Ghost of Libya

I went to Libya in 1987 to interview its strongman, Muammar Gaddafi. We spent an evening talking in his colourful Bedouin tent outside the Bab al-Azizya Barracks in Tripoli which had been bombed a year earlier by the US in an attempt to kill the troublesome Libyan leader.

Gaddafi predicted to me that if he were overthrown, Libya would break up into two or three parts and again fall prey to western domination. His efforts to bring the Arab world and West Africa out of subservience and backwardness would be ended, he foretold.

The Libyan ‘leader’ was right. Today, after his death, Libya has splintered into warring camps. The US, France and Egypt are expanding their influence in Libya, lately also joined by Italy, Libya’s former colonial ruler. They have installed the usual set of yes-men to do their bidding. Old habits die hard.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will shortly face the return of a major threat that has bedevilled her since 2012 – the attack by jihadists on the US Consulate in Tripoli, Libya and the killing of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his bodyguards.

Republicans have been trying to lay blame for Benghazi on Clinton. So far they have not been very successful. But brawler Donald Trump can be counted on to attack Hillary over Benghazi, her record as a do-little Secretary of State, and her legal troubles. What’s more, the true story of the phony “liberation” of Libya may finally emerge.

Neither the Democrats nor Republicans have so far dared reveal what really happened in Benghazi. The so-called 2011 ‘popular revolution’ in Libya was an elaborate plot by France, Britain, the US, aided by the Gulf Emirates and Egypt, to overthrow Libya’s four-decade long strongmen Gaddafi and seize control of his high-grade oil.

Western intelligence and quasi-government NGOs used the same tactics of subversion in Libya that they employed in the successful ‘colour revolutions’ Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria, but failed in Iran and Russia.

The French wanted to overthrow Gaddafi because he claimed to have helped finance former President Nicholas Sarkozy’s election. Sarkozy denied the charged. The Gulf Arabs wanted Gaddafi dead because he kept accusing them of stealing Arab wealth and being puppets of the Western powers.

French intelligence agents had tried to assassinate Gaddafi in the 1980’s. Britain’s MI6 sought to kill the Libyan leader with a massive car bomb in Benghazi. Both attempts failed.

The regime change operation begun in 2011 by the US, France and Britain by engineered popular protests in Benghazi. They were soon followed by covert military operation led by US, British and French special forces against Qaddafi’s rag-tag army, followed by heavy air attacks. The tame western media obligingly closed its eyes to this Western military intervention, instead hailing Libya’s ‘popular revolution’.

After Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered (reportedly by French intelligence agents), huge stores of stockpiled arms became available. Secretary of State Clinton, who had championed the overthrow of Gaddafi, decided to arm the West’s newest ‘colour revolution’, Syria’s anti-Assad rebels.

Most of these Libyan arms were stockpiled in Benghazi, covertly flown to Lebanon or Jordan, then smuggled to the anti-Assad rebels in Syria. US Ambassador Stevens was overseeing the arms transfers from the US consulate in Benghazi. He was killed by anti-American jihadists battling the occupation of Libya, not ‘terrorists’.

Hillary Clinton, who is bankrolled by heavy-duty neocons, holds chief responsibility for two calamities: the overthrow of Gaddafi and Syria’s terrible civil war. Gaddafi had been restraining numerous North African jihadist groups. After his overthrow, they poured south into the Sahel and sub-Saharan regions, menacing western-dominated governments.

We also learn that Clinton’s State Department green lighted over $150 billion of arms sales to 16 repressive nations that had donated large sums to the Clinton Foundation – a sort of government in exile for the Clinton clan. All very sordid business. No wonder so many Americans are furious at their political class. Lots of ammo for Donald Trump.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘Hillary haunted by Libya’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org