Why the West Is Attacking Gaddafi

By Michael S. Rozeff

May 12, 2011 "Lew Rockwell" – Outside powers in the West stirred up

and blessed the rebellion against Gaddafi. Through NATO and the UN,
they are now aiding these same rebels.

They want to get rid of Gaddafi. They want him removed from power. This
article explains why they want this.

The basic reason is simple. Gaddafi confronts their power. He confronts the
status quo of the Empire. He demands greater power for Africa and the
African Union. He demands greater power for smaller countries in the
United Nations. Gaddafi calls for investigations of past wars. He is calling
for a new way forward that reduces the powers of any one or a few
countries to dominate the world.

For the sake of appearances, the Western allies are fighting the war in
Libya within self-chosen limits. They need to maintain the facade of a
legitimate and neutral NATO that is acting with UN approval. These
organizations are under their control. They calculate that they can get rid of
Gaddafi within those limits, while still not appearing to be the aggressors
against him that they are.

Gaddafi’s relations with the West have always been rocky and filled with
mutual distrust. They have followed many twists and turns. A documentary
that interviews many of the major government players is "Gaddafi: Our
Best Enemy." This excellent production reviews the history between 1969
and 2009. A lengthy Wiki piece on Gaddafi appears here. See also here for
other views.

Pointing out some of the truths in what Gaddafi has said about the West
does not imply approval of Gaddafi’s own violence and statism. We may
disapprove of what these men of power say and do, but we still can
examine what they say and do in order to understand them and understand
what is going on in their power plays and disputes.

Gaddafi is a shrewd man of power, who has shown pragmatic flexibility in

doing what it takes to stay in power. He likes being in power. He knows
how to use power, with brutality when he deems that necessary. However,
no man of power is purely good or evil. He is no exception.
Like those who run Western states, Gaddafi is a statist. They all think
entirely in terms of the system of states. Although this system has violence
and immorality at its heart and throughout its breadth, these leaders all
employ a rhetoric of justice as well as a rhetoric of utilitarianism (that they
do evil things at times for the sake of a greater good).

The differences among these leaders are ones of degree and process, not
kind. They are birds of a feather. Some leaders are more ruthless and brutal
than others. Some are more open, others more secretive. Some operate as
dictators while others operate under cover of democracy. George Bush and
Dick Cheney brand Gaddafi as a terrorist and the West accepts this as
gospel, but when they attack Iraq and kill far more people than Gaddafi
has, the West mostly approves or looks the other way. Gaddafi is criticized
for overseas assassinations, but Obama is lauded for his.

Before Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program and made amends for past
terrorist activities, he wanted to be sure that the U.S. would keep its part of
the bargain. He distrusted the U.S. He thought that the U.S. might stab him
in the back after he gave up these valuable bargaining chips. After they
reached agreement, the U.S. did see to it that the U.N. sanctions were
removed and it normalized relations with Gaddafi and Libya. All the major
powers did the same. All sorts of high officials visited Libya, and Gaddafi
visited Paris where he pitched his tent. Soon oil contracts were being
signed. A period of sweetness and light followed.

Even before that agreement was being shaped between 2003 and 2008,
Gaddafi was pursuing cooperation with the West because the sanctions had
been hurting Libya so badly. He repeatedly warned the West about al-
Qaeda in the two years prior to 9/11. The West didn’t listen. For two years
after 9/11, he provided the West with rich intelligence about al-Qaeda,
which was one of his enemies.

Why then has the West now done an about face after the period of good
relations? Why have Gaddafi’s worst fears come to pass after a rather brief
period of friendship? After Gaddafi’s most friendly embrace and adoption
of Obama as his African son, why has Obama turned against Gaddafi?

It is not because Gaddafi met rebellion with force. It is not because the
West has humanitarian concerns. The West has done nothing against the
force used by Saudi Arabia in Bahrain and the force being used by the
government in Syria against Syrians in rebellion.
It is not because of a concern for democracy. In fact, Gaddafi proposed a
radical form of social democracy that the Libyan government rejected. He
proposed to nationalize and distribute oil revenues directly to Libyans. This
placed Gaddafi at odds with members of his own state bureaucracy and
with the Libyan National Oil Company. This friction between Gaddafi and
the government may be one of the factors that brought about a civil war.

