Bob Powell of Above Top Secret neatly unpacks the Libyan revolution-that-wasn’t. Some interesting shockers I hadn’t heard yet include the presence of al-Qaida, apparently operating with CIA blessing, in the “National Transitional Council”, and the presence of Qatari troops, in their own country’s uniform and speaking with distinctly non-African accents, among the so-called “rebels”. (The racist murders of the black Africans in Libya, often slandered as “mercenaries”, WERE known to me, but not the actual identity of who was behind them.)
Whatever your feelings on Gaddafi (and my own, like Powell’s, are very mixed), by the end of all you’ll agree, as I do, that whatever lies ahead for Libya, it won’t be good. And democracy won’t have anything to do with it. This was, like Iraq and Afghanistan, a war for oil. It had no place in the Arab Spring, which was a spontaneous uprising among several oil- and resource-poor MENA countries by their young people, who were all afflicted by the lack of money and opportunities. Their tyrants had the full support of Europe and the United States, and they were portrayed as “modern” and “democratic”, even when they were (and still are) not.
As the video above shows all too clearly, Libya’s situation was almost the exact opposite of the rest of North Africa and the Middle East. Libya had oil, and oil money, in abundance; Libyans were well educated (and for free), with an almost unheard-of 90%-plus literacy rate; housing and electricity were free; loans were interest-free; the country itself had no foreign debts whatsoever. It is, or was, a modern place for the most part, with very good living standards for most Libyans. In other words: precisely the kind of self-sufficient success story the US doesn’t want anyone else to get wind of. After all, they need to export “democracy” (read: CAPITALISM, which is not the same thing) to keep their own economy (which is currently on the skids) rolling.
Had Gaddafi not refused the almighty petrodollar (and the indebtedness to the US Federal Reserve that went with it), he might still be alive today. As it is, he’s the only MENA head of state toppled, not by the spontaneous uprisings of the Arab Spring, but by NATO and its regional allies, who are as slimy and scummy a bunch as you’d ever hope NEVER to meet.