Libya without Gaddafi.

"I am the one who created Libya, and I will be the one to destroy it." - Muammar al-Gaddafi

The personalised regime of Colonel Gaddafi has taken a page out of the Israelis' book and resorted to using cluster bombs against the population. The 1.2 million people who have been maimed, mutilated or murdered under him is a long way from the reforms delivered in the 1970s which provided the Libyan people with free health-care and free education. Nasser said of Gaddafi shortly before his death "I rather like Gaddafi. He reminds me of myself when I was that age." By the end of the decade Gaddafi had emerged as the dominant figure from a power struggle in the regime with a faction seeking to embark on greater socio-economic development. With the rival faction crushed, Gaddafi moved to support terrorist groups abroad until he became a scapegoat for the US government and Libya endured a US bombing campaign. The evidence which ties the Libyan regime to the Lockerbie bombing and the disco bombing in Germany is highly questionable. But it is undoubtedly true that Gaddafi supported the IRA and other groups.

And yet we know that the US and the UK, among other states, have intervened to block attempts to charge Gaddafi with the crimes he has committed against his own people. This is just after the international tribunal on crimes committed in Sierra Leone and the trial of Charles Taylor came to an end. All the while the media focus in Britain is still on the matter of al-Megrahi and David Cameron talks as if Gaddafi will face a war crimes tribunal. Keep in mind that it would seem that the Obama administration are bailing out the regime in Tripoli. The Central Bank of Libya has been exempted from the sanctions imposed on the country by the US. Though it is not that the US is looking to prop up the Colonel, the regime is to be reconstituted including the bourgeois tendencies of Benghazi that have agreed to respect old oil arrangements and may have even agreed recognise the state of Israel. It should also be noted that the military leadership of the rebels have links with the CIA.

The National Council in Benghazi is not totally representative of the rebellion as a grass-roots movement for democracy. The National Council consists of professional politicians and military officials, mostly defectors from the Gaddafi regime. As many of the rebels have been maimed and killed in battle, the rebellion overall has lost it's "popular character" in that the real decisions are being made in Benghazi. The rebel forces are being armed with weapons from Qatar and there have been moves to export Libyan oil through Qatar. These are the reasons that the recent summit was held in Doha, it had nothing to do with what might be best for Libyans. Though the possibility of recognising the National Council as the official government of Libya was discussed. It should also be noted that Qatar has been in bed with the US for many years. Qatar was on board with the intervention from the beginning and was one of the biggest advocates of a no-fly zone.

The way in which Qatar has acted is not a simple expression of self-interest, it should be understood as a part of the GCC as well as an extension of US-Israeli interests in the region. The major issues are oil and the tacit alliance between Israel and many Arab states. The fall of Gaddafi is welcome because he has outlived his usefulness, the rebels have seized control of the oil fields in the country and have produced a government which is even more insidiously pro-Western than before. It may even be under this leadership that the country could undergo further neoliberal reforms, which would continue the decline of health-care, education and standards of living. All of which began as Gaddafi sought to improve relations with the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union and had succeeded by the early 2000s. But as the rebel forces might be able to take Tripoli there has been talk of a "boots on the ground" intervention and a partitioned country as previously mentioned.

Whether or not the rebels can actually take Tripoli is the most important factor, a fractured nation could be the result of this conflict and a Gulf emirate model could emerge in the oil-rich east whilst western Libya descends into poverty. This might be seen as a pragmatic solution by the US, Britain and France. A further inflammation of tensions between rival tribes, as well as religious sects, as class interests relate to the geographic situation of particular tribes. This is a serious possibility as a great deal of the oil fields have been secured. A partition along such lines would be a disaster, as similar partitions have been in Ireland, Cyprus and Palestine. Even if Tripoli is taken Libya might only emerge as a bourgeois democracy, at best, with the regime only fragmented and the Colonel deposed. This might make it a wonderful holiday destination for white people, whether or not it would improve health-care in the country is another matter.

The Importance of the GCC.

The Heart of Capitalism in the Middle East.

The Gulf Cooperation Council consists of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. It is generally dominated by Saudi Arabia, which is the largest and most prominent member-state with the biggest oil reserves. As part of globalisation, the GCC is a form of economic integration on the Arab Peninsula. Since 1981 it has moved to a customs union with joint-armed forces and there is now talk of a monetary union. The GCC being the heart of capitalism in the Middle East, itself a huge investor in the global economy with a prominent place in global finance as well as the oil trade. All of these states have a tacit alliance with Israel. Gaddafi has dubbed the council the "Gulf Uncooperative Council" as it recently sided with the US against him. The GCC is actively involved in the exportation of oil from the rebel-controlled east of the country. The GCC organised the recent summit in Qatar and has been supplying the Libyan rebels with arms.