There are two reasons why the West is now trying to uproot Gaddafi. The
first is oil contracts. In the negotiations in which Gaddafi gave up his
nuclear program and compensated the families of bombing victims,
Gaddafi held out the prospect of oil concessions going to Western oil
companies. As early as March 25, 2004, a deal was done:

"A deal was signed by Shell on 25 March 2004 covering the establishment
of a ‘long-term strategic partnership’ between the oil company and the
local state-owned energy group. It was penned during a ground-breaking
visit by the then prime minister, Tony Blair, and was followed up by
meetings during July between Shell and foreign minister Baroness Symons
and then the foreign secretary at the time, Jack Straw."

In 2007, British Petroleum (BP) was the beneficiary of another British-

Libyan deal in which Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was released
from a Scottish prison, where he had been imprisoned for the Lockerbie
bombing. The profits to BP were slated to be very large as reported in
September of 2009.

But in January of 2009, prompted by a crash to low oil prices, Gaddafi

made known that he was considering nationalizing the foreign
oilcompanies in Libya. During the oil price runup to $150 in 2008, Gaddafi
had put in place infrastructure projects that depended on a high oil price.
The breaking of the bubble was causing him problems, and so he seemed to
be pondering a way of getting more from the oil companies. By June of
2009, Libya had renegotiated its contract with France’s leading oil
company. It had already renegotiated with other international oil
companies. See here and here.

This public threat to nationalize may have been a bargaining ploy, but
combined with the renegotiated contracts, it was bound to cause the oil
companies and their government friends to become somewhat uneasy about
what Gaddafi’s next moves would be. Furthermore, Gaddafi had another
bargaining chip, which was the prospect of utilizing Russian, Chinese and
Indian oil companies. He could expand their interests in Libyan oil. In fact,
during the current period of hostilities, he invited them to make up for lost
production.
Prior to this war, Gaddafi had a multi-decade record of leaving the Western
oil companies alone and honoring the contracts. For that reason, it is
unlikely that the Western governments launched a war with the only reason
being to gain firmer control over the oil, i.e., oil operations less subject to
nationalization threats and more profitable for the foreign oil companies.

Libyan oil has to be viewed in the broader context of African oil. It is not a
well-known fact, but African oil rivals or even surpasses Middle East oil as
a supplier to the U.S. There have been large oil discoveries in several
regions of Africa. There is competition to secure this oil among the U.S.,
Europe, China, Russia, India, and South Korea.

This leads into and is connected with the second reason for the West’s
desire to remove Gaddafi, which is his bid to organize African nations
politically so as to have greater power as against the major powers in the
world, East and West. Under new conditions, the world is unfolding
another chapter in the rivalries over African resources, reminiscent of
earlier colonial-imperial rivalries. In this case, the West is still interested in
controlling these resources, but it is facing competition from nations from
the East.

Although the popular press makes Gaddafi appear to be an unlikely person

to unite Africans, the Western powers are not hesitating to chop him down,
if they can. The reason for their opposition to Gaddafi shows up in high
relief in Gaddafi’s extraordinary U.N. speech of Sept. 23, 2009. There is a
video with accompanying translation of his speech, here and here. There is
also a reasonably good transcript of that translation that is available.

In this speech, Gaddafi stood up against the West. He openly and pointedly
criticized the U.N.’s structure. He told many uncomfortable truths. He
raised many uncomfortable questions. He proposed global political changes
that reduce the powers of the big countries and raised the powers of smaller
countries, African countries, and Islamic countries.

Ironically, this war against him again shows the truth in some of his
harshest criticisms of the U.N.’s behavior and political structure. But this
time not because of his supporting what the West calls terrorism, but for his
striving to change the world’s balance of powers. The West turned against
Gaddafi because of this challenge.

As it turns out, Gaddafi’s critique of the Security Council and the U.N. was
precisely on target, although he surely didn’t expect that he would be the
one to provide another example so quickly. His distrust of the U.S. and its
allies also proved to be warranted.
Important elements of the mainstream press did Americans their usual
disservice by ineptly, ignorantly, and superficially dismissing Gaddafi’s
speech as ranting, halting, rambling, and off the cuff. They played up the
length of it, comparing it with Castro’s speech. They preferred to report on
his attire in detail rather than to provide details of his criticisms of U.S.-led
wars in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan.

The best way to understand why the West is putting down Gaddafi is to
read his speech in its entirety. Discard that which is frivolous or speculation
or personal. Retain that which is serious. Be patient with the inadequacies
of the translation.

