No man can take away freedom from another without losing his own
The cast of villains in Libya’s fall is myriad and varied: war criminals George W. Bush and ‘poodle’ Tony Blair who first set the neo-con’s Middle East conquest-ball rolling, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nicholas Sarkozy and Alain Juppe, David Cameron, NATO, the Arab League (read Saudi Arabia), the African Union, and to a lesser degree, Russia and China who fatally failed to veto the UNSC resolution 1973 (2011) of 17 March 2011 that was to seal Qaddafi’s fate
Twenty two years old Salman Abedi’s name will long live in infamy as the suicide bomber who drove himself and twenty two innocent people to an untimely and unnatural death, condemning the victim’s families to lifelong trauma. The rock concert turned into a danse macabre for the mostly teenage fans that had congregated at the venue. And thereby hangs a tale of overweening hubris, deception, imperial pretensions and limitless greed.
Countless incidents of similar deadly and tragic nature have occurred ever since the US-led ‘coalition of the willing’ invaded Iraq in 2003 on trumped-up charges, making it the second Islamic country after Afghanistan to be invaded, brutalised and destabilised by ‘confidence trickster’ western leaders. What drove the British born and bred Salman Abedi, living a peaceful and no doubt comfortable life in the north of England and a world apart from the incessant atrocities and horrors of the civil war raginginhis native Libya, which he had reportedly recently visited, to resort to this agonising ‘emergency exit’? Pent-up anger, a feeling of helplessness and blind hatred must be present to an inordinate degree, no doubt intensified by the free-for all turmoil, the anarchy and the havoc he saw in his former homeland: Two national governments, sundry rogue militias and jihadi groups, al Qaeda and ISIS, and a so-called Loyalist National Army, all at each other’s throats for control of cities, regions, enclaves and the oil-rich regions. So the two worlds, East and West, now overlap, though it is the Middle East, and their twain have met, unlike as in the Kipling verse, but in tragic circumstances. The west has haughtily and myopically sown the military imperialist wind in the Levant and is now reaping the tragic but inevitable whirlwind of the deadly lone wolf attacks all over Europe.
For all his later eccentricities, embarrassing clowning and bizarre lifestyle, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi in his 41-year iron rule since taking over in 1969, transformed Libya into an African (and Middle Eastern) version of a welfare state. Libya had the highest GDP per capita income in Africa, the highest life expectancy, free education, free medical facilities of a high quality, cash grants to mothers with newborn babies and for newlyweds, loans at zero percent interest by the State Bank of Libya, cheap petrol, a literacy rate of 87 percent, with 25 percent earning university degrees, and the ultimate eye-opener for Pakistanis (ruled by democrats as compared with the ‘tyrant’ and ‘vicious dictator’ Qaddafi), free electricity (yes, no power bills!) and zero external debt. So, it was a quite a different Libya until 2011, when the flaming imperialist anger brought death and destruction on the inhabitants, turning the country into the present failed state and making it a breeding ground of terrorists of all stripes, the outlaws of religion and Cain’s of mankind, who especially targettedangry and impressionable young men like Salman Abedi for their gruesome ends.
The cast of villains in Libya’s fall is myriad and varied: war criminals George W. Bush and ‘poodle’ Tony Blair who first set the neo-con’s Middle East conquest-ball rolling, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nicholas Sarkozy and Alain Juppe, David Cameron, NATO, the Arab League (read Saudi Arabia), the African Union, and to a lesser degree, Russia and China who fatally failed to veto the UNSC resolution 1973 (2011) of 17 March 2011 that was to seal Qaddafi’s fate. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe was the driving spirit behind the resolution that called for a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians, but unfortunately also contained the seemingly innocuous lines, ‘or other purposes deemed necessary for the benefit of the Libyan people’ which provided NATO with a convenient umbrella for ferocious air strikes in favour of the Libyan rebels. Juppe moved the resolution with the familiar ‘crimes against humanity’ drama, which applies only to states other than the USA, UK, France, and of course, the Wise Men of Zion. Protection of Libyan civilians and ‘humanitarian assistance’ were his hysterical propaganda and pitch: ‘We have very little time left — perhaps only a matter of hours — each passing hour increased the weight on the international community’s shoulders’. Sarkozy referred to Qaddafi’s ‘murderous madness’ and the ‘anguished appeal’ of the Libyan people, while David Cameron insisted that launching military action was ‘necessary, legal and right’, and the usual suspects then in such cases, Britain’s Mark Lyall Grant and the US Ambassador Susan Rice, rendered similar sob stories to win over hesitant voices.
