All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Bas Spliet, again, writing for antiwar.com, and this time about the war in Libya, how NATO's war crimes created chaos in Libya.
Welcome back to the show, Bas.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Glad to be on.
Great, great.
Happy to have you here, and I'll go ahead and ruin it in my new book I'm working on.
The Libya chapter begins with an apocryphal quote, because I actually don't remember anymore exactly who it was that said this to me, but it was a friend of mine who was a regular person from real life, not a political type from the internet, and said to me, we had a war in Libya?
And I just thought that was great, because I kind of almost can't even blame the guy, because how's he supposed to know?
It wasn't a big deal.
It was just a nine-month air war regime change, lynching of a dictator and plunging of the most important nation in North Africa into absolute chaos ever since then, nine years ago, where chaos has reigned ever since.
But to the average American, they might think the wacky Colonel Gaddafi with his mirrored sunglasses and his Springfield Mayor sash is still in charge over there, but it turns out not, huh?
Yeah.
I think that anecdote is very illustrative to basically the point I'm trying to make in the article, because Libya does pop up into the news cycle once in a while.
There's not a whole lot of news about it, but ISIS surfaces in Libya in 2015, or suddenly there was this news that's two years later that there are open slave markets surfacing in Libya.
Oh, there's a news story about that?
No, that was in 2017.
But I'm just pointing to the fact that sometimes it pops into the news, and also, for weeks, it has been in the news quite a bit, because there is like a very complex civil slash proxy war going on, and there is some reporting about it, undeniably.
But if you go and look at that reporting, they're trying to explain the complex geopolitical situation and how a lot of foreign nations are coalescing around two rival governments and all of that.
And sometimes there's a brief overview of Libya, and maybe, just maybe, they mention just in one sentence, oh yeah, by the way, NATO waged a war in Libya in 2011, but they never go deeper into this.
So I think you can either give this complex overview of what is happening today, or you can choose to go another path, which I think is way more important, to look at what NATO, what our countries have actually done to wreak havoc in the country, and creating the instability and chaos that actually is the cause of what we are seeing today.
Yeah.
It really is, just like with Somalia, it just seems to be unfair that the countries whose governments are responsible for this, that the populations don't even have to be aware at all.
I mean, I'm not saying everyone should wear a hair shirt and whip themselves, or any kind of thing, but we should at least have to know, and maybe care a little bit about what our government does to people, and how they make things this way.
So anyway, that's what this show's about, that's why you're writing, so that's good.
Go ahead and tell us about the brief period there when America let Qaddafi suck up to the United States, between 2003 and 2011 there, when they brought him in from the cold, finally.
Yes, that's a good point.
So Qaddafi was in power for a very long time, like so many autocrats in the Arab world.
There was a revolution in 1969, which overthrew the monarchy, a bit like happened in Egypt, for instance.
And basically Qaddafi was this big villain, he was also accused of terrorist attacks in Europe, and all these kind of things, there were US and UN sanctions in the 1980s and 1990s, but in the end he reluctantly took responsibility for what had happened in Europe, with the Lockerbie bombing, and declared that he would get rid of his weapons of mass destruction program in 2003, and then the sanctions were lifted, and for a brief moment there Qaddafi was friends, because this was the war on terror era, so he was part of the extraordinary rendition program of the CIA, so he tortured terrorist suspects for the CIA and MI6, but then in 2011 with the Arab Spring, some people rose up against this rule, and for some reason NATO, like a lot of European and Western and US, a lot of Western governments decided that it was time for a regime change.
So it was Obama's Iraq moment, if you will, and that of Hillary Clinton, of course.
Yeah, absolutely, well, and it's important about 2003, I think, that George W. Bush really needed a win, because the Iraq war was already going badly, obviously they didn't know what they were doing, or how to control anything, and for PR's sake, they finally accepted Qaddafi, who'd been begging since at least 96 to try to normalize relations, and then they said, oh yeah, no, see, he only came into compliance because of the threat that we were going to do to him what we'd done to Saddam, and so we don't have to do all these wars, we only had to do the one big one as a demonstration, and the rest will fall in line, and it wasn't really true, but they needed that for a talking point to demonstrate that, see, the war in Iraq accomplished something, and so this is it, this is what it accomplished, is we cowed that wacky colonel into compliance, when, of course, he was the first guy to put out an international Interpol warrant for bin Laden's arrest in 96, back when the MI6 was using the al-Qaeda guys from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group to try to kill him, so, now you switch back and forth, America and Britain, whether they support the Islamist terrorists or the secular dictators, and depending which country and which time.
