Fall of desperate regime
Anti-imperialism does not equal pro-Gaddafi, argues James Turley
As it threatened, briefly, to do this spring, the regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi has collapsed. The forces previously known as the Libyan rebels have seized power in most of the country, including the capital, Tripoli – assisted, of course, by months of aerial bombardment by Britain, France and America.
Gaddafi’s fall, though hardly completely unexpected, nonetheless took place with surprising rapidity. The civil war, which had raged ever since Nato support lent some kind of military muscle to the rag-tag rebel forces, looked for months to have reached a point of stalemate. Frustration was evident at all levels of the imperialist establishment; all the signs of debilitating mission creep (a UN resolution aiming ostensibly to prevent a massacre in Benghazi having given way rapidly to an open-ended mission to topple Gaddafi) were there, easily recognisable from the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters.