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The Internationalist  
October 2011  

This Is What U.S. Imperialist-Sponsored “Democracy” Looks Like

The Assassination of Muammar Qaddafi

Serial Killer in the White House Carves Another Notch in His Gun

Imperialist media groove on lynching of Qaddafi.

On the morning of October 20, former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was captured, brutally beaten and executed in cold blood by the victorious imperialist-sponsored “rebels” who have taken over the North African country. The murder was quickly celebrated by U.S. president Barack Obama and other leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose warplanes massively bombed Libyan cities under the guise of “protecting civilians.” The victory of the competing gangs of Islamist and monarchist cutthroats armed, financed and “advised” by the Western powers is hardly a blow for democracy but the establishment of neo-colonial rule. The ugly face of that regime can be seen in the grisly cellphone videos of the lynchers as they tormented and then assassinated Qaddafi.

To all those who asked for U.S./NATO intervention in the name of “humanitarian” concerns, including many liberals and some ostensible leftists, and to the bulk of the left that hailed the reactionary rebel thugs and thereby helped pave the way for the imperialist war on Libya, we say: you asked for it, you got it. May you choke on your “victory.”

In the voluminous coverage by the imperialist media, the bloody crime which is the birth certificate of the “new Libya” was whitewashed with a variety of euphemisms. They ranged from the celebratory “Free of Khadafi” (Los Angeles Times), “Death of a Dictator” (London Guardian) and “End of a Tyrant” (London Independent) to the pseudo-objective “For Gaddafi, a bloody end in Libya” (Washington Post) and “Qaddafi, Seized by Foes, Meets a Violent End” (New York Times) to the more bloodthirsty tabloids: “Coward to the End” (New York Daily News) and the most bizarre all, “Khadafi Killed by Yankee Fan” (New York Post), treating the lynching as a sports event. A rare commentator dared call it for what it was, a “lynch mob at its most primeval” (Peter Popham in The Independent), but then excused it (“who are we to judge”).

Yes, Muammar Qaddafi was a dictator and a tyrant. We Trotskyists fought against illusions in the Libyan strongman even as he was lionized by much of the left as a symbol of anti-imperialism. We have spelled out in detail how along with his nationalist posturing Qaddafi repeatedly sought a modus vivendi, an arrangement to get along with the imperialists – and not just in recent years when he joined Washington’s “war on terror” (see “Qaddafi and the Imperialists: On and Off,” in The Internationalist No. 33, Summer 2011). But once the U.S./NATO bombing began, the League for the Fourth International defended Libya against the imperialist attack without giving an iota of political support to the Qaddafi regime. In the 1930s, Leon Trotsky called for workers to militarily defend Ethiopia against the Italian imperialist invasion while politically opposing the feudalistic regime of emperor Haile Selassie.

As the North African and Arab masses rose up against U.S.-backed dictators early this year, Qaddafi became a liability, and provided an opportunity for Western intervention. As the United States has done in the past, the now-inconvenient ally was eliminated in order to further imperialist domination. Often this was done not by right-wing Republicans but by liberal Democrats: recall the fate of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic in 1961 and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam in 1963, both assassinated by John F. Kennedy.

We now are treated to an orgy of self-congratulation in the imperialist media. We’re told that “thousands celebrate” the overthrow of Qaddafi in Tripoli, or at least 100 who can be seen in a Reuters photo, showing what skillful use of tight cropping can do to create the impression of massive numbers, as in the famous toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on 9 April 2003. What they don’t talk about is how NATO terror-bombed Surt, where pro-Qaddafi fighters fought a tenacious resistance, utterly destroying the city. Nor do they mention how a week ago, militias shot up a peaceful demonstration of Qaddafi supporters in Abu Salim, a poor neighborhood of the Libyan capital.

We get psychobabble about achieving “closure” in Libya accompanied by pious incantations from Obama about “build[ing] an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya.” Would that be the racist round-up of hundreds of black African workers and dark-skinned Libyans from the south, many of whom have been summarily executed on the bogus claim of being “mercenaries” for Qaddafi?  Meanwhile, the Islamist gangs of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who fought with the CIA-sponsored mujahedin (holy warriors) against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, are now terrorizing Tripoli, where women are once again “admonished” to wear the Islamic veil. Backed by funds and armed from the U.S.-backed Persian Gulf oil sheikdom of Qatar (which runs the Al Jazeera news network), Belhaj is also going after rival militia leaders.

Qaddafi was long demonized in the Western media. His claim that the rebels who rose against him were Islamists and monarchists was ridiculed, but turned out to be quite true. He was certainly capricious, erratic, repressive, with famously wild hair in his later years. His heavily brocaded uniforms cut the figure of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera general. But when Ronald Reagan labeled the Libyan leader the “mad dog of the Middle East,” it was not a description, it was a program, that Qaddafi should be “put down” – which Reagan tried to do by bombing his compound in 1986 after earlier shooting down Libyan planes in the Gulf of Sidra.

