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I'm Scott Horton, and now pretty much everybody knows, I think, that after George Bush let Muammar Qaddafi finally come in from the cold back in 2003-2004, lifted the sanctions, the American oil companies raced over there to do business, and in fact they were even working to sell military equipment, with people like John McCain and Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham serving as brokers to try to sell armored personnel carriers and helicopters and even military training to Muammar Qaddafi for his death squads, up until even this February, at the dawn of the Arab Spring.
And now Brian Becker from the Answer Coalition has a great new article out at answercoalition.org today about some newly wiki-leaked State Department cables describing the American oil companies' interest in Libya leading up to American intervention in the war there.
What have you got for us, Brian?
Well, as you mentioned, Scott, after 2004 when President Bush lifted the sanctions on Libya, U.S. and West European oil companies started pouring into Libya.
Libya possesses the ninth, it has the largest oil reserves in all of Africa, it's the ninth largest reserves in the whole world, it's a high-quality, quote, sweet crude, something very much valued by the Western oil companies, who had been in Libya and only forced out by the Reagan administration in 1986 following the attempted aerial assassination of Muammar Qaddafi in the spring of 1986.
Well, they came in after 2004, they started doing business.
Qaddafi was eager to do business with them, both to reintegrate Libya into the world economy, both to sort of give a bonus, I think, to the United States and Western European powers, who had been historically hostile to the regime, a bonus so that they would perhaps not continue on the path of regime change.
And so they were doing business, but we can see from the wiki-leaks documents that have come out recently, wiki-leaks documents revealing State Department cables as early as November 2007, that there was a growing alarm within the State Department reflected by the positions of these same oil companies that Qaddafi and the Qaddafi government were guilty of, quote, Libyan resource nationalism, meaning that they wanted more of the profits for Libya.
They wanted the oil companies to hire Libyans to be the managers of the oil companies.
They wanted the subsidiaries of these major oil companies to take Libyan names.
They amended the Libyan labor law in a way that affected the operations of the oil companies.
And then we see through the State Department cables, 2007, 2008, 2009, a growing hostility to Qaddafi based on this, quote, resource nationalism.
And I think that the resource nationalism language is significant and historically interesting because that's the same language that the U.S. government and the British government employed against Dr. Mohammad Mozag-Dei, the democratically elected secular government of Iran in 1951.
They accused him of resource nationalism when he nationalized what was then called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, that which we now know as BP or British Petroleum.
And for that crime, the crime of trying to keep more of the oil profits to help Iranians overcome the problem and legacy of poverty, illiteracy under development, for that crime, Mozag-Dei was targeted, demonized, the country had sanctions imposed on it.
Eventually there was enough human suffering, especially in the middle class in Iran, that they became the human materiel for a joint CIA-British intelligence coup d'etat in 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and brought to the throne the Shah, who then ruled Iran for 26 years, denationalized the oil, gave the oil back to the Western oil companies, and imposed a terror against anybody who spoke out.
So we see this, and through these leaked cables, sort of a continuum that the U.S. government has hostility towards Gaddafi, as they did against Mozag-Dei, not because Gaddafi was violating human rights, even if he was, not because he was violating democracy, even if he was.
They were condemning and getting angrier and angrier with Gaddafi because he was asserting some Libyan province over their own oil, and that's what these WikiLeaks release documents show.
And then they get particularly alarmed because in 2009, in a far-reaching speech before Georgetown University students, Gaddafi says, well, perhaps Libya and the other oil-exporting nations should nationalize their oil.
That sounded big alarms, because how dare the Libyans actually think that they should become the owners of their own oil supplies.
I think the cables reflect the fact that if there had been no civil war starting in February 2011, if there had been no Arab Spring that led to this conflict inside of Libya, the U.S. government, the European governments, including Italy, France, Britain, those who are bombing Libya, they would have gone on doing business with Gaddafi, however annoyed that they were because of his policies.
But the civil war, and this movement became a civil war almost instantly, provided a pretext for them to go in and do what they, in fact, have wanted to do for a long time, which is to get rid of Gaddafi, any sort of regime that could promise any, quote, resource nationalism, and replace it with a proxy client puppet regime, such as the Iranian Shah's regime that took the place of that which was overthrown in 1953.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, talking with Brian Becker from the Answer Coalition.
The article is Why the NATO Powers Are Trying to Assassinate Muammar Gaddafi, and he's been reading through these wiki-leaked State Department cables about how annoyed the oil companies are about Gaddafi's, quote-unquote, resource nationalism, but of course, again, as described, that's just a turn of phrase.
He wasn't really trying to nationalize things, just increase his cut a bit.
But, you know, well, a couple of things.
First of all, and you may know better than me on this one, but I had a conversation once with Greg Palast where he said that actually Mossadegh didn't really nationalize the oil, that really all he did was basically what you described Gaddafi doing, insisting that, come on, you guys are getting all the profits, shouldn't we get a couple of percent or something, and that that was enough to instigate Operation Ajax against him back in 1953.
I don't know if you can confirm or deny that.
Well, I think that there's a gray area when it comes to oil nationalization, and we see this even now, what's going on, say, in Iraq.
You know, the U.S. invaded Iraq, it took down the old government in 2003, it liquidated the Constitution of the Ba'athists, which said that the oil must be state-owned and that no non-Arab could own banks or oil companies in Iraq.
And then, as it turned out, when the new Constitution began the allowance of contracts and the re-entry of major oil companies into Iraq to service those fields, those contracts started to go to Western oil companies.
Now, the U.S. only got one major oil contract by the end, and then the Bush administration and even the Obama administration said, see, the war wasn't about oil because we didn't get the principal contracts.
But now you look at what's really going on to service the fields, the biggest contractors are Americans.
