How NATO Kills Africans in the Club Med

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Asked about it today, as he recently pontificated in relation to the Armenian genocide, that pathetic excuse for UN Secretary-General, Ban-Ki Moon, would say the potential massacre in Libya might -- and the operative word is "might" -- not even qualify as an "atrocity crime."

The six-month humanitarian bombing of Libya engineered to prevent a highly hypothetical "atrocity crime" ended up "liberating" at least 10 times more people from their lives than the previous skirmishes between Col. Gaddafi's troops and weaponized "rebels," most of them hardcore Islamist militias, now free to wreak jihadi havoc from eastern Libya to northern Syria.

Humanitarian imperialism practitioners duly created a "liberated" wasteland -- which they called "victory" -- trespassed by weaponized militias; installed a pervasive chaos trespassing a great deal of the Maghreb and Western Africa; and unleashed a massive humanitarian crisis.

Stranded in MENA

Humanitarian imperialism as applied to what the Pentagon loves to define as MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) -- from Libya to Iraq, Syria and now Yemen, as well as sub-proxy wars in Mali, Somalia and Sudan -- has led, according to Amnesty International, "to the largest refugee disaster since the Second World War." Amnesty estimates that no less than 57 million people have been turned into refugees by 2014.

A crucial subplot is that according to the International Organization on Migration (IOM), the number of refugees dying as they tried to reach Fortress Europe rose by more than 500 percent between 2011 and 2014.

This means humanitarian imperialism, as applied by the Pentagon/NATO/AFRICOM, handed the waters of the Club Med to the real winners: a vast human trafficking racket that includes smugglers, corrupt police and even "terra-rists."

Across Europe, only Italy -- to its credit -- is really outraged, and willing to accept at least a fraction, a few really, of the wretched African boat people. After all, the privileged exit point is "liberated" Libya and the privileged entry point is Italy's Sicily. France, Germany, the UK and Sweden follow Italy with much more modest attempts.

This aphasiac EU/NATO wall of silence is due to the fact that Europe now is mostly about anti-immigration political parties running amok. After all, would-be immigrants are perfect scapegoats. As fearful "nationalists" define them, they flatten wages; they live off welfare; they are mostly criminals; they reproduce like rabbits; they destroy the "national identity; and of course there are so many "terra-rists" among them who want to submit Europe to the chador and Sharia law.

This fearful, austerity-ravaged EU subjugated by NATO's military diktats cannot possibly muster the will to build a common, decent policy to confront the tragedy of a Club Med putrified by a tsunami of African bodies. A great deal of the EU in fact suspended Operation Mare Nostrum -- opting to control/police the borders of Fortress Europe instead of acting on humanitarian principles.

Call the drone cavalry

A modest proposal would involve bombing smuggling boats in their hideaways before they are filled up with their tragic human cargo; under UN protection, establish in the "liberated" Libyan coastline humanitarian stations able to process those eligible for political asylum in the EU; facilitate their air or naval travel to the nations ready to receive them; or -- using American methodology -- drone the "enemy" to smithereens, as in the smugglers and their financiers. After all US drones are expert in the matter, operating under Obama's infamous "kill list" and totally oblivious to international law.

That, though, will never happen. As Nick Turse demonstrates in a new, path-breaking book, Libya was merely AFRICOM's first war (then transferred to NATO, as I examined here); the Pentagon has much nastier plans in its evolving pivoting to Africa.