FIVE years after US imperialism, aided by their stooges in Britain and France, launched their bombing campaign against Libya and its leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, the Foreign Affairs Committee has produced a report damning Britain’s role.
MPs on the committee placed the blame for the campaign that effectively destroyed the most modern and democratic country in Africa and turned it into a living hell for its people firmly at the door of ex-Tory prime minister David Cameron, who resigned as an MP this week and is now safely out of the way.
The report found that the result of the bombing campaign ‘was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gadaffi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL (Islamic State) in north Africa’.
The criticism of Cameron centres on ‘the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy’, with the report asserting that the reasons given by Cameron and NATO for the bombing campaign had been achieved within a day of its commencement.
These reasons were the claim by Cameron and NATO that the Libyan city of Benghazi, which had been invaded by Islamist mercenaries, needed to be protected from the legitimate army of the Libyan people. Having achieved the security of Benghazi for their Islamist allies, the imperialists then moved on to the real goal of regime change.
The report states: ‘This meant that a limited intervention to protect civilians drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change by military means.’ In fact, the whole murderous ‘intervention’ was never designed to protect civilians, it was purely to support NATO’s allies amongst the terrorist groups.
There was no ‘drift’ into regime change – that was intended from the outset. The plot to overthrow Gadaffi went back long before Cameron. When Tony Blair was prime minister, he acted as imperialism’s emissary, deliberately cultivating Gadaffi and promising that Libya would be welcomed back into the West’s fold if he gave up Libya’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
Taken in by the honeyed words and promises of Blair, Gadaffi did indeed disarm his forces. Having been disarmed, Libya was then flooded by imperialism’s counter-revolutionary forces drafted in from Iraq to act as NATO’s ground force supported by NATO air power which slaughtered thousands of civilians along with the murder of Gadaffi himself.
After devastating what was once known as the ‘Jewel of Africa’ for the modern advanced nature of Libya, and in the process producing a massive humanitarian refugee crisis, the imperialist powers moved seamlessly on to repeat the carnage in Syria, transferring their allies in IS and the Al-Nusra Front to that country.
This was the next step in the campaign to effect regime change throughout the Middle East, installing puppet regimes at the point of a gun and thereby gaining absolute control of the region’s oil wealth.
In Syria, however, this counter-revolutionary offensive has run into the brick wall of Syrian resistance. Faced with the immediate prospect of their Islamist allies being wiped out in Syria, the imperialist powers are now desperately trying to ‘steal the peace’ through organising a ‘diplomatic’ settlement with the agreement of Putin and the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy that would involve the removal of Assad as the democratically elected president and replacing him with a servile government imposed by the UN and backed by NATO forces.
This is the unspoken context of this report which concludes by urging the Tory government to lead an international review into setting up a UN body to impose ‘reconstruction’ on a country that has been torn apart by imperialist wars, citing Syria, Yemen and Iraq as prime candidates for being placed under the control of the American-dominated UN.
Workers in the West must support the right of the people of Syria alone to determine who rules them and demand an end to all the imperialist campaigns for regime change across the Middle East and for the immediate withdrawal of all British forces from the region. Peace will only be achieved when imperialism is defeated and driven out of the region once and for all.
