by James Corbett
BoilingFrogsPost.com
April 8, 2014
We are taught all our lives that our modern political systems are “by and for the people.” In order to justify taking us to war, then, our misleaders have to convince us that war is not a racket, as General Smedley Butler revealed, and is not for the benefit of the industrialists who sell the munitions or the politicians in their back pocket or the financiers that own them both, but in the interest of the average man or woman. In other words, they lie through their teeth.
Such was the case with Afghanistan, which we were told was all about the hunt for Osama…until it no longer was.
Or in Iraq, which was all about weapons of mass destruction…until it no longer was.
By the time the original lie is exposed, it no longer matters why the war was started, only that it continue as long as it needs to. Suddenly the war in Afghanistan was all about women’s rights and the Iraq war was all about the purple fingers of democracy. Never mind that women in Kabul are worse off under the NATO-installed, UNOCAL consultant Hamid Karzai than they were in the bad old days before Operation Cyclone. Never mind that Iraq is now a balkanized mess, divided along religious and ethnic lines and still rocked by bloody violence on a daily basis. The media spotlight has shifted to the next 24/7 distraction, and the public can go back to not being able to place these countries on a map, let alone care about their inhabitants.
This is exactly the case with the NATO-led invasion of Libya in 2011, which once again we were told was about a heartfelt concern for the well-being of the Libyan people.
If this compassion for the plight of men and women in Libya was so heartfelt, why is it that you have heard nothing whatsoever about Libya in the last two years from the same politicians and talking heads who persuaded you that dropping bombs on the country was the only way to save it? Is it because the situation was resolved with the death of Gaddafi and the virtuous western-backed freedom fighters have established a happy, prosperous, functioning society of peace and happiness? Of course not.
Once again, the public was lied to just enough to convince them that war was necessary to maintain peace, and now that the real mission has been accomplished and Libya’s gold has been stolen and its central bank has been established and its AFRICOM-resisting leader has been killed and it has been established as an operations base for NATO’s Al-CIAda mercenaries, they couldn’t care less about the lives of the Libyan people.
Earlier this week, Faraj Muftah, a spokesman for the largest Arab tribe in Libya, the Warfalla tribe, joined me on The Corbett Report to discuss what life is like in Libya now that the NATO powers and their foreign jihadist assets have taken over the country.
There are those who have been trying to spread the word about this grim reality to anyone who will hear it, but unsurprisingly they have been ignored, shunned, and even threatened by the same US government that once mouthed its concern for Libya. A prime example of this phenomenon are James and JoAnne Moriarty, two Americans working in Libya since 2007 who became first-hand eyewitnesses to the bloody war waged against the Libyan people in 2011 and the aftermath of cover-up perpetrated at the highest levels of political office.
The treatment of the Moriartys, including their blacklisting in business circles in the United States and the numerous death threats they’ve received from government officials, is reprehensible. Those who are concerned about their situation in particular, and the real aftermath of the Libyan war in general, should see their website, LibyanWarTheTruth.com, and consult the DVD documenting their experiences for more of these details.
But as long as we continue letting politicians lie about their concern for people around the world, whether it be the Egyptians in Tahrir Square who are now living through an era of chaos and upheaval while being virtually ignored by the politicians and commentators who pretended to care for them, or the Ukrainians who have just been signed into IMF debt slavery by the same forces that pretended to care about their plight, the same scenes of violence and misery will take place over and over again at the expense of the masses and for the benefit of the few at the very top.
For citizens of the NATO countries who insist on blindly supporting the NATO war machine every time it kicks into action anywhere around the globe, and who buy into the rhetoric about helping people around the world and protecting interests abroad, ask yourself this: when was the last time that any war, anywhere, amounted to anything more than a swindle for the benefit of the bankers and the war industry, or anything less than a bloodbath for the average man or woman in the target country?
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