by Caitlin Johnstone
The Twitter account of America’s 44th president just casually shared some links to organizations providing relief to the victims of the terrible flooding in Libya, which as of this writing has already killed thousands of people.
And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America’s 44th president to do — had America’s 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we’re seeing in Libya today.
“If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief,” Obama tweeted.
Uhh, excuse me? Sir? You know you’re literally Barack Obama, right?
In 2010 the oil-rich Libya ranked higher on the UN Human Development Index than any other nation in Africa, with much better national infrastructure to protect itself from floods and other natural disasters. Today Libya is a chaotic humanitarian disaster where UN-backed investigators now say literal crimes against humanity have been taking place, including women being forced into sexual slavery.
What changed? If you’re reading this, you probably already know what changed.
In 2011, US, French and British forces helped rebels with extensive links to Al Qaeda kill Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, which immediately plunged the nation into violence, chaos, extremism and instability which persists to this day. It was later revealed that NATO powers knew they were backing murderous Al Qaeda-linked jihadists at the time.
Falsely branded a “humanitarian intervention” designed to prevent alleged plans for genocide and Viagra-fueled mass rapes against peaceful protesters by Gaddafi’s troops, the NATO attack on Libya quickly morphed into a regime change operation which saw Gaddafi brutally lynched in the streets and dying after being stabbed in the anus with a bayonet. Years later in 2016 a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee found that the narratives used to justify the intervention in Libya were “not supported by the available evidence.”
“We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya,” the report reads. “UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”
This confirmed concerns voiced by Amnesty International and a UN human rights investigator months before Gaddafi’s death that the evidence for the alleged atrocities the intervention was meant to prevent simply wasn’t there to be found. Because no policy changes were made after the Iraq invasion and nobody was ever punished for inflicting that horror upon our world, no lessons were learned, and it happened again. The west was deceived into yet another disastrous military intervention, which continues to have severe consequences for people in the region to this day.