By Ahmad BarqawiMarch 09, 2015 "ICH"
- "Counterpunch"
- Who are you?” the late Muammar Gaddafi
once rhetorically asked in a famous speech
of his towards the end of his reign;
(rightly) questioning the legitimacy of
those seeking to over-throw his government
at the time, calling them extremists,
foreign agents, rats and drug-addicts. He
was laughed at, unfairly caricatured,
ridiculed and incessantly demonized; a
distasteful parody video poking fun at the
late Libyan leader even went viral on social
media; evidently the maker of the video, an
Israeli, thought the Libyan colloquial
Arabic word “Zenga” (which means an
Alleyway) sounded funny enough that he
extracted it from one of Gaddafi’s speeches,
looped it on top of a hip-hop backing track
and voila… he got himself a hit video which
was widely (and shamefully) circulated with
a “revolutionary” zeal in the Arab world. We
shared, we laughed, he died.
But the bloody joke is on all of us;
Gaddafi knew what he was talking about;
right from the get-go, he accused the
so-called Libyan rebels of being influenced
by Al-Qaeda ideology and Ben Laden’s school
of thought; no one had taken his word for it
of course, not even a little bit. I mean why
should we have? After all, wasn’t he a vile,
sex-centric dictator hell-bent on massacring
half of the Libyan population while
subjecting the other half to manic raping
sprees with the aid of his trusted army of
Viagra-gobbling, sub-Saharan mercenaries? At
least that’s what we got from the visual
cancer that is Al Jazeera channel and its
even more acrid Saudi counterpart Al-Arabiya
in their heavily skewed coverage of NATO’s
vicious conquest of Libya. Plus Gaddafi did
dress funny; why would anyone trust a
haggard, weird-looking despot dressed in
colorful rags when you have well-groomed
Zionists like Bernard Henry Levy, John
McCain and Hillary Clinton at your side,
smiling and flashing the victory sign in
group photo-ops, right?
Gaddafi called them drug-addicted,
Islamic fundamentalists; we know them as
ISIS… it doesn’t seem much of a joke now,
does it? And ISIS is what had been in
store for us all along; the “revolutionary”
lynching and sodomization of Muammar Gaddafi
amid manic chants of “Allahu Akbar”, lauded
by many at the time as some sort of a warped
triumph of the good of popular will (read:
NATO-sponsored mob rule) over the evil of
dictatorship (sovereign state), was nothing
but a gory precursor for the future of the
country and the region; mass lynching of
entire populations in Libya, Syria and Iraq
and the breakup of key Arab states into
feuding mini-statelets. The gruesome video
of Colonel Gaddafi’s murder, which puts to
shame the majority of ISIS videos in terms
of unhinged brutality and gore, did not
invoke the merest of condemnations back
then, on the contrary; everyone seemed
perfectly fine with the grotesque end of the
Libyan “tyrant”… except that it was only the
beginning of a new and unprecedented reign
of terror courtesy of NATO’s foot-soldiers
and GCC-backed Islamic insurgents.
The rapid proliferation of trigger-happy
terrorist groups and Jihadi factions
drenched in petrodollars in Libya was not
some sort of an intelligence failure on the
part of western governments or a mere
by-product of the power vacuum left by a
slain Gaddafi; it was a deliberate,
calculated policy sought after and
implemented by NATO and its allies in the
Gulf under the cringe-inducing moniker
“Friends of Libya” (currently known as the
International Coalition against ISIS) to
turn the north-African country into the
world’s largest ungovernable dumpster of
weapons, al-Qaida militants and illegal oil
trading.
So it is safe to say that UNSC resolution
1973, which practically gave free rein for
NATO to bomb Libya into smithereens, has
finally borne fruit… and it’s rotten to its
nucleus, you can call the latest gruesome
murder of 21 Egyptian fishermen and workers
by the Libyan branch of the Islamic State
exhibit “A”, not to mention of course the
myriad of daily killings, bombings and
mini-civil wars that are now dotting the
entire country which, ever since the West
engineered its coup-d’etat against the
Gaddafi government, have become synonymous
with the bleak landscape of lawlessness and
death that is “Libya” today. And the gift of
NATO liberation is sure to keep on giving
for years of instability and chaos to come.
In an interview with the western media
misinformation collective that is the BBC,
ABC and the Sunday Times in February 2011;
the late Muammar Gaddafi told his
condescending interviewers; “have you seen
the Al Qaeda operatives? Have you heard all
these Jihadi broadcasts? It is Al Qaeda that
is controlling the cities of Al Baida and
Darnah, former Guantanamo inmates and
extremists unleashed by America to terrorize
the Libyan people…”. Darnah is now the main
stronghold for ISIS in Libya.
