How the 2011 Intervention
Helped Lead August’s Tragic Floods
Gregory Shupak / Responsible Statecraft
(September 27, 2023) — News media manufactures consent, and one way that happens is by manufacturing amnesia — burying a government’s past misdeeds makes it easier to sell future ones.
The catastrophic floods that Storm Daniel unleashed on Libya, which have killed as many as 10,000 people, are both a natural disaster and a human-made one. In the week following Storm Daniel, a large portion of the media coverage described “war” as a reason the country was ill-equipped to handle the catastrophe.
However, media discussion of NATO’s contribution to what has become Libya’s forever war has been almost non-existent. NATO’s intimate involvement — albeit by proxy — in the current war in Ukraine makes the omission all the more remarkable.
War in contemporary Libya is traceable to February 2011, when protests against Muammar Gadhafi’s government evolved into an armed conflict. In the initial days of the fighting, the US media amplified claims that the Libyan air force was bombing demonstrators despite statements by top Pentagon officials that there was “no confirmation whatsoever” that such bombing was happening.
Western media outlets and politicians accused Gadhafi of carrying out a systematic mass slaughter of civilians, and of intending to do more of the same, particularly as government forces advanced on rebel-held Benghazi. In this climate, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 in March 2011, which authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.
NATO dubiously interpreted the resolution as granting it the right to overthrow the Libyan government. NATO forces — primarily Britain, France and the US — subsequently conducted roughly 9,700 strike sorties and dropped over 7,700 precision-guided bombs during their seven-month campaign.
NATO’s endless bounty of bombs.
The bombing not only assured eventual victory for the rebels — a mostly ragtag, disparate collection of local and tribal militias, Islamist fighters, and disaffected soldiers united only by their opposition to Gaddafi (whose death was facilitated by a NATO airstrike). It also killed scores of the civilians it claimed to be protecting and left Libya without a functioning government (in addition, it enabled the proliferation of tens of thousands of arms stockpiled by Gaddafi’s government to insurgents throughout Libya, the Sahel, and beyond, notably in Syria).
For most of the period since Gadhafi’s overthrow, Libya has been afflicted by a civil war that has seen the country split between two heavily armed rival factions claiming to be the government: Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) in the east and the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord in the west.
There is no evidence that NATO bombing directly contributed to the collapse of the dams that caused the catastrophic flooding in Derna (although the war reportedly interrupted rehabilitation work by a Turkish construction company). However, it is beyond question that NATO’s intervention contributed to the destruction of the Libyan state and social fabric, helping bring about years of warfare, one consequence of which has been the inability to maintain critical infrastructure.
Yet this context has been all but invisible in US mainstream media coverage of the recent floods, even in those reports that identified “war” as a factor that helps explain the scale of the cataclysm.
I used the news database Factiva to search material published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post — arguably the three most influential national newspapers — between Sunday September 10, the day that Derna was flooded, and Saturday September 16.
I searched the words “Libya” and variations on “flood,” such as “flooding” and “floods,” and got 67 results, the great majority of them supposedly “objective” news reports rather than op-eds., Forty of the 60 included the word “war.” But only three of these also used the term “NATO,” or just 7.5 percent of the content. Two additional articles contained the words “NATO,” “Libya,” and “flood,” but not “war,” instead using the word “intervention” to describe NATO’s role.
Thus, only five articles — or 7.4 percent — of the week’s total coverage of the floods referenced NATO.
Typical of the coverage in those articles when “war” was mentioned as a contributing cause of the disaster was a Post report noting that Libya was “battered by more than a decade of war and chaos, and split between rival governments, with no central authority to shore up infrastructure or draw up plans to save residents.” Later, the article stated that “Oil-rich Libya has been ravaged by conflict since the fall of its longtime dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, in 2011,” again with no mention of NATO’s contribution.
Similarly, the Times ran a piece calling Libya “a North African nation splintered by a war, [which] was ill-prepared for the storm….[D]espite its vast oil resources, its infrastructure had been poorly maintained after more than a decade of political chaos.” Regarding the events of 2011, the articles goes to note that “Libya endured 42 years of autocratic rule under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi before he was overthrown in a revolt in 2011.” This account suggests that Gaddafi’s ouster was strictly an internal affair and completely obscures the decisive role played by NATO’s campaign on the side of the anti-government forces, creating the conditions for further instability and warfare.
