Lessons for Sri Lanka: What regime CHANGE resulted for Libya
Posted on December 19th, 2014
Shenali D Waduge
The West’s onslaught to topple Gaddafi and liberate Libya began on 15th February 2011 and ended on 20th October 2011. Noteworthy is the manner Libya was orchestrated to fall. Starting with PEACEFUL PROTESTS a surge of foreign ‘rebels’ flooded into Libya from borders to take on Gaddafi’s troops. Gaddafi’s 42 year reign ended when he was summarily executed in the most brutal and undeserving manner watched virtually live. 4 years later Libya is in complete chaos. Only now the Libyans feel sorrow, remorse and guilt for the manner their leader was eliminated. Too late they have understood the real reasons behind the Arab Spring for Libya and the devils have taken over.
| LIBYA DURING GADDAFI | LIBYA AFTER GADDAFI UNDER WESTERN CONTROL |
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Libya was claimed to be liberated from Gaddafi in 2011 using US and NATO forces. It was described as a HISTORIC Victory.
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The question is if the Libyan people were enjoying so much of virtually free hand-outs why did they want CHANGE?
Was it because they were fed up seeing the same man as their leader for 42 years? Did they get fed up with Gaddafi’s and other eccentrics he suffered from? Had the Libyan people had enough of Gaddafi’s family members and extended family? Did they not wonder what would happen if they experimented with CHANGE? Now Libyans neither have a leader nor a nation all because of CHANGE.
Why did the West want to topple Libya?
The reasons for Libya to be targeted are many and include
- To edge out China’s National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) which was a major player in Libya – Eleven percent (11%) of Libyan oil exports are channelled to China.
- Take control of Libya’s oil reserves – 3.5% of global oil reserves, more than twice those of the US. With 46.5 billion barrels of proven reserves, (10 times those of Egypt), Libya is the largest oil economy in the African continent followed by Nigeria and Algeria (Oil and Gas Journal).
- Broader geopolitical agenda – Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, possess between 66.2 and 75.9 percent of total oil reserves, depending on the source and methodology of the estimate.” (Michel Chossudovsky)
- The West was not too gaga about Gaddafi creating his own currency and dealing with gold and moreover his banks were not part of the global banking system. The first CHANGE to take place in Libya after Gaddafi was to include Libya’s bank into the global central bank system.
How was the West able to topple Libya?
The first strategy adopted was to use all media channels under their control to project Gaddafi as a dictator and build up international opinion that it was the duty of the West to liberate the Libyans. This concept is better known as R2P (Responsibility to Protect). Then the West began using all other international buttons in their possession.
The ICC stepped into to declare Gaddafi a war criminal and issued an arrest warrant against him. Gaddafi’s response was that the ICC was a “a tool of the Western world to prosecute leaders in the Third World,”
It was next the turn of the UN – thus 17 March 2011 – The UN Security Council passed a resolution to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. China and Russia must now be regretting their silence.
- 19 March – 19 French Air Crafts and Italian Air Force entered Libyan airspace. US and British ships and submarines fired 114 cruise missiles at 20 Libyan sites. 3 US stealth bombers flew non-stop from US to drop 40 bombs, 25 coalition naval vessels surrounded the area,
- 20 March – missiles were launched by British and US jets – coalition strikes continued until by 23rd March Libyan Air Force had been virtually destroyed.
- 25 March – NATO announces it would command the no-fly zone operations
- 19 April – UK announces it was sending military advisors to help rebels improve their communications
- 20 April – US announces $25m aid package to Libyan rebels (fuel trucks, fuel containers, ambulances, medical equipment, protective vests, binoculars, food, non-secure radios). Qatar supplied anti-tank missiles, pick up trucks, uniforms for the rebels. Libya accused Qatar of also sending 20military trainers to train over 700 rebel fighters. Qatar also allowed the rebels to run a satellite television operation from Doha.
- 27 April – Qatar and Libyan opposition sign oil export deal – to export oil to Qatar from rebelheld areas in exchange for money to finance the rebels.
- 9 June – Turkey donated $100m to the National Transition Council (the rebels) as ‘humanitarian assistance’
- 29 June – France admits it air dropped arms supplies to rebels.
