The West is silent as Libya falls into the abyss. The chaos there will inevitably create more wars and conflicts for the US to “intervene” in. Which is precisely the point. The US doesn’t blunder into war. It needs them to exist. That’s why we have so many of them. It doesn’t matter if we win. The cold hard facts are the US has lost most of the wars it has fought since WWII. Yet the war machine grinds on, even as the wheels seem to be falling off a bit lately. Our Middle East / North Africa adventurism has gone rather badly, both for the U.S. and for the occupants of those countries we intervened in, mouthing platitudes about democracy, which we promptly ignore, backing one warlord against another and then wondering why it all went so badly.
Libya has now disintegrated into at least two civil wars. The U.S., France, and Britain are nowhere to be seen.
It is easy enough to deride the neo-imperial posturing of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, or to describe the abyss into which Libya has fallen since 2011. The people whom that intervention propelled into power have reduced a country that had been peaceful for more than half a century to a level of violence that is beginning to approach that of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever Western intentions, the result has been a disaster. In Libya, as in Syria today, Western intervention was supposedly in support of democracy, but was conducted in alliance with the Sunni absolute monarchies of the Gulf who had no such aims.
In all three cases [Syria, Afghanistan, Libya], the West intervened in somebody else’s civil war and tried to dictate who won. There was a pretence that the Taliban, Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad were demonically evil and without any true supporters. This foreign support may give victory to one party in a civil war, as in Libya, which they could not win by relying on their own strength. In Iraq, the beleaguered Sunni could not fight a US-backed Shia government so it needed to bring in al-Qaeda. Thus the conditions were created that eventually produced Isis.
Now the U.S. can have more wars, this time against ISIS. I’m not pacifist. Some fights need to be fought. Â However, why not let the Middle East sort out its own problems. We have plenty of our own at home to solve and it’s obvious to all except DC insiders and the war pigs, that our military adventurism in other countries is beyond self-defeating.