Egypt is Calling the
West’s Bluff Over its Phony War on ISIS
By Dan Glazebrook
February 20, 2015 "ICH"
- "RT"
- Western states are trumpeting ISIS as the
latest threat to civilisation, claiming
total commitment to their defeat, and using
the group’s conquests in Syria and Iraq as a
pretext for deepening their own military
involvement in the Middle East.
Yet as Libya seems to be
following the same path as Syria – of
‘moderate’
anti-government militias backed by the West
paving the way for ISIS takeover – Britain
and the US seem reluctant to confront them
there, immediately pouring cold water on
Egyptian President Sisi’s request for an
international coalition to halt their
advances. By making the suggestion – and
having it, predictably, spurned – Sisi is
making clear Western duplicity over ISIS and
the true nature of NATO policy in Libya.
On August 29, 2011, two
months before the last vestiges of the
Libyan state were destroyed and its leader
executed, I was interviewed on Russia Today
about the country’s future. I told the
station: “There’s been a lot of talk
about what will happen [in Libya after the
ouster of Gaddafi] – will there be sharia
law, will there be a liberal democracy? What
we have to understand is that what will
replace the Libyan state won’t be any of
those things, what will replace the Libyan
state will be the same as what has replaced
the state in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is
a dysfunctional government, complete lack of
security, gang warfare and civil war. And
this is not a mistake from NATO. They would
prefer to see failed states than states that
are powerful and independent and able to
challenge their hegemony. And people who are
fighting for the TNC, fighting for NATO,
really need to understand that this is
NATO’s vision for their country.”
Friends at the time told me I was being
overly pessimistic and cynical. I said I
hoped to God they were right. But my
experiences over a decade following the
results of my own country (Britain)’s wars
of aggression in places like Kosovo,
Afghanistan and Iraq long after the
mainstream media had lost interest, led me
to believe otherwise.
Of course, it was not only
me who was making such warnings. On March 6,
2011, several weeks before NATO began seven
months of bombing, Gaddafi gave a prophetic
interview with French newspaper Le Monde du
Dimanche, in which he stated: “I want to
make myself understood: if one threatens
[Libya], if one seeks to destabilize
[Libya], there will be chaos, Bin Laden,
armed factions. That is what will happen.
You will have immigration, thousands of
people will invade Europe from Libya. And
there will no longer be anyone to stop them.
Bin Laden will base himself in North Africa
and will leave Mullah Omar in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. You will have Bin Laden at
your door step.”
He specifically warned
that Derna, a town that had already provided
large numbers of suicide bombers to Iraq,
would become an “Islamist emirate”
on the Mediterranean. Gaddafi’s warnings
were mocked in the Western media (although
many intelligence experts, in under-reported
comments, backed his assertions), and few in
Europe had ever heard of Derna. Until
November 2014, that is – when ISIS announced
their takeover of the city, the first of
three in Libya now under their control.
Their most recent conquest, Sirte, Gaddafi’s
hometown, was heralded by the posting onto
youtube of the beheading of 21 Coptic
Christians they had captured there last
December. They are widely believed to have
been immigrant workers from one of the
poorest parts of Egypt.
Sirte had been a
pro-government stronghold during NATO’s
onslaught in 2011, and one of the last
cities to fall - the result of its ferocious
resistance and zero support for the
‘rebels’. It was subjected to a massive
siege and became the scene of some of the
worst war crimes of the war, both by
NATO and their allies on the ground. Now
that the people of Sirte have been forced to
live – and die – under the latest
incarnation of NATO’s ‘heroic freedom
fighters’ - it is becoming ever clearer
why they fought so hard to keep them out in
the first place. Yet even this massacre is
eclipsed by the almost 600 Libyan National
Army soldiers killed by ISIS and their
allies in their battle to take Benghazi over
the last three years.
This is the state of
affairs NATO bequeathed to Libya, reversing
the country’s trajectory as a stable,
prosperous pan-African state that was a
leading player in the African Union and a
thorn in the side of US and British attempts
to re-establish military domination. And it
is not only Libya that has suffered; the
power vacuum resulting from NATO’s wholesale
destruction of the Libyan state apparatus
has dragged the whole region into the
vortex.
As Brendan O Neill has shown in detail,
the daily horrors being perpetrated in Mali,
Nigeria and now Cameroon are all a direct
result of NATO’s bloodletting, as death
squads from across the entire Sahel-Sahara
region have been given free reign to set up
training camps and loot weapons across the
giant zone of lawlessness which NATO have
sculpted out of Libya.
The result? African states
that in 2010 were forging ahead
economically,
greatly benefitting from Chinese
infrastructure and manufacturing investment,
moving away from centuries of colonial and
neo-colonial dependence on extortionate
Western financial institutions, have been
confronted with massive new terror threats
from groups such as Boko Haram, flush with
new weaponry and facilities courtesy of
NATO’s humanitarianism. Algeria and Egypt,
too, still governed by the same
independent-minded movements which overthrew
European colonialism, have seen their
borders destabilised, setting the stage for
ongoing debilitating attacks planned and
executed from NATO’s new Libyan militocracy.