US interests in the region rely on the ability of the GCC to repress opposition in countries like Bahrain. With Saudi Arabia in the lead, the Peninsula Shield Force, the military wing of the GCC has intervened against the uprising in Bahrain with the supposed aim of protecting the country and it's military infrastructure from "foreign interference". Officially, the fear is that the Shi'ite population might be trying to establish an Islamic state in the Gulf modelled on Iran. Interestingly, the GCC was formed in an effort by these countries to insulate themselves from the conflict between Iran and Iraq. Though the GCC supported Saddam Hussein against Ayatollah Khomeini for fear of that the "Islamic Revolution" could spread. In such a scenario the precious oil fields could be threatened, as the people living on the land are predominantly Shi'ite Muslim. When Iraq attempted to annex Kuwait in 1990 the GCC immediately made moves to ostracise Iraq and went on to participate in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq.

The Peninsula Shield Force is a counter-revolutionary force which any uprising will have to confront and fend off in order to succeed. This kind of force is necessary to maintain order as the contradiction between market and mosque can undermine such order. The tendency of the market is towards a secular, relativistic and rational individualism. So long as the hegemony of capitalism is maintained and the population remain obedient to that extent, what goes on behind closed doors is a secondary affair. Secularism and relativism are opposed to the Judeo-Islamic values and beliefs prevalent in a place like the United Arab Emirates. The contradiction emerges as the Islamic establishment is necessary for the market to reign unperturbed. The Saudi Princes can only sit around drinking whiskey and smoking expensive cigars because there is a puritan order that formally forbids this behaviour but permisses the concentration of such immense wealth.

There is something of this contradiction in US foreign policy, in that the support lent to Islamism is in contradiction with the "promotion" of neoliberalism. The economic and spiritual wasteland created by liberal capitalism, leaves people to search for an exclusive identity as a source of meaning. It can be found in nationalist and fundamentalist ideology. Arab nationalism offers a secular model, which would be preferable for capitalism, it also has plans for socialistic reforms and a unified pan-Arab state. On the other hand, Islamism posits an identity based on a rigid interpretation of Islam combined with a promised "rebirth" of the Caliphate through terrorism. A version of either can be utilised provided that it is hollowed out. So long as the Taliban will build an oil pipe-line for Unocal, the bans on all music, art and culture can be tolerated. Similarly, Egypt was rehabilitated after the socialistic reforms were reversed and relations with Israel opened up in the 1970s.

The economic interests of the GCC converge with the interests of the US and Israel, in terms of oil and security. The US Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain for this reason. What is less well known is that Qatar is home to a major outpost of US military coordination, one of nearly 30 similar outposts around the world, as well as a huge air-force from where attacks on Pakistan might have been launched by the US. The GCC played a vital role in the coordination of the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the bombing of Pakistan. There are also over 100,000 US troops stationed on military bases in GCC states. The major US objectives are to maintain the tacit alliance between Arab states and Israel whilst the extraction of oil can continue, which presupposes a repressed population. With these objectives in mind the US is acting to change the trajectory of the recent uprisings and "guide" the revolutionary fervour in accordance with it's own ends.

Critical Thoughts on the Intervention in Libya.

 "Despotism is a legitimate form of government in dealing with barbarians, provided that the end be their improvement." - JS Mill

Since the UN sanctioned an intervention in Libya to impose a no-fly zone, by shooting down planes and air-strikes against Gaddafi strongholds, there has been word of civilian killings in air-strikes and a great deal of ambiguity in the press about the nature of the intervention. An intervention that is being executed by the US, along with former colonial giants: Britain, France and Italy et al. The no-fly zone has been imposed in the midst of massacres carried out by death squads hired from Serbia by the "Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution". We have seen the way Iman al-Obeidi has been silenced after she claimed to have been raped by the counter-revolutionaries. At the same time the colonial past of Libya should not be forgotten, in the thirty-plus years of Italian colonial rule over 500,000 Libyans died - including 60,000 in concentration camps. The sheer brutality in which Libya was dominated by the Italians can be distinguished from colonial regimes in Egypt and Morocco.

