The leaders of the 22 member Arab League meeting on Saturday came out decisively on the side of imperialism when they issued a call for the United Nations to impose a ‘no-fly zone’ over Libya.
Claiming that ‘all Arab states’ agreed, the secretary-general of the league, Amr Mousa, announced that it had ‘requested’ the UN security council to impose the no-fly zone, while adding that the league rejected any ‘foreign military’ intervention.
This pious call for no foreign military intervention is a treacherous attempt to cover up the fact that the Arab League has done precisely that – given the green light to Nato and world imperialism to launch a military attack against Libya and its people, an attack that will not be confined to non-military means but will inevitably lead to imperialist forces going into Libya to secure its oil resources.
The whole history of imperialism’s murderous adventure into Yugoslavia and Iraq lead to this inescapable conclusion.
It is a complete fiction to suppose that no-fly zones can be implemented in any way other than by the aggressive bombing of Libyan infrastructure with the inevitable loss of life amongst the civilian population that this entails.
And imperialism will not stop there.
The world crisis demands nothing less than the imperialist nations attempting to physically re-occupy the ex-colonial world – to re-conquer countries like Libya from which they were driven decades ago by the revolutionary nationalist movements – and re-assert their domination of Libya’s oil industry which was nationalised under Colonel Gadaffi.
Libya would then become a base from which imperialism will seek to dominate the entire region.
Not only did the Arab League call for the UN security council to intervene militarily in Libya, they announced that they now recognise the counter-revolutionary Libyan National Council, based in Benghazi, as the ‘provisional government’ of Libya.
What the Arab League have done in effect is to provide NATO and the imperialist powers with the fig leaf that they were demanding – they have given the so-called ‘regional support’ that NATO said before the meeting that it needed for military action.
Small wonder that the US called it an ‘important step’, it is a treacherous stab in the back for the Libyan people delivered by the Arab ruling class who have opened up a common front with imperialism against the Arab revolution.
Even bourgeois commentators could not help but marvel at the contradiction of Arab states like Saudi Arabia, which is brutally suppressing its own people, or the Yemeni government which only this weekend shot down unarmed protesters, sanctimoniously calling for military intervention in Libya.
At home the working class will be equally unconvinced by the strident calls for the invasion of Libya under the guise of ‘humanitarian imperialism’.
They will contrast the support that imperialism gave to butchers like Mubarak in Egypt, or the brutal Tunisian dictator Ben Ali to the rabid calls for the overthrow of Gadaffi and the military seizure of Libya.
Above all workers will be aware that the coalition government at the same time as preparing for war against the Libyan people is engaged in an equally murderous war against the working and middle classes in Britain.
Smashing up Libya through bombs is no different from smashing up the lives of working people through destroying the welfare state, driving down wages and pensions and laying waste to the NHS.
The working class must immediately demand that the trade union movement mobilise against imperialist war against the Libyan people and their leader.
They must demand that the unions organise a general strike against imperialist war and to bring down this government, the common enemy of both the Arab masses and the working class of Britain.
