[D66] Libya: “the jewel in the crown”

[Antid Oto]

Libya: “the jewel in the crown”
30 September 2011

In a recent teleconference with US businessmen, Washington’s ambassador to Libya
let slip a telling phrase while referring to the North African nation’s oil
reserves.

Ambassador Gene Cretz, who recently ran the stars and stripes up the flagpole at
the previously abandoned US embassy in Tripoli recounted to reporters the
contents of the briefing he delivered to representatives of some 150 American
businessmen. Joining him in the presentation was Assistant Secretary for
Economic, Energy and Business Affairs Jose Fernandez, the State Department’s
point-man on pursuing US corporate—and particularly oil—interests abroad. The
agency has also played a leading role in seeking US investments in Iraq.

“We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources, but
even in Gaddafi’s time they were starting from A to Z in terms of building
infrastructure and other things,” said Cretz.

The US ambassador continued: “If we can get American companies here on a fairly
big scale, which we will try to do everything we can to do that, then this will
redound to improve the situation in the United States with respect to our own jobs.”

The “jewel in the crown” is a phrase that is drenched in the history and
ideology of imperialism. First employed in the 19th century by the British Prime
Minister Benjamin Disraeli, it referred to India and its position as the most
lucrative source of profits extracted by British imperialism from its worldwide
colonial possessions.

That such language creeps into the official briefings of the chief US
representative in Tripoli is hardly accidental. It expresses the rapacious aims
pursued by American imperialism and its NATO allies, particularly Britain and
France, since the outset of a war waged on the phony pretense of “human rights”
and protecting civilians.

Now, with NATO warplanes and heavily armed “rebels” continuing a brutal siege of
the coastal city of Sirte, where bombs, shells and lack of food and water has
already killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians, capitalist interests from
all the major powers are engaged in an unseemly stampede to exploit the wealth
created by Libya’s oil reserves, the largest on the African continent.

Similar meetings of hundreds of businessmen have been convened in
London—addressed by the envoy of the Benghazi-based National Transitional
Council on Tuesday—and in Paris, as the governments who sent warplanes and
special forces operatives to wreck the country are now mobilizing a new invasion
of capital to extract profits from it.

On Thursday, Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina and two other Republican members of the US Senate visited Libya, the
highest level US delegation to arrive in the country since the beginning of the
NATO war last March.

The purpose of the visit was clear: profits. As the Associated Press reported,
“The senators said American companies are hoping to tap into the wealth of oil
and natural resources in Libya, which under Gaddafi long faced sanctions that
prohibited much business.”

“There is a desire here by the Libyan people to make sure that those who helped
get paid back,” Graham told reporters in Tripoli. McCain added, “I think
American investors are more than eager to come invest here in Libya and we hope
and believe that they will be given an opportunity to do so.”

In the past, the Libyan oil industry has been dominated by European
conglomerates, but US corporations such a Conoco, Marathon, Hess and Occidental
have been involved in a number of projects in the country and are anxious to
increase their grip over Libya’s resources.

McCain and Graham are no strangers to Tripoli. In August 2009 they were the
guests of Col. Muammar Gaddafi and his son and national security adviser
Muatassim. A US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks described the meeting as
“positive, highlighting the progress that has been made in the bilateral
relationship” and quoted McCain as assuring the Gaddafis that he would work in
Congress to expedite US arms sales to the regime.

These contemptible US politicians, who now bray about Gaddafi the “bloodthirsty
dictator,” are no more concerned now than they were then about the lives of
Libyan working people, thousands of whom have been killed in the war they promoted.

Having previously curried favor with Gaddafi to promote the interests of Big Oil
and Wall Street, Washington and its European allies saw the mass upheavals in
Tunisia and Egypt together with the beginning of anti-Gaddafi protests in Libya
as an opportunity to initiate a predatory war aimed at securing semi-colonial
control over the oil-rich country.

An indispensable role was played in preparing this criminal venture by a whole
layer of middle class ex-lefts and liberal academics who provided a chorus that
echoed and embellished upon the cynical claims of the US, French and British
governments that their only interest in intervening in Libya was to halt a
supposedly imminent massacre and to defend “human rights”.

>From the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, to the Nation magazine and the
Pabloite International Viewpoint, the glaring contradiction that the same US
government that took the lives of approximately one million Iraqis and continues
to slaughter civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere was
suddenly seized with concern about the fate of civilians in Libya gave them no
pause.

A leading voice in this camp was that of University of Michigan professor of
Middle Eastern history Juan Cole, who used his reputation as a critic of the
Bush administration’s war policy in Iraq the better to sell the war on Libya. At
the beginning of the war, Cole issued “An Open Letter to the Left,” warning that
foreign intervention should not be turned into a “taboo” and “anti-imperialism”
should not be allowed to “trump all other values”.

In this statement, he described the argument that the US and the other
imperialist powers were waging the war not to protect the Libyan people, but “to
open the way for US, British and French dominance of Libya” as “bizarre”.

The ongoing scramble for Libya has put paid to these pathetic apologies for
colonial-style conquest. The war itself has served to expose the movement of a
whole socio-political layer of ex-lefts and liberals into the camp of
imperialism, which they seek to serve by providing a “left” cover for aggression.

The movement of this layer is itself an expression of the deep-going social and
class polarization that characterizes US society and, indeed, the entire
capitalist world. Like the turn by the major powers to wars of imperialist
conquest, it is driven by the historic crisis of the capitalist system and is a
harbinger of coming revolutionary struggles of the working class.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/pers-s30.shtml