The initially stated aim of this bombing was to diminish Libyan civilian casualties. But many, senior figures in Washington, including President Obama, have indicated that the US is gearing up for a quite different war for regime change, one that may well be protracted and could also easily expand beyond Libya.1 If it does expand, the hope for a nonviolent transition to civilian government in Tunisia and Egypt and other Middle East nations experiencing political unrest, may be lost to a hard-edged militarization of government, especially in Egypt. All of us, not just Egyptians, have a major stake in seeing that that does not happen
Category: Head Stories
Israel was an important beneficiary of these economic operations and Israel has been an important beneficiary of certain U.S. military operations, exactly as McGovern testified. The clear losers in this process are the people struggling globally for truth, justice, human rights, and peace. And there are clear and identifiable winners–if one dares to look.
Understanding who the winners are is
Eight years earlier to the day, the Bush Administration began its Operation Shock and Awe, the military destruction and occupation of Iraq, allegedly to prevent a threat of weapons of mass destruction which never existed as was later confirmed. The Iraqi invasion followed more than a decade of illegal No Fly Zone operations over Iraqi airspace by the same trio—USA, Britain and France.
Far more important than any possible numerology games a superstitious Pentagon might or might not be playing is the ultimate agenda behind the domino series of regime destabilizations that Washington has ignited under the banner of democracy and human rights across the Islamic world since December 2010.
The bombing of a sovereign country, is being carried out by the so-called “international community” to “save the lives of civilians” under the new logo of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), pursuant to UN Security Council resolution 1973.
Libya 2011: The realties are otherwise: civilians are the unspoken victims of US-NATO bombings. A Blitzkrieg is being carried out against an entire population.
The destruction of Iraq – a crime with the scope of genocide – began with aerial attacks and a siege that went on for more than a decade. No one planned the moves at the time. So there’s no point asking what the goal of the attack on Libya is. Saving human lives? As in Iraq? Maybe democracy? As in Saudi Arabia? Those who possess giant war machines with funding for research and development prefer trial and error. There are no goals. Will Al-Qaida also get there quickly? Well, there’s a huge arsenal that needs refreshing, once in the name of “human rights,” once in the name of “the war on terror.” Something will come out of this. Ratings, oil, a peace conference, photo-ops, Sarkozy next to Angela Merkel, Berlusconi next to David Cameron and Barack Obama. A smile. Speeches.
The alleged purpose of the bombing was to establish a no-fly zone and to protect a force of CIA-sponsored Libyan rebels composed of the Moslem Brotherhood, elements of the Libyan government and army subverted by the CIA (including such sinister figures as former Justice Minister Mustafa Abdel-Jalil and former Interior Minister Fattah Younis), and monarchist Senussi tribesmen holding the cities of Benghazi and Tobruk. But twin Friday ultimatums by President Obama and British premier Cameron, plus a speech by Harper, made clear that the goal was the ouster of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and regime change in the North African oil-producing nation, whose proven reserves of crude are the largest on that continent.
On the ground level there is a common pool in a separate building that was critical damaged by the tsunami. Each reactor building pool holds 3,450 fuel rod assemblies and the common pool holds 6,291 fuel rod assemblies. Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. In short, the Fukushima Daiichi plant contains over 600,000 spent fuel rods – a massive amount of radiation that will soon be released into the atmosphere.
“Operation Odyssey Dawn ” is part of a broader military agenda in the Middle East and Central Asia which consists in gaining control and corporate ownership over more than sixty percent of the world’s reserves of oil and natural gas, including oil and gas pipeline routes.
A “humanitarian war” would be “good for business”. It serves the interests of the institutional speculators, it contributes to a further process of appropriation of money wealth.
Financial institutions which had prior knowledge or intelligence of events in Egypt and Libya have already made billions of dollars in speculative gains in the futures and options markets for crude oil.
The international community is well aware of the double standard in policy. The US quietly applauded Israeli air strikes against Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear-energy plant in 1981 and has since demanded ever-stricter sanctions against Tehran and Pyongyang. Yet Washington refuses to lead by example, shrugging off the anti-nuclear movement’s pleas to stop plans for new reactors and shunning calls from the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for total nuclear disarmament. America’s campaign for an atomic monopoly, or at least nuclear dominance, is driving smaller powers toward obtaining a deterrence capability. These nations aren’t some “axis of evil”; they’re just playing the survival game by the rules – not the words – set by Washington.