George W. Bush and Tony Blair are rarely thought of as voices of reason, but hindsight has a way of offering new perspectives.
Bush and Blair are without doubt war criminals and among the world’s most dangerous ones at that. It was Tony Blair who spearheaded and later gloried in the illegal NATO war on Yugoslavia which saw the deaths of hundreds of civilians, the destruction of what remained of Yugoslavia’s infrastructure, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the bombing of civilian targets including the intentional attack on a television station, NATO troops nearly firing on Russian peace keepers in a tense stand-off, the continued KLA terrorist occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija and a refugee crisis among Orthodox Christian Serbs that remains unresolved.
Blair later stood virtually alone when George W. Bush sought and succeed in invading, occupying and destroying Iraq based on a series of total lies, setting off a daisy-chain of instability that continues to savage the Arab world to this day.
Yet, in hindsight, Bush and Blair’s successors have been even more devious and dangerous in their criminality.
In late 2003, Libyan revolutionary leader Muammar Gaddafi agreed to cease his weapons programme in exchange for normalised relations with western countries.
The move was hailed by Bush and Blair as a triumph. Blair became a frequent guest and some would say personal friend of Gaddafi in the aftermath and Bush gave up any attempts to lump secular Libya in with his infamously stupid ‘axis of evil’.
At this time, the CIA began cooperating with Libya in the capturing and imprisonment of al-Qaeda terrorists. This was an objectively good thing.
Although the irony of the US emboldening al-Qaeda in Iraq while allowing Libya to help fight al-Qaeda shouldn’t be lost on anyone, an objectively good thing, even when done by duplicitous powers, still must be characterised objectively.
Long before the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 unleashed new waves of Salafist terrorists on the world, Gaddafi’s Libya was fighting such groups and doing so highly effectively. Such groups included the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group which the Manchester ISIS bomber’s father was a member of in the early 1990s when he lived in Libya trying to overthrow Gaddafi with his jihadist cohorts.
Gaddafi began to complain that the west’s promise of rewards of Libya fell short of the newly placed responsibilities the west had placed on him. Nevertheless, he expressed no desire to go back on his deal.
It was the western ‘partners’ of Libya that proved to be totally dishonest.
In 2011, the same Gaddafi who was embraced by George W. Bush and Tony Blair that found himself the target of a Hillary Clinton authored war prosecuted by a silent and indecisive Barack Obama as well as Britain’s David Cameron and France’s Nicholas Sarkozy who did not live up to the promises of their predecessors in respect of Libya.
READ MORE: Hillary Clinton bears responsibility for the Manchester atrocity
Britain began training jihadist fighters to take over the same Libya that Bush and Blair had worked with to keep away from Europe.
Then came the lies which were doubted by many at the time and subsequently debunked, that Gaddafi had ordered the mass rape and killing of civilians.
It was the Iraqi WMD lie repackaged only with even more brazenness.
Gaddafi attempted to appeal to the western head, knowing by then that the west had no collective heart and said that if Libya falls, al-Qaeda would have free access to Europe via the Mediterranean that Libya had sealed off with its highly professional security services.
Europe is now paying the price for not listening to Gaddafi. They are also, oddly paying the price for not listening to George Bush and Tony Blair who in a rare moment of honesty (albeit not ncessarily a sincere one), embraced Libya and credited Gaddafi with being an ally against terrorism.
Libya is now a totally failed state build on top of the world’s largest terrorist training camp.
READ MORE: Total civil war in Libya
This interview taken not long before the western powers changed their position on Libya, demonstrates Gaddafi’s total understanding of the terrorist threat and his firm commitment to fighting it.
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