Forum Post: WSWS: NATO declares formal end to criminal war on Libya

NATO declares formal end to criminal war on Libya

NATO formally ended its seven-month predatory war against Libya at midnight Monday, having achieved its aim of regime change and opened up the country to what its imperialist member states hope will be the unrestrained exploitation of Libya’s huge energy resources by Western oil companies.

Speaking in Tripoli at a joint news conference with Mustafa Abdul Jalil, head of the NATO-backed National Transitional Council (NTC), Monday, NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, described the war as “a successful chapter in NATO’s history,” claiming that it had created “a new Libya based on freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”

“Free Libya” lies in ruins. Much of its infrastructure has been destroyed and whole cities, like Sirte, the target of a barbaric NATO siege that ended barely one week ago, have been turned into ghost towns.

The war was launched in March of this year based on Resolution 1973, pushed through the United National Security Council on the false pretense that it was needed to authorize the imposition of a no-fly zone and other measures to protect civilians from repression by the Gaddafi regime.

At the time, the US and the Western European powers, echoed by the media and a whole layer of human rights organizations, liberal academics and pseudo-left groups, claimed that such an authorization was required to forestall an imminent massacre of thousands in the eastern city of Benghazi, the center of opposition to Gaddafi.

There was no evidence substantiating the claims of an imminent massacre. But the intervention launched in the name of saving human lives served to unleash a bloodletting in Libya that has surpassed even the worst predictions of those proclaiming the need for an immediate “humanitarian” military intervention.

Now all of them have blood on their hands, from academic scoundrels like Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, who declared himself ready to serve NATO, to pseudo-left groups like the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, which tried to paint the imperialist intervention as a “revolutionary process.” The Libya war has made it clear that an entire layer of ex-lefts and so-called liberals have become a vital constituency for imperialism, willing to justify and celebrate mass murder in the interests of their own ruling elites.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/nov2011/pers-n01.shtml