NATO assistance comes at 'fantastic cost' to Libyans

NATO is not targeting Gaddafi, but will strike any compound where the Libyan leader might be located, said a NATO spokesman in Naples on Tuesday. But activist Lyndsey German believes NATO should not have started its intervention in the first place.

­NATO has killed thousands in Libya on the grounds they were protecting civilians, says Lyndsey German of the “Stop the War” coalition. But the activist insists the Arab world is quite capable of solving political crises without any external assistance.  

“The lesson of history in the Middle East is that they do not need the British or the French – or anybody else – to intervene in their countries," she told RT. "The Arab League is quite capable of making their own decisions. Whether they win or lose is much better when they do make their own decisions rather than when they are dependent on Britain, as this new government [in Libya] will be.”

NATO’s air raids cleared the rebels’ way to Tripoli, but this was at the “fantastic cost” of intervening in the middle of what started as a genuine uprising, argues German.

German is also frustrated that conflicting media reports coming from Libya are used to justify Western intervention into the country.

“We had the International Criminal Court saying that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was in custody when clearly they did not know conclusively that it was the case. It has been used in a political way to imply that the regime was weaker at that particular time,” German told RT. “This form of misinformation should not be coming from an international institution.”

­The fact that the rebels were only able to enter Tripoli after enormous assistance from NATO, including a bombing campaign in the country lasting five months, turn the declared humanitarian reasons for the intervention to have nothing to do with its real aim, believes Brian Becker, from the anti-war coalition ANSWER.

“Whenever the US, UK or France, the colonizers and enslavers of Africa, intervene in Africa or the Middle East or anywhere, they are assigning their mission a noble cause: to protect freedom, to protect democracy, to protect civilians as in the cause with the UN resolution 1973. But this is a long-standing policy of the US government – to overthrow the government of Libya, a country that possesses the largest oil reserves in all of Africa,” Brian Becker acknowledges.

“It has nothing to do with human rights and in fact when they bombed Tripoli, dropping 7,500 bombs and missiles on a country [Libya] that did nothing to the American people, That is an act of aggression, that is a war crime, that is a crime against humanity – that is the complete opposite of the defense of human rights,” he said.