In the sordid history of American imperialism, the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya remains an event many are keen to forget. Historical amnesia is a mainstay in the United States empire, but even as Thursday marked the five-year anniversary of Muammar Gaddafi’s murder by Western-backed rebels, the blowback from the Obama administration’s Libya intervention persists.
The North African country has essentially become a lawless hellhole, where armed militias maintain a climate of unhinged violence.
The global migrant crisis has also engulfed Libya. More than 3,000 refugees were rescued off the Libyan coast this weekend; but what awaits them on the shore are detention centers and a human trafficking economy that TIME magazine has deemed a “modern day slave market” where “humanity ceases to exist.”
If that wasn’t enough, the U.S. has begun yet another bombing campaign on Libyan soil, this time against forces of the Islamic State that have gained a footing in the war-torn nation. The Libya intervention showed the kind of brutal neocolonialism the West has displayed time and again in its suppression of Third World peoples.
Colonel Gaddafi, despite his countless faults, has now became a martyr in the centuries-old struggle between the majority of the world’s inhabitants and the imperialists that exploit them.
Though Gaddafi was maligned as a murderous dictator by U.S. officials, one cannot deny his prophetic words spoken several months before his death. “I play, personally, a stabilizing role in the African region,” he said. “If the situation in Libya is destabilized, then Al Qaeda will take command here. Libya will turn into a second Afghanistan and the terrorists will roam across Europe.”
Yet, Gaddafi stood no chance against the West’s empty intentions of bringing “democracy” to Libya, a democracy no different than the one brought to the people of Vietnam and Iraq.
In this democracy, the Libyan people are maimed and starved while the country’s National Oil Corporation is on track to produce 900,000 barrels of crude per day by the end of 2016.
Yes, it should be no surprise that the American empire merely pays lip service to its quasi-democratic principles, if and only if it can function as a means of capitalist exploitation.
We should not forget the humanitarian rhetoric employed to justify the intervention either. I went back and watched President Obama’s speeches on Libya.
They’re full of liberal platitudes fit for any Nobel Peace prize winner. He accuses Gaddafi of “intimidation and suppression” against civilians, and that a lack of U.S. action would result in a “humanitarian crisis.”
Increasingly, the war machine has been reinvented by shrouding itself in humanitarian rhetoric, rationalizing its mass murdering tendencies with lofty smoke and mirrors about how the U.S. must protect civilians.
To quote Eleanor Roosevelt, “All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished.” These words are the dangers of American imperialism the public must be made aware of.
To illustrate, 9/11 is an example of the boomerang, a day that is merely a fraction of the destruction exported by the U.S. over decades. However, with no major antiwar movement or political party, we are destined to be struck by the boomerang over again.
President Obama may be guilty of destroying this country’s antiwar sentiment more than anyone else.
If a Republican had carried out the atrocities Obama has, antiwar demonstrations would be a part of daily life. Obama, always a fine public relations man, has sold humanitarian war to a new generation.
Met with no opposition, his successor will do the same.
luwrobin@umail.iu.edu
