Vol. 75/No. 40      November 7, 2011

Following what appears to be the execution of Moammar Gadhafi at the hands of bourgeois opposition forces with imperialist backing, President Barack Obama boasted that Washington achieved its objectives “without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground.”

Increasingly the favored liberal “prescription” for advancing the U.S. rulers’ political-military objectives abroad is covert hunter-killer operations by CIA operatives, special forces, “contractors” and aerial drones—a course with dangerous consequences for working people worldwide.

The imperialists’ pretext of helping to bring down an oppressive tyranny is a hypocritical lie. Helping to cement a “stable” bourgeois regime beholden to them and restricting space for toiling masses to fight for their own interests are their objectives.

Imperialists’ bitter enmity with the Gadhafi regime began when it was established in 1969 with the overthrow of King Idris by lower echelons of the officer corps. The hated monarchy had been set up by London at the end of World War II. Its fall was a blow to imperialism and a step forward for working people.

In 1970 the new Libyan government closed down U.S. and British military bases, and nationalized all foreign banks and oil reserves—the country’s main source of wealth. Italian domination of the economy was swiftly brought to an end.

What was established was another bourgeois, anti-working-class regime demagogically claiming to champion the anti-imperialist struggle. Like other similar bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East, Gadhafi entered into growing conflicts with imperialist powers, leading to Washington’s 1986 bombing of Tripoli, Libya’s capital, and imposition of sharp economic sanctions in the 1990s.

At the end of 2003, faced with blunt threats by Washington and London after the invasion of Iraq, the Gadhafi government toned down its anti-imperialist rhetoric, abandoned its nuclear weapons program, paid billions of dollars to victims of terrorist attacks attributed to Libya, and opened up its natural resources to imperialist exploitation. To no avail. When the civil war began, the imperialist hyenas and jackals moved at once to take out their old foe and vie among each other for access to oil resources, markets and influence in what they intend to make a pliable regime.

Amid the overthrow of the Gadhafi government and the ensuing struggle among competing bourgeois forces, toilers and other oppressed layers will have an opportunity to fight for increased space to organize and advance their own interests. Imperialist powers, the enemies of working people the world over, always have been and always will be an obstacle to this struggle.

Working people should condemn the intervention by Washington, Paris and London in Libya’s civil war and demand imperialist hands off!
 
 
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Washington gloats over killing of Gadhafi  
 
 
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