Tripoli, March 19: A leading British anti-war campaign says the West’s decision to go to war in Libya is aimed at keeping the “essentials of imperial power in the Middle East in place.”
Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have expressed their readiness to support Britain, France and the US in their airstrikes on Libya.
Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia and the UAE deployed their military units in Bahrain to help the Persian Gulf kingdom in its repression of anti-regime protestors.
The national chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray, said although the decision by Britain, France and the US to impose a no-fly zone over Libya was sanctioned by a UN Security Council resolution, the move was “instigated” by Arab “despots.”
Murray said the West is not seeking to help revolutionaries in Libya attain their democratic rights, but is going to wage another war to keep its clients in the Arab world safely in place.
“The decision to attack Libya and impose regime change – for that is what the UN resolution means – may have been authorized by the Security Council. But it was instigated by the despots of the Arab League, desperate to secure deeper western involvement in the region to save them from their own peoples,” Murray said, referring to the recent popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.
He stressed that the so-called no-fly zone, which will be imposed by air attacks on Libyan defenses and Qaddafi’s troops as well as naval bombardments, is an excuse for more bloodshed by the same powers, who have “wreaked such mayhem throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds over the last ten years and longer.”
The leading anti-war activist acknowledged that the Qaddafi regime has few “admirers,” yet warned the experience of Iraq shows military intervention in Libya will only “cost more civilian lives” without leading to a democratic change in the African country.
“Attacking Libya and sponsoring the [Persian] Gulf oligarchies’ invasion of Bahrain to prop up the threatened monarchy there – under the noses of the US fifth fleet – are of a piece. They represent a concerted effort by the western powers to first control and then bring to a halt the Arab revolutions, leaving the essentials of imperial power in the Middle East in place,” Murray said.
“David Cameron’s decision to place Britain in the vanguard of efforts to topple the Gaddafi regime is dictated by the same considerations which led Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to embrace that same regime – a desire to maintain BP’s profitable access to Libyan oil,” Murray said.
He also said western military intervention in Libya is meant to “strangle” the revolutions there rather than “supporting” them.
“We call on the British government to keep its hands off the Middle East and demand that it refrain from all involvement in military action in Libya or elsewhere in the region,” he added.
—-Agencies