The gathering of enormous US military forces in the seas and territories around Iran, and the relentless rhetoric from the neocons and their media allies as they press for another regime change war, this time against Iran, inevitably recall regime change wars past.

This made me revisit an article I wrote back in 2011 in the aftermath of the successful regime change war in Libya. I reproduce it complete below.

What struck me on re-reading my 2011 Libya piece is how neocon propaganda barely changes.

There was the same rhetoric in 2011 about ‘heroic protesters’ that there is today. At the time I wrote my piece it had not yet been revealed that the anti-Gaddafi protests in Libya had been engineered by the foreign powers - essentially the US and its friends - who sought and eventually succeeded in overthrowing him. That fact is mostly undisputed today. Today, in the case of Iran, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent openly boasts that it was the US that caused the financial crisis that was the purported spark of the recent protests in Iran, and the Wall Street Journal recently confirmed the US’s direct direct role in orchestrating the recent protests by smuggling into Iran thousands of Starlink terminals.

One of the oddities in the Libyan crisis in 2011 was that the ‘protesters’ initially shouted monarchist slogans and waved monarchist flags; in the recent protests in Iran we have seen exactly the same thing. I predict that if the current government in Iran falls the ‘monarchist sentiments’ of the ‘protesters’ will vanish like the mist, just as they did in 2011 in Libya.

Of course, as was the case in the war against Libya in 2011, the Iranian government today is branded as ruthless and even genocidal on the basis of unverified and inflated claims of the numbers of ‘protesters’ killed.

Also, In Libya in 2011, as in Iran today, the neocons and their allies insist that the ‘protesters’ are ‘mostly’ peaceful, suppressing that they are anything but. For example in 2011 in Libya the (heavily armed) ‘peaceful protesters’ burnt down the Libyan parliament building just before the Libya parliament was about to meet. In Iran during the January protesters there is now compelling evidence of mass arson attacks on government buildings and mosques.

Both conflicts also show an utterly cynical and manipulative attitude to ‘international law’ and the negotiation process ahead of what is by any meaningful definition a pending act of straightforward and violent aggression against a country which poses no threat to the Western Powers or anyone else..

In some respects things today are worse. In 2011 the Western Powers at least went through the motions of consulting the UN Security Council before they acted. My 2011 article sets out the grossly manipulative and cynical way that they went about doing so. Today they no longer bother. The US has provided no justification for its pending attack on Iran at all, and since it has not even bothered to make a case it is not even going through the motions of taking it to the UN Security Council.

In one key respect however the attack on Libya was a turning point. Despite the acknowledged disaster of the Iraqi war, the aggression against Libya was the first neocon operation that took place without any serious opposition from the Western public whatsoever. Similarly, for the moment, there are no significant protests against the coming attack on Iran. The contrast with the massive protests in 2002 and 2003 against the attack on Iraq is striking. This despite the fact that Iraq in 2002 and 2003 was an actual dictatorship whilst Iran, for all the Islamic features of its political system, is not.

My 2011 article about the Libyan crisis was written directly after the events it describes. It accordingly overplayed the British role and underplayed the role played by Sarkozy and France. It also very significantly underplayed the role of the US, and specifically of US President Barack Obama, who we now know played the central role on the US side in the whole affair.

Nonetheless overall, I stand by the article. Several people from Libya have contacted me and told me that they still consider it the single best account of the whole ghastly affair.

I will finish by saying that one person alluded to in the article - Gaddafi’s son and intended successor Saif Al-Gaddafi - was recently murdered in Libya close to his home. A sign that the Libyan crisis, and the agony of Libya’s people, continues.

Here is the article:

THE TRUE STORY OF THE LIBYAN CONFLICT...

https://theduran.substack.com/p/the-coming-attack-on-iran-recalling