Chris Nineham
The news of the killing of the US ambassador in Libya along with several other US officials shows how hollow is the West’s triumphalism over last year’s operation to remove Colonel Gadhafi.
We were led to believe that the West’s military operation, which started with a humanitarian ‘no fly zone’ and morphed quickly into a massive air assault on pro-Ghadafi forces — killing tens of thousands — would bring democracy to the country. Instead it has left the country decimated, ethnically divided, and with a strong strain of anti western feeling. The Libyan Observatory for Human Rights says, “The human rights situation in Libya now is far worse than under the late dictator Muammar Gaddafi.”
The film which has sparked protests in Libya and Cairo — called the Innocence of Muslims — was clearly a deliberate provocation. Made in the United States by two film makers with deeply anti-Islamic views — one of them an Israeli American — it claims Mohammed was a fraud, and dresses up a series of insults against him as revelations.
The makers of the film are clearly in part responsible for the deaths of the first US ambassador to be killed in over two decades and three members of his staff.
But the virulent Islamophobia portrayed in their film has also been a prominent feature of the ‘war on terror’ for the past eleven years. And the widespread anti-western sentiment across the Middle East and North Africa is the legacy of the political and social chaos generated by the brutal wars that the West has pursued against Muslim countries.
The attack in Benghazi shows how futile and damaging western intervention is. The disintigration into a new tyrrany in Iraq, the disastrous war in Afghanistan, the destabalising of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia by illegal drone attacks, show how everywhere the US and its allies intervene, the only result is mass slaughter and destruction, making the world ever more unstable and insecure.
Yet instead of learning the lessons from the last decade of endless war, Barack Obama, David Cameron and their Nato allies are threatening more war against Syria and Iran. Which is why the anti-war movement must continue to campaign against all western intervention in other people’s countries, and for all foreign troops to leave.