- Britain had provided 5000 sets of body army, 6650 uniforms, 5000 high-visibility vests and communication equipment
- About nine thousand strike sorties, tens of thousands of strikes on civilian targets including residential areas, government buildings, water supply and electricity generation facilities. (See NATO Communique, September 5, 2011. 8140 strike sorties from March 31 to September 5, 2011)
- An entire nation has been bombed with the most advanced ordnance, including uranium coated ammunition
All the bombings translates to GOOD for BUSINESS and Christmas for IMF/World Bank in their heart-filled efforts to rebuild the Libyan economy. It leads to a nation bombed and locked into eternal loans in a country that was once debt-free.
Who were the Libyan rebels?
Were they Libyans, were they hired, who hired them and how were they trained is crucial to understanding how regime change unfolds. What we need to realize is that they were not civilians. They were armed. They are even said to have hired an international PR firm Patton Boggs, be accepted as the legitimate government of the sovereign nation of Libya,”. Patton Boggs signed the agreement with Ali Suleiman Aujali, the Council’s representative to the United States. (Rachel Leven report).
The US/NATO method using Al Qaeda and its fragments most of whom have at some stage or the other been trained by western intelligence has been to overthrow independent governments, then Balkanize and partition countries (as has been done in Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, Sudan) or else to use them as kamikaze puppets against larger enemies like China, Iran and Russia.
The puppets often end up being brought to the West and sent through regime change programs, trained in changing the Constitution and selected for leadership programs through the USAID and US embassies as well as through foreign-government funded organizations that pose as NGOs/INGOs/human rights organizations and international charities. Notice how all these are key features of the CHANGE being promised for Sri Lanka.
The policy is nothing other than divide and ruin and ruin and divide keeping nations bogged down in civil conflicts and clashes between each other for which the West is prepared to supply arms so long as their corporate interests are met and for every ruined nation the monetary systems step in to provide the loans that end up throttling the tax paying public beyond their graves.
For the handful of locals that agree to play a role in facilitating this divide, ruin and calamity they are assured green cards, escape route to western climes for their entire families, house and employment. Eventually a nation that was doing quite well without foreign interference would become known as a ‘failed-state’ with little acknowledgement to the fact that Libya became a failed state not because of Gaddafi but because the US and NATO created that failure.
Of course analysts would denounce the West but ONLY AFTER the damage has been done and with no likelihood of reversal. No reversing after inviting calamity is what we need to keep in mind.
The thought that must be on the minds of all non-US and non-NATO nations is the reality that if the US and NATO can do what they have done to Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan etc… would they not do the same for any other nation they are targeting by picking potential leaders, training them in regime change, showing them how to change the country’s constitution and then promising hands outs for their coterie of chosen people!
At the same time it must also not be forgotten that all those they pick as puppets end up facing the same fate eventually too – Osama bin Laden was one time a friend of the US, so too was Saddam Hussein.
Use and Discard is the motto of the West and it is good for Asian leaders to realize before they too flirt with the idea of becoming toy boys of the West to realize that they too will be discarded no different to the gruesome manner that Saddam and Gaddafi faced their fate. In fact in an ironical twist of fate US Ambassador Christopher Stevens met his death in almost a similar manner to Gaddafi – he was taken alive, raped and sodomized himself in what was Al Qaeda’s retaliation for killing its men. The caution voiced against majority non-Muslim nations being demanded to permit heretheto non-existent Islamic dress, Islamic banking, Sharia courts, Islamic schools, Halal etc are a stepping stone to segregating Muslims from integrity and thereafter brainwashing them to become the foot soldiers of the new Western Asian agenda. This is what the Asian leaders need to take stock of because Muslims have no control over their religion given the jihad movements that create mayhem in the name of Allah easily drawing people using Islams texts.
What we see with the current lot of Islamic militants are that they are bred, trained, brainwashed, mind-controlled to do the dirty work of the West and thereafter the West goes after the very same creatures they created and that eventually ends up a West vs Islamic militant global propaganda bloated to the extent of getting tax payers to fund war ships, missiles, troops etc in a war that should never have been started.
Its about time the intelligent among us started putting the dots together and realizing how conflicts take place, who funds the conflicts, who are tapped to be the enemy and in all this how the ordinary people end up suffering loss of life, property but eternally bogged down in debt and calamity.
Therefore, before people go romanticizing about CHANGE, it is good to first see what CHANGE brought about for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Kosovo and Libya while Syrians remain backing their leader President Assad despite him being projected as a dictator too.
Fast forward to relevance for Sri Lanka it is good for voters to think about
- Who is behind the Common Candidate other than those that are projected as being local supporters
- What are the deals/deal behind their support in terms of its affect for the country thereafter?
