[D66] NATO prepares bloodbath in Sirte

[Antid Oto]

NATO prepares bloodbath in Sirte
1 September 2011

Nearly six months after securing a United Nations Security Council resolution
authorizing a no-fly zone in Libya and the use of “all necessary measures… to
protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack,” the US
and its NATO allies, former colonial powers, are mounting a barbaric siege of a
major population center that threatens to produce civilian casualties on a mass
scale.

In their breathless promotion of the “final battle” to realize the real US-NATO
aim in Libya—regime-change—few in the Western media have bothered to consider
the fact that the major imperialist powers are carrying out precisely the kind
of act they claimed their war was designed to prevent.

Gaddafi’s troops were marching on Benghazi, the world was told, and only a
“humanitarian” intervention by NATO could save the city’s innocent population.
Now the “rebels” are encircling Sirte, led by British and Qatari special forces
troops, intelligence operatives and mercenary military contractors, while the
city’s population is being pounded by NATO bombs and cut off from food, fuel and
all basic supplies.

The sheer contempt shown by the US and the Western European powers for legality
and world public opinion is breathtaking. The pretense that NATO is acting under
the terms of the UN resolution that provided a fig leaf for its intervention is
more than absurd; it has become obscene.

One has to go back to the crimes of the fascist powers in the 1930s and 1940s to
search for parallels to such a siege: the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish
Civil War, the siege of Leningrad and the Warsaw Ghetto.

NATO warplanes have over the past few days conducted scores of air strikes
against Sirte, the town of Bani Walid to its west and the roads linking the two.
While there have been no independent reports from Sirte, the spokesman for the
Gaddafi regime, Moussa Ibrahim, reported that the continuous bomb and missile
attacks have killed 1,000 people in the city and left many more wounded.

Part of this ferocious air assault is aimed at assassinating Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi, who is believed by some to have taken refuge in the city or its
surrounding area. Western special forces are reportedly on the ground hunting
for Gaddafi, while an array of US spy planes have been deployed to pinpoint his
whereabouts.

The NATO-led rebels have taken up positions on the main coastal highway both
east and west of Sirte, with orders to stay in place until the NATO blitzkrieg
has sufficiently annihilated the city’s defenders.

The National Transitional Council (NTC), the self-appointed body of ex-Gaddafi
ministers, Western intelligence assets, Islamists and tribal functionaries that
has been recognized by the major powers as the legitimate government of Libya,
has announced a surrender-or-die ultimatum to the city. If a surrender is not
forthcoming by Saturday, they say, the city will be subjected to military assault.

“We have been given no indication of a peaceful surrender,” an NTC military
spokesman, Col. Ahmed Omar Bani, told a press conference in Benghazi. “We
continue to seek a peaceful solution, but on Saturday we will use different
methods against these criminals.”

“Sometimes to avoid bloodshed you must shed blood, and the faster we do this the
less blood we will shed,” said Ali Tarhouni, the deputy head of the NTC.

The Western media is justifying a bloodbath in advance, reporting that the
“rebels” have “unfinished business” or “scores to settle” with Sirte’s
defenders, which are said to include army units involved in the attacks on
Misrata and Benghazi. The city is also Gaddafi’s hometown and a center of his
tribe, the Gaddafifahs.

The criminal methods employed by NATO and its “rebel” proxies—the bombing of
cities, attempted assassinations, massacres and the lynching of black
sub-Saharan African immigrant workers—are in sync with the aim of the war:
imperialist conquest.

Having supported the Western-backed dictatorships of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in
Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt against popular revolts until the bitter end,
the US and its NATO allies decided to intervene in Libya, which lies
strategically between these two countries. They set about hijacking the
anti-Gaddafi demonstrations that broke out last February and fomenting a civil
war as a vehicle for direct NATO intervention. To this end, British and French
special forces units were deployed on the ground in Libya well before any UN
resolution was ever discussed.

This intervention was never about protecting the civilian population. Tellingly,
a spokesman for the NTC Wednesday estimated that the total number of Libyans
killed in the last six months—both civilians and combatants—has risen to over
50,000. If one were to accept as good coin the pretense that NATO waged its war
for the purpose of saving human lives, it would have to be judged a colossal
failure. This war has produced far more carnage than any repression that
preceded it.

The goal of the NATO war is to install a puppet regime in Tripoli that will be a
more pliant tool of the Western governments and energy conglomerates. Ruling
circles in Washington, London, Paris and Rome are salivating over the prospect
of turning the clock back 42 years to the days when the corrupt monarchy of King
Idris let Standard Oil write Libya’s petroleum laws and provided military bases
to both the US and Britain.

Consolidating such neocolonial aims will no doubt entail an even greater amount
of bloodshed in suppressing popular opposition within Libya.

The crimes being carried out against the people of Libya and the threat of a far
wider conflagration that is inherent in the inter-imperialist tensions over who
will control the country’s oil wealth pose the urgent necessity of a new antiwar
movement, based on the working class and a socialist perspective.

The struggle against war must be joined with the fight against the assault on
jobs, living standards and basic social and democratic rights taking place in
virtually every country. It must be consciously directed against the source of
both militarism and the unfolding social counterrevolution—the capitalist profit
system.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/pers-s01.shtml