UK Parliament Enquiry: Bombing Lybia was a mistake, Cameron guilty.

[Basil II the B.S]

https://www.parliament.uk/business/c...blished-16-17/

2011 intervention

In March 2011, the UK and France led the international community to support an intervention in Libya to protect civilians from forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi.

The inquiry, which took evidence from key figures including Lord Hague, Dr Liam Fox, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, military chiefs and academics, concludes that decisions were not based on accurate intelligence. In particular, the Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element.

A policy which had intended to protect civilians drifted towards regime change and was not underpinned by strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya. The consequence was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal welfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.

National Security Council

Libya was the first test of the National Security Council (NSC), a Cabinet Committee established by David Cameron to oversee national security, intelligence co-ordination and defence strategy and intended to provide a formal mechanism to shape foreign policy decision making. In contrast to the relatively informal process used during Tony Blair's Premiership, since criticised by Sir John Chilcot's Iraq Inquiry, every NSC meeting on Libya was minuted, documenting David Cameron's decision-making process.
Chair's comment

Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Crispin Blunt MP, commented:
"This report determines that UK policy in Libya before and since the intervention of March 2011 was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the country and the situation.

Other political options were available. Political engagement might have delivered civilian protection, regime change and reform at a lesser cost to the UK and Libya. The UK would have lost nothing by trying these instead of focusing exclusively on regime change by military means.

Having led the intervention with France, we had a responsibility to support Libyan economic and political reconstruction. But our lack of understanding of the institutional capacity of the country stymied Libya’s progress in establishing security on the ground and absorbing financial and other resources from the international community.

The UK’s actions in Libya were part of an ill-conceived intervention, the results of which are still playing out today. The United Nations has brokered an inclusive Government of National Accord. If it fails, the danger is that Libya will sink into a full scale civil war to control territory and oil resources. The GNA is the only game in town and the international community has a responsibility to unite behind it."

Full report is available on the link.

So, in the end this was another pointless invasion based on Neocon lies and propaganda.

Cameron ignored the presence of Islamic terrorists among ''protesters for democracy''.

The modus operandi of Neocons is clear:
-use Soros funded NGOs to organize protests.
-use radical groups (Islamic terrorists in Lybia, Egypt, Syria, Nazi groups in Ukraine) to turn protests to violence, forcing the unwanted government to react
-call mainstream media and say ''the evil regime is killing civilians''
-obtain justifications to overthrow said regime, turn the country into ashes, hand it over to radical groups

Can we stop electing Neocons?
Hillary this year, Sarkozy next year, etc.

[HannibalExMachina]

i agree we need to stop electing neocons, you just forgot:

dictators in egypt, syria and lybia, putin trying to get a piece of ukraine. but lets just malign the protesters, huh?

[Basil II the B.S]

i agree we need to stop electing neocons, you just forgot:

dictators in egypt, syria and lybia, putin trying to get a piece of ukraine. but lets just malign the protesters, huh?

People can protest. Soros can fund protests if he really wants to. However, those at best lead to some concessions by governments. The intent in the Middle East and Ukraine was clearly to overthrow governments disliked by Neocons and possibly replace them with complacent ones. This last part is not acceptable.

It also doesn't happen with just protests; protests get something, then die out. You need extremists to turn protests violent, force the government to react, then call the media and whine about it and demand intervention.
This whole cunning scheme has been done over and over, with awful results, every single time. The West needs to stop with this crap.

The report also reveals the biggest Western lie: the ''democratic opposition''.
There wasn't any in Lybia. There isn't any in Syria. It certainly wasn't the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

[Heathen Hammer]

i agree we need to stop electing neocons, you just forgot:

dictators in egypt, syria and lybia,

Still better alternative to permanent civil war and islamist regimes that globalists seek to replace them with.

putin trying to get a piece of ukraine. but lets just malign the protesters, huh?

By giving Poroshenko's regime discounts on natural gas and other resources? Or by signing Minsk agreement, right after regime troops got literally decimated by the rebels?

