EDITORIAL : THE DAILY MIRROR, SRILANKA

Might is Right

Gaddafi calls it Colonial, Crusader Aggression, the bombers call it Odyssey Dawn. So far 48 people had been killed and 150 wounded in the Western air strikes by early on Sunday in Libya. Three US B-2 stealth bombers dropped 40 bombs on a major Libyan airfield (Remember the precision/surgical bombing?) that was not further identified. Hours later, U.S. and British warships and submarines launched 110 Tomahawk missiles on Tripoli. 150 Weapons of Mass Destruction at Tripoli and for that count 48 deaths is really a conservative estimate-if one knew what Tomahawk and B2 bombs mean.
The military intervention in Libya has nothing to do with the humanitarian pretexts offered by the conniving Western powers. Innocent civilians are going to die in numbers in the coming days and UN Gen. Sec. Ban- ki moon and his cohorts should be pulled up in the War Tribunal to go by the common logic.
After Iraq, this could be the beginning of the war for the resources, may be the third World War by extension.
Military intervention in Libya, whose energy resources have made it the object of imperialist ogling for decades, is used both to secure access to oil and to bring a strong military presence in the region. A military presence in Libya would help the West to intimidate the Arab world -not the rulers of the Arab world whose faith and cultural conscience are more Western than Muslim.
The bombing would not protect human lives, but would transform the country into a battlefield with thousands of innocent victims just like in Iraq, where finally and shamelessly the perpetrators blamed it on the intelligence reports that there were no WMDs. None of the countries which killed the 200,000 still face any accountability charges! 300,000-330,000 civilians killed in Darfur but the so called humanitarians didn’t do anything about it. 800,000 were killed in Rwanda in 1994 and still nothing happened.
Why are the great powers not applying the same criteria in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the regimes they back employ brutal violence against any opposition? And what of Bahrain, headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet, where Sheikh al Khalifa has shot down unarmed protesters with Saudi support? What about Gaza, where these same powers stand by as the Israelis massacre Palestinians? What about Yemen, where the Western-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh on Friday shot dead some 50 protesters? asked a news editorial on the web.
Funnily French President Sarkozy, received Gaddafi just a few years ago with great pomp in Paris to negotiate trade deals worth billions, recognized the Transitional Council as the official representative of Libya. The truth is the ‘Council,’ has guaranteed international oil companies unhindered exploitation of the country’s mineral wealth.
China and Russia, which abstained in the U.N. Security Council vote last week endorsing intervention, expressed regret at the military action.  Funnily enough, neither vetoed the move.
Which endorses the unsavoury fact how much the emerging markets (BRIC) depend on the West for their economy and growth.
Meanwhile, more than 100 anti-war protesters were arrested outside the White House in demonstrations marking the eighth anniversary of the US-led war in Iraq.