So, while the vast majority in the Muslim world feels for the 22 lives cut short in the Manchester suicide bombing, and the distress of their families, it must also confront the stark fact of hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists vacuum cleaned by arrogant and ravenous western leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, while smashing the social, economic, political and military infrastructures of their hapless victims
Gaddafi, chastened by the regime change in Iraq in 2003, desperately sought to avoid a Saddam Hussein-like fate. As appeasement, he voluntarily renounced his chemical, nuclear weapons and long range ballistic missile programmes on 19 December 2003, and also meekly acquiesced to a $2.7 billion compensation for the 270 victims of the Pan Am flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, Scotland, for which he had long been blamed without a shred of evidence. On 25 February 2011, as civil war rapidly engulfed Libya, Qaddafi warned Tony Blair on telephone, ‘They (jihadists)want to control the Mediterranean and then they will attack Europe’ and in a letter to Obama, he appealed to him to ‘annul a wrong action’ of breaking off diplomatic ties while blaming the Libyan uprising on al Qaeda. Tragically prophetic words and sound advice by the wily old Libyan leader, both rebuffed, resulting in his barbaric murder on 20 October 2011 and leading, through the long trail of debris of the Libyan civil war, obliquely to the Manchester tragedy. The USA, UK and French ‘humanitarian intervention’, in reality a fierce bombing campaign, and the subsequent civil war in Libya havereportedly claimed 30,000 Libyan lives, and injuries to 50,000 and counting.
The obsession with imposed regime change, the destruction of another Muslim country which mightpose a threat to Israel and of course, oil, Libya’s sweet light crude, ideal for producing diesel, the fuel widely used in European countries, became the trophies for which Libya was reduced from a prosperous, cohesive, secular country into a broken, fragmented and perpetually civil war-riven nation. The same hardcore trio’s similar goals and tactics in Syria have failed so far, though at great human and material cost, because Russia and China are extremely wary after the Libyan catastrophe which followed the adoption of Resolution 1973 and the threat of a veto on US ambitions constricts any extreme misadventures and shenanigans.
Hardly constitutionally unstable or afflicted with insanity, as the western media gleefully portrays him, Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, is in fact logical in his single-minded pursuit of nuclear weapons and inter-continental ballistic missiles, especially after Libyan events. On Qaddafi’s voluntary disarmament from his WMD’s, the North Koreans commented that ‘Libyan’s took the economic bait, but foolishly disarmed themselves, and once they were defenceless, were mercilessly punished by the West’. Instead of expecting to browbeat Kim into winding down his nuclear and missile programmes, the US must justifiably expect ‘bigger gift packages’ from this volatile quarter.
So, while the vast majority in the Muslim world feels for the 22 lives cut short in the Manchester suicide bombing, and the distress of their families, it must also confront the stark fact of hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists vacuum cleaned by arrogant and ravenous western leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, while smashing the social, economic, political and military infrastructures of their hapless victims and directly contributing to the worldwide rise of extremism, sectarianism, jihadi radicalism and savage warlords. They also remember the nearly 500,000 children (also human) who died as a result of US sanctions on the Saddam Hussein regime and on which the US Secretary of State Madeline Albright callously commented publicly ‘I think that is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it’. And so, ‘The truth cannot be hid, Somebody chose their pain, What needn’t have happened did’. Only a Nuremberg type trial of the responsible western leaders for ‘waging aggressive war’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ can abate somewhat the fury felt in the Muslim world.
