People’s movement, not NATO invasion, can bring democracy

This video from the USA is called Massacre in Libya: Witnesses Say Protesters Have Taken Control of Benghazi Despite Gov’t Violence.

How can the violent regime of Colonel Gadaffi in Libya be replaced by democracy? In the same way as the Greek colonels’ regime fell in 1974. That Greek dictatorship was overthrown by a people’s mass movement from below. Not by bloody NATO invasion from abroad. Quite the contrary: for years, NATO had been happy to work with the anti- communist Greek dictators. Like they co-operated for decades with the Salazarist fascist dictatorship in Portugal as an official NATO member; and with the Franco dictatorship in Spain as an unofficial NATO partner.

For years, NATO country politicians like Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi, Western big businessmen and generals have worked hand in glove with the Gadaffi regime.

Now that Gadaffi may be about to fall, there is a tendency in the Western establishment to maybe replace him with, not a bone fide democracy from below, but with a dictatorship imposed by NATO invasion. A dictatorship which would safeguard multinational corporations’ access to Libyan oil; like they hoped that Bush’s Iraq 2003 war would guarantee access to Iraqi oil.

The Libyan democrats will turn out not to like that; like Iraqi democrats did not like George W Bush’s and Donald Rumsfeld‘ s invasion. A Libyan exile, interviewed by Dutch NOS TV this week, claimed that airplanes were bombing Libyan neighbourhoods. Some of those planes, he said, may be not Gadaffi Libyan, but Italian. He execrated Berlusconi for this. So, pro intervention NATO politicians might get a long bloody war like in Iraq as the result of an invasion in Libya. Not a smooth transition to a model puppet oil dictatorship, as George W Bush hoped in early 2003 about Iraq.

As this blog wrote in 2006 about Saddam Hussein (different in many aspects from Gadaffi, but similar in the “humanitarian intervention” from above and abroad, versus pro democracy mass movement from below dilemma):

As for “removing” Saddam Hussein by bloody war: why not in the same way as happened with Pinochet; the Greek colonels’ dictatorship; the Portuguese NATO fascists; Marcos in the Philippines; Mobutu in Congo; Suharto in Indonesia; apartheid in South Africa; Washington’s bloody stooges in Bolivia recently and Venezuela of the 1980s and early 1990s: by the people?

Oh, duh, because people like Cheney and Rumsfeld supported these dictators for ages.

Like they supported Saddam Hussein, already a CIA asset in the 1960s …

So, again, Saddam’s removal by the people, like what happened to the dictators of Indonesia, Greece, etc. would have been much better than this war with over 600,000 Iraqi dead and counting; thousands US dead and counting …

By now, estimates of numbers of Iraqi dead are over a million.

By Ann Talbot, about Libya today:

Calls mount for military intervention in Libya

25 February 2011

The British government is actively considering sending Special Forces troops to Libya, on the pretext of rescuing 170 workers trapped in isolated oil exploration encampments, as fighting continues there amid mass uprisings against the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Reports from inside Libya were fragmentary, due to fighting and limitations on foreign media imposed by the Gaddafi regime. They suggested that Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city, was in the hands of anti-Gaddafi forces, with fighting moving to cities such as Zawiya and al-Khums, that are closer to Libya’s capital, Tripoli. Gaddafi also broadcast another belligerent speech today, blaming the uprising on Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and claiming that protesters were on drugs.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that he did not rule out the possibility of sending Special Forces to Libya.

97 FILIPINOS ON THEIR WAY TO MANILA via PARIS; 300 NOW IN TRIPOLI: here.

From Lenin’s Tomb blog in Britain:

So, I’ve been keeping track in my mind of the connections between Qadhafi and the Third Way, since it turned out that Blair and Mandelson were tight with the dictator’s son. This morning, I found out that Qadhafi’s international lobbying operation, involved Richard Perle, Francis Fukuyama, Bernard Lewis, Dick Cheney and … Anthony Giddens.

As the protests against Colonel Moamer Kadhafi continued in Libya on Friday, Eritrean refugees and immigrants in the country said that they feared for their safety. Groups of Eritreans in Tripoli and Benghazi told RFI about violent attacks against them and describe the inadequate response to their plight, as other foreign citizens are repatriated: here.

Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias has vowed to veto a Bill that would see the divided country join Nato’s so-called Partnership for Peace programme: here.

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