Iraq and Afghanistan to achieve their aim. Once this goal is achieved, the way will be open for the next stage of their campaign: regime changes in Syria and Iran!

 

Very recently, the bombing had intensified significantly and NATO has no qualms anymore about declaring the real intentions of its bombing, i.e. to help the rebels in its aim to bring about regime change. Thus, Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on May 19th that Col Gaddafis forces were suffering under the attacks and becoming more isolated every day, ominously adding:[122]

"We have significantly degraded Gaddafis war machine and now we see the results the opposition has gained ground"

  

 

 

Continued to  Part II: The role of the Degenerate "Left"

 



[1] See for a definition of the transnational elite, Takis Fotopoulos, The Multidimensional Crisis and Inclusive Democracy (2005), ch. 3.

[2] Takis Fotopoulos, “The First War of the Internationalised Market Economy”, DEMOCRACY & NATURE, Vol. 5, No. 2, (July 1999).

[3] Takis Fotopoulos, “The global "war" of the transnational elite”, DEMOCRACY & NATURE, Vol. 8, No. 2, (July 2002).

[4] Takis Fotopoulos,  Iraq: the new criminal "war" of the transnational elite”, DEMOCRACY & NATURE, Vol.9, No.2, (July 2003).

[5] Takis Fotopoulos, “The End of Traditional Antisystemic Movements and the Need for A New Type of Antisystemic Movement Today”, DEMOCRACY & NATURE, Vol.7, No.3, (November 2001).

[6] see Takis Fotopoulos, “The Arab revolts and the elites’ plan for the neoliberal "democratisation" of the Arab world”, (forthcoming in the next issue)

[7] Ian Black, “Show of strength quells "day of rage",” The Guardian (12/3/2011).

[8] Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958).

[9] see Takis Fotopoulos, “The Arab revolts”

[10] Takis Fotopoulos, “Palestine: the hour of truth”, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 2, No. 2 (January 2006).

[11] Christopher Helman, Is Libya Going To Boot U.S. Oil Companies?,” Forbes (22/1/2009).

[12] UN, Human Development Report 1997, & 2005, Table 1.

[13] World Bank, World Development Indicators 2010, Table 2.14 & UN, Human Development Report 2005, Table 12.

[14] UN, Human Development Report 2005, Table 10.

[15] UN, Human Development Report 2005, Table 3.

[16] Peter Popham, “Tribalism is key to the countrys future”, Independent, 26/2/2011.

[17] ibid.

[18] Ali Chibani, “How Gadafy used Libya’s tribes”, Le Monde Diplomatique (March 2011).

[19] Simon Tisdall, “What next for Anglo-French forces”, The Guardian (23/3/2011).

[20] Takis Fotopoulos, Towards An Inclusive Democracy, (London/New York, Cassell/Continuum, 1997/98) chs. 5-6.

[21] Rachid Khechana, “Libya: only revolution was possible,” Le Monde Diplomatique (April 2011).

[22] “06.04.2009: French Total-led consortiums accept lower production shares in Libya” — WikiLeaks document published in Aftenposten.

[23] Deirdre Griswold. “Why imperialists hate Libya, love Bahrain,” International Action Centre (17/3/2011).

[24] Sarah Morrison and Jerome Taylor, “Activists battle police over right to protest,” Independent (10/5/2011).

[25] Benjamin Barber, (senior fellow at Demos, former member of the Gaddafi Foundation board, and author of Strong Democracy and Jihad vs McWorld), “Yes, he’s a Gaddafi. But there is still a real reformer inside”, The Guardian (13/4/2011).

[26] See the revealing report in RT, “Retweeting democracy” (14/4/2011).

[27] Xan Rice, “Gaddafi wants to stop western support. There is no al-Qaida here,” The Guardian (13/5/2011).

[28] The Interim Transitional National Council, “A vision of a democratic Libya” (March 2011).

[30] Ian R. Crane entitled, “US cloaks lies with bigger lies”, RT (12/5/2011).

[31] Robin Wigglesworth in Benghazi, “Fears rise as Gaddafi loyalists purged,” Financial Times (17/4/2011).

[32] Rob Crilly, It wasnt supposed to be like this in free Benghazi,” The Telegraph (27/3/2011).

