Published: 26 August, 2011, 06:02
The US is one of the main players in the campaign to bring Gaddafi down, while only three years ago the countries had excellent relations. Journalist Alexander Cockburn believes this sends a message to other countries that consider the US an ally.
“I think it gives the message ‘Get nuclear weapons like North Korea!’” Cockburn said. “Then they are not going to invade you.”
Cockburn believes the situation in Libya, where really NATO is engaged in a regime-toppling operation, resembles Britain’s “imperial exercise” of the 19th century.
“In my view the whole thing has been deplorable from the start, as NATO’s operations always are, as a matter of fact,” he said. “They are continuing on the basis that they had to do a humanitarian intervention, which very rapidly became a joke, as it became clear that NATO were simply engaged in getting rid of Gaddafi by whatever means possible.”
Millions of dollars are now streaming into the pockets of the rebels, who are seen as the guarantee of security and prosperity of the future Libya.
But Cockburn believes that, despite the investments, what Libya can really look forward to is a very prolonged period of instability and a growth in inequality.
“There are many different factions, there are many different international interests,” he said. “And there is above all the question of oil.”
Cockburn speculates that envy could be one of the reasons why the US engaged in the operation against Libya in the first place.
“The money [from oil] that came into Libya, which is a gigantic sum, was distributed with some degree of equity. This should be the envy of people in the United States,” he said.
Alexander Cockburn noted that Libya has not been the headline piece of information really for the last month. He also took a pot shot at the press, saying that most of it has been appalling.
“You know, the justification [for the humanitarian intervention] was the supposed genocide by Gaddafi against his people,” he said. “The human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have completely and definitively refuted these accusations, the accusations of mass rape and so on. The actual basis of the intervention has been discredited, not that the press has bothered to point this out.”
Russia also received its share of criticism from Cockburn.
“[The campaign] has been a bad business throughout,” he said. “And I actually, personally, very much deplore the position that Russia took in the initial Security Council vote, they should have been against it from the start.”