Treachery of the West - White men speak with forked tongues

Military Watch:

Ten Years Since the West’s War Against Libya: How it Served as a Warning Regarding U.S. and European Intentions

French Rafale Fighter (top) and
Explosion From NATO Strike on Libya (below)

“You give up your weapons of mass destruction, you stop developing long range missiles, you become very friendly with the West and this is the result. So what does this mean, it means this is a message to everybody that you have to be strong. You never trust them, and you have to be always on alert. Otherwise those people, they don’t have friends. Overnight they change their mind and they start bombing us, and the same thing could happen to any other country" 

- Saif Al Islam Al Gaddafi on lesson to the world of the Libyan War.

February 2021 marks ten years since the beginning of NATO military operations against the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, an African republic founded in 1969 following the overthrow of the country’s Western-aligned monarchy.

The republic had long aligned itself against Western interests, forming close ties with the South African ANC, the Zimbabwe African National Union, East Germany, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan and the Soviet Union among others during its 42 year existence. This included contributions to the Egyptian led war effort against the U.S.-backed State of Israel in 1973, a war with French and U.S. backed Chad which began later that decade, and multiple minor clashes between its own forces and those of the United States in the 1980s.

Libya was widely considered the West’s leading adversary in the Arab world in the waning Cold War years, with the Ronald Reagan administration attempting to assassinate the country’s leader Muammar Gaddafi in 1986 with a major air strike on his residence.

Following the end of the Cold War and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Tripoli notably changed its position and sought rapprochement with the West in order to avoid potentially being targeted as Iraq had been. The U.S. imposed harsh terms during negotiations including a complete dismantling of the country’s strategic missile and chemical deterrents and intrusive Western inspections of military facilities across Libya – which the Libyan government assented to in the hopes of improving ties with the Western world.

Sudanese, Libyan and Egyptian Leaders Nimeiry, Nasser and Gaddafi

Upon Tripoli’s agreement to disarm, which further included accepting considerable restrictions on its nuclear activities which had been suspected of being a nuclear weapons program, U.S. President George W. Bush hailed the African state as a “model for other countries.” He pledged: “Leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations.”

Libya would serve as a model to the world regarding the consequences of disarmament and placing trust in Western guarantees of improved relations, although in a very different way to how President Bush had likely intended.

Little over five years after its disarmament was complete, Libya came under a large scale U.S.-led attack with armed militias and mercenary forces striking on the ground armed and supplied by Western powers as U.S. and European military jets and cruise missiles devastated the country’s infrastructure and military facilities from the air.

Libya was poorly placed to defend itself, with its Western adversaries now having detailed knowledge of the country’s defences and assurance that it no longer had a means to retaliate against Western targets when its own cities were targeted.

Libya had not only provided extensive information on its defences and allowed its adversaries to strip it of its strategic deterrent, but its faith in the security guarantees provided when it disarmed also led it to neglect modernisation of its air defences.

Although the Libyan Air Force had had by far the most impressive inventory of combat jets on the African continent in the 1980s, and was the largest foreign client for the Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat interceptor which was its most formidable combat jet ever exported during the Cold War by measure of air-to-air performance, it had neglected to modernise, service or maintain the bulk of its aircraft or to train sufficient numbers of pilots.

Post-War Libya

NATO pilots had little need to target Libya's large air fleet on the ground, and were well aware that most of the country's aircraft were totally inactive with few trained pilots to operate them. Libya’s air defences were equally meagre, with negligible fortifications, modernisation, or training for surface to air missile crews leaving missile batteries extremely vulnerable to Western attacks.

The Libyan government was toppled soon afterwards and its leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi tortured and killed by Western backed militias operating under French air support. The result in Libya, formerly Africa’s most prosperous country, was over a decade of civil war, the deployment of foreign forces from multiple countries pursuing conflicting interests on its soil, the rise of the Islamic State terror group, and a return of slave markets and human trafficking.

The aftermath of the Western campaign saw anti-government militias carry out a purge of the country’s black ethnic minority with tens and by some accounts hundreds of thousands massacred, raped or sold into slavery.

Photo Allegedly Showing a Slave Being Escorted for Auction in Post-War Libya

Libya’s fate ultimately served as a warning to countries across the world regarding the potential consequences of complacency in the face of a Western military threat, and the inability to entrust one’s security to Western good will or to security guarantees from the U.S. or Europe.

Regarding North Korea in particular, the Donald Trump Administration’s Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats highlighted that Libya’s fate demonstrated why it was strongly against Pyongyang’s national security interests to disarm. He stated that the North Korean leadership “has watched, I think, what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability ... The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes ... is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”

North Korea’s own Foreign Ministry stated to much the same effect regarding the lessons learned from Tripoli’s decision to terminate its deterrent force and its consequences: “Libya’s nuclear dismantlement much touted by the U.S. in the past turned out to be a mode of aggression by which the latter coaxed the former with such sweet words as ‘guarantee of security’ and ‘improvement of relations’ to disarm and then swallow it up by force.”

Pyongyang believed that in exchange for a lifting of sanctions and better relations Libya “took the economic bait, foolishly disarmed themselves, and once they were defenceless, were mercilessly punished by the West.”

Saif Al Islam Gaddafi

When interviewed during the war in 2011 Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif Al Islam spoke of what he retrospectively saw to be the cause of Libya’s downfall, which he referred to as “a good lesson for everybody.” He indicated that despite strong advice from both Iran and North Korea not to give up its deterrence programs, Libya had gone ahead to surrender its ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction – which he referred to this as the country’s critical mistake.

He stated to this effect: “you give up your weapons of mass destruction, you stop developing long range missiles, you become very friendly with the West and this is the result. So what does this mean, it means this is a message to everybody that you have to be strong. You never trust them, and you have to be always on alert. Otherwise those people, they don’t have friends. Overnight they change their mind and they start bombing us, and the same thing could happen to any other country… One of our big mistakes was that we delayed buying new weapons, especially from Russia, it was a big mistake. And we delayed building a strong army because we thought that we will not fight again, the Americans, the Europeans are our friends [since forming positive relations after 2003.]”

Su-30SM '4+ Generation' Fighter - reportedly Libya's first choice for its planned but delayed fleet modernisation

In the aftermath of the Libyan war the country’s immediate neighbours Algeria and Egypt quickly took measures to strengthen their air defences with new Russian fighter aircraft and ground based missile systems.

The launching of an attack on Libya had been almost totally unpredictable given the prior state of Tripoli’s relatively positive relations with the West after its disarmament, which led to growing concerns that other North African states could be next. Iran too, despite coming under intense Western pressure to allow Western inspections of its military bases and accept Western imposed restrictions on its ballistic missile deterrent, drawn a red line against such steps likely at least in party due to the example set by Libya.

Libya’s fate has ultimately served as a dire warning regarding the propensity of the Western powers to launch military campaigns unexpectedly against countries outside their sphere of influence - one which has provided a strong incentive for potential targets to arm themselves regardless of how effective any detente with the West may seem.

Later leaked emails from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated that France, which had led the campaign in its early stages and been the first country to violate Libyan airspace, had been motivated to strike by the need to prevent Libya from establishing a gold backed pan-African currency – the African Gold Dinar. This would have otherwise seriously undermined French influence over its resource rich former colonies of West and Central Africa.

The currently state of war in Libya could potentially continue indefinitely into its second decade, and the consequences of the Gaddafi government's policy decisions which left open to Western attacks have ultimately set the country's development back several decades with much of the wartime damage from Western strikes a decade ago having yet to be repaired.