HMS Enterprise has arrived near to Tripoli to evacuate any remaining British people who want to leave Libya, after the British embassy was shut and its staff fled.
The British action followed on from the US closure of its embassy, when the US ambassador and his staff fled by road to Tunisia in an armed convoy. It was supported by overflying jet fighters, lest the convoy be ambushed and the US lose its second ambassador to Libya in the same number of years.
Even the US and UK governments have stopped trying to argue that what is happening in Libya is the teething pains of an emerging new democracy, and that all will be well in due course.
In fact, the reality is that neither government are under any illusion that the object of their intervention into Libya from 2007 onwards, when Tony Blair visited Gadaffi as the ‘great reconciler’, was anything else than a plan to smash the advanced Libyan state and hand Libya over to an amalgam of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda.
Libya had the highest living standards in Africa, and was able to provide free education, housing and free, advanced healthcare to all of its citizens.
It was also able to advance billions in cheap loans to struggling African states in central and southern Africa, getting very much in the way of the IMF and the World Bank, and proving that ‘freedom’ from imperialism allows a country to prosper.
Libya was a danger to imperialism and had to be destroyed, starting with its government.
This is why Blair first of all, in 2007, disarmed Libya of its WMDs and then organised for big contracts to be signed by western companies, so that Gadaffi could be got closer, with his guard relaxed, into a situation where an internal revolt of the Islamists and Muslin Brotherhood could be organised, armed and then led to remove the Gadaffi regime and murder its leader and many members of his family.
In fact, the western powers exulted in the triumph and then tried to do the same thing to Syria, exporting Libyan and other Islamists to do the job, fuelled by hundreds of millions of Qatari and Saudi dollars.
They boasted that the good work of removing Saddam in Iraq, based on the lies about WMDs following the years of softening up with sanctions that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, had been followed up by success in Libya, and that this was the prelude to carrying out ‘the Syrian job’, so as to have an Arab world where the nationalist and Ba’athist leaders could be replaced by Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The chaos, the suffering and the hundreds of thousands of deaths that they had brought to Iraq and then Libya were always a price worth paying in the words of Madeleine Albright.
It is a source of much fury to Obama, Cameron and Co that they were prevented by the anti-war movement of the British workers and by Russian opposition, from carrying out the same operation in Syria, although they have been able to enormously damage the gains that the Syrian people have made since Liberation.
What of Libya? The next stage of the imperialist campaign will be to bribe the Egyptian army regime in Egypt, the regime of President Al Sisi, with billions of dollars of aid, to follow up on its destruction of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt with an attack on the Islamists in oil-rich eastern Libya.
His mission will be to take Benghazi, the oil ports and then Tripoli, and place the imperialist agent General Haftar into power.
The Libyan masses have learnt some very hard lessons in the last four years, and now look back on the Jamahiriya of Gadaffi as a lost paradise compared to the present situation.
They must organise for a socialist revolution in Libya and reach out to the massive working class in Egypt, which even the Egyptian army fears, and also to the working class of Algeria and Tunisia and Palestine to struggle to evict imperialism, Zionism and its agents from the region.
Gadaffi’s weakness was that he fatally trusted imperialist agents like Blair and Co. The Libyan masses have learnt bitter lessons from this, and will not make the same mistake again. Forward to a socialist North Africa and a socialist Palestine!