[33] see e.g. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL Briefing, “Libya: detainees, disappeared and missing (29 March 2011).

[34] Robin Wigglesworth in Benghazi, “Fears rise as Gaddafi loyalists purged”.

[36] Patrick Cockburn, “The shady men backed by the West to displace Gaddafi,” The Independent (3/4/2011).

[37] John Pilger,” Westminster warriors untouched by Libya’s suffering and bloodshed,” New Statesman (8/4/2011).

[38] ibid.

[39] Francis Boyle, “Pre-planned military op”, RT (25/4/2011).

[40] Kareem Fahim, “Rebel Insider Concedes Weaknesses in Libya,” The New York Times (23/3/2011).

[41] Leonor Massanet, Una española en Libia, testimonio directo de la realidad de Libya,” (17/3/2011). { see English translation in this issue }

[42] Daniel Howden, “Battle for Libya shifts in desert sands as Gaddafi loyalists target oilfields”, Independent, 12/5/2011.

[43] see the testimony of Annie Machon, the ex-head of the British intelligence MI5, Using Our Intelligence”, RTTV interview (24/3/2011).

[44] See the revealing report: “Tripoli under fire in media information war,” RT (8/3/2011).

[45] Ian Black et.al., “UK pushes EU to demand that Gaddafi quit,” The Guardian, (10/3/2011).

[46] Javier Blas, Andrew England and Dan Dombey, “Qatar boost for Libyan rebel council”, Financial Times, 28/3/2011,

[47]Air strikes in Libya did not take place,” RT (01 March, 2011, 18:24); see also BBC Live news on Libya, (3/3/2011, 18:21), www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698

[48] Kim Sengupta,Terror in the air as casualties mount in Libya,” The Independent (9/3/2011).

[50]  “Gaddafi in crimes against humanity probe,” BBC News (3 March 2011, 18:46).

[51] Simon Jenkins, “"No-fly zone" is a euphemism for war. We’d be mad to try it,” The Guardian (9/3/2011).

[53] Gerald A. Perreira, “Libya, Getting it Right: A Revolutionary Pan-African Perspective,” Black Agenda Report (3/2/2011).

[54] Gamal Nkrumah, Al Ahram (10-16/3/2011).

[55]HRW: No mercenaries in eastern Libya”, Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) (2/3/2011).

[56]France recognises Libyan rebels,” (10 March 2011).

[58] Shashank Joshi, “Arming rebel groups could backfire on the West,” The Independent (9/3/2011).

[59] Robert Fisk, “Americas secret plan to arm Libyas rebels,” The Independent (7/3/2011).

[60] Charles Levinson and Matthew Rosenberg, “Egypt Said to Arm Libya Rebels”,  Wall Street Journal (17/3/2011).

[61] Francis Boyle, “Pre-planned military op”, RT (25/4/2011).

[63] see Takis Fotopoulos, “The global "war" of the transnational elite”.

[64] Robert Cooper, ‘Why we still need empires,’ The Observer (7/4/2002).

[65] Article 20 of the “new strategic concept” makes it explicitly clear that only a limited conception of sovereignty is recognized by the new NATO. (NATO, The Alliance’s Strategic Concept, 1999).

[66] Bernard Kouchner, “Libya: the morality of intervention,” The Guardian (24/3/2011).

[67] Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, “Bernard Kouchner: Israel Got Lucky” (19/5/2007).

[68] Robert Hunter, “The Allies in Libya: A New Paradigm for Intervention?”, European Affairs (10/4/2011).

[69] Takis Fotopoulos,  “Iraq: the new criminal "war" of the transnational elite”.

[70] Panos Haritos, BBC Live News (31/3/2011, 1450): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12776418

[71] Chris McGreal, “A few steps forward, many back on the long road west to Tripoli,” The Guardian (22/3/2011).

[73] Jeremy Laurance, “Blindfolded, beaten and tortured: grim new testimony reveals fate of Bahrain's persecuted doctors,” The Independent (10/5/2011).

[74] BBC News, “UN rights chief criticises crackdown,” (17/3/2011).

[75] Jeb Boone in Sanaa, “Bloodbath in Yemen as snipers target protesters,” The Independent (19/3/2011).

