Madam, – If we are indeed seeing the final days of the Muammar Gadafy regime, let’s not forget his contribution to contemporary Irish history. Libya under Gadafy was the source of more arms and explosives for the Provisional IRA than anywhere else. Gadafy’s role in this has been well covered by Brendan O’Brien in The Long War and by Ed Moloney in A Secret History of the IRA.
Gadafy’s action in supplying the IRA enabled it to prolong its terror campaign and this has a direct causal relationship to the numbers who died in the modern Troubles.
As a producer on RTÉ’s Today Tonight (forerunner of Prime Time) I travelled with then reporter Una Claffey and a film crew to Tripoli in October 1986 to record Gadafy’s first substantial interview with a western network since the US air force had bombed his compound. In the interview, Gadafy said that Northern Ireland was a colony and Libya was obliged to support those fighting for freedom.
Asked whether he had supplied the IRA with arms and money Gadafy replied that he had not said that. He repeated his support for the IRA and called on all young people North and South to join in that fight.
During a lull in the filming I asked Gadafy whether he was aware that there were one million Protestants in Northern Ireland who opposed the aims of the IRA and who lived in fear of them. Gadafy asked how many Catholics there were in the island of Ireland and how many Protestants. I replied that the figures rounded out to something more than four million Catholics and over a million Protestants. Gadafy said that meant the Catholics were in the right. Clearly in his mind if you were a Catholic you should be in the IRA and if you were a Protestant you were a colonist.
The logic of Gadafy’s analysis was contained in the copies of his Green Book which he sent to every member of the RTÉ team. Democratically elected parliaments have no place in Gadafy’s political world view. Gadafy’s democracy is a democracy of all the people in a ground-up series of councils. The existence of a parliament therefore implies the exclusion of the people. Real power, for Gadafy, can only come though a body such as the Libyan Arab People’s Jamahariya or state of the masses. In order to make his machinery of government operate, Gadafy found he had to introduce himself as the “Brother Leader”. The Jamahariya thus becomes whatever the Brother Leader says it is.
A setup like this has no problem exporting terror to other places like Ireland. Neither has the Brother Leader, aided by foreign mercenaries, much of a problem importing terror against his own people. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – What an excellent column by John Waters (Opinion, March 18th), correctly identifying the mindset of those who now immediately decry any kind of Western intervention to save foreign lives as “imperialist”, interfering and neo-colonial. This is not just about Libya, but Kosovo, and before that Bosnia. Better, it seems, that tyrants can abuse and kill their own populations than that the West should get any credit for intervening to save such people. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – John Waters’s comparison of the reaction to the crisis in Libya to the invasion of Iraq (Opinion, March 18th) lacks one important detail. Colonel Gadafy was feted by Tony Blair and George Bush in 2004 at a time when Western oil corporations secured lucrative contracts on Libya’s substantial oil and gas supplies. Thus Libya’s assets are already intertwined with that of the West. Prior to 2003 the Iraqi oil production and reserve was shut out to Western oil companies but its potential was well appreciated in the West. It is always just a question of the bottom line.
Mr Waters is correct to castigate the Western media, however, not for its perceived weak “liberalism”, but it’s unwillingness to highlight the real hypocrisy at play. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – John Waters’ s puzzlement at the reactions of so-called “liberal elites” to the current situation in Libya compared to their vocal opposition to the Iraq war is the result of a false equivocation between two situations which are only superficially similar.
The invasion of Iraq was predicated on a falsehood; the claim that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction was used as the central justification for the invasion, with the liberation of the Iraqi people from tyranny being merely a positive side-effect which gradually supplanted the original reasons for invasion once it became clear Saddam did not in fact have any weapons of mass destruction.
Provided that one does not believe that the ends justify the means, there is a vast moral gulf between the more or less unilateral invasion of a foreign country in order to counter a non-existent threat, and acting in accordance with international law in order to protect vulnerable people from a ruthless tyrant. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Leaving aside his facile explanation for Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency, John Waters (Opinion, March 18th) ignores the crucial difference between Iraq in 2003 and Libya today. There was no pressing humanitarian crisis in Iraq eight years ago that required an invasion of that country. Despite the atrocities Saddam Hussein had committed in the past, he was not then attacking his own people in the manner that Muammar Gadafy has been doing in Libya for the past month. This is why both the UN Security Council and the Arab League now advocate intervention in Libya; it is also why neither body endorsed the invasion of Iraq. When a tyrant is murdering people, the international community must act; however, to intervene in a sovereign state in the absence of a humanitarian crisis risks starting a deadly conflict.
This much, if anything, should have been learned from Iraq. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Poor Gadafy, all he had to do was invite in the Saudis to put down the rebellion and he could have avoided all the unpleasantness! – Yours, etc,
Madam, – On the 8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the lessons of two disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been learned. Despite the obvious relief for the people of Benghazi, one has to question the real motives of the western powers in launching this new war and their selective intervention in the Arab people’s uprisings, which could kill many more civilians while possibly not dislodging Gadafy.
While the UN Security Council was voting to impose a no-fly zone in Libya, at least 40 civilians were killed in a US drone attack in Waziristan in Pakistan, the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain (home of the US fifth fleet) were brutally suppressed by an invading US-backed Saudi army and 52 protesters were gunned down in Sanaa, Yemen. In Iraq, three weeks ago, 30 protesters were gunned down for seeking democratic change from the US supported Maliki government.
No western political leader is proposing no-fly zones in these countries, just as they were silent two years ago when the Israeli state killed 1,400 Gazans including 400 children.
The military intervention in Libya could just be a cynical attempt by western powers to dampen the popular Arab revolutions of recent months in order to reassert their domination of this strategic oil-rich region. The tell- tale evidence that the intervention is not all it claims to be is the western leaders’ ambiguity, if not outright silence, about the suppression in Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq and Palestine and the continued drone murders in Pakistan. – Yours, etc,