Shenali D Waduge

19 Muslims took part in 9/11 none of them were Afghans but Afghanistan was bombed because the plan had been made 2 months before 9/11. Similarly, Gen. Wesley Clarke in an interview with Amy Goodman says that a memo was floating in the US defence circles in 2001 ‘we’re going to take down 7 countries in just 5 years’. These countries were to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Iraq was invaded in 2003, Libya in 2011 and now Syria is the next target. What we need to realize is that US and NATO will do anything, use anyone, discard after realizing their objectives. The doom they have delivered to nations of the Middle East speaks volumes and should warn all nations wherein tactics are afloat to fish for politicians of the Third World ready to comprise their nations to the West so long as they are placed in power. Sri Lanka’s Opposition finds itself courting these very enemies and criminals and the Sri Lankan public need to realize the fate in store for Sri Lanka if ever they are voted into power.

LIBYA BEFORE ARAB SPRING AND UNDER GADDAFI

• Warned that Libya would become under control of jihadists if his regime fell  
• Gaddafi brought the Libyan government from poverty and debt, to prosperity and debt-free status in 41 years
• Under Gaddafi, Libyans had free education, electricity, health care and land, seeds and livestock for people who wished to farm
• Education from grade school through to college was free in Libya.
• Healthcare was free and Libyan pharmacies and hospitals were comparable to high-quality European facilities. Now thanks to NATO’s intervention the health-care sector is on the verge of collapse
• Libya gave free land and seeds to anyone who wants to farm that land. Gasoline cost 14 cents a gasoline and there was 50% subsidy on car purchases
• Gaddafi insisted on keeping oil revenues to benefit his people instead of handing them over to US corporations – the West did not like this and demonized him
• Under Gaddafi’s oil-revenue-sharing program, each Libyan got $500 (Dollars) deposited into his or her bank account each month
• Libya ranked No. 53 on the United Nations Index of Human Development
• Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa (even better than South Africa, Mauritius and Seychelles).
• No one was homeless in Libya as everyone was given a home (the story has change post-2011)
• Libyans enjoyed free electricity
• Women in Libya had equal rights, not only as a philosophy, but in practice. One of the first laws Gaddafi passed in 1970 was an equal pay for equal work lawThe United Nations Human Rights Council praised Gaddafi for his promotion of women’s rights.
• On marriage, each couple wa gifted $60,000  

If the people were enjoying so much which even welfare states cannot match for what reason was there a necessity for opposition groups to cause rumpus, democracy that allows and open doors for regime change and mischief, media that is constantly telling lies because they are owned by corporate sharks and elections end up simply an exercise wherein voters foolishly think they can change governments!

Sadly we find ourselves putting every freedom that Libyans enjoyed in the past tense in comparing Libya before and after Gaddafi. What a tragic loss to a country that was on its way to taking African Continent out of its misery. Gaddafi was bumped off because of this dream which he was working towards making into a reality.

LIBYA AFTER ARAB SPRING AND UNDER WEST

The West declared that the people of Libya were suffering under a dictator. The West wanted to liberate the Libyans from that dictator Gaddafi. Gaddafi was mercilessly killed and Libya fell in 2011.

NATO claimed it achieved a historic success. Libyan is 4 years on in complete chaos.

• Freedom as promised to the people of Libya from the dictator Gaddafi has meant – daily kidnappings, of torture, wrongful imprisonment, assassinations, bombings, raids and bloody clashes between rival militias, armed extortion, strikes that have reduced the oil sector  
• Graves of Sufi Muslims and Christians found in 2012 – religious minorities did not face any issues during Gaddafi rule
• over 50,000 Libyans who have lost their lives since 2011 – in an invasion under R2P promising humanitarian intervention and relief from a dictator
• Instead of protecting Libyan civilians, the NATO forces killed tens of thousands, built up militias and then left the country under differing factions who have unleashed a reign of terror in the society.
• New Libyan Government demands Islami Shariha law to prevail – a dream of all Muslims but an eventual curse in the long run!
• The Libyan economy is in shambles
• There are some 1700 militias with a combined total of 250,000 men with arms – allies of NATO such as Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are now connected to differing factions of the Libyan civil war – Libya now has two governments, both with their own Prime Minister, parliament and army.
• Despite the supposed ‘freedom’ in Libya post-Gaddafi elimination, foreign embassies are closing shop
• News of the current civil war in Libya remains confusing because the western news agencies have a vested interest in keeping the issues unclear so as to keep Libya destabilized and destroyed
• What has been kept from the citizens of the USA is the role of financial enterprises such as Goldman Sachs, Tradition Financial Services of Switzerland, French bank Société Générale SA, hedge-fund firm Och-Ziff Capital Management Group and private-equity firm Blackstone Group in their dealings with the Libyan Investment Authority
• US Congress has deliberately attempted to conceal the complicity of the US military and intelligence forces in their dealings with the most extreme militias.
• In order to make the NATO intervention acceptable to US citizens, the Obama administration claimed that there would be no deployment of massive troops, even though early in the campaign the US Africa Command was taking credit for the NATO Operation
• General Khalifah Hifter now 71 was a CIA agent living in the US, when the NATO bombings started in March 2011, Hifter returned to Libya and joined in with the numerous factions – CIA recruited elements in Libya who had been earlier designated as terrorists including Abdelhakim Belhadj who now controls most of the jihadists under US tutelage. US is now backing a third force: long-time CIA asset, General Khalifa Hifter, who aims to set himself up as Libya’s new dictator.
• In fact, in August 2011, President Obama confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of the African IMF and African Central Bank.

