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We’d like to have the latest breaking news for you here on the newest triumphant chapter of the Arab Spring – the rebel takeover of Tripoli. All we can tell you at this hour is:
- Nobody knows where Gaddafi is right now;
- His two oldest sons, including his right-hand man and spokesman, are in rebel custody and will probably be handed over to the International Criminal Court for prosecution;
- For the latest minute-by-minute news keep checking Al Jazeera’s Libya Live Blog;
- Celebrations will be held in Anaheim’s Little Arabia district this week; watch this space!
A look back at Gaddafi’s record-breaking 40-year dictatorship:
Hey, you want to see some real pathetic propaganda from yesterday?
BAGHDAD BOB LIVES ON!
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Update: “Top Ten Myths About the Libya War” by OJ friend Professor Juan Cole
(well, at least he corresponds with us by e-mail)
The Libyan Revolution has largely succeeded, and this is a moment of celebration, not only for Libyans but for a youth generation in the Arab world that has pursued a political opening across the region. The secret of the uprising’s final days of success lay in a popular revolt in the working-class districts of the capital, which did most of the hard work of throwing off the rule of secret police and military cliques. It succeeded so well that when revolutionary brigades entered the city from the west, many encountered little or no resistance, and they walked right into the center of the capital. Muammar Qaddafi was in hiding as I went to press, and three of his sons were in custody. Saif al-Islam Qaddafi had apparently been the de facto ruler of the country in recent years, so his capture signaled a checkmate. (Checkmate is a corruption of the Persian “shah maat,” the “king is confounded,” since chess came west from India via Iran). Checkmate.
The end game, wherein the people of Tripoli overthrew the Qaddafis and joined the opposition Transitional National Council, is the best case scenario that I had suggested was the most likely denouement for the revolution. I have been making this argument for some time, and it evoked a certain amount of incredulity when I said it in a lecture in the Netherlands in mid-June, but it has all along been my best guess that things would end the way they have. I got it right where others did not because my premises turned out to be sounder, i.e., that Qaddafi had lost popular support across the board and was in power only through main force. Once enough of his heavy weapons capability was disrupted, and his fuel and ammunition supplies blocked, the underlying hostility of the common people to the regime could again manifest itself, as it had in February. I was moreover convinced that the generality of Libyans were attracted by the revolution and by the idea of a political opening, and that there was no great danger to national unity here.
I do not mean to underestimate the challenges that still lie ahead– mopping up operations against regime loyalists, reestablishing law and order in cities that have seen popular revolutions, reconstituting police and the national army, moving the Transitional National Council to Tripoli, founding political parties, and building a new, parliamentary regime. Even in much more institutionalized and less clan-based societies such as Tunisia and Egypt, these tasks have proved anything but easy. But it would be wrong, in this moment of triumph for the Libyan Second Republic, to dwell on the difficulties to come. Libyans deserve a moment of exultation.
I have taken a lot of heat for my support of the revolution and of the United Nations-authorized intervention by the Arab League and NATO that kept it from being crushed. I haven’t taken nearly as much heat as the youth of Misrata who fought off Qaddafi’s tank barrages, though, so it is OK. I hate war, having actually lived through one in Lebanon, and I hate the idea of people being killed. My critics who imagined me thrilling at NATO bombing raids were just being cruel. But here I agree with President Obama and his citation of Reinhold Niebuhr. 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. I mourn the deaths of all the people who died in this revolution, especially since many of the Qaddafi brigades were clearly coerced (they deserted in large numbers as soon as they felt it safe). But it was clear to me that Qaddafi was not a man to compromise, and that his military machine would mow down the revolutionaries if it were allowed to.
Moreover, those who question whether there were US interests in Libya seem to me a little blind. The US has an interest in there not being massacres of people for merely exercising their right to free assembly. The US has an interest in a lawful world order, and therefore in the United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that Libyans be protected from their murderous government. The US has an interest in its NATO alliance, and NATO allies France and Britain felt strongly about this intervention. The US has a deep interest in the fate of Egypt, and what happened in Libya would have affected Egypt (Qaddafi allegedly had high Egyptian officials on his payroll).