Absolutely, and to point out why it doesn't work, and that argument is a fallacy, maybe Gaddafi complied for a while, but I want to mention this anecdote that I also mentioned in the article, about, yeah, back in 2004, just after he agreed to normalize ties completely with the West, and the sanctions were being lifted, to point to the fact that he wasn't in support, necessarily, of the Iraq war, there is this article you can find in the Bulgarian press, and also it's an anecdote, one of my professors told me, that he was having a conversation with Tony Blair, the other invader of Iraq, and he balanced his foot on his other knee, so that the sole of his foot would point towards Tony Blair, and of course Tony Blair doesn't have a clue, but that is an extremely, yeah, very impolite gesture in Arabic culture, that's also why the Iraqi journalist threw his shoe at George W. Bush, so of course the people in Libya and the people in Iraq don't agree with the idea that, oh, George Bush is waging a war in Iraq, we're better, quite the contrary, as we talked about in previous conversations, that enrages people, and makes sure they will join opposition groups that will try to fight occupation, or worse, they will go into terrorist groups, and so on and so forth.
Yeah, absolutely, and as we know, that the guys that led the revolution in Libya were the Libyan veterans of Iraq war two, where they had been part of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, later known as the Islamic State of Iraq, and then ISIS, and finally the actual caliphate there, same group, and then after Iraq war two, they came home, just like they came home to Syria to cause trouble there, but then here, and I love this part, and I understand it, it's no mystery, but it still is, to me, the height of irony, and it's just so important, that right at the time that Obama was killing Osama, which I know people are confused about that, but he was killed in Abbottabad, in that raid by the Navy Steel Team Six there in May of 2011, and right at that time that Obama's killing Osama, he takes his side in Libya, and then immediately afterwards, as well in Syria, in 2011, same year, and you know, it should be unbelievable, but of course, there's reasons, international strategy, and all of that kind of thing, America's part of the Sunni axis against the Shia, even though we fought Iraq war two for the Shia, they regretted that, so this was part of their kind of trying to correct that somehow by sucking up toward the Saudis, who were a big player in this war as well, but so that's the thing of it, is that somehow by 2011, the idea that keeping groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq down at all costs was over, you know, the war on terrorism was over, now it's the war for terrorism, these very same groups on entirely different agendas, oh look at us, we're humanitarian interventionists, they had to go and save all the people of Benghazi, boss, is that right?
Yeah, absolutely, and this so-called revolutionaries, yeah, maybe some people rose up that hated Qaddafi's guts because he was a brutal dictator, there is no denying that, but the people who actually took up arms, they were quite a few of them were like Islamists that are not really democratic revolutionaries, and that is evidenced in the fact that, for instance, there was this huge lie that was reported everywhere that, back in February 2011, that Qaddafi was employing foreign black African mercenaries to crack down on the revolution, on the uprising, but later it was found out by amnesty investigations and a lot of other people that there is no evidence whatsoever that Qaddafi flew in mercenaries, but you can find articles back in February 2011 in which talking heads of the opposition groups, like political activists, and these kind of people are quoted in media as admitting that, yeah, we executed 50 black African mercenaries because they were involved in the crackdown, but we now know that there were no African mercenaries, they were just Libyans of darker skin, or they were foreign migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa, and there's even some evidence, according to Amnesty International, that they lynched black Africans, so there's your revolution, there's your democratic revolutionaries for you.
Yeah, well, and I mean, I think the kernel of truth to that was that there were Tuaregs who were mercenaries who worked for Qaddafi in his own little kind of private Gestapo, he didn't have much of a military because he was afraid to have one, I think, but so he had his own kind of whatever security service he called it, and that did include some of these Tuareg fighters, but they're not really black, so it was, you know, it just, that became the kernel, hardly a kernel of truth to there are foreigners who fight for Qaddafi for pay here, but then they extrapolate that to all blacks somehow are now guilty of being mercenaries, when of course that was absolutely not the case in any way at all, probably no blacks, very few.