[HannibalExMachina]

also basil, all you have is another wanky conspiracy theory. you mix up western interventions with every other popular movement aimed against a dictator. interventionism is bad enough, no reason to go all tinfoil.

[Basil II the B.S]

why am i not surprised that a putin fanboy defends dictators?

also basil, all you have is another wanky conspiracy theory. you mix up western interventions with every other popular movement aimed against a dictator. interventionism is bad enough, no reason to go all tinfoil.

So, you are basically asking me to ignore the fact that Open Society, PNAC, NED and USAID funded and trained protesters in those countries and believe the Neocon lie about protests for democracy? Not going to happen.
This article is a good start. Now if investigative journalism is tinfoil hat, then it, let's just believe what the mainstream media, proven liars by now, tell us and forget about it. We are the good guys, everyone wants to have a Western style ''democracy'', especially the Muslim world totally loves the US after years of constant warfare; it's all Putin's and the frogs fault if they don't.
http://www.investigaction.net/en/the...nd-subversion/

Also can we stop with this Neocon narrative: regimes we do not like=dictators, regimes we do like=ok, despite the fact they are often worse?

[Ludicus]

regimes we do not like=dictators, regimes we do like=ok, despite the fact they are often worse?

Don't ask the question if you're not prepared to hear the expected answer: "Realpolitik".
Kissinger,

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Realpolitik for Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available option without the constraint of ideology.

He knew exactly what he was talking about.As example, Kissinger’s betrayal/duplicity toward the Kurds,

Promise them anything, give them what they get, and f… them if they can’t take a joke

(70's)

[Mayer]

Merkel has undermined the rule of law, she is de-facto a dictatress.
Only thing missing is open persecution of popular opposition by state organs, the Verfassungsschutz is looking into it, they say.

[NosPortatArma]

it was a mistake indeed. first of all, getting rid of one regime without planning for what could come after it.. What arises might very well be worse, and in this case it was. secondly, gadaffi wasn't even a problem. he stopped supporting terrorism and did in fact cooperate. He was a somewhat useful ally to have, certainly preferable to the current situation anyhow.

libya is just one of numerous victims of the US's disasterous middle east policy under obama..

[sumskilz]

libya is just one of numerous victims of the US's disasterous middle east policy under obama..

Gaddafi had sort of been scared straight. As you mentioned, he had stopped sponsoring terrorism, but he also did away with his nuclear and chemical weapons programs. So I don't see the precedent this set as having been in US interests, because it actually encourages countries like Iran to develop these weapons. I'm fine with us intimidating Iran in order to keep them from developing their nuclear program, I don't care if it's not fair, but the Libya precedent suggests we'll take out people we don't like whether they play ball or not, which gives Iran every incentive to try to develop weapons secretly as a deterrent to us doing so. It's a weird example of us using force actually reducing the deterrence of our potential use of force in the future.

[The Gurkhan]

Parliament does on occasion prove its worth. Sadly nothing concrete will come of this and it has already been brushed aside in the news.

As far as the report goes this for me was the most damning;

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

32.Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence. The Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011.72 During fighting in Misrata, the hospital recorded 257 people killed and 949 people wounded in February and March 2011. Those casualties included 22 women and eight children.73 Libyan doctors told United Nations investigators that Tripoli’s morgues contained more than 200 corpses following fighting in late February 2011, of whom two were female.74 The disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians. More widely, Muammar Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.75

33.On 17 March 2011, Muammar Gaddafi announced to the rebels in Benghazi, “Throw away your weapons, exactly like your brothers in Ajdabiya and other places did. They laid down their arms and they are safe. We never pursued them at all.”76 Subsequent investigation revealed that when Gaddafi regime forces retook Ajdabiya in February 2011, they did not attack civilians.77 Muammar Gaddafi also attempted to appease protesters in Benghazi with an offer of development aid before finally deploying troops.78