This is the reason, as pointed out by Richard Seymour, that the vilification of Colonel Gaddafi is a way of externalising evil from the West. The man referred to as a "Mad Dog" is to be understood within a historical context, in which he is responsible for his own actions but not the pre-conditions of such choices and decisions. If he had been born into a respectable middle-class family in a country which was not recently ravaged by colonial genocide. But if that were the case he would not be Gaddafi. It is true that the Colonel is a despicable human being who has slaughtered civilians, as well as political prisoners and exiled dissidents in the past. As David Fox insists that we have the right to strike at Gaddafi from the air, conveniently there is no mention of the potential civilian deaths this might incur. Instead The Sun resorts to the line that the death squads of Gaddafi are 'posing' as civilians to evade attacks from "Our Boys". But also that there were 300 civilian supporters, including children, of Gaddafi being used unwittingly as "human shields". So if we kill any civilians, they might not be civilians but if they turn out to be it was Gaddafi's fault anyway.


This is the routine line of the press used reflexively to cleanse "Our Boys" of any responsible for bloodshed and in this case it was deployed in advance by the Right. It has been used to defend the use of white phosphorus in Gaza and Iraq in the past. You might even hear from reactionaries a similar plea to defend war crimes committed in Afghanistan. Terms like "Mad Dog" are applied in disregard of the details, in the same way that Hugo Chavez is repeatedly labelled a "dictator", the BBC labelled Nasser as a "barking dictator" just as the British were about to be humiliated in the Suez Canal. Nasser was a bourgeois nationalist and a dictator, but the policies he initiated were far better for the majority of Egyptians than the infitah reforms of Sadat and Mubarak. Not to mention that it was Mubarak who kept prisons where children could be tortured in front of their parents, but this is conveniently absent in the Western media and Tony Blair still insisted that Mubarak is a "force for good". Incidentally Saddam Hussein, a monster if there ever was one, was described as a "little Hitler" even though all of his atrocities were supported by the US and Britain.

"We have to reserve the right to bomb the niggers." - David Lloyd George

We were also told that it was Saddam who was to blame for the "missing" weapons of mass-destruction. It was also the fault of the Iraqi army that the military targets were situated among civilians, effectively using them as "human shields". When it would be laughable to expect the American government to build administrative buildings and military offices in the middle of a deserted landscape in Utah. This kind of thinking is ignorant the crimes of Fallujah, we ought not elevate it to a level where it can gain a monopoly over the moral high-ground. We should also keep in mind that the West has effectively taken a hypocritical stance of aggression in this instance. There is support for an intervention in Libya as the regime slaughters it's own people, but the US fully supports the repression currently going on in Bahrain and Yemen among other places. The repression has been comparably successful. Western interests are being defended by the cops on the beat, namely the Saudis. Not like in Libya where the decision to crackdown on the population as a whole, not just demonstrations, led to a schism in the regime.

As John Rees pointed out prior to the intervention, the rebels have acquired some air capability which has been overlooked in the media. Numerous officials of government and the military have defected as a result of Gaddafi's horrendous onslaught. A few jets have been shot down by the rebels and hundreds of pro-Gaddafi troops have surrendered. But it might be rash to conclude that the rebels could easily defend themselves from Gaddafi's jets without any assistance. The Left accept intervention from Egypt and Tunisia, in the form of weapons and funding for the rebels, is necessary. We all agree that some kind of intervention is necessary, because a non-interventionist position would presuppose that we had never meddled in Libya in the first place. We're embedded in the situation, Gaddafi emerged as an alternative to pro-Western monarchy and provided crude answers to the legitimate grievances of Libyan people. Let alone the sanctions used to punish Libya, which destroyed the welfare state developed in the 1970s and led to neoliberal reforms in the 21st Century.


We can see the liberal doctrine of interventionism is being reheated and served on plastic plates. Intervention is not inherently imperialist, the context and details matter. After all it is true that the Anglo-French intervention against Germany in 1939 was a reaction to the German invasion of Poland, which was at the time a military dictatorship, this is the closest we've ever come to a just war. It is not that the intervention in Libya fits the model of a just war and Gaddafi is not Hitler. The cause for intervention was to avert a massacre in Benghazi. The intervention in Libya might well lead to a destructive partition which would leave the country torn in two, festering rage between an impoverished west and an oil-rich east. The West might support the rebellion in order to remove the annoying dictator completely, but the air-strikes could escalate into an intervention with "boots on the ground" as the major threat to Benghazi is artillery. The threat of greater civilian casualties would only increase as a result.