Whose War Is It Anyway?

Politics is never black and white. I personally never can make sense of the multitude of motives, actions and reactions of the game players. However, the 'all bad' image of Qathafi is too bad to be true.

A man is known by the company he keeps. The Libyan leader garners support from the likes of Nelson Mandela,  Fiedel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Even the UN General Assembly report from earlier this year is mainly full of praise for the Libyan government. I personally found it baffling that any Libyan will seek support from America of all the places. Things may have changed since I was there in the 80s, but that does not mean history needs to be erased. Having lived in democratic Bangladesh since, and having some exposure to the democracies in the west, I am left with questions like: What makes a good leader? Which is the ideal method of governance? What makes one rebel a revolutionary, one a freedom fighter and another one a terrorist?

Even without my Libya experience, I believe I would still be skeptic about the Libyan uprising- the last war on Iraq having turned out the way it did, and the west spending billions with financial crisis hanging over their own heads.

So I tried to find out a little more than what was in the face... tried to evaluate the source, discern the context, read between the lines and try to put two and two together. On the world wide web, there are as many varieties of Qathafi's name as there are conspiracy theories for the NATO attack on Libya, ranging from Israel's quest for new world order, US-UK-French imperial expansionist militarism to another cold war, this time against China. While I have touched on some of the possible reasons for the attack on Libya, I wanted to focus on lesser publicized facts about Qathafi as well as the rebels of Libya. I tried to include a variety of sources, especially those with more references.  I am adding some excerpts, not summary though, from each as well:



Gaddafi’s journey across 42 years:
His rule saw him go from revolutionary hero to international pariah, to valued strategic partner and back to pariah again.
In the heady days of 1969 - when he seized power in a bloodless military coup - and the early 1970s, Muammar Gaddafi first set about tackling the unfair economic legacy of foreign domination. Significant [oil] reserves had been discovered in Libya in the late 1950s, but the extraction was controlled by foreign petroleum companies, which set prices to the advantage of their own domestic consumers and benefited from a half share in the revenue. Col Gaddafi demanded renegotiation of the contracts, threatening to shut off production if the oil companies refused. The gambit succeeded and Libya became the first developing country to secure a majority share of the revenues from its own oil production.

The Truth About Libya:
Libya consists of over 150 tribes, with the two main groups, the Meghabra living in Tripolitania in the west and the Wafallah living in Cyrenaica in the east. Previous attempts to unite these tribes by the Turkish (1855-1911) and ltalian (1911-43) colonial rulers failed and the country was split in two for administrative purposes.
Libya has the highest GDP in Africa, less than 5% of the population is classified as poor and it has fewer people living below the poverty datum line than for example in Holland. Life expectancy is 75 years and is the highest in Africa and 10% above the world average. Libya has a tolerable human rights record and stands at 61 on the International Incarceration Index, comparable with countries in central Europe (the lower the rating, the lower the standing - the USA occupies the no.1 spot!).

Library of Congress Country Studies- Libya>Role of the Government [referred to in U.S. State Department’s webpage on Libya]:
Consequently, the Qadhafi government has assigned high priority to the achievement of what it perceives as "true economic independence." Qadhafi's other principal economic objective has been to promote equity, which he equates with socialism.
Most of the post-1977 economic policy innovations of the Qadhafi government were designed to inhibit the private accumulation of wealth and promote an equitable distribution of the national income.
In 1978... he outlawed rental payments for property, changing all residential tenants into instant owners.


BBC - Libya crisis: what role do tribal loyalties play?:
During Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year rule, Libya has made great strides socially and economically thanks to its vast oil income, but tribes and clans continue to be part of the demographic landscape. Women in Libya are free to work and to dress as they like, subject to family constraints. And per capita income - while not as high as could be expected given Libya's oil wealth and relatively small population of 6.5m - is estimated at $12,000, according to the World Bank. Illiteracy has been almost wiped out, as has homelessness - a chronic problem in the pre-Gaddafi era, where corrugated iron shacks dotted many urban centres around the country.

Who is Muammar Gaddafi?:
When the media – in the service of the U.S. – praised the apartheid regime South Africa, young Gaddafi in Libya trained and sent them back with the best weapons to win freedom in South Africa. Gaddafi has supported the struggles of peoples for liberation in Nicaragua, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique.
This utterly ridiculous gossip of wealth and strange customs have always been exploited by the media, it was with Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez and etc. It is enough to be a serious ruler that does not seriously kneel down and cower in fear before the United States and is not intimidated to be demonised and disparaged by the mercenary media.

