The Director General of the European strategic intelligence and security center Claude Moniquet says that political and oil interests are behind the jostling by France and Britain to spearhead the military campaign against Libya, saying that both countries are scheming to play the leading political role in the Arab world. “Besides, the action of Paris and London in that region are traditionally dictated by oil interest”, Moniquet said.
Western countries’ main aims in the troubled regions are not so much the protection of civilians, as the pursuit of economic and geopolitical interests, as evidenced by similar military operations in the past 20 years. The bombing of Serbia in 1994-1995 and Yugoslavia in 1999 by NATO, and the American-led Western incursion into Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and now in Libya, were undertaken under the pretext of the noble act of protecting the lives of civilians. The putative fight against Al-Qaeda’s brand of terrorism in both Afghanistan and Iraq was thrown into the mix of preventing humanitarian catastrophe and ethnic cleansing. Significantly, none of these tasks were fulfilled and some of the mentioned evils didn’t even exist. Suffice to recall that no smoking gun was found in Iraq after a lengthy and costly search, but the day and night bombing of Yugoslavia led to untold humanitarian catastrophe, including the mass exodus of Yugoslavians to neighbouring states. The country’s infrastructure was reduced to rubble.
New-fangled ideas, including the introduction of western-style democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq and in Albania controlled Kosovo were used to justify the wanton destruction of sovereign and independent countries. Similar spurious excuse is used to justify the intervention in Libya, and Britain, France and the U.S remain defiant about their right to solve the Libyan internal political wrangling by military force. The only question still being debated is whether it is worth it to sacrifice the Libyan leader Muammar Ghadafi on the altar of democracy ala Western model.
Behind the pseudo-humanitarian summersault lies a hidden agenda of Western countries’ geopolitical and economic interests in oil rich regions of the world. Besides, by supporting the fifth columns in such regions, the U.S and its Western allies desire to create the basis for a long term military presence, a plan that is presently being tried out in Libya. The experiment is fraught with extreme dangers, says Anna Filimonova of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ center for the study of the modern-day Balkan crisis.
“The most serious of the dangers is the confirmation of the new role of NATO in international relations, the crushing of international law and its Yalta-Potsdam post-war system. Unfortunately, the world is entering a new stage of development characterized by the formation of servile protectorates, Filimonova said. Under the new dispensation NATO would be calling the shots,” predicts Filimonova.
The Western military operation in Libya is supposedly guided by parts of the UN Charter, Security Council resolutions and UN agreements, but the campaign has exceeded the UN mandate and is taking on the features of a full-scale war against a sovereign state. As the events in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans have shown, what the world is witnessing in Libya is not the triumph of humanism and democracy, but the unleashing of anarchy and the carving up of an independent nation.