34.Professor Joffé told us that


the rhetoric that was used was quite blood-curdling, but again there were past examples of the way in which Gaddafi would actually behave. If you go back to the American bombings in the 1980s of Benghazi and Tripoli, rather than trying to remove threats to the regime in the east, in Cyrenaica, Gaddafi spent six months trying to pacify the tribes that were located there. The evidence is that he was well aware of the insecurity of parts of the country and of the unlikelihood that he could control them through sheer violence. Therefore, he would have been very careful in the actual response…the fear of the massacre of civilians was vastly overstated.79


Alison Pargeter concurred with Professor Joffé’s judgment on Muammar Gaddafi’s likely course of action in February 2011. She concluded that there was no “real evidence at that time that Gaddafi was preparing to launch a massacre against his own civilians.”80


35.We were told that émigrés opposed to Muammar Gaddafi exploited unrest in Libya by overstating the threat to civilians and encouraging Western powers to intervene.81 In the course of his 40-year dictatorship Muammar Gaddafi had acquired many enemies in the Middle East and North Africa, who were similarly prepared to exaggerate the threat to civilians. Alison Pargeter told us that


the issue of mercenaries was amplified. I was told by Libyans here, “The Africans are coming. They’re going to massacre us. Gaddafi’s sending Africans into the streets. They’re killing our families.” I think that that was very much amplified. But I also think the Arab media played a very important role here. Al-Jazeera in particular, but also al-Arabiya, were reporting that Gaddafi was using air strikes against people in Benghazi and, I think, were really hamming everything up, and it turned out not to be true.82


36.An Amnesty International investigation in June 2011 could not corroborate allegations of mass human rights violations by Gaddafi regime troops. However, it uncovered evidence that rebels in Benghazi made false claims and manufactured evidence. The investigation concluded that


much Western media coverage has from the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of events, portraying the protest movement as entirely peaceful and repeatedly suggesting that the regime’s security forces were unaccountably massacring unarmed demonstrators who presented no security challenge.83


37.Many Western policymakers genuinely believed that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered his troops to massacre civilians in Benghazi, if those forces had been able to enter the city. However, while Muammar Gaddafi certainly threatened violence against those who took up arms against his rule, this did not necessarily translate into a threat to everyone in Benghazi. In short, the scale of the threat to civilians was presented with unjustified certainty. US intelligence officials reportedly described the intervention as “an intelligence-light decision”.84

A great many pro-interventionist scum were frothing at the mouth about mythical 'genocide' as a justification for this war. Quite a few posters here too were adamant this was the case despite opposite being so bloody obvious.

[Harith]

Parliament does on occasion prove its worth. Sadly nothing concrete will come of this and it has already been brushed aside in the news.

As far as the report goes this for me was the most damning;

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

32.Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence. The Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011.72 During fighting in Misrata, the hospital recorded 257 people killed and 949 people wounded in February and March 2011. Those casualties included 22 women and eight children.73 Libyan doctors told United Nations investigators that Tripoli’s morgues contained more than 200 corpses following fighting in late February 2011, of whom two were female.74 The disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians. More widely, Muammar Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.75

33.On 17 March 2011, Muammar Gaddafi announced to the rebels in Benghazi, “Throw away your weapons, exactly like your brothers in Ajdabiya and other places did. They laid down their arms and they are safe. We never pursued them at all.”76 Subsequent investigation revealed that when Gaddafi regime forces retook Ajdabiya in February 2011, they did not attack civilians.77 Muammar Gaddafi also attempted to appease protesters in Benghazi with an offer of development aid before finally deploying troops.78


34.Professor Joffé told us that


the rhetoric that was used was quite blood-curdling, but again there were past examples of the way in which Gaddafi would actually behave. If you go back to the American bombings in the 1980s of Benghazi and Tripoli, rather than trying to remove threats to the regime in the east, in Cyrenaica, Gaddafi spent six months trying to pacify the tribes that were located there. The evidence is that he was well aware of the insecurity of parts of the country and of the unlikelihood that he could control them through sheer violence. Therefore, he would have been very careful in the actual response…the fear of the massacre of civilians was vastly overstated.79


