US and NATO murder Muammar Gaddafi

By Bill Van Auken
21 October 2011

The savage killing Thursday of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi
served to underscore the criminal character of the war that has been
prosecuted by the US and NATO over the past eight months.



The assassination follows NATO?s more than month-long siege of Sirte,
the Libyan coastal city that was Gaddafi?s hometown and a center of his
support. The assault on this city of 100,000 left virtually every
building smashed, with untold numbers of civilians dead, wounded and
stricken by disease, as they were deprived of food, water, medical care
and other basic necessities.



Gaddafi was apparently traveling in a convoy of vehicles attempting to
break out of the siege after the last bastion of resistance had fallen
to the NATO-backed ?rebels?. NATO warplanes attacked the convoy at 8:30
a.m. Thursday morning, leaving a number of vehicles in flames and
preventing it from moving forward. Then the armed anti-Gaddafi militias
moved in for the kill.



The death of Gaddafi appears to have been part of a larger massacre
that has reportedly claimed the lives of a number of his top aides,
loyalist fighters and his two sons, Mo?tassim and Saif al-Islam.



While details of the killings remain somewhat clouded, photographs and
cell phone videos released by the NATO-backed ?rebels? clearly show a
wounded Gaddafi struggling with his captors and shouting as he is
dragged onto the back of a vehicle. His stripped and lifeless body is
then shown, drenched in blood. It seems clear that having first been
wounded, perhaps in the NATO air strikes, the former Libyan ruler was
captured alive and then summarily executed. One photograph shows him
with a bullet hole in the head.



Gaddafi?s body was then taken west to the city of Misrata, where it
was reportedly dragged through the streets before being deposited in a
mosque.



The fate of the body is politically significant in that it was seized
by a Misrata militia faction that is operating under its own command
and has no loyalty to the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council
(NTC), which Washington and NATO have anointed as the ?sole legitimate
representative? of the Libyan people.



Thus this grisly event, which President Barack Obama hailed in the
White House Rose Garden Thursday as the advent of ?a new and democratic
Libya,? in reality only exposes the regional and tribal fault lines
that are setting the stage for a protracted period of civil war.



Both the US and France claimed credit for their roles in the murder of
Gaddafi. The Pentagon asserted on Thursday that a US Predator drone had
fired a Hellfire missile at the ousted Libyan leader?s convoy, while
France?s defense minister said that French warplanes had bombed it.



The US and NATO had carried out repeated air strikes on Gaddafi?s
compounds in Tripoli and other homes where they suspected he was hiding
since shortly after the brutal air war against Libya was launched last
March. One of these strikes at the end of last April claimed the lives
of his youngest son and three young grandchildren.



Washington had deployed surveillance planes along with large numbers
of drones in an attempt to track down Gaddafi, while US, British and
French intelligence agents, special operations troops and military
?contractors? operating on the ground also participated in this
manhunt.



Just two days before the murder of Gaddafi, US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton staged an unannounced visit to Tripoli on a heavily
armed military aircraft. While there, she issued a demand that Gaddafi
be brought in ?dead or alive?.



As the Associated Press reported, Clinton declared ?in unusually blunt
terms that the United States would like to see former dictator Muammar
Gaddafi dead.



??We hope he can be captured or killed soon so that you don?t have to
fear him any longer?, Clinton told students and others at a town hall-
style gathering in the capital city.?



The AP went on to note: ?Until now, the US has generally avoided
saying that Gaddafi should be killed.?



Yet in reality, Washington is pursuing an unconcealed policy of state
murder. In this case, it has openly advocated and provided every
resource to facilitate the killing of a head of state with whom the US
government had established close political and commercial relations
over the course of the last eight years.



The battered corpse of Gaddafi?s son Mo?tassim, who was also captured
alive and then executed, was put on display in Misrata. As recently as
April 2009 he was warmly welcomed to the US State Department by Hillary
Clinton.



In his Rose Garden speech Thursday, Obama boasted of his
administration having ?taken out? Al Qaeda leaders, sounding for the
all world like a Mafia don, minus the charm. Among his most recent
victims are two US citizens, Anwar Awlaki, the Arizona-born Yemeni-
American Muslim cleric, last month and, two weeks later, his 16-year-
old son Abdulrahman, who was born in Denver. Both had been placed on a
?kill list? by a secret National Security Council subcommittee and
murdered with Hellfire missiles. Abdulrahman was blown to bits along
with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other friends as they ate
dinner.



