{"id":244432,"date":"2023-09-18T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2023-09-18T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=244432"},"modified":"2023-09-17T05:02:50","modified_gmt":"2023-09-17T04:02:50","slug":"humanitarian-imperialism-created-the-libyan-nightmare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/09\/humanitarian-imperialism-created-the-libyan-nightmare\/","title":{"rendered":"Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan Nightmare"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Business is Booming – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

NATO\u2019s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

16 Sep 2023<\/em> – \u201cWe came, we saw, he died,\u201d Hillary Clinton famously quipped<\/a> when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die.\u00a0 Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias.<\/p>\n

The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country\u2019s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images<\/a> of migrants from Nigeria<\/a>, Senegal<\/a> and Eritrea<\/a> being beaten<\/a> and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya\u2019s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel<\/a> \u2014\u00a0 the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world \u2014 overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to<\/a> 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fragmentation of the country\u2019s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,\u201d said<\/a> Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.<\/p>\n

Taalas told<\/a> reporters last Thursday that \u201cmost of the human casualties\u201d would have been avoided if there had been a \u201cnormally operating meteorological service\u201d which \u201cwould have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the United Nations doctrine of R2P<\/a> (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya – as it did Iraq – as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our \u201chumanitarian intervention,\u201d which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya\u2019s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted \u2014 regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not \u2014 we forget they exist.<\/p>\n

Karl Popper<\/a> in \u201cThe Open Society and Its Enemies\u201d warned<\/a> against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering \u2014 the Jacobins<\/a>, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.<\/p>\n

Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists \u2014 Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed<\/a> an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S.\u00a0 Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash<\/a> on social media.<\/p>\n

There is no official tally of the casualties in Libya that have resulted directly and indirectly from the violence in Libya over the last 12 years. This is exacerbated by the fact that NATO failed<\/a> to investigate casualties resulting from its seven month bombardment of the country in 2011. But the total figure of those killed and injured is likely in the tens of thousands. Action on Armed Violence recorded<\/a> \u201c8,518 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Libya\u201d from 2011 to 2020,\u00a0 6,027 of which were civilian casualties.<\/p>\n

In 2020, a statement published<\/a> by seven U.N. agencies reported that \u201cClose to 400,000 Libyans have been displaced since the start of the conflict nine years ago \u2014 around half of them within the past year, since the attack on the capital, Tripoli, [by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar\u2019s forces] started.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Libyan economy has been battered by the [civil war], the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,\u201d the World Bank reported<\/a> in April of this year. \u201cThe country\u2019s fragility is having far-reaching economic and social impact. GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,\u201d the report says. \u201cThis suggests that Libya\u2019s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict. Economic growth in 2022 remained low and volatile due to conflict-related disruptions in oil production.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amnesty International\u2019s 2022 Libya report<\/a> also makes for grim reading. \u201cMilitias, armed groups and security forces continued to arbitrarily detain thousands of people,\u201d it says. \u201cScores of protesters, lawyers, journalists, critics and activists were rounded up and subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and forced \u2018confessions\u2019 on camera.\u201d Amnesty describes a country where militias operate with impunity, human rights abuses, including kidnappings and sexual violence, are widespread. It adds that \u201cEU-backed Libyan coastguards and the Stability Support Authority militia intercepted thousands of refugees and migrants at sea and forcibly returned them to detention in Libya. Detained migrants and refugees were subjected to torture, unlawful killings, sexual violence and forced labour.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reports by the U.N. Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) are no less dire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Stockpiles of weapons and ammunition \u2014 estimated<\/a> to be between 150,000 and 200,000 tons \u2014 were looted from Libya with many being trafficked\u00a0to neighboring states. In Mali, weapons from Libya fuelled a dormant insurgency by the Tuareg, destabilizing the country. It ultimately led<\/a> to a military coup and a jihadist insurgency which supplanted the Tuareg, as well as a protracted war between the Malian government and jihadists.\u00a0 This triggered another French military intervention and led to 400,000 people being displaced. Weapons and ammunition from Libya also made their way into other parts of the Sahel including Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso.<\/p>\n

The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights.<\/p>\n

The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes.<\/p>\n

Gaddafi \u2014 who I interviewed<\/a> for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 \u2014 and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave<\/a> the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton\u2019s emails, obtained via a freedom of information request and published<\/a> by WikiLeaks, also expose France\u2019s concerns about Gaddafi\u2019s efforts to \u201cprovide Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French Fran (CFA).\u201d Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported on his conversations with French intelligence officers about the motivations of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the chief architect of the attack on Libya. Blumenthal writes<\/a> that the French president seeks \u201ca greater share of Libyan oil\u201d, increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power and an end to Gaddafi\u2019s attempts to supplant French influence in \u201cFrancophone Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sarkozy, who has been convicted<\/a> on two separate cases of corruption and breach of campaign finance laws, faces<\/a> a historic trial in 2025 for allegedly receiving<\/a> millions of euros in secret illegal campaign contributions from Gadaffi, to assist with his successful 2007 presidential bid.<\/p>\n

These were the real \u201ccrimes\u201d in Libya. But the real crimes always remain hidden, papered over by florid rhetoric about democracy and human rights.<\/p>\n

The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.\u00a0 The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings<\/a> of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala<\/a> and East Timor<\/a>. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues.<\/p>\n

The nightmares we orchestrated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are minimized or ignored by the press while the benefits are exaggerated or fabricated. And since the U.S. does not recognize the International Criminal Court, there is no chance of any American leader being held accountable for their crimes.<\/p>\n

Human rights advocates have become a vital cog in the imperial project. The extension of U.S. power, they argue, is a force for good. This is the thesis<\/a> of Samantha Power\u2019s book \u201cA Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.\u201d They champion the State Department\u2019s R2P doctrine. Under this doctrine, states are required to respect the human rights of their citizens. When these rights are violated, then sovereignty is nullified. Outside forces are permitted to intervene. Miguel d\u2019Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, warned<\/a> in 2009 that R2P could be misused \u201cto justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSince the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world\u2019s leading economic and military powers, above all, the United States, in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks,\u201d writes<\/a> Jean Bricmont in \u201cHumanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cUntil the U.S. invasion of Iraq, [a] large part of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention, discovering new \u2018Hitlers\u2019 as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.\u201d<\/p>\n

The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to \u201cworthy<\/a>\u201d victims while \u201cunworthy\u201d victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yeminis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world\u2019s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are\u00a0 Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n

Utopian social engineering is always catastrophic. It creates power vacuums that augment the suffering of those the utopianists claim to protect. The moral bankruptcy of the liberal class, which I chronicle<\/a> in \u201cDeath of the Liberal Class,\u201d is complete. Liberals have prostituted their supposed values to the Empire. Incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict, they clamor for more destruction and death to save the world.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Copyright 2023 Chris Hedges<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

16 Sep 2023 – NATO\u2019s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":244433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[867,393,950,178,2431,86,112,639,70],"class_list":["post-244432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-africa","tag-anglo-america","tag-coup","tag-invasion","tag-libya","tag-muammar-qaddafi","tag-occupation","tag-pentagon","tag-uk","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":244434,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244432\/revisions\/244434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}