“If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief,” Obama tweeted. Uhh, excuse me? Sir? You know you’re literally Barack Obama, right?
By Caitlin Johnstone
The Twitter account of America’s 44th president just casually shared some links to organizations providing relief to the victims of the terrible flooding in Libya, which as of this writing has already killed thousands of people.
And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America’s 44th president to do — had America’s 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we’re seeing in Libya today.
“If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief,” Obama tweeted.
In 2010 the oil-rich Libya ranked higher on the UN Human Development Index than any other nation in Africa, with much better national infrastructure to protect itself from floods and other natural disasters. Today Libya is a chaotic humanitarian disaster where UN-backed investigators now say literal crimes against humanity have been taking place, including women being forced into sexual slavery.
What changed? If you’re reading this, you probably already know what changed.
In 2011, US, French and British forces helped rebels with extensive links to Al Qaeda kill Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, which immediately plunged the nation into violence, chaos, extremism and instability which persists to this day. It was later revealed that NATO powers knew they were backing murderous Al Qaeda-linked jihadists at the time.
Falsely branded a “humanitarian intervention” designed to prevent alleged plans for genocide and Viagra-fueled mass rapes against peaceful protesters by Gaddafi’s troops, the NATO attack on Libya quickly morphed into a regime change operation which saw Gaddafi brutally lynched in the streets and dying after being stabbed in the anus with a bayonet. Years later in 2016 a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee found that the narratives used to justify the intervention in Libya were “not supported by the available evidence.”
“We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya,” the report reads. “UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”
This confirmed concerns voiced by Amnesty International and a UN human rights investigator months before Gaddafi’s death that the evidence for the alleged atrocities the intervention was meant to prevent simply wasn’t there to be found. Because no policy changes were made after the Iraq invasion and nobody was ever punished for inflicting that horror upon our world, no lessons were learned, and it happened again. The west was deceived into yet another disastrous military intervention, which continues to have severe consequences for people in the region to this day.
In an article published earlier this month in Responsible Statecraft about the crisis in Niger, Branko Marcetic made the interesting observation that the Nigerien junta which ousted the previous government has explicitly stated that the coup was necessary because of the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” which Niger and other countries in the Sahel have been suffering from for over a decade due to “the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.”Marcetic also notes that the regime change intervention in Libya was meant to segue into a regime change intervention in Syria by the same means:
“Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. ‘I love the military … but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,’ complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be ‘an important humanitarian step.’ The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedlyurge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that ‘inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.’
“Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, ‘limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion’ could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that ‘the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.’ ”
And that’s exactly what the Obama administration set out to do: pouring weapons into Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, once again on the side of Al Qaeda-linked fighters. Had Russia not intervened in 2015 to prevent Damascus from being toppled, Syria would likely have suffered the same fate as Libya.
So that’s two countries Obama and his cohorts tossed in the incinerator back-to-back, in much the same way the previous administration torched Afghanistan and Iraq. It was done a bit more slyly and subtly than the overt Hulk Smash ground invasions of the Bush era, but the death, suffering and destabilization caused by Obama’s depravity have been just as real.
This is as clear as day, and yet we still get imperial propaganda outlets like The Washington Post telling us that “everyone” is to blame for Libya’s current troubles. WaPo has a new article out titled “Libya’s catastrophe is everyone’s fault,” which is a bit like Charles Manson saying the Manson Family killings were everyone’s fault. The article’s author Ishaan Tharoor lays the blame for Libya’s inability to adequately protect its people from the flood on “Libya’s feuding factions and fractured polity” as well as other nations in the region before conceding that NATO’s toppling of Gaddafi would have also played some role.
Another Washington Post article titled “How a decade of conflict and division put Libya in peril of disaster” lays zero blame at all on Obama and NATO powers for the nation’s suffering, saying only that Gaddafi was a brutal dictator who “was killed by rebel forces during a NATO-backed Arab Spring uprising.” But it does acknowledge that Libyans are now dying because the nation’s infrastructure has been in a state of decay since 2011:
“The country, with terrain ranging across desert and coastal communities, is highly vulnerable to human-induced climate change. But improvements to and maintenance of basic services and infrastructure, such as the country’s networks of dams, has been deprioritized, said Mary Fitzgerald, a Libya expert at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank.
“‘Between 2011 and 2014, there were already concerns about the state of Libyan infrastructure,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘And then Libya went through a six-year civil conflict from 2014 to 2020 and a lot of infrastructure was damaged during that conflict. In the three years since, you have a situation of rival government, which has yet again complicated political dynamics.’”
This nation has been in a continuous state of strife, violence and suffering since the United States spearheaded a NATO campaign to smash it to pieces. And yet you’ll still get empire simps telling you that NATO is a “defensive alliance”, and you’ll still get liberals saying that Obama’s worst scandal was wearing a tan suit one time.
Barack Obama belongs in a fucking cage. His crimes are utterly unforgivable, and if the law existed to punish the world’s worst criminals instead of to protect them he would be rotting in a maximum security prison cell.
It’s all well and good that people are sending Libya aid and that the call to do so is being amplified by influential voices. But the fact that the 44th president of the United States can just come out and pretend to support a nation he personally helped destroy without being called out and excoriated by the mass media shows that we live in a world which is dominated by lies and propaganda.
Caitlin’s articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out herpodcast, throwing some money into her hat on PatreonorPaypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. New book! Lao Sue And Other Poems, available in paperback or PDF/ebook. – All works co-authored with her husband Tim Foley. https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au
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Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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