They're Halliburton.
In other words, they may not own the oil straight out, but they're servicing the fields, they're bringing in the new technology, they're providing the networks for refining and for the distribution of that oil.
They're taking fundamental control, even if they don't have the deed for ownership.
And so I think that there is this gray area, because the world economy is dominated by the major oil giants, because the refining and transportation networks are still basically in Western hands, and even if there's a formal nationalization, it doesn't necessarily mean the exclusion of the Western oil companies.
You can see that's certainly the case in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
But there is sort of an underlying element, and that is those governments like Libya, like Syria, like Iran, have been historically independent of the complete and utter domination by the West, by the Western former colonizing countries, the imperial establishment, if you will.
And it's noteworthy that these countries, who may be no less or more brutal than others, say in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Yemen, become the focus of a selective kind of demonization, so that the West, which only really pursues its own interests, Britain, France, I mean, look at what they did to North Africa.
I mean, a million Algerians died in the war to be free of the French.
It's quite ludicrous to hear the French prime minister, Sarkozy, or any of them getting up and saying, because of their tender concern for the people of North Africa, that they must carry out humanitarian intervention.
The underlying thing is these countries that are global partners and dominant powers in the global economy, they have interests, and those interests are to control not just a country, but a region that possesses two-thirds of the world's natural gas and oil supplies.
Well, and it's also, it seems like they're interested in setting the example, if they can, that wage a revolution if you want, but we'll find our way to hijack it and keep you under our thumb anyway, and why even bother then if the CIA is going to end up running your country anyway?
I think that's an excellent point, and I think that may have been more than half of the rationale behind the Iraq invasion.
I mean, remember what Rumsfeld said right after the government in Baghdad, the Saddam Hussein government fell, which was April 9, 2003, just three weeks after the invasion force entered the country.
He got up and ran to the microphone basically and said, let this be a message to Iran and to Lebanon and to others.
Learn the lesson of Iraq.
Now, that's kind of ironic, because Iraq turned out to be a lesson for those who choose the path of occupation.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, thousands of Americans died, tens of thousands had either physical or psychic wounds that were life-changing in character, but clearly the United States did not prevail in Iraq.
I mean, they prevailed in terms of shredding the country and having oceans of human suffering, but Iraq is not a passive, pliant tool of the United States, nor will it be.
And I think we can hear that now, too, in the words of Hillary Clinton, to other governments in the Middle East, learn the lesson of Libya.
And I think that is the kind of menacing, bullying sort of approach that basically is falling on deaf ears at this point, because the people of the world are rising up not for any other reason than they must rise up.
The conditions that they're living under, the economic conditions, the unemployment, the repression, all of those factors make people do things that they would normally not do, but do do during times of revolutionary upsurge.
All right, now, Brian, I wonder, and I'm sorry we're short on time here, but I'm curious, when you're reading through these Wikileaks State Department cables about the oil companies and Muammar Gaddafi's regime there, is there any kind of funny, ironic note of self-reflection at all on the part of these State Department bureaucrats that they are simply the bag men of these oil companies, that they basically are just contractors on loan working through Foggy Bottom for Exxon or whatever over here?
No, you know, that's the great thing about the Wikileaks documents, is that it's kind of a little bit like the old, not exactly, but a little bit like the old 19th century diplomacy, where the empire builders, the imperial forces, the colonizers sort of spoke candidly and didn't have to find noble phrases to explain their motives in going into and colonizing countries.
They speak quite candidly.
And there's no reflection that would suggest that the operations of the United States in carrying out regime change or pressuring this, that, or another government has the opposite of its intended effect.
There's nothing like that.
These are just State Department officials telling their bosses back in Washington exactly what things are, and they speak candidly.
I mean, can you imagine accusing a country of resource nationalism?
Can you imagine another country accusing an American government of trying to look out for American interests inside the United States?
I mean, the colonial arrogance of the language is pronounced and, of course, well recognized throughout the region.
Well, and you know, if there's one way to get it through to the average American, it's got to be to beg them to just put the shoe on the other foot for many.
You think just how kind of, you know, hat over our heart nationalistic Americans are.
Just imagine for a moment if any country was ever doing any of these things to us.
If a foreign country had their navy off our coast in a threatening manner, dictated to us, put sanctions on us or whatever, we'd nuke them off the face of the earth.
Right.
I mean, I'm reminded, as you mentioned, that in the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden raid, which, you know, the Obama administration sent the SEALs in not only prepared to kill, certainly not capture, but to kill Osama bin Laden, but to fight off and defeat any Pakistani resistance to the armed incursion of their own national territory.
And Noam Chomsky writing about that said, well, Americans just should think about it like this.
Iraq was the victim of massive terrorism by the Bush administration.
Just think if Iraqi commandos came to Texas, flew in, executed George W. Bush, assassinated him, and then took his body out and dumped it in the Atlantic Ocean.
I mean, that's the way the people in Pakistan feel.
That's the way the people in Afghanistan feel, that the imperial powers, the Pentagon, because they think they're the 700-pound gorilla and can sit wherever they want to because of a trillion-dollar military budget, can come in and just flagrantly shred the sovereignty, independence of people everywhere.
That ultimately and always will breed resistance and hostility and necessarily will blow back against the United States.
Absolutely.
That's where we are, just about halfway through 2011.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Brian.
I really do appreciate it.
Everybody, that's Brian Becker from The Answer Coalition.
This great article is called, Why the NATO Powers Are Trying to Assassinate Muammar Gaddafi.
And that's it for tonight's show, Anti-War Radio, here on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, every Friday from 6.30 to 7 o'clock.
I'm Scott Wharton, and you can find all my archives of this show and many others at antiwar.com.
