Obama and Libya

What Obama did to Libya is as bad as what Bush did to Iraq and Afghanistan. He doesn’t deserve a historical pass.
When Obama took office in 2009, Libya was under the clutches of long-time dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. But things were looking up.
Bush and Gaddafi had cut a deal to lift western trade sanctions in exchange for Libya acknowledging and paying restitution for its role in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In a rare triumph for Bush, Libya also agreed to give up its nuclear weapons research program. Libyan and western analysts anticipated that Gaddafi’s dictatorship would be forced to accept liberal reforms, perhaps even free elections and rival political parties, in order to attract western investment.
Libya in 2009 was prosperous. As citizens of a major oil- and natural gas-exporting nation, Libyans enjoyed high salaries, low living expenses, generous social benefits, not to mention law and order. It seems like a mirage today.
As a dictator, Gaddafi was guilty of horrendous human rights abuses. But life was better then than now. Women enjoyed more rights in Libya than in any other Arab country, particularly after the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein in Iraq. By regional standards, Libya was a relatively sweet place to live.
In February 2011, militant Islamists based in the eastern city of Benghazi launched an armed insurgency against Gaddafi’s central government in the capital of Tripoli. The rebels were linked in the imaginations of American newsmedia and US foreign policy officials to the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt’s Tahrir Square. But the Benghazi-based rebels, with close ties to Al-Qaeda, were ideologically closer to the Free Syrian Army fighters who eventually metastasized into Isis.
Within the CIA and Defence departments, no one was sure who the insurgents were or what they wanted. Nonetheless the Obama administration covertly supplied them with at least $1 billion in cash and weapons.
Obama threw Gaddafi, whose regime was secular and by all accounts had been cooperative and held up his end of the deals with US, under the bus.
American forces jammed Libyan military communications. The US fired missiles to intercept Libyan missiles fired at rebel targets. The US-led numerous airstrikes against units loyal to Gaddafi. US intervention turned the tide in favour of the Benghazi-based rebels.
In October 2011, one of Obama’s killer robot drones participated in Gaddafi’s assassination. Game over.
In 2015, the UK Guardian reports, Libya is in danger of meeting the official international definition of a failed state.
To Obama’s credit, he admits it. Unfortunately, he drew the wrong lesson. In 2014, he told an interviewer that a large ground invasion force might have helped Libya’s post-Gaddafi government succeed. Because that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan. But if he really believes that, why doesn’t he order in the troops?
Obama’s real mistake was to depose a secular socialist autocrat and allow him to be replaced by a bunch of crazy militias whose factionalism ensured they’d never be able to govern.
Bush committed this error in Iraq. Obama made it in Libya. And now he’s doing it again in Syria.
Excerpted from: ‘Obama destroyed Libya’.
Courtesy: Commondreams.org