Given the controversies about the revolution, it is worthwhile reviewing the myths about the Libyan Revolution that led so many observers to make so many fantastic or just mistaken assertions about it:
1. Qaddafi was a progressive in his domestic policies. While back in the 1970s, Qaddafi was probably more generous in sharing around the oil wealth with the population, buying tractors for farmers, etc., in the past couple of decades that policy changed. He became vindictive against tribes in the east and in the southwest that had crossed him politically, depriving them of their fair share in the country’s resources. And in the past decade and a half, extreme corruption and the rise of post-Soviet-style oligarchs, including Qaddafi and his sons, have discouraged investment and blighted the economy. Workers were strictly controlled and unable to collectively bargain for improvements in their conditions. There was much more poverty and poor infrastructure in Libya than there should have been in an oil state.
2. Qaddafi was a progressive in his foreign policy. Again, he traded for decades on positions, or postures, he took in the 1970s. In contrast, in recent years he played a sinister role in Africa, bankrolling brutal dictators and helping foment ruinous wars. In 1996 the supposed champion of the Palestinian cause expelled 30,000 stateless Palestinians from the country. After he came in from the cold, ending European and US sanctions, he began buddying around with George W. Bush, Silvio Berlusconi and other right wing figures. Berlusconi has even said that he considered resigning as Italian prime minister once NATO began its intervention, given his close personal relationship to Qaddafi. Such a progressive.
3. It was only natural that Qaddafi sent his military against the protesters and revolutionaries; any country would have done the same. No, it wouldn’t, and this is the argument of a moral cretin. In fact, the Tunisian officer corps refused to fire on Tunisian crowds for dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and the Egyptian officer corps refused to fire on Egyptian crowds for Hosni Mubarak. The willingness of the Libyan officer corps to visit macabre violence on protesting crowds derived from the centrality of the Qaddafi sons and cronies at the top of the military hierarchy and from the lack of connection between the people and the professional soldiers and mercenaries. Deploying the military against non-combatants was a war crime, and doing so in a widespread and systematic way was a crime against humanity. Qaddafi and his sons will be tried for this crime, which is not “perfectly natural.”
4. There was a long stalemate in the fighting between the revolutionaries and the Qaddafi military. There was not. This idea was fostered by the vantage point of many Western observers, in Benghazi. It is true that there was a long stalemate at Brega, which ended yesterday when the pro-Qaddafi troops there surrendered. But the two most active fronts in the war were Misrata and its environs, and the Western Mountain region. Misrata fought an epic, Stalingrad-style, struggle of self-defense against attacking Qaddafi armor and troops, finally proving victorious with NATO help, and then they gradually fought to the west toward Tripoli. The most dramatic battles and advances were in the largely Berber Western Mountain region, where, again, Qaddafi armored units relentlessly shelled small towns and villages but were fought off (with less help from NATO initially, which I think did not recognize the importance of this theater). It was the revolutionary volunteers from this region who eventually took Zawiya, with the help of the people of Zawiya, last Friday and who thereby cut Tripoli off from fuel and ammunition coming from Tunisia and made the fall of the capital possible. Any close observer of the war since April has seen constant movement, first at Misrata and then in the Western Mountains, and there was never an over-all stalemate.
5. The Libyan Revolution was a civil war. It was not, if by that is meant a fight between two big groups within the body politic. There was nothing like the vicious sectarian civilian-on-civilian fighting in Baghdad in 2006. The revolution began as peaceful public protests, and only when the urban crowds were subjected to artillery, tank, mortar and cluster bomb barrages did the revolutionaries begin arming themselves. When fighting began, it was volunteer combatants representing their city quarters taking on trained regular army troops and mercenaries. That is a revolution, not a civil war. Only in a few small pockets of territory, such as Sirte and its environs, did pro-Qaddafi civilians oppose the revolutionaries, but it would be wrong to magnify a handful of skirmishes of that sort into a civil war. Qaddafi’s support was too limited, too thin, and too centered in the professional military, to allow us to speak of a civil war.
6. Libya is not a real country and could have been partitioned between east and west.
Alexander Cockburn wrote,
“It requites no great prescience to see that this will all end up badly. Qaddafi’s failure to collapse on schedule is prompting increasing pressure to start a ground war, since the NATO operation is, in terms of prestige, like the banks Obama has bailed out, Too Big to Fail. Libya will probably be balkanized.”
