Veterans Today Egypt: Mission Accomplished in Libya for Obama and Coalition

“But then, why announce that Gaddafi has to go when the White House still has second thoughts and doubts about the Libyan rebels and who they really are. Why lead a coalition of the willing to militarily intervene in Libya when they are not yet so willing to kick Gaddafi out of the country”

“Things were moving too fast and too dangerous as well. This contagion of popular uprisings had to be dealt with; they had to be, if not stopped, at least held back. In other words, the Arab spring had to lose its spontaneity and finally its momentum”

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat / Staff Writer

Politics is a dirty game but we tend to ignore this fact all the time.

Will the Arab spring contiue to blossom in Libya?

Gaddafi has lost legitimacy in Libya and he has to go”

…thus went President Obama about the popular uprising that was undergoing in Libya with rebels from east of the country taking Benghazi as their stronghold and core of the revolution.
In the wake of two strong popular uprisings that sent President Ben Ali of Tunisia on a plane to Saudi Arabia and President Mubarak of Egypt to Sharm el Sheikh Resort on the Red Sea, the day the upheaval began in Libya the world expected to see Gaddafi on a jet plane heading to Venezuela.

But that was wishful thinking driven by the powerful revolutionary tide that was sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. No one knew then that the tide was going to slow down and the Arab spring to fade away in Libya.

False flag operation

But first let’s settle this predicament and try to clearly answer the question of whether what is happening in Libya a popular uprising or some false flag operation meant to reshuffle the players in the Libyan oil game… and another question of who wants to see – the brother leader, Gaddafi- kicked out of the rule in Libya?

Whose interest would a Gaddafi-free Libya serve?

Ousting Gaddafi is hard to fit as serving the American’s interest nor the European’s considering the long 40 years that passed by with Gaddafi as the head of the Libyan oil state with no one grumbling about it from the west.  Especially after 2003 which witnessed the honeymoon with the new Gaddafi who had abandoned his support for terrorism as requested from him and dismantled his never really- existed program of weapons of mass destruction immediately following the moment he had wet his pants watching his long pal, Saddam Hussein, captured by the gallant American soldiers, after being hiding like a rat in some filthy spider hole near his hometown of Tikrit in Iraq.

With almost every giant oil corporation, form Exxon, BP and Chevron to Petro China and ENI having a nice slice of the cake would another military and political turmoil in Libya be anything except another out of-business phase for them all reminiscent of the 17 years (1986-2003) that denied all world oil corporations the exploration and investment in the oil and gas in Libya following the American bombing and the UN sanctions imposed on the country since 1992 over the Lockerbie bombing case.

Investing in an unpredictable political upheaval that changed into an ugly armed struggle between Gaddafi’s loyalists and the Libyan rebels with neither party capable of winning it over is hardly the right calculated risk for any major oil giant even if it was a French corporation with Mr.Sarkozy himself endorsing it and pushing hard for a chivalrous odyssey dawn in Libya.

Al Qaeda affiliates in Libya

A pro-democracy rebel or a Bin Laden Jihadist?

But then why announce that Gaddafi has to go when the White House still has second thoughts and doubts about the Libyan rebels and who they really are.  Why lead a coalition of the willing to militarily intervene in Libya when they are not yet so willing to kick Gaddafi out of the country?

Why go on an alleged humanitarian mission and try to sell the world this scenario while still testing the water for the likes of Osama bin laden in Libya?
The mighty United States has been waging a relentless – and rather meaningless- war on terrorism for almost 10 years now and till this moment the CIA is apparently clueless about the real existence and the influence of the so called al Qaeda in the Arab world and in Libya in particular.

What really has been bewildering throughout the last decade is the fact that the Arab world never knew such thing as the al Qaeda organization and yet it seems that the USA has been acting in this farcical war on terrorism on the most misleading and fake intelligence.

And in the light of the scanty and rather inconclusive data the United States with its European allies began to identify those Arabic Muslims who have been busy caught up in fierce desert battles for weeks now by the way they looked and talked in news footage from the mainstream media.

And so in a way reminiscent of how the Nazis soldiers identified the Jews- by their rituals and costumes- in Eastern Europe back during WWII the Muslim rebels in eastern Libya with their beards unshaven for weeks and their shouting “Allahu Akbar” whenever they managed to stand up for Gaddafi forces or seize back a newly liberated town looked a bit like the militant jihadists who followed bin Laden in Afghanistan to the White House.

