Italy, France sending troops to advise Libyan rebels … France and Italy announced Wednesday that they will send military officers to Libya to advise rebels fighting for the ouster of leader Moammar Gadhafi and his regime. Following a similar announcement by the British government Tuesday, French government spokesman Francois Baroin said a "small number" of French troops was being sent to advise the rebels' Transitional National Council. French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet has ruled out sending ground troops to fight alongside the rebels. "This is a real issue that deserves an international debate," he said, adding, "We are working within the framework of the 1973 resolution," a reference to the U.N. resolution that authorized action in Libya. "You cannot please everyone all the time," he said. Italy will send military advisers to train the rebels in self-defense tactics, Italian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maurizio Massari announced. – CNN Wire Staff
Dominant Social Theme: The people have had enough and thanks to FaceBook are rebelling.
Free-Market Analysis: Initially it took a kind of sleuthing to figure out what was going on as regards Middle Eastern and African turmoil. Rising food prices were part of it. But just as significantly, Western powers-that-be had decided on a wholesale military takeover of the Middle East and the upper portion of Africa. From Syria to Egypt, to Yemen and even the Ivory Coast, Africa is ablaze not with purely internally-inspired violence but with Western fomented revolts designed to prepare nations for a process of "Internationalization."
This interpretation (our own and others' in the alternative media) is not of course reflected in the official line. But to us it seems obvious. This unrest and regime change is yet another step in the elite's plans to set up one-world government. We have a hard time understanding how people can look at what's happening and declare it's all coincidence, or just a combination of factors coalescing coincidentally and all at once.
We won't go through all the details as reported but both Tunisia and Egypt were destabilized in part by USA-fomented AYM youth revolts and other forms of undercover activities that owe a great deal to US State Dept and CIA training and involvement.
At the time an elaborate cloak of denial and secrecy surrounded these missions. One had to peer closely to see what was going on – and we did. But now with all the turmoil one has to wonder where it ends. France was involved throughout the Ivory Coast regime-change; the West is going to be frankly involved in Libya until Gaddafi is gone (if and when he goes), and no doubt other flash points will soon make themselves apparent.
CNN in this article excerpted above provides us with fairly clear coverage of the current uptick in Western involvement in Libya. The article begins by reporting on increased British involvement and then moves on to Italy and France and their burgeoning involvement despite previous protestations to the contrary. Britain is sending military officers to the rebel-controlled city of Benghazi in an "advisory role" to help rebels with command and control functions and also to deliver aid to the local populace and France and Italy are next.
Notably, British officials explain the country's expanded role in Libya within the context of "civilian protection and its provision expressly ruling out a foreign occupation force on Libyan soil." The phrase "civilian protection" is actually a code word for "R2P," which was voted on by the UN Security Council back in 2005, and which has now been used to involve the West in a series of burgeoning overseas wars.
We have already covered R2P extensively. R2P basically abrogates national sovereignty and the Treaty of Westphalia that goes back 400 years by insisting that countries have an affirmative obligation to act to "protect civilians" when their governments have taken violent or even genocidal actions towards citizens. Of course the general language used in R2P means that the Security Council can now basically declare war on whomever it wants with impunity and decide what constitutes an act of agression against a nation's citizenry by its leaders.
Given that the Anglo-American axis basically controls the Security Council, this brave new world provides the Anglosphere elite with enormous new powers. Anglo-American elites can now leverage the world's military power against those states it wishes to destabilize without being seen in contravention of international rules regarding military aggression.
In the case of Libya, the US (the Anglo-American elite's "Bad-Boy Enforcer") has remained rhetorically cautious about placing troops on the ground, even as Barack Obama has called repeatedly for the removal of Colonel Gaddafi. Despite this goal, The White House remains adamant, CNN reports, that there will be "no U.S. ground forces in Libya, though U.S. intelligence operatives remain there." A fine distinction?
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who was instrumental in getting the West directly involved in Libya within a military context has recommend the US send perhaps $25 million in various goods and services to the beleaguered Libya rebels facing off with the Colonel. Clinton also continues to maintain that rebel forces are mostly "business people, students, lawyers, doctors, professors who have very bravely moved to defend their communities and to call to an end to the regime in Libya."
Despite Clinton's description, it has gradually become evident that the forces opposing Gaddafi involve Islamic elements as well, perhaps radical elements. Thus we can see once again that the West is supporting Islam in the context of larger, national confrontations. France and the UN just finished backing a Muslim takeover of the Ivory Coast and now we see the same thing occurring in Libya.
We have long made the point that the West is actually involved in setting up a kind of Islamic power-crescent in the Middle East and Africa that will provide justification for continuing the phony war on terror, which has proven so effective in implementing DOMESTIC authoritarian policies. Libya only strengthens that case, as does the advancing political clout of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
While the composition of rebel forces may be somewhat as Ms. Clinton describes them, the level of help obviously has been much greater than the US wants to acknowledge. And there are various kinds of evidences available that the US in particular was planning this sort of regime change for a number of years.
Within Libya, the lines have already been drawn. The Transitional National Council that speaks for the rebels claims that a future for Libya with the Gaddafi family still in power is an "impossibility." A spokesperson explains that, "Gaddafi is not willing to leave and . . . will stay here and fight until the last drop of his blood, and if that is his choice and that is the case, then the Libyan people will hunt him down, find him and charge him with the criminal offenses he's created against the Libyan people."
Unlike with Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast who was recently deposed and painted somewhat laboriously as a "Strongman," given that he has a background as a history professor, there is little difficulty in positioning Colonel Gaddafi as murderous tyrant. There is therefore not a lot of sympathy for Gaddafi in the West and regime change can likely proceed unimpeded, so long as the military action does not turn exceptionally costly for Western forces.
But the larger issue still lingers. This has to do with the scope of Western military activity and definitive intelligence involvement in destabilizing these countries. It is impossible from our view to look at these actions simply as an effort to obtain control over more raw resources and energy. There are too many countries involved now and some of them (Yemen, Syria and the Ivory Coast) have either tangential or non-existent involvement with oil, strategically or otherwise.
No, what we see here is a dramatic escalation of the Anglo-American efforts to till the ground industriously to create more hospitable soil for global governance. We are not necessarily predicting these aggressive actions will work as planned, but that they are being tried at all – and with blatant obviousness – illustrates the strangeness of the times in which we live.
If someone ten years ago had said Western countries led by the Anglosphere would be deeply involved in conflicts in the Iraq, Afghanistan, the Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen all at once (have we left any out?), the rationale for such activities probably would not be clear at all. In fact, the rationales still are not clear. It begins to look more and more like a low-key WORLD WAR – operating under the good-natured guise of installing "democracy" – rather than a series of relief missions and support activities. It is easy to be lulled by individual justifications for Western involvements in individual states, but when takes a step back and looks at the totality of what is now taking place, the view is startling and increasingly – deeply – disturbing.
