Libya At Any Cost: Warmongers Seek Escalation

Dees Illustration

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Bangkok, Thailand May 6, 2011 – “It is a test that the international community has to pass. Failure would shake further the faith of the people’s region in the emerging international order and the primacy of international law.” This comes from Brookings Institution’s “Libya’s Test of the New International Order,” February 2011.

Perhaps no single statement encapsulates better what the war in Libya is really about. Incentives for collaborators most certainly include Libya’s oil, the exploitation of their people, and the destruction of a financial, economic, political, and strategic competitor in the region. However, the exercise of the global corporate-financiers’ “primacy” over national sovereignty and the alarming, subsequent implications such an assertion represents, is the fundamental motivation driving this war.

This quite literally is a test of the West’s proposed global governance system. As we watch Al-Qaeda rebels move westward to Tripoli with US air support, and as they conduct an array of crimes against humanity, we can see just how ignoble, morally bankrupt, and self-serving the true intentions of global governance really are. And even as the war’s outcome rests in uncertainty, the “Libyan Precedent” is already being wielded against Syria and other nation-states resisting openly admitted, foreign-funded sedition.

The History of Libya’s Long Battle Against the West

The very genesis of Al-Qaeda was in the mountains of Afghanistan during the 1980s Soviet invasion. The United States and Saudi Arabia along with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) assisted the Afghans in their fight against the Soviet war machine. It was during this time that many of today’s Libyan rebels were first brought into America’s budding “Islamic” foreign legion, also known as Al-Qaeda. These fighters would go back to Libya after the Soviets were expelled, and go on to support US and British efforts to remove Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from power.

For nearly 3 decades the US and British provided these Libyan fighters with weapons and support in their bid to oust the nationalistic Qaddafi. The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in particular, not only received aid and assistance from the West, but also from Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda “legionaries.” LIFG leader Noman Benotman literally stood face-to-face with Bin Laden, as he and his fighters trained and prepared for operations against Qaddafi with Al Qaeda’s assistance.

One such attack by the LIFG, reported by the Washington Post, saw two German anti-terrorism agents gunned down in 1994. Qaddafi’s attempt to subsequently issue an INTERPOL arrest warrant against Al Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden, who was supporting the LIFG at the time, was actually thwarted by British MI6. MI6, according to the Washington Post article, had been concurrently supporting the LIFG alongside Al Qaeda and the warrant wasn’t issued until 1998.

LIFG leader Noman Benotman now supports the armed, foreign-backed rebellion from his London sanctuary, alongside other Libyan rebel leaders, Syrian opposition leaders, Egyptians, Yemenis, Iranians, Thais, and a myriad of other foreign-funded exiled forces of sedition working on similar “revolutions” on behalf of their corporate-financier paymasters.

Additionally, and perhaps most damning, is current Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, who according to the London Telegraph, “fought against “the foreign [US] invasion” in Afghanistan, before being “captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan”. He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008.” Many of the fighters under Hasidi also fought in Iraq against US troops. The current rebel strongholds of Benghazi and Derna served as the premier recruiting grounds for Al-Qaeda forces during the Iraq War, according to a West Point military study. Quite literally, John McCain in his recent trip to Benghazi, was patting on the back and shaking the hands of the very men who sent Americans home in pine boxes from Iraq.

The following time line encapsulates this narrative and perhaps is the most instructive manner through which to view the current “spontaneous” conflict. We see quite clearly there was nothing “spontaneous” nor “indigenous” about the February 17, 2011 “Day of Rage,” nor the armed conflict that followed immediately afterward.

