Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Mustafa Fetouri
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Progress without justice: why Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi’s killing is unlikely to reach a courtroom
Exactly 72 days have passed since the assassination of Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi. On 3 February 2026, in Zintan, a four-man hit squad eliminated the last “wild card” in Libya’s stagnant power play. The brazenness of the broad-daylight attack signalled a terrifying confidence, suggesting that the killers knew they had nothing…
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Western politicians lie, millions die: The architecture of manufactured consent
Modern ‘victory’ is prepared long before the first shot. It is paved with a sophisticated architecture of manufactured consent—where political deception and media complicity turn illegal aggressions into ‘moral necessities. To sustain a perpetual state of war, the public must be shielded from the gore of the battlefield and fed…
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The West Wing takeover: Replacing Libyan democracy with transactionalism
The shift in American priorities regarding Libya was laid bare on 18th February 2026, during the UN Security Council’s 60-day briefing. Libya observers including myself, expected the usual diplomatic platitudes from the US State Department, the microphone was instead taken by Massad Boulos. As the Senior Advisor to President Trump…
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When presidents lie, diplomacy dies: The global cost of post-truth under Trump
Lying is as much a part of statecraft as it is of human nature. History is littered with deceptions—some confessed, others concealed—employed by politicians for everything from survival to conquest. In the fragile balance of war and peace, a well-timed lie has often been dismissed as a ‘necessary evil’ meant…
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Board of Peace is a tactical smokescreen for war in Iran and Gaza
In recent days, the first publicly reported meeting between Hamas representatives and President Trump’s newly established Board of Peace (BoP) took place in Cairo. In high-stakes diplomacy, inaugural meetings are typically “get-to-know-you” sessions. However, the current landscape—marked by genocide in Gaza and a simultaneous offensive against Iran—does not allow for…
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Iran at 47: An anniversary or an obituary?
As the sun rose over Tehran yesterday, 11th February, the familiar echoes of revolutionary slogans filled Azadi Square, marking the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution not its collapse. For decades, observers have peered through the fog of sanctions and social unrest, wondering if each anniversary might be the…
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The “Donkey Flights” Project: Saving Animals While Strangling Gaza
While Gaza’s human population remains trapped behind concrete walls and fire, a curious “evacuation” is taking place. Under the banner of the “Donkey Flights Project,” an Israeli organization named Starting Over Sanctuary has been working with the IDF to collect, “rehabilitate,” and export Gaza’s donkeys to sanctuaries in France and…
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Libya and the UN mandates: A laboratory of frozen chaos
For nearly fifteen years, Libya has served as the world’s most expensive and repetitive political laboratory. Since the 2011 NATO intervention and the subsequent fall of Muammar Gaddafi, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) has operated through a revolving door of mandates and leadership. With the January 2025…
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Will Libya’s judicial divorce bury the UNSMIL roadmap for good?
The ink on UNSMIL’s latest political roadmap is barely dry, yet the United Nations mission is already sounding the alarm over a “constitutional division” that threatens to tear the country’s last unified institution—the judiciary—asunder. The recent escalations between Tripoli and Benghazi over the Supreme Court’s legitimacy are not merely technical…
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Somaliland and the Israeli recognition: A post-mortem of Arab strategic impotence
As 2026 dawns, the Arab world finds itself staring at a strategic catastrophe that is as much a product of its own making as it is a result of foreign design. The formal recognition of the Republic of Somaliland by Israel is not merely a diplomatic shift in the Horn…
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Maduro’s ‘capture’ and the linguistic coup: Why I have a problem with the word
As a Libyan who has lived through forced “regime change” scripts in my country in 2011, I recognise this pattern and the role the media played in defending the undefendable while claiming the higher moral grounds of objectivity and fairness. My suspicion was not born of hindsight; in fact, I…
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Despite war threats, youth revive Tripoli
Despite the constant threat of conflict, Tripoli is emerging as an unlikely hub for digital innovation. Co-working spaces have appeared where bombed-out offices once stood, start-ups promise fintech solutions to cash shortages, and social media is awash with talk of a “Libyan tech moment.” For a city better known internationally…
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Libya’s dried-up banks: The daily struggle for cash
Across Libya, thousands of people queue daily at bank branches, with lines often spilling onto streets and worsening congestion in already jammed capital roads. This is not a temporary disruption but a deepening cash crisis reshaping daily life, where physical money is scarce. Citizens remain trapped in a banking system…
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Libya: One of the most corrupt countries, yet still celebrates Anti-Corruption Day!
