NYT Discovers Meddling In Libya Is Bad: “At Least 6 Foreign Nations Fueling The Mayhem”

Well that didn’t take long. Almost a decade. The New York Times earlier this week suddenly ‘discovered’ that US regime change wars lead to failed states which lead to chaos and death which in turn lead to grinding international proxy wars. 

Though Libya has long been ignored by the mainstream after Obama and Hillary’s “liberation” of the country in 2011 — when then Secretary of State Clinton gleefully and fanatically exclaimed “we came, we saw, he died!” in reference to Gaddafi’s brutal field execution at the hands of US-backed jihadists — the Times appears to now be singing a different tune, observing its latest lengthy report on the conflict: 

At least six foreign nations are fueling the mayhem in Libya, supplying weapons, mercenaries or military advisers to rival factions battling for control of the oil-rich country.

But none of these outside actors has ever been held to account, avoiding scrutiny by exploiting either international divisions over Libya or their ties to Western powers like the United States. Sometimes they manage to avoid mention at all.

The report notes that in many cases these external powers with “ties to Western powers like the United States” are responsible for mass murder, such as the July bombing of a detention center in Tripoli which killed 53 people, mostly migrants. 

And predictably those states that are close allies to the Western alliance, such as the UAE, are rarely named in investigative reports. Citing a 13-page UN report published last week which was a result of an investigation into the migrant center attack, the NYT observes: 

What it conspicuously failed to do, though, was identify the perpetrator. “A foreign state,” investigators concluded.

The United Nations’ reluctance to identify or even hint at who was behind the bombing is symptomatic, analysts say, of the weakness of its nine-year-old arms embargo on Libya, one so widely flouted that the body’s envoy to Libya last year said that it risked becoming a “cynical joke.”

And it didn’t stop at the Emirates (a key US gulf ally) – which has been a major military backer of Gen. Khalifa Haftar and his forces – but even the French were indirectly involved, given it’s believed that French-built Mirage warplanes carried out the attack on civilians. 

The UN-backed Tripoli government had described it as “an intentional massacre”. 

“At least six foreign nations are fueling the mayhem in Libya, supplying weapons, mercenaries or military advisers to rival factions battling for control of the oil-rich country.”

Yes, regime change creates power vacuums filled by warring selfish actors.https://t.co/s1c9vGp5Rn

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) February 4, 2020

Other nations routinely escaping accountability or scrutiny are mentioned by the Times as well: “On Mr. Hifter’s side, the United Arab Emirates is joined by Russia, Egypt, Jordan and France. Turkey has sided with the beleaguered Tripoli government.”

It seems that despite a UN-embargo long in effect, recently renewed and supposedly “recommitted to” by world powers at the January 19 Berlin peace conference on Libya, weaponry and foreign fighters continue pouring into war-torn Libya at rapid pace. The NYT report notes further: 

United Nations inspectors publish reports every year documenting the profusion of weapons that foreign states have injected into the Libyan battlefield: warplanes, armed drones, laser-guided artillery, missile defense systems and a huge volume of small arms.

Yet none face any real risk of punishment, or even censure. Since 2011, the inspectors have submitted dossiers with details of embargo violations by numerous countries, including the Emirates, to a Security Council sanctions committee, two officials said.

Yet of course, in a deeper irony, the Times still fails to admit the original ‘meddler’ which unleashed this current hell on Libya in the first place as it laments that in 2011 the oil-rich country was “plunged into civil war after the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi”.

The previously stable country was of a sudden “Plunged into civil war”… We wonder how that happened?