EDITORIAL
Stop the Third Dirty U.S. War for Oil!
Defend the Libyan People!

Apr 4, 2011

Obama finally addressed the nation about the U.S. war on Libya, reassuring us that NATO is now “in the lead,” and there will be “no U.S. boots on the ground.”

Hypocrisy dripped off his every word.

NATO may be “in the lead,” but a U.S. admiral, James Stavridis, is calling NATO’s tune. The U.S. military is supplying most of the armaments, and the U.S. is footing most of the bill.

No boots on the ground? More than a month before the war started, Obama had signed an order deploying CIA agents, boots and all, right onto Libya’s ground.

Obama said that the U.S. invaded only to “prevent a slaughter”–at the very moment that the U.S. was carrying out wholesale slaughter in Afghanistan and Pakistan, sending drones that wipe out whole villages.

This latest “no-fly zone” is not some peaceful campaign. It destroys and kills. A village doctor in Libya described how U.S. strikes killed seven civilians and wounded 25 others in his one small village. Among the dead were children as young as 12. A top Catholic official in Tripoli, Libya’s capital, said that his city alone had lost 40 civilians to U.S. bombs.

A half century ago in Viet Nam, a U.S. army officer told a reporter that the U.S. had to destroy a Vietnamese village “in order to save it.” That is how the U.S. military is “saving” civilians in Libya today–just as it destroyed a million people in Iraq in order to “save” them.

The only thing the U.S. war on Libya is saving is profit for the big oil companies, the banks and the weapons producers.

Yes, Qaddafi is a monster. But he was their monster. For more than 40 years, the iron heel of the Qaddafi regime assured order in Libya for the U.S. and the other major imperialisms–France, Britain and, to some extent, Italy.

Did Qaddafi and others around him enrich themselves from Libya’s wealth? Yes, but they were small-time thieves by comparison to the big imperialist interests that stole Libya’s vast oil wealth.

Throughout the region, dictators like Qaddafi hold the population of their own countries in check, driving the workers and peasants into abject impoverishment.

But now, like so many other dictatorships, the Qaddafi regime is threatened by revolt and civil war.

The U.S. missiles and bombs are meant to reinstall a dictatorial regime in Libya against the Libyan people. The result may be someone out of Qaddafi’s regime, someone who poses as an opposition, or even Qaddafi himself. But whoever it is, the population will pay the price–unless the laboring population rises up to defend its own interests.

For almost a decade, the U.S. working class has been paying, morally and materially, for the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, the U.S. ruling class has added one more war to that list, another terrible war for which we will pay, until we force its end.

U.S. out of Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq immediately!