The blacks in Libya were migrant laborers, and including the town of Tawarga, where they essentially cleansed the entire town of 10,000 people or something, it was all these black migrant laborers, and David Enders, who was at that time reporting for McClatchy Newspapers, I talked to him, he was in Libya at the time, you know, on the phone, talking about how he'd gone to the refugee camps where these jihadists would come in and rape the women every night, the survivors of the Tawarga ethnic cleansing, and then of course, as you're saying, you know, the reports of the lynchings, and this was in the emails from Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton from the spring of 2011, so still only like, I think, maybe eight weeks into the war, 10 weeks into the war, and he's saying, hey Hillary, I'm getting reports that our heroic jihadists here are, you know, rounding up and lynching blacks and calling them mercenaries.
That may be the same thing that you're talking about there, or another similar report, and she kept going anyway, would not negotiate, and we know from the Washington Times series and everything that the CIA and the military were trying to stop the war and negotiate, and the State Department wouldn't let them.
They're leading the charge on the whole thing, and so anyway, that's the thing of it.
It's not just the the horrible nature of all the ethnic cleansing and everything, but that they knew that, look, these guys that we're backing, they're the Libyan clan.
They're not heroes.
They don't believe in liberty.
They don't believe in democracy.
These are Zarqawi's guys, you know, for God's sake.
Yeah, but they wanted their war, and they their supporter, like the so-called revolutionaries that they backed, and they themselves committed horrible war crimes upon all kinds of lies.
You know, you must know, and probably maybe your audience also knows, that Hillary Clinton and even the ICC chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, they claimed that Gaddafi was handing Viagra to his troops to rape, to use, yeah, rape as a weapon of war.
They were actually claiming this while there was no evidence for that whatsoever.
Another lie was...
Well, stick with that one for a minute, because that was hugely important at the time.
I mean, this was, you know, saturated the media, that this was, you know, the...
Look, the propaganda, these are barbarians, right?
These are like some kind of, you know, savages, not real men fighting the war.
They're not professional soldiers in uniforms.
They're savage beasts with babies on their bayonets.
This kind of propaganda to stir your emotions, you know?
I mean, of course it was ridiculous, and I've brought this up a lot of times, sorry, but I love it, and I don't want to ever forget it, and I still remember perfectly.
Driving west down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, listening to the AM radio, and some Rush Limbaugh clone, you know, basic Republican talk radio host with no name, is saying, look everybody, even Susan Rice says that Gaddafi is sending his armies out to rape his way across his own country, and to rape every woman and girl that they find, and so that's how you know it's true, as if even Susan Rice is saying it, and I'm just laughing and dying, you know, that this is what counts as thinking is the most ridiculous form of confirmation bias, like Susan Rice being the one claiming it wouldn't be the number one reason to discount it, you know?
It's just like, even Bill Clinton says we need to attack Iraq.
Well, again, wouldn't that be the number one reason to think that maybe something here is not on the up and up?
But anyway, that's just, you know, and it meant so much to him, too.
He wasn't lying.
It was like he was in favor of this war, and to him, to have a liberal Democrat agree was like the ultimate endorsement of a war that come on, and in fact, even a female minority liberal Democrat agrees.
Like, man, if that isn't the stamp of legitimacy, let me at him, come on.
Yeah, good point, but it is, we can also really look at how every phase of legitimizing the war had its own lies.
So first, in February, there was like this first report surfaced about mercenaries and also the shooting from the sky that Gaddafi was shooting at his people from the air, you know?
These were like, you can find this on every media imaginable, and even Obama also used this later on.
And this, if, you know, if Gaddafi is firing on his own people from the air and is flying in foreign mercenaries, supposedly, maybe the solution is a no-fly zone, they thought.
So the U.N. Security Council voted on imposing a no-fly zone.
But then, even though the resolution emphasized that, you know, we should look towards making peace and we want the military mission to be mainly about protecting civilians, supposedly, NATO immediately started bombing, started taking over the mission.
And when, exactly, so first, the first strikes were just a few, not that much, but when they started escalating at the end of March, this is when this Viagra story surfaced.
