Remember, Libya was supposed to be another grand humanitarian adventure, with Uncle Sam riding in to save the poor Third World peoples. In Iraq some 200,000 civilians probably have died after George W. Bush's foolish neocon crusade. In Kosovo our new allies quickly kicked out a quarter of a million people they didn't like.
There isn't much humanitarianism evident in Libya either, alas. Reports the Guardian:
As the most hopeful offshoot of the "Arab spring" so far flowered this week in successful elections in Tunisia, its ugliest underside has been laid bare in Libya. That's not only, or even mainly, about the YouTube lynching of Gaddafi, courtesy of a Nato attack on his convoy.
The grisly killing of the Libyan despot after his captors had sodomised him with a knife, was certainly a war crime. But many inside and outside Libya doubtless also felt it was an understandable act of revenge after years of regime violence. Perhaps that was Hillary Clinton's reaction, when she joked about it on camera, until global revulsion pushed the US to call for an investigation.
As the reality of what western media have hailed as Libya's "liberation" becomes clearer, however, the butchering of Gaddafi has been revealed as only a reflection of a much bigger picture. On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch reported the discovery of 53 bodies, military and civilian, in Gaddafi's last stronghold of Sirte, apparently executed – with their hands tied – by former rebel militia.
But no worries. Undoubtedly the usual suspects in Washington, always on a look-out for a new war--I mean, has John McCain opposed any war in the last three decades?--will soon find another nation to bomb, invade, and occupy. To do good, of course.
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