Photo shows a hotel after a devastating NATO air strike in the early morning in Tripoli, Libya. [Xinhua/Hamza Turkia]

The Libyan 'revolution' will forever be remembered by the image of an anti-imperialist statue -of a fist crushing a US fighter jet -being smashed by 'rebels'. These images of victory were no doubt pre-planned by NATO's Information Warfare experts. A few hundred rebels dancing with machine guns in Tripoli's Green Square, were presented in the Western media as if the 'masses' of the capital city had come out onto the streets crying, 'free at last…free at last!'

The same scene was manufactured on the day that US forces took Baghdad in 2003. It later transpired that the 'rebels', who tore down Saddam Hussein's statue with the help of a US tank, were specially shipped in for the media occasion. Excited Western journalists declared the moment to be 'historic'; they probably felt a sense of collective pride in the US mission to remake the world in its image.

The Tunisian and Egyptian mass movements this spring were revolutions, in the sense that the urban masses, took destiny into their own hands. They toppled the long standing Western backed dictators, Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, through mass street demonstrations.

During the Egyptian revolution, even when hundreds of protestors were killed and thousands injured, Barack Obama and other Western leaders refused to call for Mubarak to stand-down, until the last minute; and instead they called for 'restraint on all sides'. The same diplomatic call for 'restraint' was made when the Saudi military invaded Bahrain to crush the Arab Spring there.

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When an uprising in Libya's eastern city of Benghazi swept away Gaddafi's local apparatus of power, the gleeful cheers in Western capitals indicated that something is rotten in the state of this particular 'revolution'. The fact that the rebel flag was that of the old monarchy was indicative of the reactionary nature of this 'rebellion'. Western secret services and military forces immediately opened lines of communication with the 'rebel base'. Western arms and money flowed to the Libyan rebels despite austerity at home. The rebels were declared to be the legitimate government and provided with all their needs.

Although Gaddafi had made some deals with the West e.g. providing oil and gas contracts, the Libyan economy remained overwhelmingly in public ownership and private capitalism played an insignificant role in economic life. The administrative and power structure was not that of a capitalist state, even though Gaddafi and his entourage engaged in kleptocratic activities.