And a bit later on, then it was the story that Benghazi was going to be attacked.
And then Obama made his big address to the nation around the end of March, I think 28th of March, claiming, and I really want to quote him here, there will, if we had waited one more day with intervening, he said, there would be a massacre that would stain the conscience of the world and that would reverberate across the region.
And a couple of days later, or maybe two weeks later, he wrote an op-ed together with Sarkozy and Cameron, claiming that if we had not intervened and did our humanitarian crusades, there would have been a bloodbath and 10,000 people would have died.
But that claim is just ridiculous on the face of it, that's been scrutinized from so many levels, not in the least of which by the British House of Commons itself in 2016.
They brought out reports.
So the British Parliament themselves said in a report that this was a total lie.
There was no evidence whatsoever that Gaddafi was going to inflict genocide on his people.
Because if you look at previous cities he had retaken in February, there were not a lot of civilian casualties.
And there was a disparity, for instance, between the people that were wounded, only 3%, for instance, were women.
So this suggested that the vast majority of people that died were just combatants, which is tragic, but it doesn't mean that it's going to be a genocide against the whole people of Benghazi.
So in every phase of the war, they used this new lie.
And yeah, as you mentioned earlier, they probably knew that it was a lie, but they wanted their war, they went with it, and now people have forgotten about it.
Even though after the war was over, unfortunately, not during the war, but end of 2011 and 2012, there were a lot of reports and investigations coming from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, even the New York Times, pointing out the fact that NATO, they committed war crimes, they killed civilians, even though they claimed they didn't.
Hold on just one second, be right back.
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Yeah, you know, I went searching through my archives and I couldn't find it.
Maybe some listener can help me remember.
I used to be good at remembering things.
But it wasn't just Juan Cole who was horrible on this.
But I could swear that I interviewed someone from Amnesty International.
I know I remember this.
I couldn't find it.
But I interviewed someone from Amnesty at the time.
And it started out like, yeah, look, I mean, Gaddafi's no nice guy, right?
I mean, everybody knows that.
And this guy's like, yeah, yeah, no, he's terrible, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, yeah, but still, nobody should do anything about it.
That'd be crazy, right?
What are we gonna do?
And then he was surprised and I was surprised that he was surprised that he thought he was just there to monger a war and that I that's why I had him on when I just had him on to show that not everybody who's for the war is saying that, oh, Gaddafi's the most wonderful and progressive leader in North Africa, which some people were saying.
And I was saying, look, the guy's a piece of garbage.
He's a dictator.
But still, that doesn't mean you have a war now, you know.
But anyway, the Amnesty guy was there to monger a war.
And it's funny.
I'm not sure why that's not in the archives, but maybe somebody else has it or they know the one I'm talking about.
And maybe it is there.
And I just couldn't find it.
But they were horrible on this at the time.
In fact, when I was googling it this morning, I saw where they wrote an article saying we were not horrible on it.
Look at our official statement.
And it's like, yeah, but nevermind your official statement.
Your guy came on my show to monger it.
I remember that.
So what's up with that?
But sorry, I can't prove it because I couldn't find it.
But I know that that happened.
I couldn't have made that shit up.
Scott, I'm very happy that you bring up that point because this is what frustrates me so hard about especially human rights, and certainly also Amnesty International, that they often come out with good reporting, good investigations of war crimes by our governments.
But they tend to come out with that after the war is over or when it's not a big news story anymore.
And during the war, they're not unanimously, but they're often warmongering, as you say.
That's so true.
Like back in 1991, I think Amnesty supported the testimony that Saddam's troops were taking babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor.
They were in support.
And especially also in Syria, especially Syria, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty are so complicit in the propaganda.
But it is very difficult to scrutinize them with people that are more mainstream, if you will, because you have to be either against them or for them.
But I think these are organizations, it's good that they're around, but they make so many mistakes and they should be held accountable for that.
And maybe from Libya, a good example is that, I quote in the article, one incident in which 34 civilians, I think, were killed.
NATO just basically bombed the house with a lot of people in.
There was no evidence whatsoever that it was a military target as NATO claims, but it killed 34 civilians and a lot of children as well.
Just horrifying.