If there were any mad dogs in Libya yesterday it was the NATO-assisted “freedom fighters” who shot Qaddafi in cold blood, with two bullets to the head and one to the chest – an execution, not a “crossfire” – then splayed his body on the hood of a car, pulling his hair and banging his head, then dragged his body into the street, kicking it like a football, and now displaying it in a shopping center meat locker. This is the indelible image of the “New Libya” under the U.S./NATO-sponsored “rebels.” It’s hardly the picture of democracy and the rule of law Obama and the other imperialist butchers claimed to be fighting for.

The London Independent found the “huge outpouring of emotion” – namely the murderous blood lust – upon the capture of Qaddafi to be “touching,” and his lynching “rough justice” (“unfortunate,” to be sure). What about the other 95 bodies of pro-Qaddafi fighters which have been tallied in the tiny area where the Libyan leader made his last stand, most of them shot at close range, execution-style? This would have been rightly labeled a massacre if done by Qaddafi’s army. In fact, it is the way the Western-backed militias have acted from day one of the uprising.

Some liberals are lamenting that Qaddafi was not captured so that he could be put on trial for his crimes. Western rulers, of course, hardly wished for even a pretense of a trial where the Libyan strongman could detail how he cooperated with the imperialists. But who would try him? The International Criminal Court in The Hague? This is the imperialist kangaroo court that held a sham trial of the brutal Serb nationalist strongman Slobodan Milosevic while refusing to try the Kosovo prime minister who murdered Serb prisoners in order to harvest body organs for sale. How about a “court” convened by the new rulers of Libya? Such a show trial controlled by the imperialist stooges and racist killers now running the country would be a farce. Anyone calling for this sort of “victor’s justice” is just trying to wash the blood off the U.S./NATO rulers’ hands.

Libya is now being trumpeted as a model of liberal imperialist intervention under Obama, as opposed to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan by Republican Bush which were soon bogged down by resistance. Last week, the U.S. announced it was sending combat troops to Uganda, Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. The Democrats generally try to wrap their wars in “progressive” rhetoric, and use “humanitarian” language to cover the imposition of colonial rule (as with the U.S. reoccupation of Haiti last year under the guise of providing aid to earthquake victims). Now Obama vows that he will withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of the year. But left behind will be several thousand troops to “guard U.S. embassy personnel,” plus thousands of “contractors” (mercenaries) and legions of CIA agents.

Obama’s “assisting rebels” in Libya harks back to Theodore Roosevelt’s “assistance” to Panamanian rebels in 1904, who conveniently rose up to fight for independence from Colombia so that the U.S. could build a strategically placed canal across the isthmus. No doubt one of the imperialists’ aims in Libya was to regain control of Libya’s oil. But more than that, what’s behind the war on Libya, as well as the “war on terror,” “war on drugs” and all the other wars that the U.S. has proclaimed since the counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union is the drive for untrammeled world domination.

Proletarian revolutionaries defended Libya against the assault by rapacious imperialism while giving no political backing to its bourgeois nationalist ruler. Qaddafi was an avowed anti-communist who ruthlessly suppressed trade unions, in addition to conciliating imperialism. But the Libyan leader was also an annoyance to the imperialists for breaking their oil monopoly, and using some of the resulting petrodollars to massively raise the living standards of the Libyan population, so they are far better off than in any other country of Africa – something barely mentioned in the canned obituaries now appearing in the press.

We warned in several articles (“Imperialist Marauders in the Quicksands of North Africa,” “Libyan Showdown” and “Defeat U.S./U.N./NATO Assault” in The Internationalist No. 33) that the Libyan insurgents were quite different from the masses of unemployed workers and youth who touched off the overthrow of Mohammed Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. This was a preplanned uprising led from the very beginning by longtime agents of U.S. imperialism, and by Islamists who had waged a bloody war against Qaddafi in the 1990s after earlier being on the CIA payroll fighting a Soviet-backed modernizing reform regime in Afghanistan. (In Afghanistan, we hailed the Soviet intervention and called to extend the gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples.)

And we denounced as lap dogs of imperialism the left which fulsomely praised the (pro-imperialist) Libyan rebels and thereby helped prepare the way for bloody U.S./NATO intervention (see “Libya and the Opportunist Left,” also in The Internationalist No. 33). Now they are reaping the fruits of their opportunism. Barack Obama, who was elected with the tacit or open support of many of these same pseudo-leftists, is not only a mass murderer, presiding over the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians in Afghanistan, but he has turned assassination into a main weapon of U.S. policy. In short order, his agents and allies have killed the Islamist and former CIA “asset” Osama bin Laden, the U.S.-born Muslim cleric Anwar Awlaki in Yemen and now Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, in the interests of imposing neocolonial regimes of corrupt and murderous satraps beholden to Washington.

As Trotskyists and opponents of imperialist domination, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Haiti, we have called to defeat U.S. intervention and to defend those fighting against it, despite profound political differences. In Libya, we have insisted that what was needed was a revolution by the working people throughout North Africa to sweep away all the dictators, the kings and colonels, the sheiks and emirs, as well as the Zionist militarists, to form socialist federations of the Near East and North Africa. And we reiterate that the only way to put an end to this “U.S./NATO Murder, Inc.” is to smash imperialism through international socialist revolution.


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