Numan Abd Al-Wahid - Debunking the Myth of Americas Poodle: Great Britain Wants War

Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the intellectual. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheer-led by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their stupor. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist is not only possible: it is already flourishing. Zer0 is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before. If you have enjoyed this book, why not tell other readers by posting a review on your preferred book site. Recent bestsellers from Zero Books are:

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The suicide terrorist massacre took the lives of 22 people, mostly children, at a pop music concert in Manchester in May 2017. The bomber had grown up in the city with his parents who had, we are strongly led to believe, fled Libya during the era of Colonel Muammar Gaddafis rule. His parents had clearly settled in Manchester because there had already been a small but established community of Libyans residing there since the mid-1990s. And some of these Libyans were associated or members of a jihadi organisation, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).

Initially, the LIFG was made up of veterans from the so-called Afghan jihad whereby Islamist mercenaries were recruited from around the world to fight the Soviet Unions military intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Out of this geo-political wash emerged a group of fighters known as the Arab-Afghans, that is fighters of Arab origin who travelled to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Once the war was over, most of these fighters returned to their home countries but others sought refuge elsewhere in the knowledge that their home countries would be far from hospitable to their resettlement. Some Libyan and other veterans of this war found refuge in the United Kingdom.

The real reason behind British hospitality towards Libyan jihadis is that Libya had been a thorn in the British establishments side ever since Colonel Gaddafi overthrew the British puppet King Idris in 1969. Gaddafi did not endear himself to Britain for nationalising the oil industry and his widely reported support for the Irish resistance in the northern part of Ireland. So it was no surprise that in 1996, Britains foreign intelligence service, MI6, turned to a leader from the LIFG, a certain Abu Abdullah Sadiq, for assistance in an assassination attempt on Gaddafi. Sadiq was an alias of Abdel-Hakim Belhadj.

A leaked cable from the mid-1990s revealed that the assassination attempt on Colonel Gaddafi was to be complemented by orchestrated uprisings in Libyan cities led by Libyan colonels with limited contact to Islamist-jihadi veterans of the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This plot failed but the plan certainly chimes with what materialised in the lead up to the NATO intervention of 2011.

The so-called Arab Spring of early 2011, that is the overthrow of the pro-Western Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, provided the British establishment with the perfect pretext to finally overthrow Colonel Gaddafi. Certain militias had quickly taken up arms against the government during the early stages of the Libyan uprising. Gaddafi, in turn, made televised threats against these militias. For their part, Western media erroneously and falsely reported that Libyan army soldiers were committing rape crimes and employing foreign African mercenaries to recapture territory lost to the Islamist militias. Yet the only known foreigners in the early period of the uprising were captured British MI6 agents in Libyas second city, Benghazi.

Overlooked in the early period of the rebellion was not only the racist lynching of black Libyans and Sub-Sahara African migrant workers by some of the Islamist militias but also the fanatical calls in the British media, especially its right-wing media, for the United States to lead a military intervention in Libya.