US Prepares
Troop Deployment to Libya Amid Fight for Oil Fields
By Bill Van
Auken
May 22,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WSWS"
- Five
years after a US-NATO war shattered Libya,
Washington is preparing to send troops into the
oil-rich North African nation for a “long-term
mission,” the Pentagon’s top uniformed commander
said Thursday.
Marine Gen.
Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, told reporters returning aboard his plane
from a meeting of NATO commanders in Brussels that
the new military deployment, which could involve
thousands of US troops, could happen “any day.” It
awaited only a formal agreement with the new
government that the Western powers and the UN are
attempting to set up in Tripoli, he indicated.
General
Dunford told reporters that there had been “intense
dialogue” and “activities under the surface” aimed
at bringing about the Libya intervention. This
apparently referred to efforts by the US ambassador
to Libya, Peter Bodde, and the State Department’s
special envoy for Libya, Jonathan Winer, to wrest a
formal request for military intervention from Fayez
al-Sarraj, the unelected head of the Western-backed
Libyan Presidential Council.
Under UN
and US tutelage, Sarraj and his allies established
this council in exile in Tunisia, returning to the
Libyan capital, Tripoli, at the end of March. It is
obvious that this new puppet regime has been created
for the sole purpose of providing a veneer of
legality to another US-NATO military intervention in
the devastated country.
Sarraj’s
legitimacy, however, is by no means clear. His is
now one of three competing regimes, including the
Islamist-dominated General National Congress (GNC)
in Tripoli and the House of Representatives (HoR)
based in the eastern city of Tobruk, which was
previously recognized by the West as the legitimate
government of Libya. Neither the GNC nor the HoR
have recognized the authority of Sarraj’s
presidential council.
Nor is it
clear what fighting force Sarraj can rely upon and
the US and its allies can arm and train. It was
revealed earlier this month that US Special
Operations troops have been on the ground in Libya
since last year attempting to contact and assess
various rival militias to see which one could be
employed in the service of Washington’s interests in
the country.
Ostensibly,
the US and its allies are intervening to counter the
rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
inside the country. ISIS fighters, reported to
number at least 5,000, have taken control of a
stretch of the Libyan Mediterranean coast. It is no
accident that the center of this territory is the
city of Sirte, formerly the hometown of Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi. The city was reduced to
rubble by US-NATO attacks in the days leading up to
the October 2011 torture and murder of Gaddafi at
the hands of US-backed Islamist militiamen.
As in Iraq
and Syria, Washington is justifying this new
intervention in the name of combating a force that
it itself spawned. Libya’s ISIS fighters came from
the Islamist militias that the CIA and other Western
intelligence agencies supported and armed in the bid
to oust Gaddafi in 2011. Many of them were then sent
into Syria, along with large stockpiles of Libyan
weapons that were shipped to that country as part of
an operation run out of the secret CIA station in
Benghazi. That station and a separate US consulate
were overrun by Libyan Islamist militiamen in
September 2011, leading to the deaths of US
Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other
Americans.
Discussions
on the coming Libya intervention took place at a
meeting of foreign ministers from the US, Europe and
the Middle East on Monday in Vienna. Among the
decisions taken was to seek exemption from an arms
embargo imposed by the UN after the fall of Gaddafi
so that weapons can be funneled in to forces loyal
to the puppet Sarraj, though it is, as of yet,
unclear who those forces are. US Secretary of State
John Kerry allowed that a “delicate balance” had to
be found to prevent the arms from falling into the
hands of Al Qaeda-linked and ISIS elements that
Washington is ostensibly fighting.
The real
objective in Libya today, as in 2011, is the
assertion of undisputed US-NATO hegemony over the
country and its massive oil reserves, the largest on
the African continent. Having turned Libya into the
model of a so-called “failed state” with its first
intervention, Washington appears to want to impose
some kind of neocolonial regime with its pending
second incursion.
The
centrality of oil is manifest in the operations of
the two major armed militias that are being
considered for the role of Western puppet forces.
The first is the so-called Libyan National Army
formed under the command of Khalifa Hafter, a former
Libyan army officer who became an “asset” of the CIA
in the 1980s, set up near the agency’s headquarters
in Langley, Virginia and then airlifted by the
Americans back into Benghazi during the 2011 war for
regime change.
Hafter’s
forces have been moving slowly west from Benghazi
toward the ISIS center of Sirte, expending most of
their energies on seizing control of some 14 oil
fields along the way. The fields were taken largely
from the Petroleum Facilities’ Guards (PFG), whose
commander, Ibrahim Jadhran, had sworn allegiance to
the US-backed regime of Sarraj after previously
seeking autonomy for the east and attempting to sell
oil independently of the government in Tripoli.
Meanwhile,
a rival militia based in the city of Misurata in
northwestern Libya has been approaching Sirte from
the opposite direction with similar intentions. It
is widely anticipated that these two forces,
apparently the principal candidates for serving as
the foundation of a Western puppet force in the
country, may end up battling each other rather than
ISIS.
While
General Dunford predicted a US-NATO intervention was
imminent, he was less forthcoming about its
composition.
It had been
reported initially that Italy, which exercised
brutal colonial rule over Libya under the fascist
dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, would lead the
mission, providing upwards of 5,000 troops. Among
Rome’s principal concerns—aside from reasserting its
old colonial ambitions—is securing the Libyan coast,
which is expected to be the major route for refugees
seeking to reach Italy, now that the EU has sealed
off the so-called Balkan route.
On Monday,
however, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said
that Italy would not send troops into Libya. “While
under pressure to intervene in Libya, we have chosen
a different approach,” Renzi said in a statement.
For its
part, Germany has reportedly rejected placing any of
its troops in Libya, saying that it would only train
Libyan forces in neighboring Tunisia.
The
apparent disarray within NATO’s ranks reflects the
competing interests of the US and the various
European powers as the Libyan intervention escalates
what is emerging as a new imperialist scramble for
Africa.
As
Washington prepares to launch another military
intervention into a nation that it previously
decimated through a war of aggression, its ongoing
campaign in Iraq appears in growing danger. Baghdad
was placed under military curfew Friday night after
Iraqi security forces used tear gas and live fire to
drive back thousands of antigovernment demonstrators
who stormed the heavily fortified Green Zone,
reaching the office of Iraq’s US-backed prime
minister, Haider al-Abadi.
Initial
reports indicated at least one civilian, and perhaps
several, killed by security forces, and dozens
wounded.
Protesters,
including supporters of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,
had stormed into the blast wall-enclosed Green Zone
on April 30 to protest government corruption and
failure to provide basic services and security.
Anger has only deepened in the intervening weeks as
the result of a series of terrorist bombings claimed
by ISIS that have killed more than 150 people in
Baghdad this month.
In the wake
of the bloodshed in the Green Zone, there is a
growing threat that an armed confrontation between
government forces and armed Shia militias in the
Iraqi capital could eclipse the so-called war
against ISIS.
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