A person who is manipulative, dishonest, void of remorse, non-empathetic, and exploitative may be a psychopath. Does this definition fit those incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict? 

Are the humanitarians that clamor for more destruction and death to save the world exempt? These human rights advocates work to extend US power as a force for good. Are they just soldiers in the march to imperial dominance? 

President Obama, in a recent post, urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya. I remember a cackling Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State in the Obama administration, boasting about the 2011 Muammar Gaddafi public execution. “We came, we saw, he died.” By the way, during his murder, he was sodomized with a bayonet. Yes, those humanitarians.

Before the Gaddafi government overthrow, Libya was the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa. It was a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, and subsidized electricity, water, and gasoline. It had the lowest infant mortality rate and the highest life expectancy on the continent, with one of the highest literacy rates.

The 2005 United Nations World Summit unanimously adopted the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). It states that countries have a fundamental sovereign responsibility to protect their citizens. If they fail to do so, that responsibility falls to the United Nations system, which may take steps to protect those vulnerable people, violating the sovereignty of the relevant country if needed. So, under the UN auspices, other countries can use all means necessary, including military intervention, to prevent large-scale loss of life. 

The Humanitarians promoted R2P as a commitment to ensure that the international community never again fails to halt the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. 

However, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the UN General Assembly, warned in 2009 that R2P could be misused “to justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.” 

Jean Bricmont, a Belgian theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, calls it Humanitarian Imperialism. In other words, it uses the concept of human rights to sell war. He concludes they justify the “ideology of intervention, discovering new ‘Hitlers’ as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.” 

Realistically, it’s compassion for the worthy victims as unworthy victims get ignored. Military intervention receives approval for Iraqis, Afghans, or Libyans. But Palestinian and Yeminis human rights are ignored. Human rights become relevant when discussing Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. But irrelevant in Guantanamo, Saudi Arabia, Gaza (an open-air prison), or victims of drone attacks.

In 2011, the R2P doctrine failed miserably. The 2011 mission removed Gaddafi, but post-Gaddafi Libya has fallen into chaos. Migrants from Nigeria, Senegal, and Eritrea have been beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libyan electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields, and dams fell into disrepair. Recently, torrential rains overwhelmed two decrepit dams. Walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the major cities, leaving up to 20,000 dead and 10,000 missing.

Journalist Chris Hedges recently wrote that the intervention sold as humanitarian may have been politically motivated. https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/17/humanitarian-imperialism-created-the-libyan-nightmare/

Hedges reports that Libya was a target of intervention because it had large oil reserves and was independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.

Hedges also brings to lite that France also had a reason. Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported that the French president sought “a greater share of Libyan oil” increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power, and an end to Gaddafi’s attempts to supplant French influence in “Francophone Africa.”

Utopian social engineering litters history. The murderous French Jacobins and the Soviet communists come to mind. Should the globalists, neoliberals, and imperialists be added to this infamous list?