[Disarmo] Egitto, Libia, IS e Occidente (NATO)

[Jure Ellero LT <glry at ngi.it>]

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Digest completo in altra mail

J. Ellero

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Egypt is calling the West’s bluff over its phony war on ISIS
Dan Glazebrook
2015-02-26, Issue 715

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/94051
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As Egyptian President Sisi calls for more support in the fight against 
NATO-funded militias in Libya, the West’s refusal to back him raises the 
question of their ultimate aims in entering the region. The West is 
complicity in enabling ISIS to gain a strong foothold and further 
destabilise Libya, Syria and, potentially, Egypt.

Western states are trumpeting ISIS as the latest threat to civilisation, 
claiming total commitment to their defeat, and using the group’s 
conquests in Syria and Iraq as a pretext for deepening their own 
military involvement in the Middle East. Yet as Libya seems to be 
following the same path as Syria – of ‘moderate’ anti-government 
militias backed by the West paving the way for ISIS takeover – Britain 
and the US seem reluctant to confront them there, immediately pouring 
cold water on Egyptian President Sisi’s request for an international 
coalition to halt their advances. By making the suggestion – and having 
it, predictably, spurned – Sisi is making clear Western duplicity over 
ISIS and the true nature of NATO policy in Libya.

On 29th August 2011, two months before the last vestiges of the Libyan 
state were destroyed and its leader executed, I was interviewed on 
Russia Today about the country’s future. I told the station: “There’s 
been a lot of talk about what will happen [in Libya after the ouster of 
Gaddafi] – will there be Sharia law, will there be a liberal democracy? 
What we have to understand is that what will replace the Libyan state 
won’t be any of those things. What will replace the Libyan state will be 
the same as what has replaced the state in Iraq and Afghanistan, which 
is a dysfunctional government, complete lack of security, gang warfare 
and civil war. And this is not a mistake from NATO. They would prefer to 
see failed states than states that are powerful and independent and able 
to challenge their hegemony. And people who are fighting for the TNC, 
fighting for NATO, really need to understand that this is NATO’s vision 
for their country.” Friends at the time told me I was being overly 
pessimistic and cynical. I said I hoped to God that they were right. But 
my experiences over a decade following the results of my own country 
(Britain)’s wars of aggression in places like Kosovo, Afghanistan and 
Iraq long after the mainstream media had lost interest, led me to 
believe otherwise.

Of course, it was not only me who was making such warnings. On March 6th 
2011, several weeks before NATO began seven months of bombing, Gaddafi 
gave a prophetic interview with French newspaper Le Monde du Dimanche, 
in which he stated: “I want to make myself understood: if one threatens 
[Libya], if one seeks to destabilize [Libya], there will be chaos, Bin 
Laden, armed factions. That is what will happen. You will have 
immigration, thousands of people will invade Europe from Libya. And 
there will no longer be anyone to stop them. Bin Laden will base himself 
in North Africa and will leave Mullah Omar in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 
You will have Bin Laden at your doorstep.”

He specifically warned that Derna, a town that had already provided 
large numbers of suicide bombers to Iraq, would become an “Islamist 
emirate” on the Mediterranean. Gaddafi’s warnings were mocked in the 
Western media (although many intelligence experts, in under-reported 
comments, backed his assertions), and few in Europe had ever heard of 
Derna. Until November 2014, that is – when ISIS announced their takeover 
of the city, the first of three in Libya now under their control. Their 
most recent conquest, Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown, was heralded by the 
posting on YouTube of the video of a beheading of 21 Coptic Christians 
they had captured there last December. They are widely believed to have 
been immigrant workers from one of the poorest parts of Egypt.

Sirte had been a pro-government stronghold during NATO’s onslaught in 
2011, and one of the last cities to fall - the result of its ferocious 
resistance and zero support for the ‘rebels’. It was subjected to a 
massive siege and became the scene of some of the worst war crimes of 
the war, both by NATO and their allies on the ground. Now that the 
people of Sirte have been forced to live – and die – under the latest 
incarnation of NATO’s ‘heroic freedom fighters’, it is becoming ever 
clearer why they fought so hard to keep them out in the first place. Yet 
even this massacre is eclipsed by the almost 600 Libyan National Army 
soldiers killed by ISIS and their allies, in their battle to take 
Benghazi over the last three years.

This is the state of affairs NATO bequeathed to Libya, reversing the 
country’s trajectory as a stable, prosperous pan-African state that was 
a leading player in the African Union, and a thorn in the side of US and 
British attempts to re-establish military domination. And it is not only 
Libya that has suffered; the power vacuum resulting from NATO’s 
wholesale destruction of the Libyan state apparatus has dragged the 
whole region into the vortex. As Brendan O Neill has shown in detail, 
the daily horrors being perpetrated in Mali, Nigeria and now Cameroon 
are all a direct result of NATO’s bloodletting, as death squads from 
across the entire Sahel-Sahara region have been given free reign to set 
up training camps and loot weapons across the giant zone of lawlessness 
which NATO have sculpted out of Libya.

The result? African states that in 2010 were forging ahead economically, 
greatly benefitting from Chinese infrastructure and manufacturing 
investment, moving away from centuries of colonial and neo-colonial 
dependence on extortionate Western financial institutions, have been 
confronted with massive new terror threats from groups such as Boko 
Haram, flush with new weaponry and facilities courtesy of NATO’s 
humanitarianism. Algeria and Egypt, too, still governed by the same 
independent-minded movements which overthrew European colonialism, have 
seen their borders destabilised, setting the stage for ongoing 
debilitating attacks planned and executed from NATO’s new Libyan 
militocracy. This is the context in which Egypt is launching the 
regional fightback against NATO’s destabilisation strategy.