If none of the rifts and Islamic incursions and tribal conflicts existed during Gaddafi’s reign and it does so now after 4 years of NATO overpowering and defeating Gaddafi and his forces it shows that US and NATO are a failure in maintaining peace and order, unless that was the intent.

HAVE THE LIBYANS MADE A GRAVE BLUNDER IN HELPING GET RID OF GADDAFI? – WE THINK SO.

In reality the Libyans have lost their freedom falling prey to a bogus freedom that was promised without meaning to keep the promise. From being Africa’s richest country, Libya has been turned into a failed state by US/NATO.

IRAQ BEFORE ARAB SPRING AND UNDER SADDAM HUSSEIN

• Iraq was a wealthy nation throughout the ’70s and ’80s despite 8 year war with neighbor Iran
• Iraqi’s enjoyed universal healthcare and education
• Nobody in Iraq starved.
• People had all they needed   
• Sunnis and Shias got on ok, there were plenty of Christians and even a handful of Jews.
• It was difficult to find anyone hating Saddam except the demonizing appearing on western media.
• women enjoyed far more freedom under Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist government than women in other Middle Eastern countries – equal rights for women were enshrined in Iraq’s Constitution in 1970, including the right to vote, run for political office, access education and own property
• Prior to the devastating economic sanctions of the 1990s, Iraq’s education system was top notch and female literacy rates were the highest in the region, reaching 87 percent in 1985 – in 1982 Iraq received the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) award for eradicating illiteracy (education system crumbled from financial decay under the weight of the sanctions pushing over 20 percent of Iraqi children out of school by 2000 and reversing decades of literacy gains)
• employment laws that guaranteed equal pay, six months fully paid maternity leave and protection from sexual harassment
• Iraqi Parliament reserved 25% seats for women!
• A noteworthy factor is the Iraqi’s did not care to defend their nation – they simply watched US take over.

 IRAQ AFTER ARAB SPRING AND UNDER WEST

On 9 April 2003, Iraq fell and the US captured Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s ‘dictator’. nearly 24 years as president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, ousted from power by the invading Allied forces. Saddam was sentenced to death in November 2006 – a Kangaroo Court. Defence counsels were brutally murdered, witnesses threatened and judges removed for being impartial and replaced by puppet judges. George W Bush and Tony Blair’s claim that history would justify their decision to invade Iraq – what a load of lies and liars.

The people of Iraq have gone through much : Iraq-Iran war in 1980-88, Gulf War 1 in 1991, sanctions following Kuwait invasion.

An illegal war that killed over one million Iraqis, created 4.5 million refugees, provoked sectarian strife that was for centuries virtually non-existent and empowered religious zealots—women are anything but liberated.”

US sanctions starved to death 1million Iraqis – over half were children.