According to the Journal, “The natural disaster [in Libya] was decades in the making — a result of years of official neglect of two nearby dams during the authoritarian regime of Moammar Gadhafi and the political crisis and war since his ouster in a 2011 revolution.” The authors highlight the role that war played in setting the stage for the floods but gloss over how the NATO intervention against the Gadhafi government helped generate societal and governmental collapse, and post- Gadhafi warfare.
Of course, simply mentioning NATO doesn’t necessarily mean that a news article has given readers an accurate picture of what the alliance did in Libya. For example, a Post story says Gadhafi ruled Libya until “he was killed by rebel forces during a NATO-backed Arab Spring uprising.” This phrasing is ambiguous at best: it gives readers no sense of what form NATO’s “back[ing]” of Libya’s “Arab Spring uprising” took. An analysis by the Post’s Ishaan Tharoor, which was not published in the paper’s print edition, was much closer to the mark when it says that “Libya’s unstable status quo” is both the result of domestic political forces in Libya and of “the intervention of outside actors. That began with the NATO-led intervention in 2011.”
The Times, Journal, and Post repeatedly noted the link between the flooding in Libya and armed conflict in the country. However, with very few exceptions, the publications declined to acknowledge that, in 2011, NATO opted to bomb Libya until its government was overthrown. In this regard, the papers have failed to remind their readers that NATO’s intervention was part of the chain of events that led to this month’s calamity. Such a reminder would seem especially pertinent today in light of NATO’s much-touted reinvigoration and northern expansion owing to its growing role in supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion.
News media manufactures consent, and one way that happens is by manufacturing amnesia — burying a government’s past misdeeds makes it easier to sell future ones.
The catastrophic floods that Storm Daniel unleashed on Libya, which have killed as many as 10,000 people, are both a natural disaster and a human-made one. In the week following Storm Daniel, a large portion of the media coverage described “war” as a reason the country was ill-equipped to handle the catastrophe.
However, media discussion of NATO’s contribution to what has become Libya’s forever war has been almost non-existent. NATO’s intimate involvement — albeit by proxy — in the current war in Ukraine makes the omission all the more remarkable.
War in contemporary Libya is traceable to February 2011, when protests against Muammar Gadhafi’s government evolved into an armed conflict. In the initial days of the fighting, the US media amplified claims that the Libyan air force was bombing demonstrators despite statements by top Pentagon officials that there was “no confirmation whatsoever” that such bombing was happening.
Western media outlets and politicians accused Gadhafi of carrying out a systematic mass slaughter of civilians, and of intending to do more of the same, particularly as government forces advanced on rebel-held Benghazi. In this climate, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 in March 2011, which authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.
NATO dubiously interpreted the resolution as granting it the right to overthrow the Libyan government. NATO forces — primarily Britain, France and the US — subsequently conducted roughly 9,700 strike sorties and dropped over 7,700 precision-guided bombs during their seven-month campaign.
The bombing not only assured eventual victory for the rebels — a mostly ragtag, disparate collection of local and tribal militias, Islamist fighters, and disaffected soldiers united only by their opposition to Gaddafi (whose death was facilitated by a NATO airstrike). It also killed scores of the civilians it claimed to be protecting and left Libya without a functioning government (in addition, it enabled the proliferation of tens of thousands of arms stockpiled by Gaddafi’s government to insurgents throughout Libya, the Sahel, and beyond, notably in Syria).
For most of the period since Gadhafi’s overthrow, Libya has been afflicted by a civil war that has seen the country split between two heavily armed rival factions claiming to be the government: Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) in the east and the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord in the west.
There is no evidence that NATO bombing directly contributed to the collapse of the dams that caused the catastrophic flooding in Derna (although the war reportedly interrupted rehabilitation work by a Turkish construction company). However, it is beyond question that NATO’s intervention contributed to the destruction of the Libyan state and social fabric, helping bring about years of warfare, one consequence of which has been the inability to maintain critical infrastructure.
Yet this context has been all but invisible in US mainstream media coverage of the recent floods, even in those reports that identified “war” as a factor that helps explain the scale of the cataclysm.
I used the news database Factiva to search material published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post — arguably the three most influential national newspapers — between Sunday September 10, the day that Derna was flooded, and Saturday September 16. I searched the words “Libya” and variations on “flood,” such as “flooding” and “floods,” and got 67 results, the great majority of them supposedly “objective” news reports rather than op-eds., Forty of the 60 included the word “war.” But only three of these also used the term “NATO,” or just 7.5 percent of the content. Two additional articles contained the words “NATO,” “Libya,” and “flood,” but not “war,” instead using the word “intervention” to describe NATO’s role.
