When hell came to Libya — a look back at NATO’s murder of a nation

John Wight
12 min readMay 15, 2023
Libya in ruins

Why, given the previous disasters of the West’s wars and interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, would the ‘masters of the world’ embark on yet another military intervention in the Arab and Muslim world so soon after, and in so doing confirm Marx’s admonition that ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.’

And why would they intervene in Libya, given that what was roundly being described as a revolution in 2011 clearly failed the test of popular support throughout the country to qualify it as such? If it had been a revolution, underpinned by mass support among the population, and involving the defection of significant numbers of the country’s military and security forces, it stands to reason that it would not have taken eight months to topple the regime even with NATO air support.

Western news footage of the rebels was largely made up of disparate groups of men driving around in pick-up trucks, some with assault weapons and heavy machine guns mounted on them them, firing salvos into the desert. They lacked discipline, cohesion, or organization, and instead appeared to embody the very definition of rag-tag.

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John Wight

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