Lies, slaughter, capital: The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, part one

There were a lot of interesting factors at play in the 2011 NATO bombings, and I want to start discussing them by first dispelling any idea that the bombings were somehow undertaken for humanitarian purposes. Continued in part 2.

Submitted by Soapy on December 18, 2013

On March 19th, 2011, just hours after the UN passage of Resolution 1973 authorizing the use of force by UN member states in Libya to “take all necessary measures” to “protect civilians,” France, without warning its fellow NATO countries, began bombing targets in Libya. Gaddafi’s forces were abruptly halted on their rapid advance towards the rebel capital of Benghazi, and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, without even so much as giving a fair warning to the representatives of the NATO countries he had been meeting with earlier that very day, began a war which did not end until October of that year.

According to France’s Chief of Defense, the war was supposed to last a matter of “weeks”. However, much of the Libyan populace, especially in the region of Tripolitania, resented the foreign invaders and took up arms to defend their homeland. When Gaddafi’s forces had ruthlessly mowed down protesters in the days leading up to the conflict, the death toll stood somewhere around a thousand. The war would claim the lives of anywhere between 10,000-50,000. The armed Libyan forces fighting against Gaddafi, called the National Transitional Council (NTC), estimate 30,000 dead which would make the conflict in Libya bloody on a scale surpassing every Arab Spring uprising with the exception of Syria. During the civil war, African migrant workers suffered the worst of the violence. Racist hatred was fueled against them by a myth spread most notably by Al Jazeera that African migrant workers in Libya were actually Gaddafi’s hired mercenaries. This racist violence was wrought with a vengeance against the 35,000 citizens living in the city of Tawergha. The Tawerghans were forcibly removed from their homes, a few were executed, and the rest were sent away never allowed to return. Their crime was their supposed support for Gaddafi. Vijay Prashad in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter writes of one incident that took place in the days before the bombings began, when protesters executed 50 “African Mercenaries” at a police station in the province of Cyrenaica. During the bombings, NATO showed no compassion towards the African migrant workers. Horace Campbell, in Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure of Libya writes, “More than 900 Africans drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to escape the fighting in Libya. In one spectacular incident, two survivors reported the tragic story of a boat carrying 72 African immigrants that ran into difficulty trying to reach the Italian port of Lampedusa. The Africans on board, including women and children, were left to drift in the Mediterranean for sixteen days after a number of European military units apparently ignored their cries for help. Two of the nine survivors claimed this included a NATO ship. Despite alarms being raised with the Italian coast guard and the boat making contact with a military helicopter and a warship, no rescue effort was attempted.” This wanton disregard for human life is emblematic of the entirety of the NATO intervention. It was a horrific affair with tens of thousands massacred. In the letter published by U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and British President David Cameron, the three announced that they “would not rest” until, “the Libyan people can choose their own future.” During the fall of Gaddafi’s capital of Tripoli, mobs of barely armed Gaddafi supporters, ordinary citizens of the Libyan city of Tripoli, rallied to defend Gaddafi’s compound Bab al-Aziza. There they were attacked by the full might of NATO’s arsenal. Some 63 bombings were undertaken targeting the supporters at the compound in a single 24-hour period. Apache gunships and drones were used to attack this mass of what were technically “combatants” so that now "the Libyan people can choose their own future."

The NATO forces involved in the conflict have a miserable history in North Africa. At the outbreak of the protests across North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011, known as the Arab Spring, French Foreign Minister Michelle Aliot-Marie put on display the French commitment to democracy when she offered to send “security forces” to the countries of Algeria and Tunisia to help them quell the growing protests. While U.S. President Barack Obama announced his support for anti-Gaddafi protesters, the U.S. continued to send massive AID to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak whom the U.S. had kept in power for over three decades. Additionally, the protests in Bahrain were crushed after a U.S. supported Saudi invasion of the country. The Italian role in the NATO operation is especially appalling considering the history of colonialism that no doubt played a large role in the unexpected increase in support that Gaddafi received from the Libyan population once the bombings began. Associate Professor of Government at Darmouth College Dirk Vandewalle estimates that during the Italian colonization of Libya (1911-1942), Italian forces were responsible for the deaths of between 250,000-300,000 Libyans out of a population of 800,000-1 million. In 1921 and 1922, 20,000 Libyans were executed by firing squad alone. Not in NATO but welcomed into the coalition was the nation of Sudan whose president Omar al-Bashir currently has an International Criminal Court warrant out for his arrest due to the horrific crimes committed in the Sudanese province of Darfur. And the nation of Qatar which is just as undemocratic and repressive as Gaddafi’s Libya.

