As noted in the introduction to a 2020* post:
Libya: 3000 Camels Evacuated From Tripoli
"A seemingly endless herd..."
I blame David Cameron.
Also assorted Americans.
Maybe a resident of the Élysée, or two.
The events of 2011, across the MENA from Libya to Syria, have yet to play out.
And the history of the U.S. and UK meddling has yet to be written.
I don't think "We came, we saw, he died" is going to be the final word.
From Chris Hedges' substack, The Chris Hedges Report, September 16, 2023:
NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe.
“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die. Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias.
The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel — the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing.
“The fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.
Taalas told reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.”
Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya - as it did Iraq - as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.
Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S. Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media....
The events of 2011, across the MENA from Libya to Syria, have yet to play out.
And the history of the U.S. and UK meddling has yet to be written.
I don't think "We came, we saw, he died" is going to be the final word.
Here at Climateer Investing we recycle!
Some of our Libya posts:
January 2018Mr. Obama, Mr. Cameron, About that Libya Thing
March 2016
"Libya Threatens to Open Migrant Floodgates Into Europe"
US-Russian Marines Set Up Bridgehead in Eastern Libya for Campaign Against ISIS
Following up on yesterday's "Tony Blair Calls For Ground Troops Pretty Much the Across Middle East"....
August 2013
I Don't Think U.S. Middle East/North African Policy is Working So Well: "Libya on the Brink of Chaos"
Either the U.S. backing of the "Arab Spring" was a deliberate attempt to set the MENA on fire or we are governed by idiots....
May 2020
"Turkey warns Libya's Haftar of military escalation"
What the hell is Turkey doing in Libya?
I seem to recall something about "We came, We saw, He died"
And a U.S. Predator drone hitting Gaddafi's escaping convoy and then the French Air Force came screaming in.
And then the British SAS-advised NTC rebels caught Gaddafi and sodomized him with a bayonet and Leading from Behind jokes made the rounds in D.C. and David Cameron joined the Council on Foreign Relations and tried to raise a $1 billion UK-China fund but proved he's no Tony Blair in the money game but
What the hell is Turkey doing in Libya?
