by B. R. GOWANI
France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy (R) chats with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. PHOTO /ANTONIO COTRIM / AFP/Getty /Time
Former British prime minister (1997-2007) Tony Blair’s Eid wishes to Gaddafi and his family. IMAGE/Daily Mail
Vultures in Libya
The jobless rate in the United States at present is over 22%. There were 3309 foreclosures in just Maricopa County in Arizona in the month of August. This situation demands creation of jobs, not only to improve the economy but to also avert public outpouring of anger. The warring step Obama administration took (along with Britain and France), it seems, was to put some people back to work. This is what one may surmise from what the US ambassador to Libya, Gene A. Cretz said about Libya’s oil.
“We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources.”
The reader may wonder how can the oil in Libya create jobs in the US? Well Cretz clarifies:
“If we can get American companies here on a fairly big scale, which we will try to do everything we can to do that, then this will redound to improve the situation in the United States with respect to our own jobs.”
Britain, another member of the destroy-and-rebuilt trinity, is also in a hurry to get its share of the loot. Britain’s defence secretary, Philip Hammond, told the BBC:
“I would expect British companies, even British sales directors, [to be] packing their suitcases and looking to get out to Libya and take part in the reconstruction of that country as soon as they can… Libya is a relatively wealthy country with oil reserves, and I expect there will be opportunities for British and other companies to get involved.”
France, it was disclosed last month, was offered 35% of the Libya’s gross national oil production “in exchange” (the term used) for “total and permanent” French support for the “rebel” National Transition Council.
And now Libya’s interim leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil has asked NATO to stay till the end of this year because Qaddafi’s people may create trouble. The real reason seems that he wants to establish his own authority over various factions of the NTC through NATO bombings.
War costs
But who’s going to bear the cost of the war. Well, the people of Libya. Britain’s ruling Conservative Party’s member of parliament Daniel Kawczynski said:
“Libya is clearly not a country without means. We should not forget that in helping to free the people of Libya from oppression, we have also helped free an economy rich in natural resources that exported over $34 billion worth of oil products in 2009 and had a GDP estimated at over $85 billion.”
It reminds me a South Asian phrase: “Your ass, and your sputum.”
War crimes
To get unhindered access to Libya’s natural resources, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi had to be removed. (100 years ago, Libya became the world’s first victim of aerial bombing–the aggressor was Italy.)
The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had, during her last week’s trip to Libya, expressed her desire: “We hope he [Gaddafi] can be captured or killed soon …” Her wish was fulfilled. She proudly pronounced: “We came, we saw, he died.”
Professor Noam Chomsky once wrote about the Nuremberg laws:
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. By violation of the Nuremberg laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And Nuremberg means Nuremberg and Tokyo.”
(At the Nuremberg Trials, the German war criminals of the Second World War were tried. As usual, the victors punished the defeated ones, without pondering over their own crimes, and then presented their version of the history. On March 9-10, 1945, the US bombs turned Tokyo into a “raging fireball“. About 100,000 people died in just one night. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atom bombed in August.)
The Counterpunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn trusts “that in the years of her retirement Mrs Clinton will be detained amid some foreign vacation and handed a subpoena.”
Her visit’s other motive: “How to integrate Libya fully into the 21st-century world [read Western] economy.”
Juan Cole
Every illegal and heinous war has its defenders; one of them is Juan Cole. Here is his defense:
“You can’t protect all victims of mass murder everywhere all the time. But where you can do some good, you should do it, even if you cannot do all good.”
Most of the people were unaware of the fact that the US is in the business of doing good, such as the murder of Chilean leader Dr. Salvador Allende, reinstalling the Shah of Iran, overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, killing of over a million Vietnamese, …
Any leader who has tried to carve his or her own independent path has been harassed, overthrown, or murdered–and the country suffers the fate of embargo. George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state, once said about Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat that he says “unc” “unc” instead of saying the whole “Uncle.” When Arafat said “uncle” then he was on the tolerable list.
Cole’s argument, when translated in simple English, means: We can’t fuck all of the baddies so we’ll go after the ones who are not allowing us the full freedom to loot their resources and prohibits us from establishing our base/s in their country.
The point Cole intentionally misses is that the country professing to do some good should have something on record to show that it has indeed performed some nice acts in the past. Not to forget that the country embarking on a do-good mission has first taken all the necessary steps to make its own population happy and prosperous–instead of filling up prisons, letting the disparity between the rich and others widen, racism, and so on. And the main thing is: Who decides that some country is to be bombed in order to carry out a “humanitarian mission”? As far as the UN Security Council is concerned, it is merely a tool in the hands of the US and other Western countries to carry out their imperial agenda.
The US balance sheet as regards to do-good is in the red.
William Blum gives us the real reason behind the war:
“If the [Holy] Triumvirate [the US, NATO, and the European Union] decides that it wants to overthrow the government of Libya, though that government is secular and has used its oil wealth for the benefit of the people of Libya and Africa perhaps more than any government in all of Africa and the Middle East, but keeps insisting over the years on challenging the Triumvirate’s imperial ambitions in Africa and raising its demands on the Triumvirate’s oil companies, then the Triumvirate will simply overthrow the government of Libya.”
Shadow of tyranny
On Qaddafi’s death, Obama proclaimed: “The dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted,” “at a time when we see the strength of American leadership across the world.” Then he utters the favorite words of most of the leaders: “There will be difficult days ahead.” That is, don’t dream about anything, the future is uncertain.
However, the real motive behind the war against Libya, to establish a base and to strengthen the US hegemony in Africa, he does not mention.
What is happening right now in Libya is that the lifting of a dark shadow of tyranny is being replaced with the white shadow of US imperialism which will cover not only Libya but the entire continent of Africa.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com