NATO War In LIbya

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press Wednesday September 07, 2011 14:03 by James Turley

James Turley looks at developments in Libya: the divisions among the rebels, how most of the Left opposed NATO intervention. More at link.

As it threatened, briefly, to do this spring, the regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi has collapsed. The forces previously known as the Libyan rebels have seized power in most of the country, including the capital, Tripoli - assisted, of course, by months of aerial bombardment by Britain, France and America.

Gaddafi's fall, though hardly completely unexpected, nonetheless took place with surprising rapidity. The civil war, which had raged ever since Nato support lent some kind of military muscle to the rag-tag rebel forces, looked for months to have reached a point of stalemate. Frustration was evident at all levels of the imperialist establishment; all the signs of debilitating mission creep (a UN resolution aiming ostensibly to prevent a massacre in Benghazi having given way rapidly to an open-ended mission to topple Gaddafi) were there, easily recognisable from the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters.

The TNC is a motley coalition of academics, liberals, royalists, Islamists and ex-Gaddafi cronies who saw which way the wind was blowing. It is perhaps not the perfect Party of Order, but strange times make for strange bedfellows. Any stable regime to come out of it would necessarily entail significant restrictions on political freedom, if not to the degree enjoyed by Gaddafi; and it would have to sufficiently placate key constituencies of the rebel forces, not least the Islamists and tribal leaders. Given the ideologically protean character of Gaddafi - who claimed to be a pan-Arabist, a pan-Africanist and a pan-Islamist - it is likely that his erstwhile henchmen will have no problem adapting in particular to Islamism.