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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThree Years After Gaddafi, Libya Is Imploding Into Chaos And Violence
World View: Its government has no real power; militias are ever more entrenched, and now the state itself is under threatPatrick Cockburn Sunday 16 March 2014
The Libyan former prime minister Ali Zeidan fled last week after parliament voted him out of office. A North Korean-flagged oil tanker, the Morning Glory, illegally picked up a cargo of crude from rebels in the east of the country and sailed safely away, despite a government minister's threat that the vessel would be "turned into a pile of metal" if it left port: the Libyan navy blamed rough weather for its failure to stop the ship. Militias based in Misrata, western Libya, notorious for their violence and independence, have launched an offensive against the eastern rebels in what could be the opening shots in a civil war between western and eastern Libya.
Without a central government with any real power, Libya is falling apart. And this is happening almost three years after 19 March 2011 when the French air force stopped Mu'ammer Gaddafi's counter-offensive to crush the uprising in Benghazi. Months later, his burnt-out tanks still lay by the road to the city. With the United States keeping its involvement as low-profile as possible, Nato launched a war in which rebel militiamen played a secondary, supportive role and ended with the overthrow and killing of Gaddafi.
A striking feature of events in Libya in the past week is how little interest is being shown by leaders and countries which enthusiastically went to war in 2011 in the supposed interests of the Libyan people. President Obama has since spoken proudly of his role in preventing a "massacre" in Benghazi at that time. But when the militiamen, whose victory Nato had assured, opened fire on a demonstration against their presence in Tripoli in November last year, killing at least 42 protesters and firing at children with anti-aircraft machine guns, there was scarcely a squeak of protest from Washington, London or Paris.
Coincidentally, it was last week that Al-Jazeera broadcast the final episode in a three-year investigation of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people in 1988. For years this was deemed to be Gaddafi's greatest and certainly best-publicised crime, but the documentary proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of carrying out the bombing, was innocent. Iran, working through the Palestinian Front for The Liberation of Palestine – General Command, ordered the blowing up of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by the US navy earlier in 1988.
Much of this had been strongly suspected for years. The new evidence comes primarily from Abolghasem Mesbahi, an Iranian intelligence officer who later defected and confirmed the Iranian link. The US Defense Intelligence Agency had long ago reached the same conclusion. The documentary emphasises the sheer number of important politicians and senior officials over the years who must have looked at intelligence reports revealing the truth about Lockerbie, but still happily lied about it.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/three-years-after-gaddafi-libya-is-imploding-into-chaos-and-violence-9194697.html
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Warpy
(111,286 posts)as the temporary lawlessness causes a lot of old scores to be settled.
They'll get the next strong man soon enough and then they can start their real war, probably against women.
Igel
(35,323 posts)If there's no good basis for unity, no perceived shared goal and no shared view of history, it'll need a strong man to impose a shared goal and shared view of history.
Egypt looked like an okay candidate, and had the "democrats" not been so intent on having the elections necessarily lead to their installation in power it might have turned out well. If the MB was unpopular, all signs were it would have hung around for a few years, passed some nasty legislation, and then failed in governing and been voted out. Or succeeded and been re-elected. Even if we didn't like the laws it passed, it may well have been representative and fair for the local culture. (Culture's change, as well, and as they change the set of laws change.) Or, perhaps the "tribes" there, secularists versus Islamists, would have riven the country so that it would have been ungovernable. That we may never know.
Iraq was a bad candidate. So was Libya. So was Jugoslavija. Too many tribes, too much power shared unequally and no shared view of the past. Too many long-nurtured grievances, many of which were exaggerated or half-fictional. The "shared goal" is for each tribe to gain dominance over the other, not a national vision or something that unites them to work together instead of be at each other's throats.
Russia was a close call. It was an empire with many "tribes," and in some cases the bonds holding them all together unravelled. But there was enough shared history for most of the subject peoples to agree, with the Russians, that Stalin was bad and the USSR was a nasty thing. That was enough for the nastiness of the '90s to provide a common background and for the shared economic ties to hold them together. Until Putin could come along and make sure nobody left without being overrun, tortured, repressed, and forcibly kept in the empire. Ingushetia and Chechnya come to mind. Now the incredible resurgence of Russian nationalism is a bad thing, but they're stuck with it, even as the Russian population demographically implodes and economically relies on mineral extraction for its wealth.
malaise
(269,076 posts)Sometimes I'd like to jump off this planet
Democracyinkind
(4,015 posts)Everybody knows that US foreign policy is impeccable!!! Go home you Lybia-loving fool!!1!!
TomClash
(11,344 posts). . . who were zealous advocates for the"revolution," one internet warrior in particular was fanatical and arrogant in his support for the "New Libya." Accessory to murder.
reformist2
(9,841 posts)CFLDem
(2,083 posts)🐏🐑🐏
seveneyes
(4,631 posts)Seems to me it just allowed the religious fanatics to chip away at any sense of infrastructure they had going for them. And it also let the violent religious ones free to harm minorities and women.
Igel
(35,323 posts)Most of the "colored" revolutions also turned out okay.
Probably because unlike Egypt and Libya there was little is any outside interference.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)kelliekat44
(7,759 posts)than "democracy."
