Libyan War And Control Of The Mediterranean
Rick Rozoff
March 30, 2011 19:25
A year after assuming the post of president of the French
Republic in 2007, and while his nation held the rotating
European Union presidency, Nicholas Sarkozy invited the
heads of state of the EU's twenty-seven members and those
of seventeen non-EU Mediterranean countries to attend a
conference in Paris to launch a Mediterranean Union.
In the words of Britain's Daily Telegraph regarding the
subsequent summit held for the purpose on July 13, 2008,
"Sarkozy's big idea is to use imperial Rome's centre of
the world as a unifying factor linking 44 countries that
are home to 800 million people."
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, however, announced that his
nation would boycott the gathering, denouncing the
initiative as one aimed at dividing both Africa and the
Arab world, and stating:
"We shall have another Roman empire and imperialist
design. There are imperialist maps and designs that we
have already rolled up. We should not have them again."
[1]
The unprecedented summit was held with the intention of
"shift[ing] Europe's strategic focus towards the Middle
East, North Africa and the Balkans." [2]
Less than three years later Sarkozy's Mirage and Rafale
warplanes were bombing Libyan government targets,
initiating an ongoing war being waged by France, the
United States, Britain and what the world news media refer
to as an international coalition - twelve members of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the emirate of
Qatar - to overthrow the Gaddafi government and implant a
more pliant replacement.
The Mediterranean Sea is the main battle front in the
world currently, superseding the Afghanistan- Pakistan war
theatre, and the empire of the new third millennium - that
of the US, the world's sole military superpower in the
words of President Barack Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize
acceptance speech, and its NATO partners - is completing
the transformation of the Mediterranean into its mare
nostrum.
The attack on Libya followed by slightly more than three
weeks a move in the parliament of the Eastern
Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus to drag that state
into NATO's Partnership for Peace program [3], which if
ultimately successful would leave only three of twenty
nations (excluding microstate Monaco) on or in the
Mediterranean Sea not full members of NATO or beholden to
it through partnership entanglements, including those of
the Mediterranean Dialogue (Algeria, Egypt, Israel,
Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia): Libya, Lebanon
and Syria.
NATO membership and partnerships obligate the affected
governments to open their countries to the US military.
For example, less than a year after becoming independent
Montenegro had already joined the Partnership for Peace
and was visited by then-commander of U.S. Naval Forces
Europe Admiral Harry Ulrich and the submarine tender Emory
S. Land in an effort "to provide training and assistance
for the Montenegrin Navy and to strengthen the
relationship between the two navies." [4]. The next month
four NATO warships, including the USS Roosevelt guided
missile destroyer, docked in Montenegro's Tivat harbour.
If the current Libyan model is duplicated in Syria as
increasingly seems to be the case, and with Lebanon
already blockaded by warships from NATO nations since 2006
in what is the prototype for what NATO will soon replicate
off the coast of Libya, the Mediterranean Sea will be
entirely under the control of NATO and its leading member,
the U.S.
Cyprus in the only European Union member and indeed the
only European nation (except for microstates) that is -
for the time being - not a NATO member or partner, and
Libya is the only African nation bordering the
Mediterranean not a member of NATO's Mediterranean
Dialogue partnership program.
Libya is also one of only five of Africa's 54 countries
that have not been integrated into, which is to say
subordinated to, the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).
The others are:
Sudan, which is being balkanized as Libya may also soon
be.
Ivory Coast, now embroiled in what is for all intents a
civil war with the West backing the armed groups of
Alassane Ouattara against standing president Laurent
Gbagbo and under the threat of foreign military
intervention, likely by the AFRICOM- and NATO-supported
West African Standby Force and possibly with direct
Western involvement. [5]
Eritrea, which borders Djibouti where some 5,000 U.S. and
French troops are based and which was involved in an armed
border conflict with its neighbour three years ago in
which French military forces intervened on behalf of
Djibouti.
Zimbabwe, which is among likely candidates for the next
U.S.-NATO Operation Odyssey Dawn-type military
intervention.
The Mediterranean has been history's most strategically
important sea and is the only one whose waves lap the
shores of three continents.
Control of the sea has been fought over by the Persian,
Alexandrian, Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman,
Spanish, British and Napoleonic empires, in part or in
whole, and by Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany.
Since the end of World War Two the major military power in
the sea has been the U.S. In 1946 Washington established
Naval Forces Mediterranean, which in 1950 became the U.S.
Sixth Fleet and has its headquarters in the Mediterranean
port city of Naples.