Thus, only five articles — or 7.4 percent — of the week’s total coverage of the floods referenced NATO.
Typical of the coverage in those articles when “war” was mentioned as a contributing cause of the disaster was a Post report noting that Libya was “battered by more than a decade of war and chaos, and split between rival governments, with no central authority to shore up infrastructure or draw up plans to save residents.” Later, the article stated that “Oil-rich Libya has been ravaged by conflict since the fall of its longtime dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, in 2011,” again with no mention of NATO’s contribution.
Similarly, the Times ran a piece calling Libya “a North African nation splintered by a war, [which] was ill-prepared for the storm….[D]espite its vast oil resources, its infrastructure had been poorly maintained after more than a decade of political chaos.” Regarding the events of 2011, the articles goes to note that “Libya endured 42 years of autocratic rule under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi before he was overthrown in a revolt in 2011.” This account suggests that Gaddafi’s ouster was strictly an internal affair and completely obscures the decisive role played by NATO’s campaign on the side of the anti-government forces, creating the conditions for further instability and warfare.
According to the Journal, “The natural disaster [in Libya] was decades in the making — a result of years of official neglect of two nearby dams during the authoritarian regime of Moammar Gadhafi and the political crisis and war since his ouster in a 2011 revolution.” The authors highlight the role that war played in setting the stage for the floods but gloss over how the NATO intervention against the Gadhafi government helped generate societal and governmental collapse, and post- Gadhafi warfare.
Of course, simply mentioning NATO doesn’t necessarily mean that a news article has given readers an accurate picture of what the alliance did in Libya. For example, a Post story says Gadhafi ruled Libya until “he was killed by rebel forces during a NATO-backed Arab Spring uprising.” This phrasing is ambiguous at best: it gives readers no sense of what form NATO’s “back[ing]” of Libya’s “Arab Spring uprising” took.
An analysis by the Post’s Ishaan Tharoor, which was not published in the paper’s print edition, was much closer to the mark when it says that “Libya’s unstable status quo” is both the result of domestic political forces in Libya and of “the intervention of outside actors. That began with the NATO-led intervention in 2011.”
The Times, Journal, and Post repeatedly noted the link between the flooding in Libya and armed conflict in the country. However, with very few exceptions, the publications declined to acknowledge that, in 2011, NATO opted to bomb Libya until its government was overthrown. In this regard, the papers have failed to remind their readers that NATO’s intervention was part of the chain of events that led to this month’s calamity.
Such a reminder would seem especially pertinent today in light of NATO’s much-touted reinvigoration and northern expansion owing to its growing role in supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion.
Greg Shupak writes fiction and political analysis and teaches at the University of Toronto. He is the author of the book, “The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media,” and a columnist at Canadian Dimension. His work appears FAIR, The Guardian, Jacobin, and The Nation.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
Libya Flood Deaths Expose
Climate Chasm in Conflict-hit States
Fahmi Igwianan and Nazih Osseiran / Context – Thomas Rueters Foundation
MISRATA / BEIRUT, Libya (September 20, 2023) — Over a month ago, Asmahan Balauon, a member of Libya’s eastern-based parliament, requested that it should establish a climate change committee.
She was told a date would be set to discuss the issue — but her efforts were overtaken by the fatal floods that struck the city of Derna this month after heavy rains caused the collapse of two dilapidated dams, unleashing a torrent of destruction.
“Unfortunately, our attention to… laws and elections and these things was a hindrance,” said Balauon, who is based in the coastal city of Benghazi.
Storm Daniel moved far faster than the conflict-torn nation’s politicians, triggering flooding that overwhelmed infrastructure and swept away parts of Derna, destroying hundreds of buildings.
The UN has confirmed more than 4,000 deaths from the disaster, while over 8,500 people remain unaccounted for.
A further 40,000 were displaced across northeast Libya, including at least 30,000 residents inside Derna, the UN said.
Scientists working with World Weather Attribution, a research collaboration that examines the role of global warming in specific weather events, said climate change made the heavy rainfall that led to Libya’s floods up to 50 times more likely and caused up to 50% more rain during that period of the year.
They also blamed other factors including building in flood plains, the poor condition of infrastructure, and years of armed conflict.
