by BILL VAN AUKEN
While a decade ago, an uprising against Gaddafi would have been celebrated in Washington as a triumph over the “axis of evil,” today, Obama remains silent and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, treats the wholesale massacres in Tripoli, Benghazi and elsewhere in the nation of six-and-a-half million with the utmost circumspection. Over the past decade Gaddafi has been embraced by Washington as a force for stability—and a guarantor of profits—in the region. Significantly, the uprising against him is the first of the spreading revolutionary developments in the Middle East to trigger a sell-off on Wall Street.
The political path that has ended in Gaddafi calling in airstrikes against unarmed protesters and unleashing heavily armed mercenaries against his own people began in September 1969 with his leadership of a bloodless military coup that toppled the corrupt and servile US-backed monarchy of King Idris.
A 27-year-old army officer from an impoverished Bedouin background, Gaddafi was part of a generation whose political conceptions were heavily influenced by the rise to power of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt through a similar coup against another thoroughly corrupt monarch, King Farouk, in the Egyptian revolution of 1952. Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, his denunciations of Western imperialism and his calls for Pan-Arab unity struck a powerful chord in Libya, which had suffered under Italian colonial domination from 1911 until 1943, with literally half its population massacred or starved to death by the Italian fascists.
While the powerful anti-imperialist sentiments of the Libyan masses provided a broad base of support for Gaddafi’s expulsion of the US military from its strategically vital Wheelus Air Force Base and for his nationalization of US oil firms, the regime’s fleeting attempts to forge Pan-Arab unions with Egypt, Syria and Tunisia came to nothing.
Libya, like all of the states of the Middle East to emerge from colonialism, was based upon geographical borders and political constructs imposed to serve the interests of imperialism, not those of the peoples of the region. The rising bourgeoisie within each of these countries, however, remained determined to hold onto these borders and their individual states as the foundations of their class rule.
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