Muammar Gaddafi is dead. Forty years of dictatorship has come to an end. Hundreds of political prisoners have been freed. The Libyan people are in control of their own destiny. Or are they?

The promise of the Arab Spring is contained in a truth that the West has denied for so long: The Arab people want democracy, want freedom, and are capable of bringing it about on their own terms, of their own volition. This truth has been realized in Tunisia, which has just elected its first democratic government since achieving independence in 1956. Egypt, on the other hand, is still very much in the hands of the military; the revolution stands incomplete. But in Libya, it appears that the West has reasserted control over an Arab nation, re-imposed its imperial will, and checked the historical forces which have the potential to threaten its interests in the region and beyond.

Yes, it can be said that the NATO intervention in Libya may have stopped a massacre or a prolonged civil war. In the early days of the revolt, Gaddafi’s troops amassed on the city limits of Benghazi poised to viciously beat back rebel forces. NATO intervened and the tides were turned back in the rebel’s favour. Could the Libyans have toppled Gadaffi’s regime without NATO’s backing? We will never know.

Those who supported the intervention argued that a game of historical ‘what ifs’ cannot be played when the lives of thousands are at risk (Check Makaya Kelday’s article in the latest issue of POUND for an excellent account of the positions for and against Western intervention in Libya). Those who oppose Western intervention should not easily dismiss the question of when force can be justifiably used to prevent or stop mass slaughter; though many recognize that the interests of imperial powers are almost always hidden behind the mask of ‘humanitarian intervention.’ (The DR Congo – where civil war has led to the death of more than 5 million people – serves as a tragic counterpoint to the arguments of the humanitarian interventionists. It seems that as long as the resources continue to flow out of a country, and geopolitical interests are not threatened, the West is happy to rely on diplomacy in the case of humanitarian crises).

So in the name of “protecting civilians” and under the cover of a UN resolution, NATO imposed a no-fly zone over Libya, crippled Gadaffi’s air force and carried out numerous attacks that weakened the regime’s infrastructure and military capabilities. Yet as Seamus Milne of the Guardian newspaper recently argued, if Nato’s intervention was to protect civilian life, it has failed miserably in its mandate. According to reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the victorious rebels have engaged in mass detention, beatings, torture and execution; exactly the type, and the degree of violence that NATO claimed to be preventing when it intervened. Now it is reported that rebel troops are engaging in ethnic cleansing as migrant workers from neighbouring countries (who are identified as black Africans and not Arabs) try to flee. And black Libyans are subject to racist attacks as rebel troops question their loyalty to the new government. One has to ask where NATO’s human rights rhetoric is now. As with any imperial adventure, duplicity and hypocrisy are the order of the day.

In a turn of events that summed up the whole Libyan episode, it was a NATO fighter jet that attacked Gadaffi’s convoy, leaving Libyan rebels on the ground the easy work of detaining and subsequently murdering the dictator. After a video of his killing went viral, the Americans and Brits cried foul, calling for an investigation into Gadaffi’s death, maintaining the imperial posture of ‘civilization’ and ‘the rule of law’. But surely they didn’t want Gadaffi to stand trial in the International Criminal Court, giving him a platform to tell the world about his long friendships with Western powers; friendships that lasted right up until the first NATO missiles were launched destined for Libyan soil. And now in typical imperial fashion, French, British and Italian oil companies are negotiating contracts with their new friends in Tripoli.

It appears then that in Libya, the West has wrested control of the Arab Spring from the Arab people. It remains to be seen whether the Arab people can take it back.

-simon black