If the topless body of the African continent had a head, it would have been attached atop Libya – a nation back in the news in the aftermath of the US/NATO scorched earth bombing campaign against it in 2011. No longer the seaside playground of Italian yuppies and no longer providing its native population a prosperous milieu in which it could raise its families, the beautiful, environmentally sound nation is now another desecrated piece of real estate mortally infected with the islamist virus and taking its place alongside Iraq, Afghanistan and the others on the scrap heap of america’s junkyard empire.
But in Libya’s case there is another sinister dimension: just as in the early 40s, when Cyrenaica presented the competing armies of the west a theater for its war games, Libya is again being re-purposed as a staging ground – a vast Coliseum – for war on the dark continent.
As we now know, Libya’s former vainglorious ruler had created the world’s largest underground reservoir with enough free water to supply the Sahel and parts of black sub-Saharan Africa with all it would need to survive the droughts of this new century. Libya’s state financed distribution was to be the piece de résistance in Kaddafi's quest to be seen as the “Bolivar of Africa.”
But in 2011, just before distribution channels for the flow of the free water were to be made operative, Libya was invaded for the threefold purpose of destroying its national bank, safeguarding the privatization plans for the water sources south of Libya and – most of all – providing the US military-industrial-complex (MIC) a secure staging ground for a new “enemy” – the Islamist State (IS) – for hunting and profit, insuring that its war-on-the-world can continue for decades to come.
Of course for the past sixty years those who took the trouble to pay attention to the world around them know too well how the most hideous atrocities were brought about in the African nations of Liberia, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Angola, the Congo and half dozen others where rogue governments (the Congo, et al) and/or drugged out insurgent groups (UNITA) came to power via support by the US either indirectly through a micromanaged illegal arms/drug/diamond trade and collaboration with M16 (Congo) or directly with CIA on-the-ground assistance.
Yet it’s funny, not to mention hypocritical, how no one seemed to give a shit then when the errant article here or there appeared graphically displaying photos of children in West Africa with their arms cut off and their villages burned to the ground and their democratically elected leaders tortured and crucified (“Black Jesus” - Patrice Lumumba) as a result of such US support. There were no hero marines coming to the rescue of the villagers and no flag waving mobs on the homeland cheering them on.
To an american public plagued with ADD, it’s as if nothing gruesome had ever happened in that part of the world before and that these crazed militarized fundamentalists in the IS invented terrorism with their head chopping signature act.
Ironically, as depraved as IS may be, it may be less so for that very fact – it only cuts off heads. In the play Marat Sade, Marquis de Sade chastises Jean Paul Marat with a perverse twist of logic stating that the righteous, ascetic Jacobins are too pure to employ torture, and that by inventing the guillotine to provide an economical and quick form of execution they essentially took the human element out of punishment! Notably from the French Revolution onward, the French performed all executions by guillotine, right up until Mitterrand abolished capital punishment, leaving america’s nefarious ally, Saudi Arabia, the distinction of beheading’s official standard bearer. And on the world scorecard for head counts, Saudi Arabia still holds the lead.
Nevertheless, the ghastly imagery of headless bodies and the video game persona of the IS opponent are being skillfully nurtured into viral fear by both sides to insure public support for MIC and to gain new conscripts for IS. With IS now completing its “spring training,” and gaining the experience to become a proper adversary, the civilian world can only hope the US hasn’t unleashed a sparring partner in IS that proves more athletic than MIC and puts the earth in jeopardy of being overwhelmed.
Looking to history for that hope, however, provides only bad news: MIC has demonstrated in each of its invasion/war scenarios – from Vietnam to Iraq – it has no regard whatsoever for endgame, whereas its new combat rival, IS, is only about endgame. If those opposing directional arrows continue to stay on course, we may soon be witnessing a redux of the classic 60s adventure/horror film, the Naked Prey, where the US becomes the great white hunter stripped down like Cornell Wilde and sent running for its life in the African bush.
But whatever the outcome, the world will be further diminished.