The killing of Gaddafi is the culmination of a criminal war that
killed untold numbers of Libyans and left most of the country in ruins.
This operation was launched on the pretext of protecting civilian
lives, based on the trumped up claim that Gaddafi was preparing to lay
siege to the eastern city of Benghazi to massacre his opponents. It has
ended with NATO orchestrating a siege of Sirte, where thousands have
been killed and wounded in suppressing opposition to the ?rebels?.



From the beginning, the entire operation has been directed at the re-
colonization of North Africa and pursued on behalf of US, British,
French, Italian and Dutch oil interests.



While over the past decade Gaddafi had curried favor with US, Britain,
France and other Western powers, striking oil deals, arms agreements
and other pacts, US imperialism and its counterparts in Europe
continued to see his regime as an impediment to their aims in the
region.



Among the principal concerns in Washington, London and Paris were the
increasing Chinese and Russian economic interests in Libya and more
generally Africa as a whole. China had developed $6.6 billion in
bilateral trade, mainly in oil, while some 30,000 Chinese workers were
employed in a wide range of infrastructure projects. Russia, meanwhile,
had developed extensive oil deals, billions of dollars in arms sales
and a $3 billion project to link Sirte and Benghazi by rail. There were
also discussions on providing the Russian navy with a Mediterranean
port near Benghazi.



Gaddafi had provoked the ire of the government of Nicolas Sarkozy in
France with his hostility to its scheme for creating a Mediterranean
Union, aimed at refurbishing French influence in the country?s former
colonies and beyond.



Moreover, major US and Western European energy conglomerates
increasingly chafed at what they saw as tough contract terms demanded
by the Gaddafi government, as well as the threat that the Russian oil
company Gazprom would be given a big stake in the exploitation of the
country?s reserves.



Combined with these economic and geo-strategic motives were political
factors. The turn by Gaddafi toward closer relations to the West had
allowed Washington and Paris to cultivate elements within his regime
who were prepared to collaborate in an imperialist takeover of the
country. This includes figures like Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gaddafi?s
former Justice Minister and now chairman of the NATO-backed NTC and
Mahmoud Jibril, the former economics official who is chief of the NTC
cabinet.



With the popular upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt?on Libya?s western and
eastern borders?the US and its NATO allies saw an opportunity to put
into operation a plan that had been developed over some time for regime
change in Libya. With agents on the ground, they moved to exploit and
hijack anti-Gaddafi demonstrations and foment an armed conflict.



To prepare for a direct imperialist takeover, they followed a well-
worn path, vilifying the country?s leader and promoting the idea that
only outside intervention could save innocent civilians from a looming
massacre.



The supposed imminent destruction of Benghazi was utilized to win
support for imperialist war from a whole range of ex-lefts, liberals,
academics and human rights advocates, who lent their moral and
intellectual weight to an exercise in imperialist aggression and
murder.



Figures like University of Michigan Middle Eastern history professor
Juan Cole, who had raised limited criticism of the Bush administration?
s invasion of Iraq, became enthusiastic promoters of the ?humanitarian?
mission of the Pentagon and NATO in Libya. Representative of an upper
middle class social layer that has become a new constituency for
imperialism, they were utterly compromised, politically and morally.
They were untroubled by the lawlessness of the entire enterprise and
the mounting evidence of the murder and torture of immigrants and black
Libyans by the so-called rebels.



Their attempt to portray the regime change in Libya as a popular
revolution becomes more preposterous with each passing day. The
unstable puppet regime that is taking shape in Benghazi and Tripoli has
been installed through relentless and massive NATO bombing, murder and
the wholesale violation of international law.



Libya stands as a warning to the world. Any regime that gets in the
way of US interests, runs afoul of the major corporations or fails to
do the bidding of the NATO powers can be overthrown by military force,
with its leaders murdered.



Already, the US media, which has staged a hideous celebration of the
bloodbath outside Sirte, is braying for NATO to repeat its Libyan
intervention in Syria. For her part, Clinton warned Pakistani leaders
on Thursday that insufficient support for the US-war in Afghanistan
would mean that they would pay ?a very big price.?



There can be no doubt that future operations are on the way, with
bigger wars coming into focus, posing catastrophic consequences. The
Obama administration has already put Iran on notice that all options
remain ?on the table? in relation to a fabricated plot to assassinate
the Saudi ambassador in Washington. And as the Libyan intervention was
aimed in no small part at countering Chinese and Russian influence both
in the region and globally, so China and Russia themselves are seen as
future targets.



The bloody events in Libya, and the economic motives underlying them,
are providing a fresh lesson in the real character of imperialism. The
crisis gripping world capitalism is once again posing the threat of
world war. The working class can confront this threat only by
mobilizing its independent political strength and rearming itself with
the program of world socialist revolution to put an end to the profit
system, which is the source of militarism.

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