2011: America's Little-Known Mission to Support Al Qaeda's Role in Libya - National Interest

[TomSea]

August 13, 2019 Topic: Security Region: Middle East Tags: Al QaedaLibyaWarMuammar El-QaddafiRebellion
America's Little-Known Mission to Support Al Qaeda's Role in Libya

The rebellion in Libya was led by Islamist veterans of wars in the Middle East. Thus, the United States and its allies, not realizing it at the time, intervened to support a group of terrorists.
by Alan J. Kuperman

THE 2011 intervention in Libya, authorized by the United Nations and led by the United States and some NATO allies, has been criticized for two main reasons. First, it was justified on phony grounds—that Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi was slaughtering civilians, when in fact he was carefully targeting rebels who had attacked first. Second, the interveners aimed at regime change and thus failed in their ostensible humanitarian mission, instead magnifying the death toll at least ten-fold while fostering anarchy that persists until the present day. Yet perhaps the most profound drawback has remained hidden: the intervention rescued a rebellion that was actually led by Al Qaeda militants, not by pro-Western liberals as reported at the time.

This starkly contradicts the press narrative of 2011, which claimed that Libya’s unrest had started with peaceful protests over the arrest of a human rights lawyer. Allegedly, the regime used lethal force against these nonviolent demonstrators, compelling them to reluctantly take up arms in self-defense. These amateur rebels then supposedly seized control of eastern Libya within days, prompting Qaddafi to deploy forces to commit genocide, which was stopped only by intervention. In reality, however, scholars and human rights groups have long disproved key parts of this story: the uprising was violent from the first day, the regime targeted militants rather than peaceful protesters and Qaddafi never even rhetorically threatened unarmed civilians.

The remaining mystery has been who actually launched the rebellion in eastern Libya—that is, which militants did the interveners rescue from defeat and help overthrow Qaddafi? The conventional narrative improbably suggests that Libyan human rights lawyers, reacting spontaneously to regime violence, somehow acquired arms and conquered half the country in a week. The truth makes much more sense: the rebellion was led by Islamist veterans of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Thus, the United States and its allies, not realizing it at the time, intervened to support Al Qaeda.

This remarkable story has remained obscured for eight years due to deceit and gullibility. ...

Read more at: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-little-known-mission-support-al-qaedas-role-libya-73271

Sounds fascinating, if this was coming out of a lot of news outlets like consortium news say, I'd pass up on it. It's a bit compelling. Passing it on.

[PeteS in CA]

  But Libya is now a North African Paradise, right?

OhBummer!'s foreign policy @#$%-ups set in motion the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Libya and Syria, and Egypt (which is no Sunday school picnic) came close to falling into similar chaos.