World’s Poor Left to “Sink or Swim”
Libya’s situation echoes that of other turbulent countries like Afghanistan and large parts of Africa’s Sahel region, which face growing climate-related threats while grappling with political instability and weak governance, making it harder to access funding for measures to protect people and assets.
Back in 2007, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace prize laureate, described this situation as “adaptation apartheid”.
“Leaving the world’s poor to sink or swim with their own meagre resources in the face of the threat posed by climate change is morally wrong,” he wrote in a UN report. “Unfortunately… this is precisely what is happening.”
That observation about the lack of finance for vulnerable people on the frontlines of a warming world — repeated many times since by a growing chorus of climate justice activists — appears to have changed little on the ground.
Ciaran Donnelly, a senior vice president for international programmes at the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian agency, pointed to “an emerging kind of tiered system”.
He identified about 15 countries simultaneously suffering from climate volatility and conflict-driven political fragility, including Yemen and Somalia.
Much of the donor cash available for building resilience to more extreme weather and rising seas depends on having an effective government to receive the money — a requirement that risks excluding politically unstable states, he said.
“Countries… where you have this kind of weak public sector, just won’t be able to access (climate funding) and they’ll get further behind,” Donnelly said. “It really becomes a kind of self-reinforcing, vicious cycle.”
Bureaucracy and Corruption
Climate change — while all but absent from the political narrative in Libya — has had a pronounced effect on the life of Walid Fathi, a 34-year-old government employee living in Al Bayda, a city west of Derna.
The floods swept away the back wall of his home and killed his neighbours, a family of seven.
What meagre savings he can muster from his salary will go towards fixing his house. He now lives in uncertainty and fear, afraid of the weather and what winter might bring.
“We do not know what to do,” he said. “We are afraid — we do not have anywhere to go.”
Neither the internationally recognised government in Tripoli nor the eastern authorities that have controlled Derna since the Libyan National Army (LNA) ousted jihadists from the city in 2019 had attempted to repair long-known weaknesses in the dams or tried to evacuate people before the forecast storm hit.
In addition, people living in different parts of the city were given different instructions by the authorities, said local families. Those living by the shore were told to evacuate, while others in the centre were told to stay put, they noted.
The LNA under Khalifa Haftar is the dominant player in the eastern half of Libya, a nation that has been divided since a NATO-backed uprising toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Mohamed Manfour, commander of an airport near Al-Bayda in the east, blamed the flood disaster on the international community and on governments ruling the two halves of the country.
“There are mistakes in the infrastructure, mistakes in the construction and architecture, mistakes in the lack of maintenance of dams,” he said in a phone interview.
In the hours after the catastrophe, LNA chief Haftar said on local television that the flood-hit area was suffering “difficult and painful moments”, adding he had issued orders for necessary support to be provided.
Tim Eaton, a senior research fellow on the Middle East and North Africa with Chatham House, a London-based think-tank, said the focus of many who have managed to gain power in Libya “has been staying in power”, rather than working to protect the population from external threats like climate change.
“You are definitely not going to be able to do these things and access these (climate) funds if nobody is really thinking about them and it’s not part of the political discourse,” he added.
Earlier this month, the head of the World Meteorological Organization said casualties could have been avoided in Libya’s floods if the divided country had a functional weather service.
Weak Weather Services, Infrastructure
Over in the west, at the Meteorological Centre in the capital Tripoli, the number of people with technical expertise in climate change “can be counted on your fingers”, spokesperson Mohieddine Bin Ramadan told Context.
The centre, which falls under the transportation ministry, lacks radars that can accurately measure rainfall across the country. Bin Ramadan said the public administration is corrupt — and bureaucracy often delays orders for months and years.
“If the government does not take care of the centre, then we cannot keep up with climate change,” he said. “We are missing a lot of things; it is not easy.”
The transportation ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The same issue affects climate services and infrastructure in other places around the world.
Depending on how they are managed and funded, they can either expose people to the impacts of climate change — as in Libya — or help protect them if well-maintained and planned to stand up to future climate risks.
Most of the Earth’s dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, said Caitlin Grady, an engineering professor at George Washington University in the United States, adding that many are now reaching the end of their lifespan, threatening disaster.
“We’re still going to have extreme rainfall events all over the world,” she said, adding “I would expect this to keep happening in multiple locations unless something changes in our fight” against climate change and for climate adaptation
Reporting by Fahmi Igwianan in Misrata and Nazih Osseiran in Beirut;