This speech challenges the American Empire. It challenges the West. It

challenges the dominance of a few major powers. The West wants to
suppress this kind of thinking. The West is suppressing this kind of
thinking. The West is in the process of removing Gaddafi and replacing
him with their puppets. That is why NATO is bombing Libya. The West is
attacking Gaddafi to reduce the influence of his ideas among other nations.

The West cannot put up with a leader who says

"It should not be called the Security Council. It should be called the ‘Terror
Council’.

"The American presidents used to say to us, they shall terrorize us....And
we shall lead the world, and we shall punish anyone whether they like it or
not. We shall punish anyone who will be against us.

"Then we come to the Suez Canal war in 1956. The file should be opened.
Why three countries who have permanent seats in the Security Councils
enjoyed the right, the veto of the Security Council's attack, a member state
in this General Assembly?

"A country that is Egypt in this case, that was a sovereign state, was
attacked and the army was destroyed. And thousands of Egyptian people
were killed, and towns, villages were destroyed.

"How could such a thing happen during the era of the United Nations? And
how can we guarantee that such a thing will not be repeated unless we
redeem the past?

"And this is a very dangerous thing. The Suez Canal war, the Korean War,
we should open the files.
"And then we come to the Vietnam War. Three million victims of the
Vietnam War. During 11 days, bombs were used more than the bombs used
during the whole war. And during the Second World War, all the shells and
the bombs that were used, or bombed during the four years of the war, the
bombs that were used in the 12 days were more than.

"This was a fierce war. And this war took place after the establishment of
the United Nations. And we decided that there would be no wars.

"This is the future of the mankind, and we cannot keep quiet. How can we
be how can we be safe? How can we feel accomplished? How can we feel
complacent, I mean. This is the future of the world and this is the General
Assembly of the world, and we have to make sure that such wars will not
be repeated in the future.

"Then Panama was attacked, even though it was an independent state, a

member state of the General Assembly, of the United Nations. And 4,000
peoples were killed, and the president of this country was taken as a
prisoner and was taken put in prison.

"And Noriega should be released, and we should open the file. And how
we give the right to a country that is a member state of the United Nations
to go and wage a war against a country and take the president of such a
country and take him as a criminal and put him in prison? Who would
accept that?

"This may be repeated. And we should not be quiet, and we should make
investigations, and we should each one of us may face the same destiny.
Each member state of us may face the same, especially if this aggression is
made by a member state that is has a member seat in the Security Council
and supposed to look and maintain the world peace security.

"Then we have the Grenada war. This country was attacked, was invaded
even though it was a member state, by 7,000 - 5,000 warships and using
7,000 troops. It is the smallest country in the world.

"And after the establishment of the Security Council, after the

establishment of the United Nations, and the (inaudible). And the president
of this country, Maurice Bishop, was assassinated. How this can be done
with impunity? This is a tragedy.

"And then how can we guarantee that the United Nations is good or not,
that the Security Council is good enough? Can we be safe and happy about
our future or not? Can we trust the Security Council or not? Can we trust
the United Nations or not?

"Then we have to check and investigate the bombing of Somalia.

"Somalia was a member state of the United Nations. It is an independent

country. And (inaudible).

"Why? Who allowed that? Who gave the green light for such a country to
attack to be attacked?

"Then the Yugoslav war. No country that is peaceful country like

Yugoslavia, that was built that was built step by step, piece by piece, after
it was destroyed by Hitler. We destroy it as if we are doing the same job
like Hitler.

"Hitler after the death of Tito and he built this country step by step and
brick by brick, and then we come and dismember it for imperialist personal
interests. How can we be satisfied? How can we be happy? If a peaceful
country like Yugoslavia faced this tragedy, the General Assembly should
make investigations and the General Assembly should decide who should
be tried for the (inaudible).

"Then we come to the Iraqi war, the mother of all evils. The United
Nations also should investigate.

"The General Assembly presided by (inaudible) should be investigated by

the General Assembly, the invasion of Iraq itself. This was in violation of
the United Nations charter without any justifications made by several
countries who have member seats in the Security Council.

"Iraq is an independent country, member in this General Assembly. How

this country is attacked and how this country how we have already read in
the general in the in the charter that the United Nations should have
interfered and stopped."

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living

in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-bookEssays on
American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S.
Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.