Bill Van Auken

A column by Philip Zelikow entitled “Gaddafi’s fall will renew the Arab spring,” published on the Financial Times web site Monday, provides a glimpse into the far-reaching aims being pursued by Washington and the other major imperialist powers in their supposedly “humanitarian” intervention in Libya.

Zelikow is a former State Department counselor under Condoleezza Rice in the George W. Bush administration and a former advisor on the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush during the period of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. He is a trusted and experienced operative within the US political establishment, so much so that he was tapped to serve as executive director of the 9/11 Commission. In that position he was the individual most responsible for organizing a cover-up of the US government’s role in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Close to the Project for a New American Century and one of the authors of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, Zelikow has intimate experience in both the theory and practice of US imperialism’s drive to impose its hegemony over the Middle East.

Zelikow begins his column by debunking the arguments of those on the Republican right who opposed the Libyan war as an example of “liberal interventionism.” He dismisses this concern, saying it is merely a misunderstanding “fed by some rhetoric, especially from the government.” The war, he writes, was launched because of Libya’s particular “history and a geography that well justified hard-headed calculations by the US, Britain, France and many other countries that they should seize this opportunity to help the rebels get rid of this particular demented regime.”

In other words, the major imperialist powers saw a set of circumstances in the Libyan events that allowed them to “seize the opportunity” to execute a military campaign for regime-change for the purpose of establishing firm control over the oil-rich North African nation.

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Stephen Lendman

Mark Twain once called reports of his death greatly exaggerated. The same hold for Libyans, not ready to submit to NATO colonization, occupation, plunder and exploitation. Not at least without a fight.

The stakes are high - stay free or die socially, economically, politically, emotionally, and/or perhaps physically.

Washington-led NATO is a rogue killing machine plunderer. It comes, sees, slaughters, ravages, and pillages all its surveys.

In March, it arrived in Libya on cruise missiles, bombs, shells, other munitions, fifth column infiltrators, media liars, and other rogue elements, not white horses, not as liberators nor humanitarian interveners.

It came for another imperial trophy at the expense of free Libyans. They know it and won't submit without a fight, a long-term struggle perhaps that may ebb and flow, but won't end until NATO's scourge ends.

It's the same spirit driving Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, and millions of others throughout North Africa/Middle East/Central Asia/and elsewhere. Live free or die.

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Dmitriy Sedov

Libyans inspects the site of massive explosion that occurred
during the night in Benghazi. (AP/Tara Todras-Whitehill)

The West Scores Another Triumph Over the Arab World

The fall of M. Gadhafi's regime will come as a huge success of the globalization forces seeking to establish a new world order. The proportions of the campaign the West launched in Libya and the level of sophistication of the technologies employed were impressive regardless of the accompanying political assessments – altogether they combined into a fundamental political initiative with far-reaching historical goals.

In Libya, the West managed to undermine and eventually demolish a completely viable regime which must be credited with keeping the country stable and the population's living standards – fairly high. Even though, customarily for the region, Gadhafi was an eccentric and self-righteous autocrat, a relatively short time ago he used to be a figure to which the majority of Libyans showed no signs of allergy. Under such circumstances, it had to take serious manipulative skills to convince the people that things in their country were skewed and to lead them to rebel against the legitimate government.

The shift in the public atmosphere is hardly attributable to the impact of any particular subversive programs or to the sway of a handful of Western satellite TV channels over Libya's public opinion. Rather, it could be induced within a wider approach based on what specialists these days refer to as informational warfare. Currently, whole populations in a number of countries enduring regime changes are the targets of informational warfare altering traditional models of human existence and conduct. The alliance of the West's ideological agencies and media built around a certain type of information policies is the force behind the ongoing informational aggression. Its key objective is to saturate all information flows with the notion of an a priori superiority of the Western democracy standard and to instill among the nations whose political lives are not aligned with it a humiliating sense of inferiority. Under appropriate external influence, the sense of inferiority automatically nourishes public discontent. Given the background of pervasive informational aggression, ideological campaigns and provocations aimed at destabilizing and in the long run dislodging otherwise stable regimes tend to become extremely efficient.

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Adnan Al-Daini

[Photo: "Allied air strikes will go on in Libya until Muammar al-Gaddafi stops attacking civilians, pulls back his forces and allows in humanitarian aid," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. PM David Cameron listening.]

NATO Chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said today (August 22, 2011)

“NATO wants the Libyan people to be able to decide their future in freedom and in peace.”

Dare I hope that the statement is sincerely meant?  Or am I being naïve? 

At the start of the Arab spring in Tunisia followed by Egypt, the West was hesitant in its support of the revolutionary young.   Remarks such as "Mubarak is not a dictator" by Joe Biden, or the French offer to the Tunisian President of sending French advisers and equipment to help him deal with demonstrators, underscored their support for despots; not much concern for human rights there. As far as they were concerned, the model of controlling the Arab world and its resources through dictators that they could bribe and control had served them well. It is much easier to control a despot who rules by instilling fear in the people than having to deal with the messy business of democratically elected leaders and institutions.

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