'New Priorities' Rally and March

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-were-not-being-told-the-truth-on-libya-2264785.html

The most plausible explanation is that this is a way of asserting raw Western power and trying to arrange the fallout in our favour

Friday, 8 April 2011

Most of us have a low feeling that we are not being told the real reasons for the war in Libya. David Cameron's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to jump on a plane and tour the palaces of the region's dictators selling them the most hi-tech weapons of repression available. Nicolas Sarkozy's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to offer urgent aid to the Tunisian tyrant in crushing his people. Barack Obama's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to refuse to trim the billions in aid going to Hosni Mubarak and his murderous secret police, and for his Vice-President to declare: "I would not refer to him as a dictator."

Yet now we are told that these people have turned into the armed wing of Amnesty International. They are bombing Libya because they can't bear for innocent people to be tyrannised, by the tyrants they were arming and funding for years. As Obama put it: "Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different". There was a time, a decade ago, when I took this rhetoric at face value. But I can't now. The best guide through this confusion is to look at two other wars our government is currently deeply involved in – because they show that the claims made for this bombing campaign can't be true.

Imagine a distant leader killed more than 2,000 innocent people, and his military commanders responded to evidence that they were civilians by joking that the victims "were not the local men's glee club". Imagine one of the innocent survivors appeared on television, amid the body parts of his son and brother, and pleaded: "Please. We are human beings. Help us. Don't let them do this." Imagine that polling from the attacked country showed that 90 per cent of the people there said civilians were the main victims and they desperately wanted it to stop. Imagine there was then a huge natural flood, and the leader responded by ramping up the attacks. Imagine the country's most respected democratic and liberal voices were warning that these attacks seriously risked causing the transfer of nuclear material to jihadi groups.

Surely, if we meant what we say about Libya, we would be doing anything to stop such behaviour? Wouldn't we be imposing a no-fly zone, or even invading?

Yet, in this instance, we would have to be imposing a no-fly zone on our own governments. Since 2004, the US – with European support – has been sending unmanned robot-planes into Pakistan to illegally bomb its territory in precisely this way. Barack Obama has massively intensified this policy.

His administration claims they are killing al-Qa'ida. But there are several flaws in this argument. The intelligence guiding their bombs about who is actually a jihadi is so poor that, for six months, Nato held top-level negotiations with a man who claimed to be the head of the Taliban – only for him to later admit he was a random Pakistani grocer who knew nothing about the organisation. He just wanted some baksheesh. The US's own former senior military advisers admit that even when the intel is accurate, for every one jihadi they kill, as many as 50 innocent people die. And almost everyone in Pakistan believes these attacks are actually increasing the number of jihadis, by making young men so angry at the killing of their families they queue to sign up.

The country's leading nuclear scientist, Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, warns me it is even more dangerous still. He says there is a significant danger that these attacks are spreading so much rage and hatred through the country that it materially increases the chances of the people guarding the country’s nuclear weapons smuggling fissile material out to jihadi groups.

So one of the country's best writers, Fatima Bhutto, tells me: "In Pakistan, when we hear Obama's rhetoric on Libya, we can only laugh. If he was worried about the pointless massacre of innocent civilians, there would be an easy first step for him: stop doing it yourself, in my country."

The war in the Congo is the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe. When I reported on it, I saw the worst things I could have ever conceived of: armies of drugged and mutilated children, women who had been gang-raped and shot in the vagina. Over five million people have been killed so far – and the trail of blood runs directly to your mobile phone and mine.

The major UN investigation into the war explained how it happened. They said bluntly and factually that "armies of business" had invaded Congo to pillage its resources and sell them to the knowing West. The most valuable loot is coltan, which is used to make the metal in our mobile phones and games consoles and laptops. The "armies of business" fought and killed to control the mines and send it to us. The UN listed some of the major Western corporations fuelling this trade, and said if they were stopped, it would largely end the war.

Last year, after a decade, the US finally passed legislation that was – in theory, at least – supposed to deal with this. As I explain in the forthcoming BBC Radio 4 programme 4Thought, it outlined an entirely voluntary system to trace who was buying coltan and other conflict minerals from the mass murderers, and so driving the war. (There are plenty of other places we can get coltan from, although it's slightly more expensive.) The State Department was asked to draw up some kind of punishment for transgressors, and given 140 days to do it.

Now the deadline has passed. What's the punishment? It turns out the State Department didn't have the time or inclination to draft anything. Maybe it was too busy preparing to bomb Libya, because – obviously – it can't tolerate the killing of innocent people. (Britain and other European countries have been exactly the same.) Here was a chance to stop the worst violence against civilians in the world that didn't require any bombs, or violence of our own. If the rhetoric about Libya was sincere, this was a no-brainer. It would only cost a few corporations some money – and they refuse to do it. So the worst war since 1945 goes on.

This all went unreported. By contrast, when the Congolese government recently nationalized a mine belonging to US and British corporations, there was a fire-burst of fury in the press. You can kill five million people and we'll politely look away; but take away the property of rich people, and we get really angry.

