Yet, Qadhafi’s departure cannot remotely justify the manner in which powerful Western states, led by Britain and France, and backed by the US, tried to dislodge him by raining as many as 22,000 warplane sorties on Libya (8,000 of them armed attacks), and killing scores of civilians. They also tried to assassinate him, illegally. The mindset underlying the campaign reeks of colonial arrogance, and bodes ill for fairness and balance in international relations, and ultimately for global security.

It is no small irony that a Western power, Italy, had colonised Libya before World War-II, and carried out a campaign of repression bordering on genocide. Britain occupied Libya in the 1940s and 1950s, and maintained its military presence there until Qadhafi seized power in a nationalist revolt in 1969. Yet, in another ironical turn of history, the same Western powers later propped up Qadhafi, and built up his army and Libya’s oil industry.

Qadhafi deserved to be deposed, not once, but ten times over, by his own people whom he tormented and oppressed, but not by external forces. The Anglo-French attacks were carried out in the name of enforcing UN Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorised member-states “to take all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack”, especially in Benghazi, but forbade the landing of foreign forces on Libyan soil.

However, the Resolution violates the principles of the UN Charter. Article 2 (7) says: “Nothing in the present Charter shall authorise the UN to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state”.

True, this cannot be cited as a shield behind which to take cover for genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. But it’s hard to argue that the Qadhafi regime, despicably despotic as it was, indulged in any of this or threatened civilians on a mass scale—any more than the Western intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, or Israel’s predatory conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories, especially Gaza, where it has regularly used warplanes to attack civilians.

Yet, even before the NATO countries launched air raids on Libya in March, their armies had been supplying armaments to rebels and covertly training them in overseas camps, funded by Saudi money, and smuggling them back into Libya to fight Qadhafi’s troops.

The Western powers’ zeal and single-mindedness in acting against Libya, to the point of breaching UN rules and taking strong military initiatives short of a ground invasion, stands in sharp contrast to their deplorable coddling of Israel and their extreme reluctance to invoke international law against what is undeniably one of the world’s most lawless states.

The West’s evocation of human rights and democracy to depose Qadhafi sits ill at ease with its close collaboration with his regime until recently. Damaging evidence of such collaboration has emerged in documents found on September 2 at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster by journalists and Human Rights Watch.

There were at least three dockets or binders of English-language documents, one marked CIA.and the others marked MI-6, among a larger set of documents in Arabic. These contain new details of the CIA’s close relationship with the Libyan intelligence agency. The most startling one suggests that the US as part of its policy of “extraordinary renditions” sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning to Libya despite its regime’s reputation for torture.

Reports The New York Times: “Although it has been known that Western intelligence services began cooperating with Libya after it abandoned its programme to build unconventional weapons in 2004, the files left behind as Tripoli fell to rebels show that the cooperation was much more extensive than generally known with both the CIA and [Britain’s}… MI-6. Some documents indicate that the British agency was even willing to trace phone numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by the Americans for Qadhafi about renouncing unconventional weapons.”

The CIA kidnapped and transported to Libya suspects from various countries, using luxury jets supplied with the connivance of major US corporations. Among them was Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the present commander of the anti-Qadhafi forces in Tripoli, and former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who now says he’s a grateful ally of the US and NATO. He was detained in Malaysia on behalf of the US, sent to Thailand, and tortured, allegedly by CIA agents. He was then sent back to Libya, where he was put into solitary confinement for six years.

The West has been keen to intervene in Libya for three reasons. First, and most important, Libya’s oil; second, the former imperial powers’ craving for controlling events, in particular, the unfolding of the Arab Spring, in a volatile part of the world; and third, their long-term plans to retain their influence in all situations and regions where popular agitations for democratisation might break out, and where they can selectively support or oppose regimes depending on their value for Western strategic and economic interests.

Libya has Africa’s largest, and the globe’s ninth-biggest, oil reserves. It is one of the world’s top dozen oil producers and until recently supplied 1.6 million barrels of oil daily. Its “sweet” crude is of high quality. Western oil companies have a vulture-like interest in the oil and are fighting over the spoils through the National Transitional Council, a Western puppet.

British oil interests are working through the UK’s international development ministry. The French have reportedly extracted an assurance from the NTC that they would get 35 percent of Libya’s oil in return for military help. Western oil is desperate to find new sources, especially in the region’s offshore basins and the territorial waters of Syria, Israel, Lebanon and Cyprus as other mature fields run out. Libya also has rich freshwater reserves, on which Western aqua companies have an eye.

The Western powers early on sensed the value of shrewdly backing the Arab Spring in ways that suit them. They are now turning their attention to Syria, where an agitation is building up against President Bashar Assad’s secular Ba’athist government. Syria’s location next to Iraq and Israel, and its links with Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, make it critical to the US plan to undermine Iran’s importance as a regional power. Turkey is meanwhile exerting pressure on Syria to weaken its bonds with these groups, and to accommodate the Muslim Brotherhood

Among the West’s strategies of destabilising the Bashar regime, which is based on the Alawites (a broadly secular Shia sect), is to set the Sunni majority against it. This is likely to create new ferment in the region’s “Shia arc” around Saudi Arabia, comprising Iraq (with a 65 percent Shia majority), Bahrain (80-90 percent Shia), Kuwait (35 percent Shia) and Yemen (with a significant Shia minority, whose imams ruled the country for centuries). Saudi Arabia too has a Shia minority that’s believed to be 15 percent of the population. Shia unrest could have unpredictable regional consequences

Meanwhile, however, it’s clear that the European powers’ attempts to prop up different opposition movements selectively will weaken these groups’ legitimacy and security, while destabilising North Africa. These powers, in particular, Britain and France, are entangled in a bad mess in Iraq and Afghanistan. France is in the middle of shooting wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Ivory Coast. But they have learnt few lessons from the past—about the unviability of slogans like eliminating mass-destruction weapons and al-Qaeda, or ushering in democracy.

They fail to grasp that regime change can only be legitimately accomplished by the people of a country. Their attempt to promote a new imperial agenda under the banner of “liberal interventionism” to protect people from tyrants is unlikely to fly.

The European powers built their empires in the name of a “civilising mission”. They are rebuilding it in the name of protecting human rights—another pretext for dominating the world. But ordinary people, including the Arabs who long for democratisation, are unlikely to be taken in by this.

Regrettably, there has been very little resistance until very recently to the Western powers in the Security Council. The US, France and Britain (P-3) managed to get Resolution 1973 through because all other members, including Russia, China and even India, abstained.

On Syria, however, India, Brazil and South Africa put up a fight to prevent a harsh P-3 resolution. They managed to win Russian and Chinese backing for a presidential statement which doesn’t mandate military intervention. But fighting the P-3 won’t be easy unless there’s strategic thinking and resolute action. (IPA Service)