What also bears mentioning is the repeated refusal of NATO and the NTC to engage with negotiations that should have been pursued. UN Resolution 1973 was the paper-thin legal justification used for the bombings. It clearly stated that a peaceful settlement to the civil war was the most desirable. As Hugh Roberts writes in his article, Who said Gaddafi had to Go?, “Resolution 1973 was passed in New York late in the evening of 17 March. The next day, Gaddafi, whose forces were camped on the southern edge of Benghazi, announced a ceasefire in conformity with Article 1 and proposed a political dialogue in line with Article 2. What the Security Council demanded and suggested, he provided in a matter of hours. His ceasefire was immediately rejected on behalf of the NTC by a senior rebel commander, Khalifa Haftar, and dismissed by Western governments.” Haftar, or spelled Hifter depending on the source, was in the two decades prior to the conflict living in Arlington, Virginia, home to, among other government offices, the Pentagon. “‘We will judge him by his actions not his words,’ David Cameron declared, implying that Gaddafi was expected to deliver a complete ceasefire by himself: that is, not only order his troops to cease fire but ensure this ceasefire was maintained indefinitely despite the fact that the NTC was refusing to reciprocate. Cameron’s comment also took no account of the fact that Article 1 of Resolution 1973 did not of course place the burden of a ceasefire exclusively on Gaddafi. No sooner had Cameron covered for the NTC’s unmistakable violation of Resolution 1973 than Obama weighed in, insisting that for Gaddafi’s ceasefire to count for anything he would (in addition to sustaining it indefinitely, single-handed, irrespective of the NTC) have to withdraw his forces not only from Benghazi but also from Misrata and from the most important towns his troops had retaken from the rebellion, Ajdabiya in the east and Zawiya in the west – in other words, he had to accept strategic defeat in advance. These conditions, which were impossible for Gaddafi to accept, were absent from Article 1.” Aside from Gaddafi’s own initial attempts at negotiation to avoid the subsequent bloodbath, the African Union (AU), with the vocal support of Nelson Mandela, made tireless attempts to get NTC and NATO leaders to sit down with Gaddafi. In response to attempts made in April by the AU, the NTC announced that Gaddafi would have to step down as a precondition for any negotiation. The message was clear, there was no desire by the NTC or NATO for negotiation.

Based on the refusal of the NATO powers to negotiate with Gaddafi while avenues were open, on the glaring hypocrisy of the NATO powers and their allies in the conflict, and, finally, based on the horrific death toll wrought by the conflict and the clear disregard for human life displayed by all sides, we can safely put aside all rhetoric of “freedom,” “democracy,” and “international law,” in this civil war and start to focus on what this conflict was really about. Capital.

Comments

baboon

10 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by baboon on December 19, 2013

One wouldn't have thought that after the unmitigated disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan ("mission accomplished" according to Cameron a couple of days ago) France, Britain and the US would have thought twice before unleashing their warfare and consequent generalised chaos on Libya - but that's imperialism for you; "the imperialist imperative" as Paul Mattck called it.

Soapy's text is to be welcomed as denunciation of the blood on the hands of our democratic regimes. I agree with the characterisation of the hypocrisy of the above as well as their lies and alibis about "humanitarian" intervention or "the protection of civilians" which go back decades as cover for their imperialist wars. I also agree with the fundamental tenet of the text that the problem is capitalism although I would argue that it is its particular form of imperialism, a force, that while there are certain economic considerations, becomes more and more irrational and unstable. As far as Libya is concerned one only has to look at the growing instability and chaos across the Maghreb, through Mali, Chad, Mauritania and down to Kenya, even Syria where the Libyan "triumph" has contributed to feeding and fueling devastation, war and jihadism. One aspect of the war regarding the "allies" was, opposite to the recent past, the gung-ho involvement of the French who have since moved on the imperialist chess-board into Mali, the CAR, and were urging the Americans to bomb Syria along with themselves. Some change from the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" whose taste for "foreign intervention" has never abated.