I don’t understand the propensity of Western analysts to keep pronouncing nations in the global south “artificial” and on the verge of splitting up. It is a kind of Orientalism. All nations are artificial. Benedict Anderson dates the nation-state to the late 1700s, and even if it were a bit earlier, it is a new thing in history. Moreover, most nation-states are multi-ethnic, and many long-established ones have sub-nationalisms that threaten their unity. Thus, the Catalans and Basque are uneasy inside Spain, the Scottish may bolt Britain any moment, etc., etc. In contrast, Libya does not have any well-organized, popular separatist movements. It does have tribal divisions, but these are not the basis for nationalist separatism, and tribal alliances and fissures are more fluid than ethnicity (which is itself less fixed than people assume). Everyone speaks Arabic, though for Berbers it is the public language; Berbers were among the central Libyan heroes of the revolution, and will be rewarded with a more pluralist Libya. This generation of young Libyans, who waged the revolution, have mostly been through state schools and have a strong allegiance to the idea of Libya. Throughout the revolution, the people of Benghazi insisted that Tripoli was and would remain the capital. Westerners looking for break-ups after dictatorships are fixated on the Balkan events after 1989, but there most often isn’t an exact analogue to those in the contemporary Arab world.
7. There had to be NATO infantry brigades on the ground for the revolution to succeed. Everyone from Cockburn to Max Boot (scary when those two agree) put forward this idea. But there are not any foreign infantry brigades in Libya, and there are unlikely to be any. Libyans are very nationalistic and they made this clear from the beginning. Likewise the Arab League. NATO had some intelligence assets on the ground, but they were small in number, were requested behind the scenes for liaison and spotting by the revolutionaries, and did not amount to an invasion force. The Libyan people never needed foreign ground brigades to succeed in their revolution.
8. The United States led the charge to war. There is no evidence for this allegation whatsoever. When I asked Glenn Greenwald whether a US refusal to join France and Britain in a NATO united front might not have destroyed NATO, he replied that NATO would never have gone forward unless the US had plumped for the intervention in the first place. I fear that answer was less fact-based and more doctrinaire than we are accustomed to hearing from Mr. Greenwald, whose research and analysis on domestic issues is generally first-rate. As someone not a stranger to diplomatic history, and who has actually heard briefings in Europe from foreign ministries and officers of NATO members, I’m offended at the glibness of an answer given with no more substantiation than an idee fixe. The excellent McClatchy wire service reported on the reasons for which then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the Pentagon, and Obama himself were extremely reluctant to become involved in yet another war in the Muslim world. It is obvious that the French and the British led the charge on this intervention, likely because they believed that a protracted struggle over years between the opposition and Qaddafi in Libya would radicalize it and give an opening to al-Qaeda and so pose various threats to Europe. French President Nicolas Sarkozy had been politically mauled, as well, by the offer of his defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, to send French troops to assist Ben Ali in Tunisia (Alliot-Marie had been Ben Ali’s guest on fancy vacations), and may have wanted to restore traditional French cachet in the Arab world as well as to look decisive to his electorate. Whatever Western Europe’s motivations, they were the decisive ones, and the Obama administration clearly came along as a junior partner (something Sen. John McCain is complaining bitterly about).
9. Qaddafi would not have killed or imprisoned large numbers of dissidents in Benghazi, Derna, al-Bayda and Tobruk if he had been allowed to pursue his March Blitzkrieg toward the eastern cities that had defied him. But we have real-world examples of how he would have behaved, in Zawiya, Tawargha, Misrata and elsewhere. His indiscriminate shelling of Misrata had already killed between 1000 and 2000 by last April,, and it continued all summer. At least one Qaddafi mass grave with 150 bodies in it has been discovered. And the full story of the horrors in Zawiya and elsewhere in the west has yet to emerge, but it will not be pretty. The opposition claims Qaddafi’s forces killed tens of thousands. Public health studies may eventually settle this issue, but we know definitively what Qaddafi was capable of.
10. This was a war for Libya’s oil. That is daft. Libya was already integrated into the international oil markets, and had done billions of deals with BP, ENI, etc., etc. None of those companies would have wanted to endanger their contracts by getting rid of the ruler who had signed them. They had often already had the trauma of having to compete for post-war Iraqi contracts, a process in which many did less well than they would have liked. ENI’s profits were hurt by the Libyan revolution, as were those of Total SA. and Repsol. Moreover, taking Libyan oil off the market through a NATO military intervention could have been foreseen to put up oil prices, which no Western elected leader would have wanted to see, especially Barack Obama, with the danger that a spike in energy prices could prolong the economic doldrums. An economic argument for imperialism is fine if it makes sense, but this one does not, and there is no good evidence for it (that Qaddafi was erratic is not enough), and is therefore just a conspiracy theory.
Remember all those dastardly “blame America first” liberals?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present the leaders of the “thank America last” crowd.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/177751-mccain-and-graham-us-failed-to-get-rid-of-gadhafi-fast-enough
Rick Santorum joins the “thank America last” chorus.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-santorum-on-obama-libya-20110822,0,945188.story?track=rss
This is really another job well done by the Obama administration. Some wanted us to do more. Some wanted us to do less, or nothing. I would have preferred this were approved by Congress. But it turned out well, we lost no people, we didn’t spend much, it was done in five months, and we’re on the right side of history for once.
The domino effect.
Leaders and their administrations being rejected by the people.
Next Syria, followed by Fullerton, California and then Washington DC.
The domino effect.
Vern Nelson wrote:
> This is really another job well done by the Obama administration.
All that President Barack O-bomba has demonstrated is that he is a far more sophisticated imperialist butcher than “Dubya.” Now if George W. Bush had been in office, you’d be blasting him as a war criminal for bombing the crap out of Libya.
> Some wanted us to do more. Some wanted us to do less, or
> nothing. I would have preferred this were approved by Congress.
So it would have been more acceptable to you if Congress rubber-stamped O-bomba’s criminal behavior? Hey, this is the same gang of thieves that rubber-stamped “Dubya’s” attack and invasion of Iraq, remember? You trust these clowns?
> But it turned out well, we lost no people, we didn’t spend much,
So it “turned out well” because the victims of U.S. aggression were unable to fight back and cause casualties on our side?
And yes, “we didn’t spend much.” The amount of money O-bomba spent on this “good war” probably would have paid university tuition for about 250,000 needy students. No big deal.
What’s really important is U.S. bombs succeeded in splattering the body parts of Libyans all over the desert. I’m sure the defense industry is happy their products worked. Maybe they’ll cut O-bomba’s campaign committee a much bigger check next year.
> it was done in five months, and we’re on the right side of history
> for once.
So while the O-bomba administration is using drones to kill hundreds of innocent civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan, propping up corrupt repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and giving the Israeli’s weapons to slaughter even more Palestinians, we’re suddenly “on the right side of history for once”?
I don’t know about you, but I find your statement analogous to claiming that some of America’s most prolific serial killers–say Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, or Ted Bundy–were “on the right side of history for once” because maybe at some time in their lives they helped a little old lady cross the street at a crowded intersection.
As for Juan Cole, his deeply flawed analysis absurdly hints that O-bomba and the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization is intervening in Libya because they’re deeply concerned about Muhammar Gaddafi killing people. Really now? That’s laughable given that our own crooked leaders–including O-bomba himself–have blood on their hands.
I mean, Democratic and Republican presidents–with the full support of Congress, by the way–were responsible for slaughtering about two million people in Iraq through 12 years of devastating economic sanctions and war, weren’t they? Bombs were being dropped on that country every 12 days when “Slick Willie”–the “peace president”–was in office.
When powerful countries want to attack a weaker nation for some nefarious reason, they most always use some phony pretext–like “humanitarian intervention” or “stopping genocide”–to justify their criminal actions. Adolph Hitler used the same ruse to invade Czechoslovakia. He claimed the Czechs were committing genocide. Was he a great humanitarian?
That Cole has bought into this garbage has caused him to lose all credibility with me, that’s for sure.
Now if George W. Bush had been in office, you’d be blasting him as a war criminal for bombing the crap out of Libya.
Nope.
…analogous to claiming that some of America’s most prolific serial killers–say Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, or Ted Bundy–were “on the right side of history for once” because maybe at some time in their lives they helped a little old lady cross the street at a crowded intersection.
Glad you admit it was a good thing that happened; however I bet the Libyan people consider being rid of a brutal and corrupt 42-year dictatorship is a slightly bigger deal than an old lady crossing a street.
Vern Nelson wrote:
> Glad you admit it was a good thing that happened; however
> I bet the Libyan people consider being rid of a brutal and
> corrupt 42-year dictatorship is a slightly bigger deal than an
> old lady crossing a street.
No, I was merely pointing out the irony you make saints out of butchers for trivial things. I mean, I’ve read biographical accounts that Adolph Hitler loved his dog. So what? Does that make him a poster child for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals?
And I’m not of the belief what the U.S. and the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization have done in Libya is motivated by kindness or goodwill toward the people of that nation. In fact, I’m not so certain if Muhammar Gaddafi’s regime was as unpopular as you have been led to believe.
As for O-bomba doing the “right thing” in Libya, that’s hogwash. O-bomba’s foreign policy is very selective. Let’s see: Saudia Arabia–which has a far more repressive regime than Libya’s–sent truckloads of troops into Bahrain to suppress an uprising there.
Gee, why didn’t O-bomba–our virtuous defender of freedom and democracy around the world–come to the rescue of the repressed Bahrainis by bombing the crap out of Saudis? I mean, O-bomba knows that we have plenty of firepower in the Persian Gulf, doesn’t he?
Of course, the reason why O-bomba doesn’t want to liberate the Bahrainis from their dictators and their Saudi backers is because these guys are pretty much our puppets and are sitting on a huge pot of oil. They are not “evil dictators” because they are our stooges.
The U.S. and NATO are meddling in Libya all because of oil–not in spite of it. They don’t like Gaddaffi because, unlike the Saudis, he’s not our puppet. He’s too unpredictable. So they’re taking advantage of unrest to toss him out and replace him with a trustworthy stooge.
Mr. Roberts, your points are well-taken. I’m sure you’re aware, however, that current policy in the middle east predates President Obama. If you’re suggesting less meddling in the middle east, I certainly agree…and as a general proposition, I’m sure Vern does as well.
Anon writes:
> Mr. Roberts, your points are well-taken. I’m sure you’re aware,
> however, that current policy in the middle east predates President
> Obama.
I wholeheartedly agree. But that doesn’t mean we should let O-bomba off the hook, however.
> If you’re suggesting less meddling in the middle east, I
> certainly agree…and as a general proposition, I’m sure Vern
> does as well.
I just find it funny that bloody oil wars become “good wars” when a Democrat president wages them.
If this were a “bloody oil war” you’d be right.
Vern Nelson wrote:
> If this were a “bloody oil war” you’d be right.
Obama’s NATO War for Oil in Libya
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162908/obamas-nato-war-oil-libya
And that whole revolution. Just make-believe? Or created by NATO? All those young rebels are dupes, or paid-off by Uncle Sam? All of Kaddhafi’s threats were a joke and his murders were a hoax?
Of course oil companies are going to try to take advantage of the situation if they can. What else would you expect? That doesn’t mean that’s the reason the Libyans revolted. Or the main reason we helped them.
Vern Nelson wrote:
> And that whole revolution. Just make-believe? Or created
> by NATO? All those young rebels are dupes, or paid-off
> by Uncle Sam?
It took almost six months of intensive bombing by U.S and the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization to get to the point to where “rebels”–most likely financed and armed by Uncle Sam–invaded Tripoli.
If Gaddafi had no base of support, his regime would have collapsed months ago. In my opinion, the “rebels” are dissident members of the ruling classes angry Gaddafi’s clan monopolizes the wealth.
If Gaddafi did a much better job sharing the loot he plundered with these other elites, I seriously doubt he would be in the predicament that he is in today. There would have been no “rebellion” at all.
The U.S. and NATO don’t like Gaddafi because he’s untrustworthy. He won’t let their oil companies rape that country of its resources. So they took advantage of the “unrest” by siding with his enemies to oust him.
> All of Kaddhafi’s threats were a joke and
> his murders were a hoax?
Who cares? The point I’m trying to emphasize is that U.S. and NATO meddling in the internal affairs of Libya has zero to do with any crimes–real or imagined–that Gaddafi may or may not have committed.
Heck, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, O-bomba and many other American presidents have all backed dictators, tyrants, and other murderous thugs who have committed far more egregious atrocities than Gaddafi.
And in a just world, all of these clowns–U.S. presidents included–would’ve been put on trial for violating the Nuremberg Code for pursuing policies that caused the deaths of millions of people around the globe.
Interesting that O-bomba doesn’t bomb Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or even Syria. Is it because the rogues that run these regimes are U.S. allies? Heck, the CIA used to send terrorist suspects to Syria to be tortured.
More amusing is O-bomba considers Iran to be a threat to the Middle East, when in fact, that country, despite being run by religious nuts, is a far more democratic country than Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, or Syria.
> Of course oil companies are going to try to take advantage
> of the situation if they can. What else would you expect?
> That doesn’t mean that’s the reason the Libyans revolted.
> Or the main reason we helped them.
That’s true. Maybe O-bomba had an epiphany and got religion? Like “Dubya,” he heard God tell him to bomb Libya to smithereens to save the little children of that country from their baby-eating dictator.
Or maybe his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, whispered into his ear and told him he should bomb Libya to divert attention away from the fact Saudis helped finance her husband’s presidential library.
If you do a search on Google, the corporate media–especially the business press–is going hog wild over the fact Gaddafi’s ouster means that Western oil companies will have unfettered access to Libyan oil.
You can ignore all of this. But when a “rebel leader” is quoted in the press saying petroleum firms linked to the U.S. and NATO countries are going to get juicy oil contracts, something smells rotten.
*Good article……thanks. Dr. Gadhafi…….is safely hidden in a dark celler in Syria,,,,
Good article by Juan Cole;
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/22/top-ten-myths-about-the-libya-war/?hpt=hp_t2
Whoops, I read the post before the update, sorry.
No, I was merely pointing out the irony you make saints out of butchers for trivial things. I mean, I’ve read biographical accounts that Adolph Hitler loved his dog. So what? Does that make him a poster child for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals?
No, I said simply, “another job well done by Obama.” My choice of “another” was partly combative, in the knowledge that most OJ readers are against anything Obama does (mostly from the right.) And I can think of “other” jobs well done by this administration – first thing that comes to mind is the Osama assassination, which you probably have problems with too. But that’s far from what you make it out to be – a general uncritical endorsement of all Obama policies. I more often than not criticize him on this blog, and am part of the chorus of voices wanting us out of Afghanistan and Iraq much quicker, and demanding a restoration of the civil liberties, rights, and privacy we’ve lost in the past decade which he’s done very little to restore.
All of your other criticisms have already been addressed and debunked by Professor Cole above, whom I realize you no longer trust as his views are not predictably and unrelievedly anti-American.
Vern Nelson wrote:
> All of your other criticisms have already been addressed and
> debunked by Professor Cole above, whom I realize you no
> longer trust as his views are not predictably and unrelievedly
> anti-American.
First, if you carefully look at what I typed, I didn’t say that everything Juan Cole wrote in his missive was wrong or incorrect. What I criticized him for is his naive support of U.S./NATO meddling in Libya and his incredibly absurd claim this is not an oil war.
Second, Cole is already being debunked as we speak on the issues I criticized him for. Do a Google search and you’ll find articles are popping up all over corporate media about U.S. and European oil companies jockeying for control over Libyan oil.
The New York Times, for example, came out with this great piece today illustrating the fact–something that I already knew–that U.S./NATO meddling in Libya has everything to do with ensuring U.S. and European oil companies get better deals:
The Scramble for Access to Libya’s Oil Wealth Begins
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/business/global/the-scramble-for-access-to-libyas-oil-wealth-begins.html
Another reason why the U.S./NATO are meddling in Libya not only because it is a major oil producer, but because Africa is has quite a bit of oil and the Western powers are scrambling to seize control every bit of it before the Chinese get any.
Efforts by the U.S. and European powers to seize control of Africa’s oil is being openly discussed all over the English-language press in Africa. Check out the article that The Southern Times of Africa published about this matter earlier this month:
Black Gold
http://www.southerntimesafrica.com/article.php?title=Black%20Gold&id=6173
The evidence overwhelmingly contradicts Cole. It is not surprising that CNN has made him a commentator on their blogs. They need useful idiots like him to parrot O-bomba’s lies that we bombed Libya to promote freedom and democracy.