[76] T. Fotopoulos, “The myths about the economic crisis, the reformist Left and economic democracy”, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 4, No. 4, (October 2008).

[77] Takis Fotopoulos, “Transnational elite and Russia: a new bipolar world?”, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol.4, No.4, (October 2008).

[78] BBC News, 27/3/2011, “London cuts march: Government sticking to plan - Cable”.

[79] Ewen MacAskill and Michael White , “Blair to defy anti-war protests,” The Guardian (17/2/2003).

[80] Remarks of President Barack Obama — As Prepared for Delivery — "A Moment of Opportunity," (19/5/2011).

[81] Shimon Peres, “We in Israel welcome the Arab spring”, The Guardian (1/4/2011).

[82] By Andrew North,Libya: Barack Obama's step from Nobel winner to warrior”,

[84]Libya air raid "killed civilians",” BBC News (1/4/2011):

[86] Press Association, “Gaddafi forces using cluster bombs, claim rebels”, Independent (16/4/2011).

[87] Josef Federman, “ Hamas denies targeting Israeli civilians during war in Gaza,” The Guardian (29/1/2010).

[88] Chris McGreal, “Israel supporters accused of false allegations in campaign to discredit human rights watchdog,” The Guardian (14/11/2009).

[89] UN Security Council Resolution no. 1973 (2011).

[90] BBC Live News (23/3/2011, 1502).

[91] Roula Khalaf, “Arab League reiterate support for Libya action,” The Financial Times (21/3/2011).

[92] Isabel Gorst and Neil Buckley, “Medvedev and Putin clash over Libya,” The Financial Times (21/3/2011).

[93] Chris McGreal, “A few steps forward, many back on the long road west to Tripoli”, The Guardian (22/3/2011).

[94] Kim Sengupta, “No water, food or power and still the rebels resist regime's attacks,” The Independent (22/3/2011).

[95] Libya: what next?”, BBC (24/3/2011).

[96] Mark  Mardell, “Obama's Libyan mission creep?,” BBC (22/3/2011).

[97] Seumas Milne, “There’s nothing moral about Nato’s intervention in Libya,” The Guardian (23/3/2011).

[98] Chris McGreal and Ian Black, “Libyan rebels advance on Muammar Gaddafi's home town,” The Guardian (28/3/2011).

[99] Kevin Connolly, BBC Live News, 0804: 28/3/2011 and “Coalition air strikes hit Gaddafi hometown Sirte”.

[100] James Blitz and Daniel Dombey, “Russians question allies’ adherence to UN remit,” The Financial Times (28/3/2011).

[101] John Simpson, “Libya crisis: Gaddafi forces adopt rebel tactics”, BBC News (30/3/2011): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12911904

[102] Kim Sengupta, “Disillusioned Libyan rebels flee and abandon their gains,” The Independent (31/3/2011).

[103] ibid.

[105] Kim Sengupta and David Randall, “Western military advisers become visible in Benghazi,” The Independent (3/4/2011).

[106]Libyan rebels "receive foreign training",” Al Jazeera (3/4/2011).

[107] Patrick Cockburn, “The shady men backed by the West to displace Gaddafi”, The Independent (3/4/2011).

[109] Kim Sengupta, “Free Libya' oil tanker brings new hope but rebels in retreat,” The Independent (6/4/2011).

[110] Kim Sengupta, “Divided and disorganised, Libyan rebel military turn on Nato allies,” The Independent (7/4/2011).

[111] ibid.

[112] The staying power of Col Gaddafi”, BBC News (6/4/2011).

[115] ibid.

[116] Patrick Cockburn, “Libya's parallels with Iraq under Saddam are truly ominous,” The Independent (13/4/2011).

[117] Leading article, The Independent (9/4/2011).

[118] Patrick Cockburn, “Libyas parallels with Iraq under Saddam are truly ominous”.

[120] Con Coughlin, Nato must target Gaddafi regime, says Armed Forces chief Gen Sir David Richards,” The Telegraph (16/5/2011).

[121] Jonathan Marcus, “Libya stalemate leaves Nato without "Plan B",” BBC News (11/5/2011).