• US and NATO again promised to liberate the Iraqi people from the dictator Saddam Hussein. They did get rid of Saddam but life did change for the Iraqis – it became worse than under Saddam
• Sunday Herald reported that eight multipurpose dams were
  repeatedly bombed, smashing the infrastructure for flood control, municipal and industrial water storage, irrigation and hydroelectric power. Four of Iraq’s seven major pumping stations were destroyed, as were 31 municipal water and sewage facilities – The result: Water-borne diseases — typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis, cholera and polio — have killed thousands of civilians in Iraq
• Sunday Times has reported that tens of thousands of American and British troops are suffering from radiation poisoning from the depleted uranium shells fired during the Gulf War.
• Evidence from Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison showed American soldiers sexually abusing and torturing detainees, and treating them like animals
• In 2007, employees of security contractor Blackwater shot dead 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square, while escorting US State Department vehicles
• about 40 percent of Iraq’s professionals fled the country between 2003 and 2006.
• 4,573 civilians died in Iraq in 2011 – ‘An average of 200 people are killed every month in Iraq as a direct result of the illegal invasion
• 23 percent of the population lives in poverty
• about 60 percent of Iraqi households are suffering from the lack of at least one of the following: access to improved drinking water source, access to improved sanitation facility, a minimum of 12 hours of electricity from the public network a day, or food security
• Unemployment is around 15 percent
• Today, a quarter of Iraqi women are illiterate, more than double the rate for Iraqi men (11 percent). Female illiteracy in rural areas alone is as high as 50 percent.
• US invasion has led women vulnerable to an underground sex industry and subject to severe methods of punishment by an increasingly religious post-invasion government. 4000 women and young girls are missing suspected to have been sold across borders for prostitution
• 2m Iraqi women are widowed
• 5m children are orphaned
• More than 3million women have no source of income or protection making them vulnerable to trafficking, sexual exploitation, polygamy, and religious pleasure marriages
• Today, Islamic extremists have conquered Mosul
• terrorist groups including Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which would formally become the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda in 2004
• Attempts are afoot to create a new Islamic territory combining part of Iraq and Syria – Bridges linking four key border towns on the Iraqi side have been dynamited. Road signs read – Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS)
• al-Qaeda has mounted repeated strikes across the country, with an average of 68 car bombs a month this year – US created Al Qaeda and continues to fund it.
• The death toll for 2013 has already topped 7,000, with the United Nations saying that 979 died in October alone – a country that the US and NATO promised would be liberated!
• Some 933,000 people are now enlisted in various military and paramilitary police units.

The execution was timed for 30 December 2006 to anger Sunni Muslims against Shiites. Immediately after the execution US identified Syria and Iran as enemies of Iraq.

 SYRIA BEFORE US/NATO INCURSIONS  

• Christians compose 10 percent of Syria’s 26 million people. Some of the churches of Syria are older than Islam itself. Many of Syria’s 2.5 million Christians are supporting President Bashar Assad amidst ongoing protests in the country
• The president guarantees religious minorities’ rights, Christians are allowed to practice their faith freely and churches are protected. Assad generally hands out important government and army posts to members of his own group, the Alawis, but Christians also hold a number of senior positions in important institutions such as the presidential guard and intelligence services
• The head of the country’s central bank is a Christian, as is the new defense minister. Many Christians belong to the ranks of the privileged within the system,
• Syrians know there were abuses against demonstrators in early 2011; they also know that the President dismissed the Governor of Dara for this – Saudi official Anwar el-Eshki admitted to the BBC that his country had provided weapons to Islamists in Dara

SYRIA AFTER US/NATO INTERFERENCE

• S. is using ISIS as a pretext to expand their imperialist wars, domination, and exploitation in Iraq and Syria
• S., NATO, Israel join an alliance of absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan to line up against the Syrian government.
• Power matters more than the fact that they all worship Allah!
• 70% of Syrians support President Bashar al-Assad, 20% adopt a neutral position and 10% support the “rebels.”
• S. Congress gives approval to President Barack Obama’s plan for training and arming moderate Syrian rebels to battle Islamic State
• Some 2.5 million people have sought refuge outside the country
• About 1.5 million of those fled in the past year – a staggering 4,110 a day – Every two minutes: Eight children inside Syria are forced to flee their homes – displaced children in Syria has more than tripled over the past year, from 920,000 to nearly 3 million (UNICEF)
• More than 146,000 people have been killed in the last 3 years
• 40 years of Syrian human development have been lost. Before the conflict, the country met standards constituting medium human development” on the Human Development Index; it now sits in the low human development” group.
• 3 percent of the labor force, 3.39 million people, faces unemployment. The loss of income because of this mass unemployment is estimated to adversely affect 11.03 million Syrians.
• 61 of the country’s 91 public hospitals have been damaged; 45 percent are out of service
• The total economic loss because of the conflict, by the end of 2013, is estimated at $143.8 billion, 276 percent of the country’s 2010 GDP in constant prices.

 If we are to believe all that the West and Western media says why do the Syrian public continue to support a man the western powers have claimed is constantly attacking and terrorising ‘his own people’ were these not the same accusations the West and media accused Gaddafi and Saddam of too and notice how the West is now portraying other leaders as ‘dictators’ and calling their governments as ‘tyrannical regimes’?

There has to be a reason why Noam Chomsky calls America a ‘terrorist state’ and that Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation in history. Does the American public know how many civilians the US has killed and continues to kill including children? Are Americans not aware that terrorism that exists are sponsored by US and Allies? US has been directly supporting Al Qaeda and other terrorists and providing them arms, money and logistical support in Syria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iran and other countries – so what is this farce about a ‘war on terror’.

In Sri Lanka we see the US envoys busy rallying youth entrapping them with galaxy phones, scholarships and now drawing them to enlist in social media training that follows the same formulas used in all other nations where US operated covert tactics to topple governments and replace them with puppets.

It is good if the GOSL finally realizes who their friends and or at least pinpoints their enemies.