And in the investigation, which I think was published in 2012, they mentioned that Human Rights Watch, they visited the site four times, including one the day after the attack had happened in September 2011, which is still a month before Gaddafi is eventually overthrown, right?
So why don't they come out in September 2011 saying, we are not exactly sure yet, but we have this mounting evidence that NATO has committed war crimes.
No, they wait until the war is over to publish it and make a big deal out of it when everyone has already forgotten about the war.
And this is so frustrating.
Yep.
All right.
Now, this is just a side note, a small little parentheses here that this war was totally illegal, that the president of the United States has no authority, no legal right whatsoever to start a war without getting a declaration of war from Congress.
And the president himself, at least according to Robert Gates, who I think was honest about this, must have been, he said that Obama had said that his decision to start this war was 51 to 49, not 90, 10 or 70, 30, or even 60, 40, but 51 to 49, which is nothing other than an admission of a war crime itself right there.
That's an admission right there that he didn't have to do it.
It was a choice whether to start a war.
And he decided to start a war.
But that's illegal, not just as unauthorized, but it's a war crime.
And that makes him a felon.
And that doesn't even matter.
That's just a technicality.
I hate to get bogged down in the technicalities.
But Congress, when they did convene on this question, refused to condemn the war and defund it.
But they also refused to ratify it.
And it went on for another five months after that, which is unprecedented.
You know, even when Truman invaded Korea without permission, Congress quickly ratified it with their rubber stamp for what it was worth.
But here they didn't even get that.
But anyway, who cares?
That doesn't matter.
That's just the letter of the law.
No big deal.
Nobody cares about that anyway.
But just pointing out that, you know, if there was such a thing as the law, then this wouldn't have happened at all.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, ever since 9-11, as far as I understand, you're the American youth, so you will be the expert.
But yeah, there has not really been, even before that, but especially since 9-11, there was this authorization for use of force against Al-Qaeda.
Well, they authorized Iraq separately.
They did have a separate authorization for Iraq War II, but not for Somalia.
Yeah, I think Iraq War II is the only one, right?
Yeah, none for Libya.
Now on Syria, they didn't really have a war there exactly.
That was a covert action, which the president legally can do with a finding, can authorize the CIA to fund terrorists.
Still, I hold the point that arguably the war wouldn't have happened to the effect that it did happen without American ideological and covert support and support of their allies, which inflated the insurgency.
And the same is true for Libya.
I quote these experts in the article, a Cambridge historian called Dirk van der Walle, who wrote a book about the history of Libya.
He said in his book, at the end of his book, in an updated version, he said that for the rebels, NATO's involvement became a sine qua non, just to be able to maintain their positions.
And NATO was absolutely essential in their advancements and in their eventual overthrow of Gaddafi.
So without NATO, it wouldn't have happened probably, and it wouldn't have descended into chaos.
And all of the horrible stuff we see nowadays in Libya would probably not have happened.
That doesn't mean that we think that Gaddafi is a good guy.
But I think there are very few people that will argue that today Libya is in a better shape with almost a third of the population having fled the country by now.
Absolutely horrible.
Wow, I didn't realize that.
Not surprising, though.
And of course, the CIA parachuted General Haftar in there, but quickly decided they didn't like him anymore.
And the Russians picked him up.
He's been fighting from Benghazi.
Interesting turn.
The secularists owned the east of the country and the Islamists, the West, in a reversal from before the war there.
And Haftar has just attacked Tripoli over and over again and failed to take it over.
And you have the Turks, of course, backing the Islamists, Muslim Brotherhood-tied guys in Tripoli, while the Saudis and the Egyptians, I guess, are with Russia backing Haftar.
And who knows what the Americans are doing?
I don't know.
I'm sure the Americans are probably on both sides.
Yeah.
Also, the UAE should be mentioned, especially backing Haftar, as well as Egypt indeed.
And I saw something to the effect that the Emiratis tried to lobby the United States to get more involved.
But Trump said something to the effect of, we're already involved in so many places, so we'll skip on this one.
I guess that was a good call.
Good enough for me, yeah.
Yeah, that doesn't mean that their crimes should go unpunished.