So, secretary Clinton began to talk about al Qaeda affiliated groups in Benghazi and president Obama refrained from mentioning the Libyan transitional National council (TNC) in his speech about the intervention in Libya as if they never existed.

And this was Gaddafi’s moment of relief and a twist of fate for the rebels.

Stalemate, is the name of the game

On handing over the command of the operations to NATO, and with this obvious inclination of the United States to take a back seat and enjoy the panoramic odyssey dawn from afar, the NATO began to take it easy on Gaddafi and bring some dramatic excitement to the battlefield as recurrent incidents of friendly fire began to be reported to which NATO firmly stood unapologetic.

With the rebels getting the feeling they are being let down by a coalition of the so far, so unwilling, to end this mess up, and with the fluid situation on the ground the Libyan uprising has perfectly and conveniently reached its preplanned stalemate point.

Now the mainstream media is talking about the Libyan uprising no more, rather they talk of a fluid military situation with never meant to oust Gaddafi intervention. Along with the undergoing diplomatic efforts to settle this war in Libya and with the NATO allowing brokers from Europe and the African union to meet with the two conflicting sides the situation in Libya has been intendedly steered towards this diplomatic and military stalemate.

Ever since this unprecedented and abrupt popular uprisings in the Arab world with its frightening and uncontrollable domino effect began and the west has been watching in amazement those unfolding revolutions as they toppled the strong men of the west in the Middle East one by one and taking down with them years of political plans and partnership in the region.

The United States and the west had been taken by surprise in Tunisia and Egypt; they were simply outpaced and outsmarted by the power of the people there. The same power that thought it was time to ask Gaddafi to go.

And as the imperialist interests began to be threatened and totally drifted out of control, the west just couldn’t stand watching for too long, they had to intervene some way or another to control this catastrophic domino effect and try to save the day in North Africa and the Middle East and this is where Libya came in, and in the right moment with its psychic and paranoid dictator whose reckless reactions would be the perfect excuse for the Americans and the allies to step in and save the Libyan people the same way they saved the Iraqi’s with their similarly paranoid and reckless, Saddam Hussein.

Sarkozy woke up one morning to find bin Ali of Tunisia gone and Obama the other morning also found himself unable to even allow Mubarak to stay for the few left months of his term in office conducting what he called a transitional period.

Things were moving too fast and too dangerous as well. This contagion of popular uprisings had to be dealt with; they had to be, if not stopped, at least held back. In other words, the Arab spring had to lose its spontaneity and finally its momentum.

This is exactly what happened after the west had intervened in Libya. The tide of the revolution has been interrupted not only in Libya but elsewhere in the Arab world; the uprisings that were starting in Morocco, Oman, Algeria and Iraq had been put to rest days later, the Bahrain unrest has been cut off from the mainstream media coverage and Saudi security forces were sent to forcibly control the situation there with not a flicker of comment or objection from the United States or the freedom loving Europeans.

Thousands of Yemenis have been marching in the streets for almost a month now but with president Saleh emboldened by what happened in Libya and with the absence of any international objection to his dodging the protesters demands not to mention the potent support of the Saudi kingdom the situation in Yemen reached almost the same stalemate point Libya did.

Freedom dawn is bound to break

And when it was time for the Syrian storm to start, the general Arabic mood was intoxicated with endless scenes of blood, coffins, new promises, new cabinets, compromises, European and African brokers and deadlock situations everywhere.

USA and the NATO under the cover of yet another noble and humanitarian world mission managed to not only save the day for Gaddafi in Libya, but also to hinder this fervent domino effect in the Arab world that was resketching the region’s political map and menacingly encroaching upon the rich with oil Gulf countries and the rest of Israel’s allies and this is where the red line had to be drawn.

The odyssey dawn will be regarded as a mission accomplished in Libya and the rest of the Arab world. Gaddafi and many other dictators in the Arab world might have won some time by this no-fly zone operation but eventually they are bound to get on the same departure plane that Ben Ali and Mubarak had been aboard.

Due to this inconclusive intervention in Libya the Arab spring has been prematurely interrupted, but soon, new dawn will undoubtedly break. And next time it will not be the odyssey of the coalition military adventure but rather of Arabs’ continued quest for freedom.

For more articles by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat visit his website.

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