London, March 22: Britain is taking part in another bombing campaign against another foreign country, using a bunch of ‘March lies’ as a pretext.
The UK government and its allies unleashed a bombing campaign against crisis-hit Libya on Saturday to enforce a UN Security Council resolution, which called for a no-fly zone over the North African country to protest its civilian population from being killed at the hands of its long-time dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
However, the campaign exceeded bounds set by the UN resolution as evidenced by the death of at least 48 civilians and the wounding of over 150 others in Libya, whose residences were hit by the Western coalition’s most sophisticated weaponry, including Tomahawk missiles, and other state-of-the art weapons.
It is not surprising at all, since Britain, in the same week of March 1991, played a leading role in the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
And again, on the same days in 2003, Britain teamed up with the US military to play yet another leading role in the invasion of Iraq.
Now, it’s March again and Britain is bombing another foreign country, says The Guardian .
UK officials said they attacked troubled Libya to “protect the people” from being murdered by Qaddafi troops, because the Libyan dictator was violating self-declared ceasefire and was killing its people.
Well, all these could be true – but there are other examples and experiences of other March assaults in which Britain has played a prominent role and those experiences lead the public opinion of the world to think that the reasons for launching war against Libya lack credibility.
In March 1991, the UK government used the brutal massacre campaign launched by the then Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Milosevic, as a pretext to launch the military intervention. The pretext later confirmed to be “an exaggeration.”
They told the British voters that “Milosevic was set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War II,” but that wasn’t true.
Far from Milosevic engaging in a “Hitler-style genocide,” what was occurring in Kosovo was a civil war between Yugoslav forces and the western-backed Kosovo Liberation Army, with atrocities committed on both sides, according to The Guardian .
In March 2003, the UK government under Prime Minister Tony Blair lied about the executed dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, when he claimed that “We had to launch an attack on Iraq because its regime possesses weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that could be activated within 45 minutes,” and that wasn’t true either.
In fact, the West wanted to topple a regime it had fully supported in the 1980s, when Saddam’s regime imposed an eight year war against Iran. The then Western leaders were not happy with the Iraqi dictator anymore and they used WMDs as a pretext to justify a military intervention to topple the regime.
Both in 1999 and 2003, British officials lied to their people about the real reasons for the country’s involvement in military conflicts.
Now, how can the people be sure that what is happening in 2011 is any different? The Guardian asked.
The report said, “If the UK, the US and France are acting out of genuine humanitarian concerns for Libyan civilians, why has there been no discussion of similar action against the government in Bahrain — which last week invited into the country military forces from that great democracy Saudi Arabia to crush pro-democracy protests — or against the regime in Yemen, where 45 anti-government protesters were killed Thursday?”
The answer to this question could be, “The world’s public opinion would never ever again accept the so-called West’s humanitarian concerns as a good excuse for supporting evil objectives behind Western leaders’ military interventions elsewhere around the globe.”
——–Agencies