Because another reason I wrote an article now is, I'm sure you know, and you interviewed people, and your audience also probably knows that our great ally in Kosovo back in 1999 is now at least charged with war crimes.
And maybe it's a good time to rethink what happened in Libya and at least contemplate that if like in Serbia in 1999, maybe the United States and its European allies in the context of NATO are complicit in war crimes.
And I think the evidence, as we haven't really talked about it, but I mentioned some examples in which it's pretty clear that they bombed sites of no military significance and killed many civilians.
So yeah, why are people not talking about that?
Yep, mostly because they don't know anything about it.
Or, you know, in the case of liberal Democrat types who, you know, favor Obama, they don't want to say anything to besmirch him, especially when they have Trump to compare him to.
They just don't want to hear it.
And Republicans, you know, they're mad about Benghazi, but smashing Gaddafi, that's something that most Republicans can support, even under Obama, I guess it turns out.
Even though Ronald Reagan didn't do it, Ronald Reagan just bombed him for a day or two, did try to kill him, but then backed off.
But Obama can have, you know, a hundred times the war Ronald Reagan had there and nobody bats an eyelash.
Ain't that something?
And you know what it is?
It's because of Iraq War II, because George W. Bush just marched the entire 3rd Infantry Division and the entire Marine Corps and all this stuff in there.
And it made such a spectacular disaster out of it all, that then a drone bombing anywhere, no matter how many women and children are killed, still doesn't compare.
And an air war like what happened in Libya, where special operations forces and the militia men fighting on the ground, and American air power up there, you know, planes don't fall, other than the F-35, our planes don't fall out of the sky very often.
Our soldiers, you know, our airmen are not threatened.
Our Navy pilots are not threatened.
And so they can just do that.
And it's like the Kosovo War.
It's like a cheap and easy and high-tech space age war that doesn't cost our side anything.
And so, you know, and there's even, in fact, it's probably the perfect example, is Jeremy Scahill, who's the great progressive journalist on the Bill Maher show, saying that what Obama's doing with these drones killing people is wrong.
And this is the war against terrorism.
Never even mind the war for it.
But this is, you know, killing people in Yemen, fighting against AQAP, this kind of thing.
And Bill Maher, he can't help it.
You know, he's not that smart.
He just goes with his gut.
And he goes, yeah, but compared to Iraq, it's so small.
And so that's it.
It's a blank check.
It's a free pass.
If it's less worse than Iraq War II, it's permissible.
Yeah.
I recently got around to reading Eric Porter's book about the Vietnam War.
What's it called?
Oh, really?
Oh, that's great.
I have it and I still haven't read it.
I'm jealous.
It's a dense book.
It is kind of difficult to read because it's so packed with so much information.
But I'm over halfway now.
And his basic arguments about Vietnam, the Vietnam War, is that the reason that it happened is not communists were going to take over the world.
It's because the United States realized that it had no rivals that could stop them.
So that's why they did it.
And I think that's also why, for instance, in Libya, you mentioned like there's no way like the American or European airplanes were going to be shot out of the sky.
And because they create this dominance, this is the whole argument of the no-fly zone is for me is debunked in this way.
You create this dominance by the overlord protector, which is NATO.
And they back one side in the conflict.
And that's why they can change the political situation on the ground.
And they can make their advance.
And that's why they were able to overthrow Gaddafi.
And that's because it was a dictatorial socialist oppressive regime.
Instability follows.
Yep.
Yeah.
The perils of dominance.
You think you're such a big shot, you can do anything, but it turns out you can't.
That's basically it.
And in fact, people remember back in 2002, the spirit of the whole thing was the U.S. Army can do anything.
Are you saying it can't, pal?
And then that was the whole thing like, well, look, they probably can't bake a really nice cake or, you know, all kinds of different things that are not their speciality, like determine who ought to rule next in Iraq, something like that.
Can they defeat Saddam Hussein's army?
Sure.
But who says that any of the rest of what's going on there is within their purview?
But the idea is, but they're so strong and Bush would talk about that to our forces.
They're so strong that they can just insist and things will go the way that they want, which, of course, is just not true and turned out not to be true.
But that was the idea, you know, very.
So, in other words, the sense that you're talking about only very explicit, you know.
Exactly.