I don't think that France initially acted alone in "Operation Dawn Odyssey" though it was gung-ho to act. Also involved, as well as the US and GB, were Holland, Belgium, Italy Denmark, Greece, Norway, the UAE and Qatar - the latter as Soapy says with its propaganda wing of Al-Jazeera but also with an extremely brutal fighting forces on the ground. Russia, China and Brazil were openly against the war, but suckered into supporting the UN resolution (something that wasn't going to happen with Syria) and Germany point blank refused to even give logistic support through its AWACs - though Germany, economically, has done better than most out of the war.

The war was undertaken by a joint US, British and French plan of action decided in advance. It was entirely in line with the Pentagon policy of "leading from behind" as the US "pivoted" its main forces towards the Pacific and its confrontation with China. The first bombings may have been launched from a French aircraft carrier but British and US bombing raids soon followed. While there is a clear economic motive here there is also the geo-strategic element particularly in that the Egyptian regime was unstable and recently allowed Iranian warships through the Suez Canal. Whatever social protest there was in Libya, and it turns out that it was virtually non-existant, was quickly drowned in fractionalisation, pogroms (as Soapy points out regarding black workers) and imperialist division. I think that Soapy's post tends to underestimate the role of Britain in the assault whose actions in the war and prior to it with Blair's embrace of Gaddafi and the role of its secret services, underline the imperialist strategy of "Perfidious Albion".

Khalifa Hafter, who Soapy talks about above, was a long-time collaborator of the CIA as was Mohamed Al Magiraf of the US-based National Front for the Salvation of Libya who became the acting president but since resigned of the Libyan NTC.

A good text with plenty more to say.

Soapy

10 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Soapy on December 19, 2013

baboon

I don't think that France initially acted alone in "Operation Dawn Odyssey" though it was gung-ho to act. Also involved, as well as the US and GB, were Holland, Belgium, Italy Denmark, Greece, Norway, the UAE and Qatar - the latter as Soapy says with its propaganda wing of Al-Jazeera but also with an extremely brutal fighting forces on the ground. Russia, China and Brazil were openly against the war, but suckered into supporting the UN resolution (something that wasn't going to happen with Syria) and Germany point blank refused to even give logistic support through its AWACs - though Germany, economically, has done better than most out of the war.

Well I plan on getting into this more in part 2. Italy was actually at first very against the intervention because they had been winning big in oil contracts in Libya not to mention the fact that Libya was a major shareholder in several important Italian companies and they were building relations with Gaddafi to try and get him to crack down more on immigration from Libya . However, they hopped on board once they realized there was going to be a regime switch. France had serious economic motives and that is why they were the most gungho. Again I putting together part 2, not sure when I'll finish but I will touch on the really meaty stuff there

Soapy

10 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Soapy on December 20, 2013

But I do think it's funny that I spent all this time researching Libya and it turns out of course that someone else on libcom knows more! There's always someone out there who knows more than you do, and they probably post on libcom.

Of course I do appreciate the feedback quite a bit!

Soapy

10 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Soapy on December 21, 2013

The more I think about it I'm regretting some of the wording I used in the article. When I referred to the NTC I really just mean a collection of militias that loosely identified themselves as part of the NTC although may not have any contact with a formal command structure. There were thousands of militias that sprung up all over Libya and the NTC was almost certainly created in large part through the urging and manipulations of NATO countries to make sure that they could sell the idea that the "Libyan people" wanted NATO intervention. Obviously there would be no way of knowing if they wanted it or not. Of course, my article is wordy already, I didn't want to make it unreadable but I do feel a little bad about not explaining this.