- What will actually result in dabbling with CHANGE given the not so fantastic resume’s of those that are supporting the Common Candidate as well as his own lack of ability to lead the nation.
- As for the incumbent it is no better a time to also realize that if people are galvanizing towards the common candidate it is because there are some issues that the incumbent has not satisfactorily addressed and these are areas that should be viewed and looked into by a competent team.
It is also good to realize that the nation will back its leader so long as the leader protects the nation and its people as well as its history, culture and heritage.
A picture speaks a thousands words and should also show the lies that prevail and the extent of lies manufactured simply to advance the agendas of Western nations!
The only defense a nation a has is an ‘informed public’.
December 19th, 2014 at 5:27 am
The past history of American wars tells us that, when the war-going begins to get tough, the professional P.R campaigns get going, often with wholly invented stories. For example, when in 1990 Defense Secretary Colin Powell was expressing doubts that the United States should attack Kuwait, stories appeared that, as revealed by classified satellite photos, Saddam had amassed 265,000 troops and 1500 tanks at the edge of the Saudi Arabian border. Powell then changed his mind, and the attack proceeded. But after the invasion a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times viewed satellite photos from a commercial satellite, and “she saw no sign of a quarter of a million troops or their tanks.”
Hawks in Congress, notably Tom Lantos and Stephen Solarz, secured support for the attack on Iraq with a story from a 15-year-old girl, that she had seen Kuwaiti infants snatched from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers. The story was discredited when it was learned that the girl, the daughter of the Saudi ambassador in Washington, might not have visited the hospital at all. She had been prepped on her story by the P.R firm Hill & Knowlton, which had a contract for $11.5 million from the Kuwaiti government.
The history of American foreign interventions is littered with such false stories, from the “Remember the Maine” campaign of the Hearst press in 1898, to the false stories of a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. destroyers in the so-called Second Tonkin Gulf incident of August 4, 1964. We know furthermore that in their Operation Northwoods documents, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 proposed a series of ways, some of them lethal, to deceive the American people in order to engineer a war against Cuba.
Since the fiasco of the false Iraqi stories in 1990-91, these stories have tended to be floated by foreign sources, usually European. This was conspicuously the case with the forged yellowcake documents from Italy underlying Bush’s misleading reference to Iraq in his 2003 State of the Union address. But it was true also of the false stories linking Saddam Hussein to the celebrated anthrax letters of 2001. (Their anthrax was later determined to have come from a U.S. biowarfare laboratory.)
This recurring history of falsified stories to justify interventions happened in Libya, when western media publshed stories like Gaddafi had been using rape as a method to fight insurrection, and may had been guilty of raping victims himself. This reminded us of the sorry record of the U.S. mainstream media in circulating past false stories to justify war. It is painful to say this, but virtually every major U.S. military intervention since Korea has been accompanied by false stories.
As an African country, Libya never had a fair hearing or any form of justice from the ICC. The International Criminal Court created with high hopes of international justice in 2002 has been used against 7 African countries. The ICC has never examined U.S. drone attacks on defenseless civilians in at least 8 African, Arab and South Asian countries. Nor has it even touched U.S. invasions and occupations. Israeli bombing of the Palestinian people is “off limits”.
This is an essential time to remind all people concerned about the rights of women that U.S. intervention or any imperialist intervention has never protected women. Even women serving within the U.S. military machine are not “safe”. According to a study published by the Journal of Military Medicine, 71% of women soldiers have been sexually assaulted or raped while serving in the U.S. military. Women who have been assaulted consistently report poor medical treatment, lack of counseling, incomplete criminal investigations and threats of punishment for reporting the assaults. In 2009 the Pentagon admitted that approximately 80% of rapes are never reported – making it the most under-documented crime in the military. In addition U.S. military bases are all too often surrounded by an entire sex industry of abused women forced by hunger, dislocation and lost families into work in bars and clubs.
Rape in every society has little connection to sexuality and desire. It has always been about imposing power and domination.
The “political rape” charge in Libya made no sense and had no basis beyond the U.S.-NATO desire to justify expanding the war against Libya.
December 19th, 2014 at 7:15 am
SW, I hope you can advise MR camp and make public aware of what is going on with My3 camp.
December 19th, 2014 at 12:36 pm
NOT FOR ANOTHER TWO YEARS PLEASE. THE PRESIDENT CAN GO ON FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS, WIN OR LOSE, AS HE IS LEGALLY ENTITLED TO DO SO. IT IS CONFIRMED.