Doesn't this cast a different light on the Libya debate? We are pushed every day by the media to look at the (usually very real) abuses by our country's enemies and ask: "What can we do?" We are almost never prompted to look at the equally real and equally huge abuses by our own country, its allies and its corporations – which we have much more control over – and ask the same question.

So the good and decent impulse of ordinary people - to protect their fellow human beings - is manipulated. If you are interested in human rights only when it tells you a comforting story about your nation's power, then you are not really interested in human rights at all.

David Cameron says "just because we can't intervene everywhere, doesn't mean we shouldn't intervene somewhere." But this misses the point. While "we" are intervening to cause horrific harm to civilians in much of the world, it's plainly false to claim to be driven by a desire to prevent other people behaving very like us.

You could argue that our governments are clearly not driven by humanitarian concerns, but their intervention in Libya did stop a massacre in Ben Gazhi, so we should support it anyway. I understand this argument, which some people I admire have made, and I wrestled with it. It is an argument that you should, in effect, ride the beast of NATO power if it slays other beasts that were about to eat innocent people. This was the argument I made in 2003 about Iraq – that the Bush administration had malign motives, but it would have the positive effect of toppling a horrific dictator, so we should support it. I think almost everyone can see now why this was a disastrous - and, in the end, shameful - argument.

Why? Because any coincidental humanitarian gain in the short term will be eclipsed as soon as the local population clash with the real reason for the war. Then our governments will back their renewed vicious repression - just as the US and Britain did in Iraq, with a policy of effectively sanctioning the resumption of torture when the population became uppity and objected to the occupation.

So why are our governments really bombing Libya? We won't know for sure until the declassified documents come out many years from now. But Bill Richardson, the former US energy secretary who served as US ambassador to the UN, is probably right when he says: "There's another interest, and that's energy... Libya is among the 10 top oil producers in the world. You can almost say that the gas prices in the US going up have probably happened because of a stoppage of Libyan oil production... So this is not an insignificant country, and I think our involvement is justified."

For the first time in more than 60 years, Western control over the world's biggest pots of oil was being rocked by a series of revolutions our governments couldn't control. The most plausible explanation is that this is a way of asserting raw Western power, and trying to arrange the fallout in our favour. But if you are still convinced our governments are acting for humanitarian reasons, I've got a round-trip plane ticket for you to some rubble in Pakistan and Congo. The people there would love to hear your argument.

j.hari [at] independent.co.uk; http://www.twitter.com/johannhari101

http://www.counterpunch.org/sereni04082011.html 4-8-11

The few people Colonel Muammar Gaddafi did business with regarded him as unpredictable, inconsistent and temperamental. President Ronald Reagan described him in 1986 as the “mad dog of the Middle East”, sent the Sixth Fleet to bomb his country and imposed a strict oil embargo. Gaddafi was a pariah, yet 20 years later, he had put Libya back among the world’s top crude oil exporters, thanks mostly to US oil giants.

Clearly he must have behaved more rationally in his dealings with the oil sector than in other domestic and foreign policy initiatives, perhaps because he was less involved. International oil companies also learned how to operate – and make a lot of money – in Libya’s unstable, even hostile, business environment.

Libya became independent in 1951, as the product of a union between waning British imperialism and a Saharan Muslim order, the Senussi, whose leader became Libya’s king. Libya had long been known as the “empty kingdom” and was destitute, since its only export was scrap iron collected from Second World War battlefields.

Explorations by Italian geologists in the 1930s, continued by US army experts, suggested that there might be oil under this vast country of 1.7m sq km. Libya’s 1955 Petroleum Law broke with the usual Middle Eastern practice of granting concessions to a single company, such as Anglo-Iranian in Iran, Aramco in Saudi Arabia and the Iraq Petroleum Company in Iraq. Libya instead offered many concessions, limited geographically and, in duration, to five years. Once oil was struck, this proved a wise decision.

Some 10 companies joined the initial oil rush, and in 1961 oil was shipped for the first time from the terminal at Marsa el-Brega. In less than five years, production passed an unprecedented million barrels a day, and 19 companies, including Exxon, Shell, BP and ENI, were operating there; by 1968 there were 39. This new model for oil exploitation gradually went global.


Playing the oil companies

When Gaddafi took power in the coup of 1969, he was determined to get a higher price for his crude. On the advice of Saudi Arabia’s first oil minister Abdullah al-Tariki (the “red sheikh”, sacked by King Faisal for his outspokenness), he played one oil company against another, pitting the biggest, Esso, against a small independent, Occidental. He cut their daily production by half to try to force them to pay his government a higher price. Esso was able to replace its losses with production in other countries, but Occidental had no wells outside Libya. It was in a weak position, especially since the world’s seven biggesplus the US company Gulf Oil, and the European/UK companies Royal Dutch Shell and BP.refused to let it have a single barrel. “It has put all its eggs in one basket,” the Libyan negotiators sniggered. The company accepted the price increase. With the Suez Canal closed, the Achnacarry cartel followed suit in September 1970, and at a stroke, prices and taxes rose by 20 per cent.