Over the past year in particular, Egyptians have witnessed their Western 
neighbour rapidly descending down the same path of ISIS takeover as 
Syria. In Syria, a civil war between a Western-sponsored insurgency and 
an elected secular government has seen the anti-government forces 
rapidly fall under the sway of ISIS, as the West’s supposed ‘moderates’ 
in the Free Syrian Army either join forces with ISIS (impressed by their 
military prowess, hi-tech weaponry, and massive funding) or find 
themselves overrun by them. In Libya, the same pattern is quickly 
developing. The latest phase in the Libyan disaster began last June when 
the militias who dominated the previous parliament (calling themselves 
the ‘Libya Dawn’ coalition) lost the election and refused to accept the 
results, torching the country’s airport and oil storage facilities as 
opening salvos in an ongoing civil war between them and the newly 
elected parliament. Both parliaments have the allegiance of various 
armed factions, and have set up their own rival governments, each 
controlling different parts of the country. But, starting in Derna last 
November, areas taken by the Libya Dawn faction have begun falling to 
ISIS. Last weekend’s capture of Sirte was the third major town to be 
taken by them, and there is no sign that it will be the last. This is 
the role that has consistently been played by the West’s proxies across 
the region – paving the way and laying the ground for ISIS takeover. 
Egyptian President Sisi’s intervention – airstrikes against ISIS targets 
in Libya - aims to reverse this trajectory before it reaches 
Iraqi-Syrian proportions.

The internationally-recognised Libyan government based in Tobruk – the 
one appointed by the House of Representatives that won the election last 
summer - has welcomed the Egyptian intervention. Not only, they hope, 
will it help prevent ISIS takeover, but will also cement Egyptian 
support for their side in the ongoing civil war with ‘Libya Dawn’. 
Indeed, Egypt could, with some justification, claim that winning the war 
against ISIS requires a unified Libyan government committed to this 
goal, and that the Dawn’s refusal to recognise the elected parliament , 
not to mention their ‘ambiguous’ attitude towards ISIS, is the major 
obstacle to achieving such an outcome.

Does this mean that the Egyptian intervention will scupper the UN’s 
‘Libya dialogue’ peace talks initiative? Not necessarily; in fact it 
could have the opposite effect. The first two rounds of the talks were 
boycotted by the General National Congress (GNC) - the Libya Dawn 
parliament- safe in the knowledge that they would continue to receive 
weapons and financing from NATO partners Qatar and Turkey whilst the 
internationally-recognised Tobruk government remained under an 
international arms embargo. As the UK’s envoy to the Libya Dialogue, 
Jonathan Powell, noted this week, the “sine qua non for a [peace] 
settlement” is a “mutually hurting stalemate”. By balancing up the 
scales in the civil war, Egyptian support military support for the 
Tobruk government may show the GNC that taking the talks seriously will 
be more in their interests than continuation of the fight.

Sisi’s call for the military support of the West in his intervention has 
effectively been rejected, as he very likely expected it to be. A joint 
statement by the US and Britain and their allies on Tuesday poured cold 
water on the idea, and no wonder – they did not go to all the bother of 
turning Libya into the centre of their regional destabilisation strategy 
only to then try to stabilise it just when it is starting to bear fruit. 
However, by forcing them to come out with such a statement, Sisi has 
called the West’s bluff. The US and Britain claim to be committed to the 
destruction of ISIS, a formation which is the product of the insurgency 
they have sponsored in Syria for the past four years, and Sisi is asking 
them to put their money where their mouth is. They have refused to do 
so. In the end, the Egyptian resolution to the UN Security Council 
(UNSC) on Wednesday made no mention of calling for military intervention 
by other powers, and limited itself to calling for an end to the 
one-sided international arms embargo which prevents the arming of the 
elected government but does not seem to deter NATO’s regional partners 
from openly equipping the ‘Libya Dawn’ militias. Sisi has effectively 
forced the West to show its hand: their rejection of his proposal to 
support the intervention makes it clear to the world the two-faced 
nature of their supposed commitment to the destruction of ISIS.

There are, however, deep divisions on this issue in Europe. France is 
deepening its military presence in the Sahel-Sahara region, with 3000 
troops based in Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali and a massive new 
base opened on the Libyan border in Niger last October, and would likely 
welcome a pretext to extend its operations to its historic protectorate 
in Southern Libya. Italy, likewise, is getting cold feet about the 
destabilisation it helped to unleash, having not only damaged a valuable 
trading partner, but increasingly being faced with hundreds of thousands 
of refugees fleeing the horror and destitution that NATO has gifted the 
region. But neither are likely to do anything without UNSC approval, 
which is likely to continue to be blocked by the US and Britain, who are 
more than happy to see countries like Russian-allied Egypt and 
Chinese-funded Nigeria weakened and their development retarded by terror 
bombings. Sisi’s actions will, it is hoped, not only make abundantly 
clear the West’s acquiescence in the horrors it has created – but also 
pave the way for an effective fightback against them.

Dan Glazebrook is a political analyst and author of “Divide and Ruin: 
The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis”. This article 
originally appeared on RT.com.

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