People's University in Chicago

Marco Rossi, experienced Chicago anti-imperialist and solidarity activist, will present “Libya, the West, and the Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention: A Critical Examination of Foreign Military Intervention in the Battle for Libya”:

The military intervention into Libya has received a tremendous amount of celebration and controversy. For those supportive of the military strike the United Nations has changed its inaction towards crises. Those opposed have accused the intervention of being another attempt to take over an Arab nation. There is a manner to systematically address these concerns. The UN Secretary General’s report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility outlines the moral parameters for humanitarian interventions. While the ability to use force in the NATO strike on Libya is legal, according to the criteria accepted by the authors of A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, it is not legitimate.

Alan Maass, editor of Socialist Worker and author of The Case for Socialism, will present “NATO’s Mission Creep and the War in Libya”:

When it was formed in the aftermath of the Second World War, the NATO military alliance was supposed to have a defensive mandate—a coalition of countries led by the U.S. to oppose the former USSR during the Cold War. This was never true—the alliance had an offensive character from the beginning. This aspect of NATO became more pronounced falling the collapse of the Eastern European satellites of Russia, and then the USSR itself. First in Europe, and then beyond, NATO has played the role of aggressor, representing the interests of the most powerful governments involved, above all, the U.S.

This was the role that NATO played in Libya. The national rebellion against the Qaddafi regime was entirely legitimate, but after an initial hands-off attitude, the West, led by the U.S., intervened in Libya with the aim of shaping anti-Qaddafi forces into a new political and economic structure that would by to its interests. The result has been a set-up in post-Qaddafi Libya that has been dominated, though not without sympathetic challenges, by pro-Western forces nurtured during the NATO intervention.