BBC - Libya's thirst for 'fossil water':
In August 1984, Muammar Al Qadhafi laid the foundation stone for the pipe production plant at Brega. The Great Man-Made River Project had begun. In September 1993, Phase I water from eastern well-fields [aquifers] reached Benghazi. Three years later, Phase II, bringing water to Tripoli from western well-fields was completed.
But the Great Man-Made River Project is much more than an extraordinary piece of engineering. They estimate that when the Great Man-Made River is completed, they will have spent almost $20bn. So far, that money has bought 5,000km of pipeline that can transport 6.5 million cubic metres of water a day from over 1,000 desert wells. The combination of water and oil has given Libya a sound economic platform.

Destroying a Country's Standard of Living: What Libya Had Achieved, What has been Destroyed:
Differently from other countries that went through a revolution – Libya is considered to be the Switzerland of the African continent...These developments are in sharp contrast to what most Third World countries were able to "achieve" under Western style "democracy" and "governance" in the context of a standard IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment program.
While rising food prices in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt spearheaded social unrest and political dissent, the system of food subsidies in Libya was maintained. Libya was one of the few countries in the developing World which maintained a system of price controls over essential food staples.

The Times - Gaddafi offers oil and power to people:
[Feb 2009] Many feel that they have not had their equal share even if outward signs of poverty in the deeply religious society are scarce. Satellite dishes adorn the low concrete apartment blocks; bread is cheap; petrol is 17 cents a litre, and imported cars carry families along the fertile coastal strip. Disaffection rarely spills into violence.
Forty years into the revolution he unleashed on Libya, Muammar Gaddafi has announced plans to dismantle the Government, hand the riches from Africa's biggest oil reserves to the people and nationalise foreign oil operations that have recently been allowed back into the country...The announcement has left diplomats and the 40 overseas oil companies operating in the country on edge.

Why The West Wants The Fall Of Gaddafi?:
Rousseau sets out ... four conditions for a country to be labelled a democracy and according to these Gaddafi’s Libya is far more democratic than the USA, France and the others claiming to export democracy.
Libya has much more to teach than those fighting it now, and not the contrary. In the USA, 5 per cent of the population owns 60 per cent of the national wealth, making it the most unequal and unbalanced society in the world.
Also see: [Mar 29] Declaration of Dignity - The Tripoli Statement by former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney

Gold, Oil, Africa and Why the West Wants Gadhafi Dead:
The AU is the framework the Libyan leader was using to establish African self determination and economic self-sufficiency. An example of such projects was installing independent satellite communications across Africa. The continent was burdened with an annual $500 million fee paid to Europe for satellite usage. Col. Gadhafi infused $300 million into African satellites costing a onetime payment of $400 million and no annual fee.
The moves are also bad for France because when the African Monetary Fund and the African Central Bank in Nigeria starts printing gold-backed currency, it would “ring the death knell" for the CFA franc through which Paris was able to maintain its neocolonial grip on 14 former African colonies for the last 50 years.

Muammar Al Gaddafi Meets His Own Rebels:
If Muammar Al Gaddafi behaved paranoid, it was for good reason. It wasn’t long after... 1969, that threats to his power and life emerged - from monarchists, Israeli Mossad, Palestinian disaffections, Saudi security, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO), British intelligence, United States antagonism and, in 1995, the most serious of all, Al Qaeda-like Libyan Islamic fighting group.
Attempts on his life occurred often. U.S. ’surgical strikes’ on Tripoli, in 1986, clearly aimed to kill the Libyan leader.
British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice [The Observer].