And it's good arguments to like what libertarian theory is that like, yeah, if it's like two parties have a lot of like are well prepared or aren't and they're more or less as powerful, they will be deterred from from yeah, from shooting at each other when that's equality is gone.
Violence follows, unfortunately.
Yep.
But I'm guessing you're starting to run out of time.
So maybe I just really want to read the quotes to and to remind folks of how terrible the airstrikes could have been.
And I have this one very powerful quote from a survivor.
Sure.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Can shed light on how how horrible NATO's war in Libya was back then.
And that's not even talking about the consequences.
So I guess it was in August.
NATO bombed its compounds.
Not far, not too far from Tripoli.
And it turned out that this was just civilian buildings and a lot of people died in it.
And this is a quote through Amnesty International from one of the survivors.
I can't understand why they bombed my home.
We are civilians and had nothing to do with the war, politics or any such things.
I lost my daughter, Hanan, who was due to get married after Ramadan and my nephew's little girl, Arwa, who was always laughing and running around, and my brother's daughter, Salima, and her three little children and her sister-in-law, Mancia, and their little twin girls had come to visit from Benghazi and got stuck here because of the war.
They were all killed together with other relatives.
And my wife, Fatia, sustained a serious head injury and her left leg had to be amputated.
She's in Germany now for medical care.
Maybe the injuries can heal eventually, but the heart can't.
My home became a graveyard for my family and until today, neither NATO nor the NTC, the National Transitional Council, which replaced Gaddafi for a while, have even contacted us, not even to say sorry or to ask us about the victims.
We have been forgotten.
Yeah.
Imagine a Libyan is just like an American human, only from somewhere else, and feel just the same way that we might feel in their same situation, a bomb falling through the roof of their own house, huh?
Blowing their entire extended family away, huh?
It was to prevent genocide, supposedly, and I think Nafis Ahmed, whom I'm sure you're familiar with, has even argued that NATO has also bombed some parts that were vital to the great man-made river project, the water infrastructure.
It's a desert country, so water is pretty important.
This is not only a war crime, but might amount to genocide, because if you obstruct the water system, which back in 2015, when he wrote the article, at any rate, I suppose it's not better now, there are still four million people left without water and the water crisis continues to escalate, he wrote.
If you look at international law, just like in Yemen, when the Saudis are doing, they're bombing, literally, agricultural grounds.
So yeah, you could make the argument that Obama wasn't stopping genocides, maybe he was even complicit in one.
Him and Hillary Clinton out there walking the streets right now.
That's scary.
We came, we saw, he died.
Yeah, they did.
By the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands by now.
By the way, is anyone counting excess death rates in Libya?
Do you know?
I have no answer to that.
I'm not sure.
But it's difficult to count, of course, because you have people dying due to direct consequences of the conflict.
But yeah, if you think about Bastiat's way of, with the seen and unseen, like the fact that you're, if you're bombing a nation's water supply, what does that do to an already impoverished nation?
The lives that you destroy indirectly should be counted, but it's impossible to count.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I guess I'm all out of questions here.
I really need to focus on what America's role is there right now.
But I'll just, we'll have to get back to that.
Maybe that can be your next one.
Yeah.
United States is less involved right now.
So maybe very briefly, you have the two rival governments, Haftar, which is more the secular one, and is supported by the United Arab Emirates, to a little extent, the Saudis, Russia, and Egypt.
And Egypt, yeah, it made some, Sisi made some very dangerous statements.
Other sides, you have the more Islamist governments backed by Turkey.
Oh, I should mention France is also involved with Haftar.
On the other side, you have Islamist governments together with Qatar and especially Turkey.
And yeah, because, yeah, France is our ally.
United Arab Emirates is our ally.
Turkey is our ally.
So I think Trump doesn't really know what to do.
Maybe that's for the better.
Yeah.
Well, he's got special operations command in virtually every other country on the African continent right now.
So if they're skipping Libya for the moment, that'd be all right.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much for your time again.
And thanks for writing another great one for antiwar.com.
I sure appreciate it, boss.
You're welcome.
All right, you guys, that is BossSplit.
And this one, well, it'll be running on antiwar.com by the time you hear this, I guess.
It's called How NATO's War Crimes Created Chaos in Libya.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
