Morning Star, Monday 14 March 2011.

William Hague’s backing for a no-fly zone, and his “sympathy” for former Tory foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind’s call for military supplies to be sent openly to Libyan opposition forces, are extremely dangerous.

They should be understood in the context of the armed intervention by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Co-operation Council troops in Bahrain, and Arab League backing for a Libyan no-fly zone.

There is a coming together of hawkish European Union states, with Britain and France to the fore, and the Gulf feudal dynasties to impose a military solution on the entire region.

Concern for democracy and human rights plays no part in this process. As ever, imperialist priorities centre on mineral wealth and politico-military influence.

The Arab League has always been little more than a cipher for US imperialism in the region, seeking favour while recognising that it will never supplant Israel in Washington’s affections.

Even the league’s own members must discern the huge measure of hypocrisy in a bunch of corrupt sultanates, monarchies and other dictatorships plumping for Western military intervention in Libya in support of rebels demanding democratic change.

These dynastic despots make no secret of their willingness to drown domestic movements for democratic change in their own blood.

If the rebels in Libya were to establish a democratic alternative to the equally corrupt and dictatorial Gadaffi regime, taking its place alongside the partially successful struggles for change in Tunisia and Egypt, the example set would have these despots quaking in their boots.

From this it is clear that any change in Libya, if the European powers and their regional satraps have their way, will not be of an independent democratic nature.

It will, irrespective of what many Libyans want, be restricted to a change of leading personnel, with the new leadership indebted to the EU states for arms and humanitarian aid, and prepared to jump through hoops for them as a result.

The Morning Star has made clear its opposition to the Gadaffi regime. It has supported the demands for democratic change, human rights and an end to repression.

However, it rejects absolutely outside military intervention, whether a no-fly zone, supply of weaponry or outright intervention by those powers that exploit Libya’s plentiful oil and gas reserves.

Invasion would present Gadaffi with the opportunity to misrepresent himself as an anti-imperialist rather than someone who has accommodated himself to imperialism to the extent of signing up to the West’s phoney war on terror.

The Iraq and Afghanistan invasions drew support in Britain from a tiny, though overrepresented in the media, section of the left known as the B52 liberals, who cited humanitarian concerns as the reason to back imperialism’s onslaught.

An equally desperate group seeks to equate the UN arms embargo on Libya with imperialism’s imposition of a non-intervention treaty on Spain in the late 1930s, that denied the democratically elected Republican government the right to buy arms to defend itself against a military rebellion backed to the hilt by fascist Italy and nazi Germany.

Historical analogies are rarely exact and attempts to equate Spain and Libya are utterly fatuous.

There is no benefit for the Libyan people in a long drawn-out military conflict. Both sides should cease offensive actions and engage with the progressive Latin American countries that have offered themselves as intermediaries to facilitate a peaceful resolution.