NATO'S War

Johann Hari of the Independent asks why are our governments really bombing Libya and then quotes Bill Richardson, the former US energy secretary who served as US ambassador to the UN:
"There's another interest, and that's energy... Libya is among the 10 top oil producers in the world. You can almost say that the gas prices in the US going up have probably happened because of a stoppage of Libyan oil production... So this is not an insignificant country, and I think our involvement is justified."
So there you have it. Blatant , undisguised self-interest, and no recourse to such fine rhetoric, so beloved by US politicians, as the "free world", or hypocritical cant about "democracy".

Hari himself answers "For the first time in more than 60 years, Western control over the world's biggest pots of oil was being rocked by a series of revolutions our governments couldn't control. The most plausible explanation is that this is a way of asserting raw Western power, and trying to arrange the fallout in our favour."

Some, but not all, wars are fought over markets. In the modern world, markets often take second place to strategic issues. Governments are little more than the executives of their respective master classes and in the cut-throat world of capitalist competition they must be seen to be promoting their profit-oriented interests, and to hell with the cost of life. In Washington, London, Paris, and in state capitals the world over, governments will always maintain that oil takes priority over blood. What’s so special about Gaddafi? Yes, you’ve guessed it. He’s not just any old tin-pot crazy dictator. The power and wealth of his regime derive from sitting on an oil-field, which US capital is anxious to modernise so as to increase the world supply of oil.

Under the UN Charter, states have to find a legal pretext before they going to war. The UN Charter is just a scrap of paper. All it has done is forced governments to be even more dishonest about the reasons they go to war. The Western capitalist powers are using "democracy" and "humanitarianism" as their ideology to win mass support for war. The homage paid by vice to virtue. Socialists say: don’t be taken in by such propaganda.

War is completely unnecessary. We are living in a world that has enough resources to provide plenty for all, to eliminate world poverty, ignorance and disease, to provide an adequate and comfortable life for everyone on the planet. Yet under capitalism resources are squandered on armaments, of individual as well as of mass destruction, and, as now, in actual war. Consequently massive propaganda exercises are employed by the state to present it as being in some way humanitarian.This is because people have a healthy horror of war. They know war means death and destruction. Death not only of the soldiers on both sides, but also of women, children and old people as "collateral damage"