After Iraq and Afghanistan, it beggars belief that fresh military intervention in Libya is given as any sort of solution
Lindsey German
Last Friday US aircraft attacked Islamic State in Libya, killing 41 in a training camp. Now Italy has agreed the use of a base in Sicily for US drone strikes on Libya. There is talk of full military intervention there, in what the Guardian describes as ‘the new frontier of the western war against Islamic State.’ Yet another country which has received more than its due attention from western powers has suddenly found that there is a problem of Islamic State and other forms of terrorism.
IS, formed during the occupation of Iraq, spreading to Syria where it has been the subject of 18 months of western bombing, and now gaining ground in Afghanistan, is a terrible and reprehensible organisation. But who can deny that it is a product of war, its support nurtured in conditions of occupation, bombing and airstrikes.
Libya has been divided by civil war for half a decade now, its rival governments based in Tobruk and Tripoli, its people suffering terribly, many of them fleeing across the Mediterranean in the most dangerous conditions.
The catastrophe which has enveloped Libya is barely noticed or remarked on by most western politicians. Yet it is connected to the intervention carried out there in 2011, when a UN backed intervention was spearheaded by the UK, France and Italy, and David Cameron was one of its major cheerleaders.
The aim supposedly was to prevent a massacre in Benghazi; in reality the aim was regime change, to overthrow the country’s president, Muammar Gadaffi, whose erstwhile cooperation and dealings with Tony Blair was not enough to prevent him being ousted, dying an ignominious death.
But the achievement of regime change did nothing to create a more stable society. In a depressingly familiar set of events, mirroring those in Afghanistan and Iraq, overthrow of a tyrannical leader and unpopular regime was reality straightforward, given the west’s vastly superior air power and resources. Time and again the second part of the plan – the establishment of stable democratic states _ fail before they even begin.
In Libya, a whole state has been systematically destroyed, to the extent that it cannot establish any unified and recognised government which could invite the military intervention some in the west now crave. Among other features of Libyan society now is not just the existence of IS around Sirte in the north, but the export of terrorism and weapons to Syria and to other parts of Africa, the lack of any civil society and a grim future for the people there.
It beggars belief that, given its record in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in Syria, fresh military intervention is given as any sort of solution to these problems.
The only way it can be justified is to ignore these previous horrors and pretend that every time we are starting from scratch. However, it is impossible to ignore the cumulative effect of all four British military interventions in the profoundly misnamed war on terror. All of the wars still continue, out of sight much of the time but evidenced by the influx of refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The latest, in Syria, was applauded in parliament but has involved very little military action on the part of Britain.
They are all about imperialist strategic and political interest, which leaves the people of the Middle East in a state of permanent instability and danger. These latest plans will only help to worsen that.
