“No fly zone” is war by another name

Roy Ratcliffe writes

Despite the rhetoric of “saving the people”, the military intervention by the coalition of Arab, European and North American forces reveals the real issue in Libya and elsewhere. The intervention is a struggle over which form of political elite (dictatorial or pseudo-democratic) governs the people and resources of the middle east and North Africa. The US and Europe have never been concerned with the welfare of the mass of the people of the middle east and north Africa, nor with the huge numbers of those who have died in their struggle against oppression. Take, for example, the conduct of the political elite of US and Europe in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Nor have they backed previous struggles for self-governing democracy in any of the former colonised countries.

They have always backed and armed regimes which have guaranteed preferential treatment for western economic and financial interests.  However, the spreading uprisings have presented the political and economic elite in the US and Europe, with considerable problems. Under whose control is the supply of oil and other assets to fall. It is this newly unravelling process which has finally prompted yet one more stage in the continuing interventions in this region. The massive, and costly, forces deployed (eleven warships, dozens of aircraft and hundreds of missiles, etc.) against an unpopular regime that was having difficulty in prevailing over ordinary citizens armed only with light ordinance, demonstrates the extreme importance attached by this coalition to UN resolution 1973.

Western elites, who under the pretext of controlling excessive state debt, are inflicting severe cuts in the welfare of their own citizens, are suddenly prepared to spend billions on curbing the advances of the Gaddafi regime – in a supposed late attempt to save those not already killed by his forces.

This level of coalition mobilisation doesn’t immediately make sense, when the same result could have been achieved by supplying light-weight portable, anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons costing a few millions, to the anti-Gaddafi forces. However, such huge and reckless expenditure does make sense if this effort will serve to roll back the entire chain of uprisings currently taking place in the Arab Peninsular and the Maghreb. These uprisings threaten the middle-eastern hegemony the western elite require to continue ruling their own people. Relatively cheap oil/petrol, other raw materials and open markets are absolutely essential to maintain ‘stability’ in Europe and North America. Without them, the citizens of Europe and North America may be persuaded to engage in mass uprisings themselves.

The creation of the coalition of Europe, North America elites and Arab dictators to intervene in Libya, once again introduces a military supported force which will be able to stand between the ordinary citizens and their reactionary regimes. Despite, protestations to the contrary this 2011 invading ‘coalition of the willing’ in Libya is yet another link in the Imperialist chain of control stretching from the overt and covert military interventions in Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Iraq. This action will not benefit ordinary people anywhere and we should oppose it with all means possible. We should call for both a withdrawal of the coalition forces and the supply of appropriate arms to the anti-Gaddafi citizens.