Other oil exporting countries learned from this that it is better to deal with several operators than one, and to balance the majors with smaller companies without alternative resources. After that, independent and European state oil companies broke into the global oil scene.
Gaddafi and his Revolutionary Command Council, taking their cue from Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, were determined to make the nation wealthy again. But they also had to consider bad precedents, too, such as the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, removed from power by the CIA in 1953 because he had dared to take on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; and the Algerian president Colonel Houari Boumedienne, who nationalized French-owned oil wells in 1971 only to be subject to a costly embargo.

Libya’s actions were surefooted. The shah of Iran’s soldiers occupied Abu Musa and the Tunb islands in the Gulf in December 1971, just before British forces withdrew from the region. To punish Britain for allowing this to happen, the Libyan government nationalized BP’s assets. The pretext was flimsy but the stakes were high: BP owned the majority of the Sarir oilfield, the biggest in Libya. After a stormy legal battle, an agreement was signed restoring complete control of the oilfield to Libya. Every confrontation ended the same way: foreign technicians were harassed, work on platforms slowed and productivity was badly hit. Gulf, Philips, Amoco, Texaco, Socal and others abandoned the oilfields, and Libya, in disgust. The Libyan National Oil Company (NOC), which had been formed on the US model, had no trouble taking them over, and in a decade, national revenue quintupled, reaching $10,000 per capita in 1979.


Trouble starts

Politics were the problem. The US State Department published its first list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1979, and Libya figured prominently, because of its support for radical Palestinian groups. The US soon closed its embassy in Tripoli, and banned US citizens from buying Libyan crude. Then in June 1986, all trade with the Jamahiriya (Gaddafi’s new national term, from the Arabic words for republic and the masses) was declared illegal. When Pan Am flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, and the French UTA flight 772 was attacked in November 1989, international sanctions were imposed on Libya, affecting the oil industry. These added to problems such as the fall in the global price of crude, the expense of big construction projects and some disarray in the domestic economy. (That was the result of attempting to follow the recommendations of the Green Book – Gaddafi’s long and abstruse anarcho-collectivist tract, the “guide of the Revolution” preaching a third universal theory, halfway between capitalism and Marxism.)

Even though NOC easily found new markets in Europe, Turkey and Brazil to replace lost outlets in the US, the embargo ended its plans to develop oil exploration, petrochemicals and natural gas; these were put on hold for lack of western capital, technology, expertise and equipment. There were networks to bypass the embargo through Tunisia and Egypt, but it was expensive to pay off criminals on both sides of the Mediterranean. A nail or a screw cost five or six times as much in Libya after 1986. The oilfields were getting old, and it was essential to restart exploration if production was not to halt.

The period 1992-99 was difficult: economic growth slowed to just 0.8 per cent a year and per capita income dropped by 20 per cent. Discontent also grew, and there were uprisings in eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) and several attempts to overthrow the regime. Gaddafi had no choice but to give in. He handed over to the UK the Libyan intelligence agents accused of the Lockerbie bombing, and paid generous compensation to the families of the 270 victims (and a little less to the 170 victims of the UTA flight). After 9/11, Libya supported the US “war on terror”, and in 2003, a few days after US tanks entered Baghdad, Gaddafi publicly renounced any ambition to develop nuclear weapons.

On November 13, 2003 the last international sanctions were lifted, and Libya’s oil industry revived. Gaddafi wanted to double production rapidly, to over 3m barrels a day (the same as Iran), and make Libya an influential member of Opec, the cartel that sets oil prices. In August 2004 NOC auctioned 15 exploration licenses, starting an oil rush.

In all, 120 companies were interested, including several US and British oil giants that had left Libya in 1986 without being nationalized; 11 of the 15 blocks were given to US companies (Occidental, Amerada Hess, ChevronTexaco). Gaddafi’s strategy was again to favor US companies over European ones such as Total, despite the fact it had supported Libya through the period of sanctions. International oil companies were impatient to get into Libya even though the contracts were harsh: $133m to be paid on signing, and a minimum of $300m to be spent on exploration. In return companies would keep at most 38.9 per cent of production, more likely just 10.8 per cent.

So why is there such a lasting, mutual fascination between Libya and oil companies, big and small, given that conditions there are so difficult? Libya’s crude is excellent in quality, and its oilfields are close to Europe’s refineries, among the biggest in the world. Libyan oil currently represents around 15 per cent of consumption in France, although less than 10 per cent in the European Union. But the main reason is that the balance of power has shifted. In 1960 the British and US oil majors controlled most of the production outside the communist world. The national companies of producer countries have replaced them. They now own their mineral resources, and control access, even if they still need international companies to prospect for new oilfields.

Looking for oil is risky and expensive, so it requires huge capital and technical expertise. National oil companies have neither. Most of the money they earn is spent elsewhere (the Gaddafi family, with six sons and one daughter, takes more than its share) and their sphere of activity remains confined within their borders. So despite expulsions, revolution and nationalisation, the renewal of ties is inevitable, with or without Gaddafi.

Translated by Stephanie Irvine Jean-Pierre Séréni is a journalist.