NATO has been bombing Libya for months now, but it has not been able to break Muammar Gaddafi's grip on the oil-rich North African country.

Press TV talks with Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley, an author and historian in Washington, who argues that it is NATO's "imperialist coalition" that is nearing its breaking point.

What follows is the text of the interview:

Press TV: This looks like just another war waged by the West that civilians are bearing the brunt of it, doesn't it?

Tarpley: Well, the difference here is of course that the NATO and the CIA have an infantry and in that case it is made of people with heavy representation from al-Qaeda, the Libyan­­­­ Islamic fighting group and various Islamist rebels and that is pretty much what the Benghazi rebel council is made up of. Their infantry is obviously a kind of rabble in arms as long as they are up in these mountains of the west and as long as they are getting plenty of arm shipments from the French which they have been getting and of course NATO airstrikes, they are able to make a certain amount of progress but what you see now as soon as they get down into that plain where Tripoli is 60 or 70 miles away they are subjected to counter attacks and I think they are going basically nowhere.

The word from CBS and BBC is that Al Qualish is now in the hand Gaddafi forces so that may be a see-saw battle, but I think the bigger picture is we are now on the eve of the 14th of July, so it is Bastille Day and this is a tremendous embarrassment for President Nicolas Sarkozy; who would have thought when he started bombing Libya on the 19th of March that we would be on the 14th of July and Gaddafi is still holding out, much longer than Serbia did under a NATO bombing campaign ten years ago.

In the meantime, we have got Norway dropping out of the air war, this was ten percent of the whole NATO effort, Norway dropping out. The Netherlands say they will continue to fly the no-fly zone but they will not bomb. Prime Minister Berlusconi of Italy says he regrets the whole thing, he was forced into it, he likes to get out of it and the Northern League, his opposition, which is going to pressure him to get of it.

Finally here in the US, we are 16 votes away in the House of Representatives from passing a resolution to cut off all funds for this neo-imperialist escapades that Obama's got going and we have got essentially the perspective that the Cole amendment, which has already has been passed by the House, is cutting off all the money to the rebels, no tainting and no weapons for these rebels because US public opinion is learning who they are and who they are al-Qaeda.

Press TV: Certainly these countries, especially the US, went to this Libya war with a plan in mind, so Where did it all go wrong?

Tarpley: The plan goes back to at least November of last year when the secrete British French treaty was signed to bomb Libya some time during 2011. The idea was to attack and loot and to spoil Libya and get the Italians out. the idea was that Libya has all of this wonderful reserve of very high quality light crude oil and it also got the man-made river, Gaddafi's huge irrigation project, which means it is one of the main concentrations of fresh water available in North Africa and in the Middle East, so those were the two targets and this was then going to become south Misrata and that is the bombing that we are seeing now except that as the euro crisis spread, all of these countries are more and more bankrupt they lack the sinews of war.

I think the NATO effort is on its ways to collapsing and at that point the entire war will come to an end because the rebels simply cannot continue without this tremendous financial, military, diplomatic, media and other support from the NATO imperialist coalition.