In fact the genesis of the US Navy was the Naval Act of
1794, passed in response to the capture of American
merchant vessels off the coast of North Africa. The
Mediterranean Squadron (also Station) was created in
reaction to the first Barbary War of 1801-1805, also known
as the Tripolitan War after what is now northwestern
Libya. The US fought its first naval battle outside the
Western Hemisphere against Tripolitania in 1801.
US Naval Forces Europe-Africa, also based in Naples, is
assigned to the Sixth Fleet and provides forces for both
U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command. Its
commander is Admiral Samuel Locklear III, who is also
commander of NATO's Allied Joint Force Command Naples.
He has been coordinating US and NATO air and missile
strikes against Libya from USS Mount Whitney, the flagship
of the Sixth Fleet, as commander of Joint Task Force
Odyssey Dawn, the US Africa Command operation in charge of
US guided missile destroyers, submarines and stealth
bombers conducting attacks inside Libya.
Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations (the
highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Navy), recently stated
that the permanent U.S. military presence in the
Mediterranean allowed the Pentagon, which "already was
positioned for operations over Libya," to launch Odyssey
Dawn on March 19. "The need, for example in the opening
rounds, for the Tomahawk strikes, the shooters were
already in place. They were already loaded, and that went
off as we expected it would."
"That's what you get when you have a global Navy that's
forward all the time....We're there, and when the guns go
off, we're ready to conduct combat operations.. .." [6]
On March 22 General Carter Ham, the new chief of U.S.
Africa Command, visited the U.S. air base in Ramstein,
Germany and met with British, French and Italian air force
leaders to evaluate the bombing campaign in Libya. He
praised cooperation with NATO partners before the war
began, stating, "You can't bring 14 different nations
together without ever having prepared for this before."
[7]
As the AFRICOM commander was in Germany, Defence Secretary
Robert Gates was in Egypt to meet with Field Marshal
Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, commander in chief of the
Egyptian armed forces and chairman of the Supreme Council
of the Armed Forces, to coordinate the campaign against
Libya.
The Pentagon's website reported on March 23 that forces
attached to AFRICOM's Task Force Odyssey Dawn had flown
336 air sorties, 108 of them launching strikes and 212
conducted by the U.S. The operations included 162 Tomahawk
cruise missile attacks.
Admiral Roughead stated that he envisioned "no problem in
keeping operations going," as the Tomahawks will be
replaced from the existing inventory of 3,200. Enough to
level Libya and still have plenty left over for the next
war. [8]
The defeat and conquest, directly or by proxy, of Libya
would secure a key outpost for the Pentagon and NATO on
the Mediterranean Sea. The consolidation of U.S. control
over North Africa would have more than just regional
repercussions, important as they are.
Shortly after the inauguration of U.S. Africa Command, Lin
Zhiyuan, deputy director of the Chinese People's
Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences, wrote the
following:
"By building a dozen forward bases or establishments in
Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and other African nations, the
U.S. will gradually establish a network of military bases
to cover the entire continent and make essential
preparations for docking an aircraft carrier fleet in the
region.
"The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with the
U.S. at the head had [in 2006] carried out a large-scale
military exercise in Cape Verde, a western African island
nation, with the sole purpose of controlling the sea and
air corridors of crude oil extracting zones and monitoring
how the situation is with oil pipelines operating there.
"[A]frica Command represents a vital, crucial link for the
US adjustment of its global military deployment. At
present, it is moving the gravity of its forces in Europe
eastward and opening new bases in Eastern Europe.
"The present US global military redeployment centers
mainly on an 'arc of instability' from the Caucasus,
Central and Southern Asia down to the Korean Peninsula,
and so the African continent is taken as a strong point to
prop up the US global strategy.
"Therefore, AFRICOM facilitates the United States
advancing on the African continent, taking control of the
Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the
entire globe." [9]
Far more is at stake in the war with Libya than control of
Africa's largest proven oil reserves and subjugating the
last North African nation not yet under the thumb of the
US and NATO. Even more than domination of the
Mediterranean Sea region.
1) Daily Telegraph, July 10, 2008
2) Daily Telegraph, July 14, 2008
3) 'Cyprus: U.S. To Dominate All Europe, Mediterranean
Through NATO', Stop NATO, March 3, 2011
4) United States European Command, May 24, 2007
5)' Ivory Coast: Testing Ground For U.S.-Backed African
Standby Force', Stop NATO, January 23, 2011
6) U.S. Department of Defense, March 23, 2011
7) U.S. Air Forces in Europe, March 23, 2011
8) U.S. Department of Defense, March 23, 2011
9) People's Daily, February 26, 2007,
Rock Rozoff is editor of Stop NATO, where this article
first appeared. The photo is by BRQ Network.
