Seumas Milne - Iraq may have been a blood-drenched disaster and
Afghanistan a grinding military and political failure. But Libya was
supposed to have been different. Nato’s war to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi
in 2011 was hailed as the liberal intervention that worked.
The
western powers might have had to twist the meaning of the UN resolution
about protecting civilians, the city of Sirte might have been reduced to
rubble, large-scale ethnic cleansing taken place and thousands of
civilians killed. But it was all in a noble cause and achieved without
Nato casualties.
This wasn’t Bush and Blair, after all, but Obama,
Cameron and Sarkozy. The people were free, the dictator was dead, a
mooted massacre had been averted - and all this without any obvious
boots on the ground. Even last year the prime minister was still
claiming it had all been worthwhile, promising to stand with Libyans
“every step of the way”.
But three years after Nato declared
victory, Libya is lurching once again towards civil war. Over the past
few days, the CIA-linked General Hiftar launched his second coup attempt
in three months, supposedly to save the country from “terrorists”. On
Sunday, his forces stormed the national parliament in Tripoli, after 80
people were killed in fighting in Benghazi two days earlier.
Now
Libya’s chief of staff has called on militias to defend the government
in advance of new elections. Since the country is overrun with militias
far more powerful than its official forces, riven with multiple
divisions and prey to constant external interference, the chances of
avoiding full-blown conflict are shrinking fast.
But these are
only the latest of the clashes and atrocities that have engulfed Libya
since Nato’s “liberation”: including bombings, assassinations, the
kidnapping of the prime minister, the seizure of oil terminals by
warlords, the explusion of 40,000 mainly black Libyans from their homes,
and the killing of 46 protesters on the streets of Tripoli in one
incident - ignored by the states that supposedly went to war to protect
civilians.
In reality, the west seized the chance to intervene in
Libya to get a grip on the Arab uprisings. Nato air power in support of
the Libyan rebellion increased the death toll by a factor of about 10,
but played the decisive role in the war- which meant no coherent
political or military force was ready to fill the vacuum. Three years
on, thousands are held without trial, there are heavy curbs on dissent,
and institutions are close to collapse.
But the US and Britain are
still training Libyan troops to keep control. Before Gaddafi’s
overthrow, Hiftar headed the military wing of the CIA-backed National
Salvation Front. In advance of his latest coup attempt, a sympathetic US
sent a force of marines to Sicily ready to intervene, and John Kerry
has promised to help Libya with “security and extremism”.
Both the
UAE and Saudi Arabia are openly backing Hiftar, as is the military coup
leader in Egypt, General Sisi. Having suppressed, jailed and shot in
large numbers Egypt’s own Islamists, Sisi and his Gulf backers are
determined to prevent them consolidating power in oil-rich Libya. There
are signs that Sisi - who complains that the west failed to garrison
Libya after Gaddafi’s overthrow - wants to use Libya’s crisis to send in
his own forces.
But it’s not just Libya that’s living with the
fallout from Nato’s intervention. Blowback from the Libyan war has
spread across Africa, destabilising the Sahel region and beyond. After
Gaddafi’s fall, Tuareg people who had fought for him went home to Mali,
bringing Libyan arms caches with them. Within months, that had tipped
northern Mali into full-scale armed rebellion and takeover by the
fighters.
The result was last year’s French military intervention,
backed by the US and Britain. But Libya’s impact goes much wider. Among
the groups whose armed campaigns have been fuelled by large-scale heavy
weapons supplies from Gaddafi’s looted arsenals is Boko Haram.
Support
for the fundamentalist Nigerian terror sect - which kidnapped 200
schoolgirls last month and has been responsible for more than 1,500
deaths since the start of the year - has been fed by deprivation,
drought and brutal state repression in the Muslim north.
But, as
elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East, each outside intervention only
spreads the cycle of the terror war. So the call for action over the
outrage of the Boko Haram kidnapping has brought US, British and French
forces to oil-wealthy Nigeria, just as the Mali crisis last year led to
the establishment of a US military drone base in neighbouring Niger.
#US
armed forces are now involved in 49 out of 54 African states, along
with the former colonial powers of France and Britain, in what’s
becoming a new carve-up of the continent: a scramble for resources and
influence in the face of China’s growing economic role, underpinned with
an escalating military presence that spreads terror as it grows. That
will bring its own backlash, as did the war in Libya.
Supporters
of #Nato’s Libyan war counter that, even if the country is now plagued by
chaos and violence, there was no western military intervention in Syria
and more than 150,000 have died in its horrific civil war. But of
course there is large-scale covert intervention in support of the Syrian
rebels by both the Nato powers and the Gulf states.
One of the
ugliest aspects of western policy towards Syria is the turning on and
off of that backing to keep their favoured armed groups in the game -
without giving them any decisive advantage. In fact, US, British and
Gulf support is being stepped up right now because of regime advances on
the field.
But it defies logic to imagine that the death toll
would have somehow been lower in Syria, or the sectarian conflict less
brutal, if the US and its allies had launched a full-scale military
attack at any stage of the conflict. The experience of Iraq, where the
war is now estimated to have killed 500,000, makes that obvious enough.
But
such is the expectation of routine war-making among parts of the
western elite that they’re already impatient for another outright
intervention. “What would America fight for?” asked the Economist
plaintively earlier this month, echoing the US Republican charge of
weakness in the White House. For the rest of the world, the reality of
Libya and its disastrous consequences should be answer enough. –Guardian
