By Walid Shoebat

With global attention focused on Iraq and Syria, Libya was left to convulse under the weight of its own brand of political instability and insecurity, yet another failed Arab Spring state.

Of course, mainstream media watched and reported as Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s regime crumbled under an unprecedented, violent popular armed insurgency in 2011. That attention, however, was short-lived and fleeting.

Libya came back into focus on Feb. 14, when Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants published a gruesome video, “A Message Signed in Blood to the Nation of the Cross.” The five-minute video shows ISIS militants simultaneously beheading a group of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, who had been abducted in Libya earlier this year.

With ISIS now inserted into the mix of Libya’s unravelling, the country is back on the forefront of the war on terror. Two days after the video surfaced, Egypt’s Ambassador to the U.K. Nasser Kamel told the BBC that ISIS would attempt to break into Europe by exploiting conventional migration routes, camouflaging its fighters within the waves of illegal migrants pouring toward Western capitals.

Indeed, ISIS has articulated its intentions to enter Europe via Italy, since the Italian coast is easily accessible from Libya. Abu Arhim al-Libim, the alias used by an ISIS propagandist, wrote in a February letter to the West, “It [Libya] has a long coast and looks upon the southern Crusader states, which can be reached with ease by even a rudimentary boat.” He also noted “the number of trips known as ‘illegal immigration’ from this coast, which are huge in number.”

The arrival of ISIS in Libya has been more insidious than its arrival in other parts of the MENA region — namely, Iraq and Syria, where terror militants have scored a series of grand military victories, powered by foreign patrons. Yet ISIS has nevertheless managed to impose itself as a Goliath among Libya’s many factions and militias.

Libya’s descent into chaos began like that of many countries in the region in 2011, an unexpected byproduct of the Arab Spring and, as U.S. author and historian William Blum noted, “America’s most dangerous export — democracy.”

Democracy in the Middle East was destructive. As far back as January 31, 2011, way before all this mayhem, Shoebat.com wrote:

“Obama wants “rights of assembly” and “elections” in Egypt. Americans need to realize that democratic elections in the Middle East have never resulted in western style freedom! The rule in any Muslim majority nation, is that democracy is used DURING the elections ONLY… Period!”

We even went further, way before the current crisis to say:

“What did democratic elections in Muslim majority nations do? Iran is now a theocracy, Lebanon is in a state of chaos, Palestine is still a state of psychosis, Sudan is on the verge of splitting, and Turkey’s democratic elections are slowly emerging as an axis that will eventually lead to an Islamist alliance against Israel and the West. Soon, we’ll also see North Africa – in the name of democracy – remove all their dictators so they can elect you know who!”

Way before we even saw any results to the Arab Spring we wrote in the same article in 2011:

“The most plausible outcome for Egypt’s chaos is a future election as demanded by world opinion, the outcome of which can be seen from the experience we had in the Palestinian elections, on which president George W. Bush insisted. The results ushered in a divide between Islamists and so-called moderate Palestinian Authority. Palestinians were killing Palestinians in the streets as Hamas ran rampant, executing other Muslims who didn’t agree with their agenda. But unlike that miniature state of psychosis, the scale of mayhem in Egypt will be immense! Egypt’s “democratic elections” will simply change one form of dictatorship into another!”

The west was playing with fire. It did not learn from small experiments in Israel when they demanded that Palestinians practice democracy. The rule of thumb is that if one spikes the punch bowl with a capsule of cyanide and it kills a dozen, pouring a barrel of the same substance into a reservoir will kill entire cities. The minature “democracy game” which Bush insisted for ‘Palestine’ was no different from Obama’s grand scale experiment in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq. Today, the war between moderates and Islamists is immense, spreading in several nations where Muslims exist. It will even get much worse when the world believes that empowering moderates is another brilliant solution since most moderate Muslims will quickly turn into psychopaths when it comes to one issue: Jerusalem. In 2011, we also added:

“Whether it is the Iranian Shia or Sunni Revolutions, the way to victory will not be only by stepping over Israel but also over Arabia – the cradle of Wahabism that started the trouble in the first place.”

And now we have an alliance between Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Why? It is because Wahhabist Saudi Arabia fears Iran’s expansion into Iraq which in the same January 31, 2011 article we wrote:

“Once Obama succeeds in pulling our troops out of Iraq as a good gesture to satisfy the screaming and complaining progressives that the U.S is not an occupier, then Iraq will immediately be gobbled up by Iran.”

And today we see, Obama pulled out, the strongest military presence in Iraq now is not the U.S. any longer, but Iran’s military power resides in Iraq just as we wrote.

ISIS now sees Libya as another Syria, another Iraq, to add to their growing caliphate. Both the U.S. and the EU were wrong to believe that Libya’s designated elite would transition into a thriving democracy. How could superpowers fail to see that the common denominator in the Muslim world is not democracy, but Islam? And what is coming next is even worse, since democracy failed, empowering the moderates will be the solution which will establish the Turkish model of Islam over Wahhabism.

Libya currently has two governments jostling for legitimacy: the internationally-recognized government, based in the eastern coastal town of Tobruk, and the Islamist-backed General National Congress (GNC), based in the capital, Tripoli. In perfect symmetry, ISIS appointed two emirs: the emir of Tripoli, a Tunisian national known as Abu Talha, and the emir of Darna, a Yemeni national who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Al Baraa el-Azdi. As of February, ISIS was, if not in control, in a strong enough position that it could taunt Western capitals and lay claim to Libya’s vast oil resources, as its militants have launched coordinated military campaigns against the country’s oil fields. On Monday, hundreds fled as ISIS fighters clashed with Libya Dawn forces over the weekend in the coastal city of Sirte, the hometown of ousted dictator Gadhafi and one of the country’s biggest oil ports.

So what will the west concoct as an answer to all of this mayhem? Ground troops. And while Iran was glad to comply in Iraq, Turkey will be glad to comply in Libya.

SOURCES

Mint Press News