it just had to intervene, unlike Bahrain which has compliant US toady/sock puppets running the show who are not inclined to set a bad example by trying to remain independent of the US empire.
It was also for a long time the official story that the US only went into Afghanistan with financing and support for the fundamentalist, Muslim "freedom fighters" after the USSR had invaded to put down these same noble freedom fighters. That was until Zbignew Brzezinski spilled the beans and acknowledged years later that, acting upon his advice, the US had been arming and funding the "freedom fighters" before the Soviet invasion with the express intent of drawing the Soviet Union into a quagmire. I wonder what we will find out about the sources of this Libyan revolution if/when it all comes out in the wash a few years down the road.
In the meantime when the mainstream media presents an issue like this as the US/Nato white-hatted cavalry riding to the aid of the oppressed freedom lovers (like we haven't seen that song and dance routine before), and the situation is supposedly so cut and dried, i.e. evil vs. good, you can almost bet there is much more to the story that will NEVER make it to air on the corporate, mainstream media.
The War in Libya: Race, "Humanitarianism," and the MediaBy Maximilian Forte
April 24, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- Firing for Media Effect: Setting the "African" Agenda "We left behind our friends from Chad. We left behind their bodies. We had 70 or 80 people from Chad working for our company. They cut them dead with pruning shears and axes, attacking them, saying you're providing troops for Gadhafi. The Sudanese, the Chadians were massacred. We saw it ourselves." (A Turkish oilfield worker who fled Libya, speaking to the BBC and quoted in NPR's "In Libya, African Migrants Say They Face Hostility," 25 February 2011)
"I am a worker, not a fighter. They took me from my house and my wife," he said, gesturing with his hands. Before he could say much more, a pair of guards told him to shut up and hustled him through the steel doors of a cell block, which quickly slammed behind them. Several reporters protested and the man was eventually brought back out. He spoke in broken, heavily accented English and it was hard to hear and understand him amid the scrum of scribes pushing closer. He said his name was Alfusainey Kambi, and again professed innocence before being confronted by an opposition official, who produced two Gambian passports. One was old and tattered and the other new. And for some reason, the official said the documents were proof positive that Kambi was a Kadafi operative. . . . All I know is that the Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits prisoners of war from being paraded and questioned before cameras of any kind. But that's exactly what happened today. The whole incident just gave me a really bad vibe, and thank God it finally ended . . . . Our interpreter, a Libyan national, asked (LA Times reported David) Zucchino: "So what do you think? Should we just go ahead and kill them?" (Luis Sinco, "Journalists Visit Prisoners Held by Rebels in Libya," Los Angeles Times, 23 March 2011)To what extent is the revolt in Libya a continuation of earlier race riots against the presence of migrant workers from Sub-Saharan Africa? Where do members of the Gaddafi regime, some of whom were apparently responsible for setting security forces against those migrants, fit in with the current rebel leadership? How does the calculated cultivation of racial fear and racially selective xenophobia tie in with calls for foreign military ("humanitarian") intervention? How might intervening powers be providing cover for another massacre, one that is color-coded and rendered invisible? How do the mass media, social media, and government pronouncements from NATO members feed off each other? When both sides in a war have killed civilians, by what definition of "humanitarianism" do we intercede on one side in an armed conflict?
SNIP
The Liberal Democratic Ideal" of R2P (Responsibility to Protect)?
The liberal democratic ideal of R2P can be so easily raped by cynical manipulations that it has become pregnant with irony after irony, resulting in miscarriage. This is the Libyan war's biggest ideological victim. It will be impossible for R2P advocates, who labored to produce stories of "genocide" in Libya, while turning a blind eye to reports of atrocities against civilians from Sub-Saharan Africa, to ever again invoke their doctrine without facing even greater hostility from those who will learn the lessons of the current debacle. As 24 "human rights groups" jointly invoked R2P and called for foreign intervention, not one of them mentioned, even once, the plight of African migrant workers targeted and killed by the Libyan opposition. Even if one rejects every single other argument made against "humanitarian intervention" in Libya, this fact alone, this racial blindness that effectively places Africans beyond the scope of "human rights," is a damning enough indictment by itself.
We have been repeatedly instructed that the opposition leadership consists of "academics, lawyers, businessmen, professionals" and because of this list of members of an elite class it seems that the assumption is that "we" not only actually know something about what these people stand for, but because merely of their membership in a professional club "we" should sympathize with them. Yet, it is also a way of getting us to think white -- these are not "rag tag" black migrants and mercenaries, these are the respectable people, the forces of progress, deserving of human rights . . . as much as they deny them to others, as much as we ignore these others except as bearers of evil.
Maximilian Forte is a professor of anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, specializing in political anthropology, media ethnographies, and the new imperialism. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27957.htm 
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