By
Lawrence Wilkerson Col, USA (Ret)
January 30, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
“The collapse of the Libyan state
has had region-wide repercussions, with flows of
people and weapons destabilizing other countries
throughout North Africa.” This statement came from
the Soufan Group’s recent Intelbrief, entitled
“Fighting Over Access to Libya’s Energy Supplies”
(24 January 2020).
Are you listening,
Barack Obama?
“There’s a bias in
this town [Washington, DC] toward war,” President
Obama said to me and several others assembled in the
White House’s Roosevelt Room on September 10, 2015,
almost seven years into his presidency. At the time,
I thought he was thinking particularly of the tragic
mistake he made by joining the intervention in Libya
in 2011, ostensibly im52924
plementing United
Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.
Obama’s secretary of
state, John Kerry, was sitting right beside the
president as Obama spoke. I recall asking myself at
the time if he were lecturing Kerry as well as
lamenting his own decision, because Kerry had been
rather outspoken at the time about heavier U.S.
participation in yet another endless war then — and
still — transpiring in Syria. Obama however, was
apparently having none of that.
The reason is that
the Libya intervention not only lead to the grisly
death of Libya’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi — and set
in motion a brutal and continuing military conquest
for the title of “who rules Libya,” invite outside
powers from all over the Mediterranean to join the
fray, and unleash a destabilizing refugee flow
across that inner sea — it also put the weaponry
from one of the world’s largest arms caches into the
hands of such groups as ISIS, al-Qa’ida, Lashkar e-Taibi,
and others. Additionally, many of those formerly
Libyan weapons were being used in Syria at that very
moment.
