The Destruction of Libya in 2011: a good general survey of events surrounding the downfall of Colonel Ghaddafi

Carlton Meyer, “The Destruction of Libya in 2011” (Tales of the American Empire, May 2020)

A very good general survey of how the US overthrew Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi’s government in 2011 after 42 years of rule and turned what had been Africa’s most prosperous and stable nation into one of the continent’s poorest and most volatile flash-points, this short film does rely on other sources to flesh out its narrative but it is straightforward, unflinching and easy to follow. After pushing for a no-fly zone at the United Nations and getting it, the US and its allies invaded Libya, bombed its major cities and infrastructure (including the Great Man-made River Project, the world’s largest irrigation scheme, bringing water from beneath the Sahara to Libya’s coastal cities) and allowed Islamic jihadists, many of them foreign, to brutalise, sodomise and kill Ghaddafi. The country’s gold wealth was stolen by Western banks and thousands of Libyan refugees, along with hundreds of thousands of refugees from other parts of Africa, wracked by wars stemming in part from foreign (especially US) meddling, fled Libya by attempting dangerous sea voyages across the Mediterranean Sea to Malta and Italy, and then beyond. Thousands drowned in the Mediterranean and even those who made landfall in the EU faced uncertain and often dangerous futures.

Through maps, archived newsreels and John Pilger’s interview of Julian Assange on the then US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in pushing an invasion of Libya, narrator Meyer lays out how the US has plotted to bring down Ghaddafi’s government since he deposed the country’s former king in 1969 and set about reconstructing Libyan society along socialistic lines. Ghaddafi introduced free education and healthcare to Libyans and many other services were subsidised by the government. The Great Man-Made River Project was financed entirely by Libyan banks operating on what Westerners would regard as unorthodox financial and banking principles. Throughout Ghaddafi’s long reign as the country’s figurehead – he relinquished the role of Prime Minister in the late 1970s – the US consistently painted him as a quixotic dictator and blamed him or his country’s agents for various terrorist incidents including the Pan Am passenger jet bombing at Lockerbie in December 1988. The no-fly zone declared in late 2011 allowed a US-led coalition that included France and Italy to initiate a bombing campaign of Libya in which thousands were killed or injured. Since then, Islamic jihadist groups such as ISIS and al Qa’eda, financed or supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the US and EU nations, have been fighting the Libyan National Army commanded by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, formerly on the CIA payroll.

The most jaw-dropping part of the video is John Pilger’s interview of Julian Assange in which Assange states that Hillary Rodham Clinton (hereafter HRC) pressured US President Barack Obama to attack Libya and depose Ghaddafi, with the intention of using a successful attack and overthrow of the Libyan government as a core feature of her Presidential election campaign in 2016. The evil cynicism behind this behaviour on HRC’s part is mind-boggling: thousands of people had to die, and floods of people had to pour out of Libya (which had hitherto provided them with jobs on the GMMR Project) and into Europe, destabilising that continent, just so this wretched woman could use the invasion to flaunt herself as a Presidential candidate in 2016. With Donald Trump’s success in the US Presidential elections in 2016, HRC’s ambitions came to naught.

At every step along the way to Ghaddafi and Libya’s downfall, the US government or its agencies (particularly the CIA and maybe the National Endowment for Democracy) are in the thick of the plotting and grooming of alternative leaders who nearly always have been educated in the US from childhood on and who know very little of their original countries’ histories, in part because their families left and joined the global diaspora of migrants, refugees and other displaced individuals and family groups.

The film does have an abrupt open-ended conclusion though the message is very clear that US political / economic / military interference in another nation’s affairs nearly always leads to impoverishment, instability and degeneration manifested as political corruption. Neoliberal economic policies and programs are pursued that enrich a very small elite and force the rest of the population to live close to the breadline. Punishment can’t come soon enough for HRC, Barack Obama and others (in France, Italy and the UK at least) who stood to benefit from the US destruction of Libya in 2011.