The war which led to the destruction of Libya was unnecessary, launched on false pretense and disastrous. This is the conclusion drawn from reading the UK parliamentary report on the War that destroyed Libya and destabilized a continent.

Well, at least the British will criticize their leaders for taking their country into disastrous wars, albeit well after the fact. In July, the Chilcott report exposed thatTony Blair lied to get Britain to go to war in Iraq. The new Libya report is just as scathing of David Cameron’s war in Libya although it hardly goes far enough.

First, I am convinced there was nothing spontaneous about the February 15, 2011 protest in Benghazi where government security forces were attacked and fired back, hitting demonstrators in the process.  If you look at the images from that protest, the demonstrators were carrying professionally printed posters in at least three languages and factory produced flags from the days of King Idris, overthrown in 1969. None of these could have been made in Libya where presses and factories were under state control.

Secondly, the Libyan government never said it would kill everybody in Benghazi as our media portrayed. They said they would go from house to house and find those who attacked security forces and government property. But Gaddafi also said that if the rebels had laid down their arms, they would not be harmed. Believe it if you will, the point is the population of Benghazi was never threatened with annihilation.

Encouraged by Prime Minister David Cameron, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the rebels stepped up their campaign against the Libyan government.  Where did the arms come from? Where did the money come from?

It had already been made clear that they were playing with fire. A West Point study from from 2008 pointed out most of the foreign fighters in Iraq came from Eastern Libya where Islamic extremism was rife.

From the beginning of the US/UK/French onslaught it was obvious they were providing air support for rebel ground forces being equipped, financed and trained by outsiders with the goal of regime change.  Clinton’s statement “We came. We saw. He died.” is an admission of what their intention was all along.

But why was this war necessary?  Hadn’t Gaddafi gone along with everything the West asked of him? Stop illegal immigration; open oil to foreign firms; dispose of weapons of mass destruction; renounce terrorism.  Lets look at what was on Gaddafi’s agenda just prior to the Nato war.

He planned on using his huge stores of gold to create an African Central Bank, an African Monetary Fund and an African Currency.  This would have done away with the influence of the World Bank and the IMF in Africa and would have destroyed France’s hold on its former colonies which use the CFA-Franc, a pan-African currency used by 14 countries. Those countries are obliged to store a major part of their gold and foreign currency holdings in the Banque de France which Paris then uses as collateral for cheap loans. Their money is in France. The colonial masters would have lost all economic control over Africa.

Gaddafi wanted to sell oil in a different currency than the dollar, perhaps the Euro or the new c currency he wanted to create, very much like Saddam Hussein prior to the US invasion of Iraq. And he was threatening to throw out western oil companies who had not met their promise to help finance security which the West translated as an attempt to re-nationalize the country’s oil.

The International Criminal Court, ICC, made wild accusations of hundreds of civilians killed based on rebel statements with no proof, much like in Kosovo when Bill Clinton lied about mass killings and ethnic cleansing to pave the way for Nato’s war against Serbia.

In July 2011 Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in an interview with Russia Today denied the ICC’s allegations that he or his father Muammar Gaddafi ordered the killing of civilian protesters. He said that he was not a member of the government or the military and therefore had no authority to give such orders. He also said that his father made recorded calls to General Abdul Fatah Younis, who later defected to the rebel forces, in order to request not to use force against protesters, to which he said Fatah Younis responded that protesters were attacking a military site and soldiers were acting in self-defense. (paragraph lifted from Wikipedia).

Or to quote the UK government mouthpiece, the BBC :  “the foreign affairs committee said the government “failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated,” adding that it “selectively took elements of Gaddafi’s rhetoric at face value”. This is political speak for “he lied!”

No, the British study does not go far enough. It was a criminal war of agression for imperial design without any plan on how to save the country from falling into tribal and Islamic chaos.  Its consequences can be felt in the destabilization of Africa all the way down to Cameroon and in the massive influx of illegal migrants to Europe.  If the ICC were not an American proxy, US neo-Cons, along with the likes of Hillary Clinton and British politicians as well as Nicolas Sarkozy, would be up for trial in the Hague.  The problem is they still have not learned their lesson and will continue killing their way to the collapse of any kind of world order.