On 9 December, Libya’s Tripoli-based Government of National Unity marked International Anti-Corruption Day with a carefully staged event that leaned more toward celebration than self-examination. At a high-profile ceremony attended by Prime Minister Abdel Hamid Dbeibah and senior officials, institutions presented a series of initiatives framed as steps toward greater…
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Split on the ground, intact on paper: Libya’s enduring limbo
More than a decade after Libya fractured into rival administrations, the country remains split in practice—but not on paper. What prevents this fragile de facto partition from solidifying into a formal division, and why have external powers quietly accommodated it? As Libya drifts between paralysis and managed dysfunction, the real…
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How Israel poisoned Gaza’s agricultural land for years to come
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has not only levelled most of the built environment — satellite analyses in 2025 show damage to the vast majority of structures across the Strip. A UN’s last October assessment report puts damaged structures at roughly 81 per cent. At the same time, Gaza’s agrifood system…
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Beyond jargon: Tripoli’s ‘Supreme Authority’ is a self-preservation plot, not a co-ordinating framework
The Libyan political landscape, long defined by competing governments and institutional fragmentation, has recently delivered its most rent—and perhaps most confounding—invention yet: the Supreme Authority of the Presidencies (in Arabic, al-Hay’at al-‘Ulyā lil-Riyāsāt). Announced on 20 November 2025, in Tripoli, this body emerged from an agreement between the heads of…
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One funeral, one birth: From Cheney’s dark shadows to Mamdani’s bright horizon
In the span of just twenty-four hours, two events unfolded that seemed to bookend an era. On 3 November 2025, Dick Cheney—the chief architect of America’s forever wars—died, bringing to a close the life of a man whose decisions reshaped the Middle East through force, fear, and extraordinary violence. The…
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Haftar’s “Libyan solution”: A sovereignty claim or a power grab?
For months now, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar has been pushing to further legitimize his long-standing grip on power in Libya’s eastern and parts of southern regions. The general—who launched what he and his supporters called the Karama (“Dignity”) Revolution in May 2014—has always had one overriding ambition: to rule Libya.…
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Israel in peace and war: How society rejects peace and endorses genocide
Israel’s vaunted commitment to justice—and its long-held brag of having “the most ethical army in the world”—collapsed spectacularly this week. The scandal traces back to July 2024, when surveillance footage from the Sde Teiman detention centre captured Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian detainee, who later suffered severe injuries. Earlier this…
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Libya at the mercy of regional powers: Where is Washington?
Fourteen years after NATO helped destroy Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, Libya remains fractured, ungovernable, and exposed. Over the years, the once stable and peaceful country has become a battleground for regional powers, often tacitly encouraged by superpowers, including Washington and Moscow — with the former increasingly ceding the lead or remaining…
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Is Libya’s UN-facilitated political process stalling again?
When Hanna Tetteh, the new UN envoy to Libya, unveiled her “roadmap for renewed political consensus” on 21 August, it was meant to signal a fresh start after years of stagnation. She assumed that two months, a kind of self-imposed deadline, would be enough to implement the first stage of…
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On the Nobel Peace Prize’s troubling drift
When Alfred Bernhard Nobel composed his final will in Paris on 27 November 1895, he committed nearly his entire fortune to a bold and idealistic experiment. He directed that “all of my remaining realisable assets … constitute a fund, the interest on which is to be distributed annually as prizes…
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US 3Ps in Africa: Prosperity for Whom?
For all the fanfare surrounding the so-called 3Ps—Peace, Partnership, and Prosperity—being marketed by Washington’s new envoy to Africa, Massad Boulos, what is taking shape on the ground looks less like a genuine reset and more like the latest repackaging of an old project: US dominance over African priorities. In speeches…