Alison Pargeter concurred with Professor Joffé’s judgment on Muammar Gaddafi’s likely course of action in February 2011. She concluded that there was no “real evidence at that time that Gaddafi was preparing to launch a massacre against his own civilians.”80


35.We were told that émigrés opposed to Muammar Gaddafi exploited unrest in Libya by overstating the threat to civilians and encouraging Western powers to intervene.81 In the course of his 40-year dictatorship Muammar Gaddafi had acquired many enemies in the Middle East and North Africa, who were similarly prepared to exaggerate the threat to civilians. Alison Pargeter told us that


the issue of mercenaries was amplified. I was told by Libyans here, “The Africans are coming. They’re going to massacre us. Gaddafi’s sending Africans into the streets. They’re killing our families.” I think that that was very much amplified. But I also think the Arab media played a very important role here. Al-Jazeera in particular, but also al-Arabiya, were reporting that Gaddafi was using air strikes against people in Benghazi and, I think, were really hamming everything up, and it turned out not to be true.82


36.An Amnesty International investigation in June 2011 could not corroborate allegations of mass human rights violations by Gaddafi regime troops. However, it uncovered evidence that rebels in Benghazi made false claims and manufactured evidence. The investigation concluded that


much Western media coverage has from the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of events, portraying the protest movement as entirely peaceful and repeatedly suggesting that the regime’s security forces were unaccountably massacring unarmed demonstrators who presented no security challenge.83


37.Many Western policymakers genuinely believed that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered his troops to massacre civilians in Benghazi, if those forces had been able to enter the city. However, while Muammar Gaddafi certainly threatened violence against those who took up arms against his rule, this did not necessarily translate into a threat to everyone in Benghazi. In short, the scale of the threat to civilians was presented with unjustified certainty. US intelligence officials reportedly described the intervention as “an intelligence-light decision”.84

A great many pro-interventionist scum were frothing at the mouth about mythical 'genocide' as a justification for this war. Quite a few posters here too were adamant this was the case despite opposite being so bloody obvious.

Muammar was a brutal dictator no question. However, this was more about Qatar and Saudi projecting their power rather than the wellbeing of Libya.

Fact of the matter is, one ceases to be a member of the patriotic opposition when he receives funding, training, intelligence and orders from others.

Just like the Syrian spring, the Libyan one ended when arms were taken up and foreigners started "aiding" rebels.

[The Gurkhan]

He was an absolute menace to a number of nations in the past (especially my own with his support for IRA terrorists) but as far as Arab dictators go he was no where near the worst domestically. Ergo he was not deserving of a Loving Liberal Intervention which has come close to gifting ISIS swathes of territory.

[Cyrene]

A great many pro-interventionist scum were frothing at the mouth about mythical 'genocide' as a justification for this war. Quite a few posters here too were adamant this was the case despite opposite being so bloody obvious.

While i sort of agree with you here, i wouldn't dismiss the possibility of tribal-ethnic killings by a good percentage of the Libyan Army, the latter was composed of Tripolitanians for the most part, and footage of them on the outskirts of Benghazi shouting "No Pity! No Mercy!" (mimicking the Tripolitanian soldiers at the massacre of Derna in 18th Century after the latter's revolt against Ottoman rule) is evidence that these intentions were real to some extent.

despite that ethnic cleansing was indeed a possibility, it does not make the Western intervention Legitimate, as they did nothing to stop their rebels from ethnically cleansing an entire town in Western Libya, and besides, i seriously doubt they were so informed of Libyan Society/Demographics so as to know the West-East rivalries of the country, what they wanted first and foremost was to overthrow Qaddafi, with no regard to the consequences.

[Heathen Hammer]

Qaddafi's real "crime" was abandoning the petrodollar. Same with Saddam.