1980s: US-CIA backed National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) made multiple attempts to assassinate Qaddafi and initiate armed rebellion throughout Libya.
1990s: Noman Benotman and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) wage a campaign of terror against Qaddafi with Osama Bin Laden’s assistance.
1994: LIFG kills 2 German anti-terrorism agents. Qaddafi seeks arrest warrant for Osama Bin Laden in connection to the attack but is blocked by MI6 who was concurrently aiding the LIFG.
2003: Upon Qaddafi’s abandonment of WMD programs, Libya’s collaboration with MI6 & the CIA to identify and expose the LIFG networks begins, giving Western intelligence a windfall of information regarding the group. Ironically this information would give Western nations an entire army to rebuild and turn against Qaddafi in 2011.
2005: NFSL’s Ibrahim Sahad founds the National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO) in London England.
2011: Early February, the London based NCLO calls for a Libyan “Day of Rage,” beginning the “February 17th revolution.”
2011: Late February, NFSL/NCLO’s Ibrahim Sahad is leading opposition rhetoric, literally in front of the White House in Washington D.C. Calls for no-fly zone in reaction to unsubstantiated accusations Qaddafi is strafing “unarmed protesters” with warplanes.
2011: Late February, Senators Lieberman and McCain and UK PM David Cameron call for providing air cover for Libyan rebels as well as providing them additional arms.
2011: Early March; it is revealed UK SAS special forces are already operating inside Libya
2011: Mid-March; UN adopts no-fly zone over Libya, including air strikes. Immediately, the mission is changed from “protecting civilians” to “ousting Qaddafi.” Egypt violates the arms embargo of UN r.1973 with Washington’s full knowledge by supplying Libyan rebels with weapons, while Al Qaeda’s ties to the rebels are admitted by everyone including the rebels themselves.
2011: Late April; Documented evidence is revealed that Libya’s rebels are conducting a barbaric campaign, employing extrajudicial killings, indiscriminate military force, child-soldiers, landmines, and torture. New York Times blames a lack of support.
2011: Late April, early May; Followed by calls to assassinate Qaddafi, ordnance crash into his son’s home killing him and 3 of Qaddafi’s grandchildren. NATO concurrently seeks a new UN resolution authorizing ground troops while aggressor states seek to release seized Libyan assets to the rebels.

Escalation Inevitable

Viewed through the prism of history we see that this war did not start on February 17, 2011 with Qaddafi reportedly killing unarmed, peaceful protesters. This is the crescendo of 30 years of subversion, armed insurrection, terrorism, and extraterritorial military aggression on the part of the West and its proxies in eastern Libya as well as America’s Al-Qaeda foreign legion.

The war has descended into the realm of the surreal with John McCain walking amongst men who just finished tours in Iraq killing US troops. Equally surreal are senators calling for billions in aid to be handed over to rebels who are on record committing horrendous, documented crimes against humanity, and calls for national and international law to be thrown to the wayside in order to assassinate Libya’s leader Muammar Qaddafi.

NATO has been seeking a new resolution from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), calling UNSC r.1973 inadequate. NATO spokesman James Appathurai recently stated that, “the UN Security Council should adopt a new resolution on Libya. Resolution 1973 does not envisage land operations. We need a new resolution.” Of course, the architects behind the current and growing global conflagration have said as early as March that ground troops would be necessary and their inclusion in the assault on Libya were inevitable.

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Propagandist Bill Kristol of the Foundation for Defending Democracies (FDD) and the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) stated in a March 20, 2011 interview that, “no, we cannot leave Gaddafi in power and we won’t leave Gaddafi in power. The immediate military mission, Admiral Mullen correctly described but the political goal is to remove Gaddafi and ultimately military assets will serve that political goal. First we protect civilians and destroy his military capability. And then we help other remove him indirectly, presumably. Though I, unlike the president, would not rule out ultimately having to go in with peacekeeping and nation stabilizing forces. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we do that at the end of the day.”

Quite obviously this complete contradiction of the litany of lies the American public is fed on a daily basis is the blueprint that fellow FDD member Senator Joe Lieberman and International Republican Institute members Lindsey Graham and John McCain are channeling every time they belly up to a podium calling for an escalation of the war in Libya. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman both called for increased US intervention and to literally assassinate Qaddafi and his inner-circle.

Graham then took it upon himself to deride the UN mandate and even the UN’s authority in general by stating, “the people around Gadhafi need to wake up every day wondering, ‘Will this be my last?’ The military commanders in Tripoli supporting Gadhafi should be pounded. So I would not let the U.N. mandate stop what is the right thing to do. You cannot protect the Libyan people if Gadhafi stays. You cannot protect our vital national security interests if Gadhafi stays. You can’t let the Russians and the Chinese veto the freedom agenda. So any time you go to the United Nations Security Council, you run into the Russians and the Chinese. These are quasi-dictatorships, so I wouldn’t be locked down by the U.N. mandate.”

This of course, beckons one to question, if Graham and his corporate-financier sponsors aren’t beholden to the US Constitution or the United Nations, from where do they derive their authority? Graham, McCain, and Lieberman are not rogue politicians, they are the “elected representatives” of a global corporate-financier oligarchy who has apparently decided that the war with Libya will be won at any cost, with or without national or even contrived international legal groundings. It then would make little sense for us to shake our fists in anger at these puppet politicians, rather, we should direct our ire toward the unelected corporate-financier interests unilaterally driving this agenda.

It is essential that as the public grows increasingly aware that something is tragically wrong with our nation and indeed the “international community,” they also realize that localization, self-sufficiency, and true political and economic independence are the answers.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at 
Land Destroyer Report.