DAMP SQUIB FOR THE CIRCUS.
December 19th, 2014 at 1:08 pm
SL had 10 ruling party changes so far. None of these things happened.
There is a HUGE difference between REGIME CHANGE and elections that changes power.
Why it happened to Libya. Because no proper democracy existed during Gaddafi time. Every leader has an expiry date. They should GO before that peacefully. Even George Bush left office after serving 2 terms.
December 19th, 2014 at 6:03 pm
Lorenzo your slip is about to fall!
Democracy, Human Rights, Free Speech, Yaha Palanaya no where to be found in this world. So don’t lament about not finding Kalu Nika!
Who the hell cares about Democracy and Yaha Palanaya if ordinary people get their basics and the country advances in making the lives better, lays the infrastructural foundations for the future.
It is only the Colombians and their lap dogs in the rest of the country who are worried about these empty words.
Developing countries such as Sri Lanka cannot entertain such luxuries just for the sake of making US, UK and their ilk happy! For them Democracy is a way of keeping countries disunited and unstable.
December 19th, 2014 at 9:41 pm
>>>The puppets often end up being brought to the West and sent through regime change programs, trained in changing the Constitution and selected for leadership programs through the USAID and US embassies as well as through foreign-government funded organizations that pose as NGOs/INGOs/human rights organizations and international charities. Notice how all these are key features of the CHANGE being promised for Sri Lanka.<<<
Ranil goes to MIT in America in April of this year with the sole focus on "how to abolish the executive presidency in Sri Lanka" (Google: "MIT CIS: Ranil Wickremesinghe Joins MIT"). Maithripala goes to Harvard in America last year and receives a totally undeserved health award sponsored by USAID and WHO. It turns out that the WHO representative that recommended Maithripala for the Harvard award was the SAME GUY who recommended the Thailand firm as the SOLE bidder to provide saline for Sri Lanka's dengue fever eradication program run out of the Health Ministry under Maithripala. This saline turned out to be substandard, resulting in the deaths of over 1000 Sri Lanka people, and the incidents of dengue fever have actually INCREASED under Maithripala's leadership.
Concerning NGOs, nearly ALL NGOs operating in Sri Lanka are funded by ONE American Jewish billionaire – George Soros. He funds Transparency International, Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, and Open Society Foundations that fund many smaller NGOs in Sri Lanka. Soros has been the principal financial backer of the Arab Spring that sought to change the governments of many Arab countries that were not sufficiently friendly to the United States. George Soros is also famously anti-Chinese, and there is no doubt he has targeted Sri Lanka with the human rights accusations to force regime change to a less China-friendly regime, which is what Ranil/Maithripala represent.
December 19th, 2014 at 11:43 pm
Ratanapala,
We NEED good governance and democracy (as long as it is working). Without good governance, LTTE Diaspora will take over SL’s economy and SL people will remain poorer than otherwise.
IF we are not to have democracy, why should we have MR? We can have military rule.
December 20th, 2014 at 1:34 am
Lorenzo Says:
December 19th, 2014 at 11:43 pm
What kind of democracy do they have in Libya? What about Egypt where the party with the largest share of the vote has been BANNED?
You just aren’t getting it Lorenzo – democracy and good governance are just slogans for certain interests to gain power. You need only look at the thoroughly corrupt pay-to-play campaign donations culture in America to know that they are not serious about democracy at all. PLUTOCRACY (rich folks rule) is what they want, and they want it on terms where the rest of the world is subservient to Western powers.
You should also consider that Maithripala has NO PROVEN GOVERNING SKILLS, so no one with any intelligence would elevate him to the highest office in the land given his lack of a proven record. It would be like electing your 10-year-old son to be president of Sri Lanka, who would have no choice but to defer to others (Ranil and Chandrika) because he has no clue on how to run a country.
The Maithripala Manifesto is like a Republican Party manifesto in America, in which rich folks privatize everything for their own benefit and everyone else gets the crumbs that are left over. It does not work in America, and it will not work in Sri Lanka.
It is unfortunate that Maithripala on his visit to Harvard did not tour some of the largest and poorest neighborhoods in the area (Google: “Poverty’s grip tightens in Boston, study says”). If he had taken THAT tour instead of the rich white folks tour through Cambridge along the Charles River, he would then see how he is being taken for a ride by the Right Wing in America. They want to use him just like Ranil and Chandrika to KEEP SRI LANKA POOR AND DIVIDED, just like they do in large parts of America.