An Attempt to Seize Power

June 7, 2011

By Eddie McDaid,
special to The Libyan Civil War
via e-mail

While we are constantly reminded that much of the West's media is 'under strict control of the Libyan regime' we are undoubtedly subjected to skewed filtering of information lending itself to bolster any 'humanitarian' ideologies we are claiming are our reasons behind the repeated assasination attempts on Gaddafi. I think it's very important to remain sceptical and recognise the counter reports and claims about the 'rebels' and their actions, who might be behind them, and ultimately their vision of a 'free' Libya.

I'm not anti-intervention per se, but this current situation doesn't appear to, nor has anyone I know except some of the most rabid right wingers, been labelled as some sort of genocidal operation by the Libyan army, but more an emerging civil war with an already well armed group of rebel/protesters.

Indeed, if the accusation of moving towards any form genocidial agenda has been levelled against anyone in this conflict it is the 'rebels' and their treatment of black non-Libyans - the 'rebels', the ones we're arming and funding.

However, how sure are we of what is really going on? Are we there to support/defend ordinary 'protestors' or are we arming and providing support to essentially mob rule who are just as vicious as the current regime?

The oversimplification here is that Gaddafi is a bad man who is oppressing his own people and a group of rebels are trying to win democracy and liberty for the people and they need and should get our help. The complexity is that its actually far more like a tribal civil war and some people in Libya are just as frightened of the rebels as they are of Gaddafi. People can't go all realpolik on us about why its Libya and not somewhere else if you're supposedly supporting some high-minded principle of humanitarianism to justify this. It's either humanitarian or it isn't.

I strongly suspect that support for Gaddafi, as loony as he seems to us, is far greater in Libya than our media and politicians would want us to believe and that this rebellion is not in fact a popular uprising at all, but an attempt to seize power by forces funded and encouraged by us.

And now with the intervention of NATO, are we the real purveyors of death in Libya? If previous 'military interventions' are anything to go by, very many innocent people will suffer or die as a direct consequence of our actions.

I'm interested in getting both sides of the story, which is something you won't get from our politicians. Obviously Gaddafi is a lunatic and a thug, but what he actually does, and what the 'rebels' actually do will be grotesquely distorted by us in order to fit a simplistic good vs evil narrative in order to sell our imperialist intervention.

I don't know what the real motive is behind our intervention, but I'd hazard a guess that in an era of spiralling oil prices and serious worries about energy security it's about getting rid of the unpredictable anti west guy and replacing him with a more stable, dare I say it, pliant regime. And it always a nice bonus if you can get a government in place that's happy to take some of our cash and then let us privatize the shit out of all their natural resources and saddle them with loads of debt to 'help' them rebuild the stuff we blew up.

It's a kind of historical cycle. We intervene out of *insert whatever culturally acceptable fig leaf here* and breed the next generation of dictators, tyrants stoking up civil wars, which explode a few decades down the line meaning we have to intervene to mop it up. And repeat.

Our bombing of Libya to influence their internal politics is on the exact moral level of Al Qaeda bombing New York to influence American internal politics. And it seems to be having the same entirely predictable result.

A fascinating article here by Adam Curtis is well worth a read: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurti...d_baddies.html