This is the context in which Egypt is
launching the regional fightback against
NATO’s destabilisation strategy.
Over the past year in
particular, Egyptians have witnessed their
Western neighbour rapidly descending down
the same path of ISIS takeover as Syria. In
Syria, a civil war between a
Western-sponsored insurgency and an elected
secular government has seen the
anti-government forces rapidly fall under
the sway of ISIS, as the West’s supposed
‘moderates’ in the Free Syrian Army either
join forces with ISIS (impressed by their
military prowess, hi-tech weaponry, and
massive funding) or find themselves overrun
by them. In Libya, the same pattern is
quickly developing. The latest phase in the
Libyan disaster began last June when the
militias who dominated the previous
parliament (calling themselves the ‘Libya
Dawn’ coalition) lost the election and
refused to accept the results, torching the
country’s airport and oil storage facilities
as opening salvos in an ongoing civil war
between them and the newly elected
parliament. Both parliaments have the
allegiance of various armed factions, and
have set up their own rival governments,
each controlling different parts of the
country. But, starting in Derna last
November, areas taken by the Libya Dawn
faction have begun falling to ISIS. Last
weekend’s capture of Sirte was the third
major town to be taken by them, and there is
no sign that it will be the last. This is
the role that has consistently been played
by the West’s proxies across the region –
paving the way and laying the ground for
ISIS takeover. Egyptian President Sisi’s
intervention – airstrikes against ISIS
targets in Libya - aims to reverse this
trajectory before it reaches Iraqi-Syrian
proportions.
The internationally-recognised
Libyan government based in Tobruk – the one
appointed by the House of Representatives
that won the election last summer - has
welcomed the Egyptian intervention. Not
only, they hope, will it help prevent ISIS
takeover, but will also cement Egyptian
support for their side in the ongoing civil
war with ‘Libya Dawn’. Indeed, Egypt could,
with some justification, claim that winning
the war against ISIS requires a unified
Libyan government committed to this goal,
and that the Dawn’s refusal to recognise the
elected parliament , not to mention their
‘ambiguous’ attitude towards ISIS,
is the major obstacle to achieving such an
outcome.
Does this mean that the
Egyptian intervention will scupper the UN’s
‘Libya dialogue’ peace talks
initiative? Not necessarily; in fact if
could have the opposite effect. The first
two rounds of the talks were boycotted by
the General National Congress (the Libya
Dawn parliament), safe in the knowledge that
they would continue to receive weapons and
financing from NATO partners Qatar and
Turkey whilst the internationally-recognised
Tobruk government remained under an
international arms embargo. As the UK’s
envoy to the Libya Dialogue, Jonathan
Powell, noted this week, the “sine qua
non for a [peace] settlement” is a
“mutually hurting stalemate”. By
balancing up the scales in the civil war,
Egyptian support military support for the
Tobruk government may show the GNC that
taking the talks seriously will be more in
their interests than continuation of the
fight.
Sisi’s call for the
military support of the West in his
intervention has effectively been rejected,
as he very likely expected it to be. A joint
statement by the US and Britain and their
allies on Tuesday
poured cold water on the idea, and no
wonder – they did not go to all the bother
of turning Libya into the centre of their
regional destabilisation strategy only to
then try to stabilise it just when it is
starting to bear fruit. However, by forcing
them to come out with such a statement, Sisi
has called the West’s bluff. The US and
Britain claim to be committed to the
destruction of ISIS, a formation which is
the product of the insurgency they have
sponsored in Syria for the past four years,
and Sisi is asking them to put their money
where their mouth is. They have refused to
do so. In the end, the Egyptian resolution
to the UN Security Council on Wednesday made
no mention of calling for military
intervention by other powers, and limited
itself to calling for an end to the
one-sided international arms embargo which
prevents the arming of the elected
government but does not seem to deter NATO’s
regional partners from openly equipping the
‘Libya Dawn’ militias. Sisi has effectively
forced the West to show its hand: their
rejection of his proposal to support the
intervention makes it clear to the world the
two-faced nature of their supposed
commitment to the destruction of ISIS.
There are, however, deep
divisions on this issue in Europe. France is
deepening its military presence in the
Sahel-Sahara region, with 3000 troops based
in Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali and a
massive new base opened on the Libyan border
in Niger last October, and would likely
welcome a pretext to extend its operations
to its historic protectorate in Southern
Libya. Italy, likewise, is getting cold feet
about the destabilisation it helped to
unleash, having not only damaged a valuable
trading partner, but increasingly being
faced with hundreds of thousands of refugees
fleeing the horror and destitution that NATO
has gifted the region. But neither are
likely to do anything without UNSC approval,
which is likely to continue to be blocked by
the US and Britain, who are more than happy
to see countries like Russian-allied Egypt
and Chinese-funded Nigeria weakened and
their development retarded by terror
bombings. Sisi’s actions will, it is hoped,
not only make abundantly clear the West’s
acquiescence in the horrors it has created –
but also pave the way for an effective
fightback against them.
Dan Glazebrook, for
RT.
Dan Glazebrook is a
political writer and author of “Divide and
Ruin: The West's Imperial Strategy in an Age
of Crisis”.