Lockerbie and the Bulgarian Nurses:
It was understood [by Liyan people] that Gaddafi had finally given in to Western pressure to accept responsibility – but not guilt – for Lockerbie merely in order to get the unpopular sanctions lifted... Hans Kochler, UN-appointed special observer to the Lockerbie trial, thought Megrahi may have been subjected to “morally outrageous” blackmail to abandon his appeal against his will... leaving the CIA frame-up officially unexposed.
Harriet Washington in a New York Times column: "The evidence against the Bulgarian medical team, like H.I.V.-contaminated vials discovered in their apartments, has seemed to Westerners preposterous. But to dismiss the Libyan accusations of medical malfeasance out of hand means losing an opportunity to understand why a dangerous suspicion of medicine is so widespread in Africa".... Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov complained to a European summit in Brussels that key members of that council in Benghazi “are the people who tortured the Bulgarian medics for eight years".
See also Lockerbie: Human rights lawyer states Megrahi was framed and Lockerbie: Megrahi was framed by John Pilger

Gold, Oil, Africa and Why the West Wants Gadhafi Dead:
In the months leading up to the military intervention, he called on African and Muslim nations to join together to create this new currency that would rival the dollar and euro. They would sell oil and other resources around the world only for gold dinars. It is an idea that would shift the economic balance of the world.
Also see Libya: It’s Not About Oil, It’s About Currency and Loans and Saving the world economy from Gaddafi.

Reuters - Anti-Gaddafi figures say not contacting foreign govts:
Opponents of Muammar Gaddafi based in eastern Libya said on Sunday they did not want any foreign intervention in the country and said they had not made contact with foreign governments. The comments were made by a spokesman for a new National Libyan Council, which was formed after a meeting in Benghazi. The spokesman described the council as the face of the revolution and not an interim government.

The media misinformation campaign behind the war:
According to the U.S. government’s own sources: As the February 17 2011 “day of rage” neared...the maelstrom irrupted in Benghazi after a group of protesters rushed a local barrack to take the weapons in the armoury.
When this happened, the Libyan forces in the local garrison reacted by firing upon the protesters. In any country, including the United States and Britain, soldiers and security forces will fire on any of their own citizens that attack a military or police compound with the intention of taking its arms.

Boston.com - False pretense for war in Libya?:
Human Rights Watch has released data on Misurata, the next-biggest city in Libya and scene of protracted fighting, revealing that Moammar Khadafy is not deliberately massacring civilians but rather narrowly targeting the armed rebels who fight against his government.

RT International - "Airstrikes in Libya did not take place” – Russian military:
The reports of Libya mobilizing its air force against its own people spread quickly around the world. However, Russia's military chiefs say they have been monitoring from space – and the pictures tell a different story.

Why Gaddafi got a red card:
This is above all neo-Napoleonic President Nicolas Sarkozy's war...Gaddafi was about to transfer his billions of euros to Chinese banks.,..had decided not to buy Rafale fighters anymore, and not to hire the French to build a nuclear plant.... Energy giant Total wanted a much bigger piece of the Libyan energy cake - which was being largely eaten, on the European side, by Italy's ENI, especially because Premier Silvio "bunga bunga" Berlusconi, a certified Big G fan, had clinched a complex deal with Gaddafi.This war started in October 2010 when Gaddafi's chief of protocol, Nuri Mesmari, defected to Paris, was approached by French intelligence and for all practical purposes a military coup d'etat was concocted.

Four phases of Gaddafi's rule:
With the assistance of Nato air power, the rebels consolidated their position in Benghazi and a transitional government -- National Transitional Council (NTC)- led by Mustafa Abdul Jalil was installed. France was the first to recognise the NTC as the legitimate government of Libya [Mar 10, 2011]. Gradually many European nations followed and the US also accorded recognition on July 20.

NPR - Foreign Policy: Teaming Up With Enemies In Libya:
Forty-four days into the uprising against Col. Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, and 11 days after NATO forces stepped in to enforce a no-fly zone over the country, we still have a fuzzy-at-best idea of who the rebels fighting against Gadhafi actually are. Sinjar documents [leave] little doubt that the rebellion includes at least some jihadists sympathetic to al-Qaida.

The CIA’s Libya Rebels:
The rebels are clearly not civilians, but an armed force. What kind of an armed force?
The tribal underpinning of the Gaddafi regime has been an alliance of the tribes of the West, the center, and the southern Fezzan, against the Harabi and the Obeidat, who identify with the former monarchist ruling class. Today, the rebels use the monarchist flag, and ... are far closer to monarchism than to democracy.
The ethnic base of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (a continuum of Al-Qaeda) is apparently to be found in the anti-Qaddafi Harabi tribe, the tribe which makes up the vast majority of the rebel council including the two dominant rebel leaders, Abdul Fatah Younis and Mustafa Abdul Jalil. We are thus witnessing an attempt by the Harabi tribe to seize dominance over the 140 tribes of Libya.
West Point study of Sinjar Records... suggests that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, the elite of the Harabi tribe, and the rebel council supported by Obama all overlap for all practical purposes.

Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?:
The LIFG was founded in 1995 by a group of mujahideen veterans who had fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
As recently as February 2004, then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that "one of the most immediate threats [to U.S. security] is from smaller international Sunni extremist groups that have benefited from al-Qaida links. They include ... the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Mustafa Abdul-Jalil and Mahmoud Jibril Have Been Paving the Way for NATO’s Conquest Since 2007:
Abdul-Jalil gained his job in the Libyan government in January 2007, when he was named Secretary of the General People’s Committee for Justice (the equivalent of Justice Minister). He oversaw the release from prison of the hundreds ...of members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an Al-Qaeda affiliate which launched an armed insurrection against the Libyan state in 1995 lasting for two years – including its founder Abdulhakim Belhadj, now military chief of Tripoli.
A large part of the dialogue between Abdul-Jalil and US officials recorded in leaked US diplomatic cables focused on privatisation of the economy.

The Guardian - Abdel Fatah Younis assassination creates division among Libya rebels:
The assassination of Abdel Fatah Younis[Commander in Chief of Rebel Forces], one of Gaddafi's former right-hand men and a high-profile defector to the rebels, was announced [on July 28, 2011]. But Mustafa Abdul Jalil, president of the ruling National Transitional Council who said only that Younis had been killed on his way back to Benghazi where he had been "summoned" for questioning, failed to explain the circumstances of the death.

Khalifa Hifter: New Rebel Military Commander may have ties to CIA:
The Libyan National Council the group that speaks for the rebel forces has appointed Khalifa Hifer as head of its military operations. He first arrived in Benghazi back on March 14. Hifter has spent the last twenty years in Suburban Virginia. Hifter, a colonel in Gaddafi's army in 1987, was captured fighting in Chad in a Libyan-backed rebellion against the US-backed government of Hissène Habré. He defected to the Libyan National Salvation Front (LNSF), the principal anti-Gaddafi group, which had the backing of the American CIA. He organized his own militia, which operated in Chad until Habré was overthrown by a French-supported rival, Idriss Déby, in 1990
Also see UNHCR- Libya: The Djava Khalifa Haftar movement and Is General Khalifa Hifter The CIA’s Man In Libya?

The Telegraph - Libya: Former Guantánamo detainee is training rebels:
Rebel recruits in the eastern port city of Derna are being trained by Sufyan Bin Qumu, a Libyan who was arrested following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and held at Guantánamo for six years. Abdel Hakim al-Hasidi, a senior Libyan rebel commander in Derna, was also held following the invasion of Afghanistan and handed over to Libyan custody two months later.

Libya: What Revolution? Whose Revolution?:
As for that Libyan blueprint for change, it does not sound like a document that was anything other than “cut and paste” from various international charters. In A Vision of a Democratic Libya the “Interim National Council” (other times referred to as the Transitional National Council, or TNC) elaborates, briefly, a blueprint for a Libya where rights are conceived entirely within the framework of a Western discourse of individual civil and political liberties, thus ignoring the social and economic rights that had been advanced and protected under the Gaddafi regime.

Noam Chomsky - Libya and the World of Oil:
An oil-rich dictator who is a reliable client is granted virtual free rein. There was little reaction when Saudi Arabia declared “Laws and regulations in the Kingdom totally prohibit all kinds of demonstrations, marches and sit-in protests ...In Kuwait, ...Saudi-led military forces intervened to ensure that the minority Sunni monarchy would not be threatened by calls for democratic reforms... Bahrain is sensitive not only because it hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet but also because it borders Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia, the location of most of the kingdom’s oil...Libya is a different case, an oil-rich state run by a brutal dictator, who, however, is unreliable: A dependable client would be far preferable. ...What the West seeks is what Bush announced: control, or at least dependable clients, and in the case of Libya, access to vast unexplored areas expected to be rich in oil. U.S and British internal documents stress that the “virus of nationalism” is the greatest fear, since it might breed disobedience.