In a bizarre coincidence (or some sort of
cosmic irony); the date on which ISIS chose
to release its video of the beheading of
Egyptian captives, thereby officially
declaring its presence in the war-torn
country with three oil fields under its
control, (appropriately) marked the 4th
anniversary of the start of the so-called
Libyan revolution on February 15th,
2011; a more apt “tribute” to commemorate
the Western instigated regime-change debacle
in Libya could not have been made.
But even long before ISIS became the
buzzword, the acrid nature of a
“revolutionary” Libya showed in full,
sickening splendor almost instantly right
after the old regime fell, everything the
late Gaddafi was falsely accused of doing
was literally perfected to a chilling degree
by the so-called rebels; massacres,
indiscriminate shelling of residential
areas, car-bombings, mass arrests, torture,
theft of oil and national resources… the
whole lot. In 2013; two British
pro-Palestine activists, on their way to
Gaza with an aid convoy, got to experience
first-hand the rotten fruits of the Libyan
chapter of the so-called Arab Spring when
they were abducted by a motely crew of
Libyan revolutionaries-turned-warlords in
the city of Benghazi and gang raped in front
of their father.
Proponents of Humanitarian Interventions
must be patting themselves on the back these
days; now that Libya has completed its
democratic makeover from a country with the
highest standard of living in Africa under
Gaddafi’s rule into a textbook definition of
a failed state; a godless wasteland of
religious fanaticism, internal bloodletting
and wholesale head-chopping, in fact Libya
became so “democratic” that there are now
two parliaments and two (warring)
governments; each with its own (criminal)
army and supported with money and caches of
weapons from competing foreign powers, not
to mention the myriad of secessionist
movements and militias which the illegal
coup against Gaddafi has spawned all over
the country while free health care,
education and electricity, which the Libyans
took for granted under Gaddafi’s regime, are
all now but relics of the past; that’s the
“Odyssey Dawn” the Libyans were promised; a
sanitized version of Iraq sans the public
outrage, neatly re-packaged in a
“responsibility to protect” caveat and
delivered via aerial bombing campaigns where
even the West’s overzealous Gulf
Co-conspirators Club (GCC), driven by
nothing beyond petty personal vendettas
against Gaddafi, got to test the lethality
of its rusted, American-made military
aircrafts alongside NATO on the people of
Tripoli and Sirte.
This is what Gaddafi had predicted right
from the get-go and then some; the ephemeral
euphoria of the Tunisian and Egyptian
revolutions was just too potent and too
exhilarating for us to read the fine print;
was it a conspiracy or a true revolutionary
spirit gone awry? It doesn’t really matter
now that ISIS has become the true legacy of
Tahrir Square; “they will turn Libya into
another Afghanistan, another Somalia,
another Iraq… your women won’t be allowed
out, they will transform Libya into an
Islamic Emirate and America will bomb the
country under the pretext of fighting
terrorism”, the late Libyan leader had said
in a televised speech on February 22nd,
2011, and more prophetic words were never
spoken.
America’s “clean war” Libyan prototype
proved to be such a success that it was
replicated with a wanton abandon in Syria;
Paul Bremer’s “Blackwater” death squads of
old, which reigned terror all over Iraq, are
back… with an Islamic twist; bearded, clad
in black and explosives from head to toe and
mounting convoys of Toyota Land Cruiser
trucks with an ever-expanding, seemingly
borderless Islamic Caliphate (that somehow
leaves the Zionist regime unencumbered in
its occupation of Palestine) set in their
sights.
Everyday the Arab World is awakened to a
new-videotaped atrocity; steeped in gore and
maniacal terror courtesy of ISIS (or IS or
ISIL), and countless of other “youtubeless”,
albeit more heinous crimes courtesy of
America’s very own ever-grinding, one-sided
drone warfare; the entire region seesaws
between machete beheadings and hellfire
missile incinerations. Death from above… as
well as below; the War on Terror rears its
ugly head once again; to bring in line those
nasty terrorists that the West itself funded
and sponsored in the name of democracy to
destabilize “unsavory” regimes; an
unrelenting Groundhog Day that starts with
the Responsibility to Protect and ends with
the War on Terror, with thousands of
innocent lives, typically chalked up to
collateral damage, crushed in the process.
This is exactly what Gaddafi foresaw; a
Libya mired in utter chaos, civil conflict
and western diktats; a breeding ground for
Jihadi fundamentalism and extremists… too
bad we just laughed his warnings off to an
Israeli-made parody tune.
Ahmad Barqawi, freelance columnist
and writer.