Politicians, Media Ignore NATO’s Role in Horrific Death Toll of Libya Floods
War criminal Barack Obama had some thoughts recently about the latest devastation in Libya, where massive floods caused by Storm Daniel destroyed two dams killing more than 11,300 people. “If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief,” the ex-president tweeted along with a post by his own Obama Foundation listing various charities.
Even while he was president, Obama had a gift for performatively expressing outrage at his own policies and making empty calls to action, conveniently overlooking his own record and powers as president of the United States of America. The case of Libya is yet another example. Obama was of those most responsible for unleashing NATO’s 2011 war of aggression against Libya, a country that happens to possess some of the world’s largest oil reserves. The imperialist attack killed thousands of civilians, destroyed what had been Africa’s richest country, devastated vital infrastructure, and turned Libya into a failed state wracked by civil war and open slave markets. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have since fled the country.
To be fair, Obama wasn’t alone in ignoring his own responsibility for years of horrific conflict that made Libya a living nightmare, and ill-equipped to deal with extreme weather events exacerbated by the climate crisis. The same bourgeois media outlets that cheered bombing Libya in 2011 now avoid any reference to the war they supported that helped destroy Libya’s infrastructure.
The CBC, for example, titled a video: “How Libya’s preoccupation with war left it vulnerable to epic flooding” (my emphasis). That’s one way to describe it. In a video lasting more than 10 minutes that details how a decade of civil war worsened the flood’s death toll, host Andrew Chang never once mentions NATO’s bombing, which left a power vacuum that made civil war possible in the first place.
The CBC report focuses on “endless internal strife” of a country “locked in civil war.” The closest Chang gets to mentioning NATO’s war of aggression is when he says, “Since 2011 and the toppling of a 40-year dictator in Moammar Gadhafi, Libya never truly recovered.” With the omission of that crucial context, what we’re left with is the presentation of Libya as a country that, gosh darn it, is “preoccupied with war” for some mysterious reason. The effect is to blame Libyans themselves for their current predicament.
The reality is French, British, U.S., and Canadian imperialism caused the destruction and continued suffering of countries like Libya and Iraq. Roberto Sarti wrote in 2019:
The starting point for understanding what is happening in Libya is that the civil war is not the sole product of fundamentalist or fanatic bedouins, as some media sources suggest. It is a reflection of the clashes between the imperialist powers, at a regional and an international level, who are fighting a proxy war. The imperialists try to manoeuvre the players in that civil war like puppets. But sometimes the puppets rebel against their puppeteers.
He continues:
Imperialism thought that everything was resolved after the fall and assassination of Gaddafi in 2011. British and French imperialism pushed for it, imagining that they could sweep in and reap the riches, as they had in the past — but not this time.
Italy followed the US. Later, Obama said that the intervention in Libya was “the biggest mistake of [his] administration”. Not because he felt sorry for the civilian casualties, but because he was dragged in by other powers to which he was subordinate in the field.
Imperialism created a living nightmare in the country. It has unleashed contradictions and reactionary forces that were sleeping for decades in the country and that Gaddafi, who refused to carry the 1969 Libyan revolution to the end and oversee the abolition of capitalism, was not able to eliminate.
Libya in the ’70s and the ’80s was one of the most developed countries in Africa. A significant welfare state was developed and illiteracy was almost eradicated. The relative independence of the Gaddafi regime could not be tolerated by western imperialism which saw an opportunity to remove him under the guise of the arab revolution.
Better to create a living hell than leave in power someone we cannot really control, was the logic in Washington, London and Paris. This formula has been repeated many times, from Afghanistan to Iraq, and in the last decade in Syria and Libya.
The CBC ignores not just the role of NATO and Western imperialism, but the role of Canadian imperialism in particular. With Operation Mobile, Canada committed hundreds of troops to NATO’s attack on Libya, including the special forces of Joint Task Force 2, along with CF-18 Hornet fighter jets, transport and patrol aircraft, and two Royal Canadian Navy warships. A Canadian general, Charles Bouchard, commanded the entire NATO operation and, The Globe and Mail reports, personally signed off on every last bombing target. The House of Commons in 2011 unanimously supported Canada’s imperialist war in Libya. The NDP, Liberals, and Bloc Québécois all backed the motion of the ruling Conservatives calling for military intervention.
Yves Engler points out that the later reluctance of bourgeois politicians and media to discuss Canada’s role in destroying Libya differs sharply from the self-congratulation that followed NATO’s war and the killing of Gadhafi:
The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, National Post and Vancouver Sun all published editorials endorsing the 2011 war. After six-months of fighting the federal government organized an $850,000 nationally televised celebration for Canada’s “military heroes,” which included flyovers from a dozen military aircraft. Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the 300 military personnel brought in from four bases: “We are celebrating a great military success.”
At a ceremony held in the Senate, General Bouchard was awarded the Meritorious Service Cross by the Governor General and PM for leading the NATO mission. Bouchard was also made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
The war celebrations were a cross party affair. After Gaddafi was savagely killed interim Liberal leader Bob Rae commended the Canadian military and NDP leader Nycole Turmel released a statement noting, “the future of Libya now belongs to all Libyans. Our troops have done a wonderful job in Libya over the past few months.”
Capitalist media in other countries have followed suit in ignoring NATO’s war that helped make the recent floods so devastating. Jeff Bezos mouthpiece The Washington Post, which never met a U.S. war it didn’t support, ran an op-ed by Ishaan Tharoor with the headline, “Libya’s catastrophe is everyone’s fault”. Of course, if everyone is responsible, that means no one is responsible. Alan MacLeod of MintPress News saw through Tharoor’s obfuscation and correctly said “everyone” really means “NATO”.
Writers have long recognized the needs of ruling classes to help the masses forget inconvenient historical facts — from the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Gore Vidal’s “United States of Amnesia”. Politicians and media outlets that cheered on imperialist war in Libya would prefer that we forget their own role in NATO’s bombing that destroyed the country and made it so much more vulnerable to this recent flood. We can’t let them get away with that.
