Libya and the US game
I recently met a young man from Libya. Being the fist Libya person I had ever met, I pumped him for information about live in Libya and the US game post Gaddafi.
We had a good chat. These are some of the things he told me. No, I have not verified any of this.
He told me that Gaddafi himself had talked about his own assassination, and about what the US would do to Libya if given the chance. He spoke about this in terms of the external funding of the anti-government militants and what would happen if they succeeded in tearing the country apart.
He is utterly disgusted by what the US has done to its country. Admittedly he was only 16-17 when Gaddafi was killed but his memory was of a fairly free and prosperous, and safe, place to grow up in. An urbane, modern cosmopolitan Muslim state.
Cultured and progressive, with many renewable energy projects already online or in the pipeline.
Under Gaddafi Libya had a huge sustainable energy program, particularly solar..
See Libya’s idea to supply all of Europe with solar energy for Libya’s ideas to transform itself from simply being an oil producing country in the cross hairs of the US to a solar energy exporter.
For more photos of their various solar projects see
Now there are massive petrol shortages, sometimes the queues go for miles. Most refineries and oil wells have been closed. The currency is now worth 25% what it was.
It is important to note that Gaddafi was no saint either, and probably not someone you would like to have over for dinner.
Gaddafi was probably guilty of hasty things like the bombing of that airliner some years ago, and was possibly funding terrorist attacks on the West, although that also does not make sense given he knew the downside of that and was not interested in the war between Islamic sects or with the US.
He was definitely another Middle Eastern strongman who kept his country together, ruling with an iron fist a la Saddam and Al Bashari in Syria. But if we challenge the notion of democracy, as it is practised in the West, is a far superior system than how these guys ran their countries, then he was not such a bad guy.
Gangs and street violence
You do not go out in most Libyan cities and urban areas after 7 at night as it is too dangerous. You do not drive a fancy car cause you will be carjacked and or killed.
The huge solar and sustainable energy programs Gaddafi had built have been shut down. Electricity goes off for days at a time. Food supplies in the supermarkets are erratic as are the local markets.
Nobody even knows who the Libyan government is, as there are various groups who claim to be government as there are many groups that control various industries and areas.
We might well ask, when will the West (US hegonomists in particular) learn about ‘going into’ sovereign nations, about ‘regime change’? The society and culture, along with much of the infrastructure of the Middle East has been destroyed, and in some areas forever due to the use of depleted uranium weapons, and ‘we’ wonder why there are terrorists.
Maybe the destruction of the economies and culture of the the Middle East was the point. Not the concept of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and the choice to eat MacDonalds!
The prevailing view amongst people like me, leftist, cynical of the close alignment between US government policy and US corporate profits, was that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, were about oil and controlling the flow of oil.
Yes we knew about the threat posed to the $US by Saddam and Gaddafi wanting to sell their oil for Euros, undermining, possibly destroying the role of the $US as the international currency of choice, thus threatening the US economy with bankruptcy.
This was certainly part of the rationale of the Iraq war.
However, what about if this whole US/Middle East confrontation was about controlling the oil price?
I read somewhere around 2005 that Chevron had made an extra $750billion in profit by 2005, two years after the Iraq invasion, due to increased oil prices as a result of destroying Iraq’s oil industry.
In effect the cost of the Iraq war was born by US taxpayers but was recouped by US shareholders!
That was just Chevron, not including BP, Exxon etc.
Then of course these companies, in league with the US government and the Pentagon, build a war chest so they can then deflate the oil price to pressurise Russia as they are now doing, trying to trigger a massive sell-off (to US interests) by the Russians of their oil and energy assets.
Russian oil companies also enjoyed rocketing prices and their economy expanded rapidly, and now the cash has dried up.
The radical, ‘people’s government’ of Venezuala has also been all but destroyed now its shale oil industry has collapsed, being dependent on an oil price of $80/barrel to be sustainable.
The US economy has been struggling since the crash in 2008, and so low oil prices have also worked to stabilise it in its recovery period. Now the US is getting stronger, though Brexit seems to have knocked the world economy way more than anyone on the Brexit side imagined or verbalised, it may be time for oil prices to rise again.
Yes it all a manipulation on such a scale that it is impossible to conceive for most people.
By Mark O’Brien, July 2016
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