|
How The War On Libya Will Continue
The obviously finally comes to light in some U.S. media. The "rebels" in Libya are just a bunch of maybe 1,000 wild running rag tags with no structure or real population support. On top of these, but without any control, are a handful of freshly imported expatriates, usually the U.S. indoctrinated type, and a few old Gaddafi hands who have fallen out with him.
Turkey did some yeoman's work to get the whole operation under NATO control. France's Sarkozy objected because he did see that it would end his plans. NATO is a political consensus machine. A majority of NATO countries, the two biggest old European ones, Turkey and Germany, and all the new eastern members, objected to the use of force against Gaddafi.
Now NATO is in control and will follow the UN resolution by the letter. It now sets the rules of engagement. Accordingly there will be no more direct air support for the rebels. There will be no official weapon transfer to them either.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen dismissed the idea in a CNN interview yesterday, saying “we are not in Libya to arm people, but to protect people.”
(France and the U.S. will likely try to circumvent that, but will hear some serious objections.)
Without air support the rebel gang will lose. This will not be a stalemate, the rebels will lose. Not only the oil cities like Ras Lanuf but all of the cities they "conquered" including Benghazi.
Before that happens there will be a lot of back and forth over hundreds of miles of coastal roads like we have seen over the last day. If you want to learn why that will be the case read Infantry Brigadier starting at chapter 7. New Zealand's WW-II officer Howard Kippenberger fought against Rommel in just the same area and his report on the back and forth is amusing and scholarly. Logistics, logistics, logistics …
For the rebels to win the U.S., France and the U.K would have to get troops on the ground, train the rebels, provide weapons, artillery, communication, medics, food and everything else and then start a march on Tripoli through cities with a hostile population. I doubt that now, as the likely length of such a campaign becomes obvious and more serious thinkers are finally getting the upper hand in the discussion, the will to do so will still be there.
Gadaffi may well survive this and the continuing sanctions. Libya has been under sanctions so many years that little will change. Someone will buy that light, sweet crude. Eventually some need will come up to rehabilitate him.
Then again I may be wrong on all of this. But I wouldn't bet on any other scenario.
At the risk of seeming hypocritical for criticising Bevin’s post of a stratfor report, I thought I would link to this stratfor report on the ‘business council for africa’ site which considers the demise of the current libyan administration, in light of Libya’s huge investment in Africa. Unsuprisingly stratfor concludes that it shouldn’t be too much of a problem:
Libyan leader Moammar Gaddhafi has pursued an aggressive foreign policy of Pan-African integration and the cultivation of Libyan regional dominance during the latter half of his 42 years in power. Consequently, Libya’s financial influence can be traced throughout Africa, raising the question of whether Gaddhafi’s potential exit might have any destabilising effect on the continent.
Historical overview
At the end of the 1990s, Gaddhafi established economic ties with many of the countries and groups he previously had backed politically. Through a series of investment vehicles funded by the country’s petroleum revenues, the Libyan state systematically developed an extensive network of financial holdings designed to generate a return on investment and to protect Libyan interests in strategic regions.
By 2002, subsidiaries of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), had accumulated or extended investments in at least 31 countries throughout Africa. The largest investments were in Zambian telecommunications firm Zamtel ($394 million) and in oil storage and pipeline infrastructure linking Moanda to Matadi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (around $300 million). The majority of stakes were significantly smaller, however. These investments came on top of an existing network of commercial banking subsidiaries established largely to manage the supply of ongoing petroleum exports from Libya.
Despite this, Libyan aid and investment does not appear to pose a concentration risk to any African government. The freeze on Libyan state investments does mean that subsidiary companies may struggle to access the working capital needed to maintain operations. But overall, Libya has spread its aid and investment too thinly to create a risk of destabilisation in potential client states.
What is stratfor saying? although african states, corporations & workers may suffer from being cut off from their capital by the newly introduced sanctions, it should not be so destabilising that insurrections occur?
After Libya was chased out of a meaningful role in providing assistance for ME countries by fukUS and amerika’s puppets in the house of saud, Libyans looked around for somewhere else to ‘do some good’ with their surplus oil revenue and settled on Africa where at that time, no one else appeared to give a flying fuck as long as they could assure stability in the resourse extraction areas they had dotted across the continent.
The engine of imperialism is fuelled by economics, so we have chiefly considered Libya’s oil as being the reason that france and england were so keen to get involved in controlling Libya and thereby ensuring that the amount of Libyan oil revenues spent in Libya was reduced. Their objective is to gain control of the Libyan administration to ensure more of the revenues remain within england and france. amerikan involvement would then be purely a sort of a charity thing, europe had zealously supported amerikan colonial wars over the last decade, so amerikan support for the violation of Libyan sovereignty was a relatively inexpensive way of keeping europe on board for the next ten years of the empire’s agenda.
But it may be more than that; certainly for the european nations who buy mobs of Libyan oil, aside from Italy who does sell a fair swag of exports to libya, most other nations have a huge trade imbalance which is prolly exacerbated by Libyan insistence on investing their revenue in African development rather than european capital markets and real estate. So stopping Libyan support of africa would save them a quid and may even allow the europeans to ‘tickle the peter’ that is to grab the Libyan entities currently operating in Africa under the pretext of ‘reparations for terrorism’ or some such bulldust, and make them their own. Certainly news emanating from england about the quisling Moussa Koussa have suggested he is being interrogated about the Locekerbie explosion.
Perfidious albion certainly needs ‘evidence’ that Libya was involved with Lockerbie because many people in england don’t believe that fit up is true.
But as well as providing a bit more ’cause’ for arming the new puppets, Moussa Koussa’s perjury, which may be a condition of his asylum, could easily create a situation where the cost of england’s war against libyans is immediately borne by Libyans, rather than on the more traditional drip-feed manner that imperialists normally utilise to ensure their subjects pay for their own oppression. England seizes a top potential earner like the Libyan funded LAP Green networks that has set up mobile phone services in Niger, Ivory coast, Uganda and Rwanda and plans on doing the same in Chad, Sierra Leone, Togo and southern Sudan. english pm cameron then hands the network over to his mates in the english mobile conglomerate, Vodafone.
But all of that is ancillary to the larger issue of why some elements of the amerikan empire have been so gung-ho about regime change despite the reality that the Libyan regime has been careful to avoid un-neccessarily antagonising the town bully for the last couple of decades. Africom and the awful reality that Africa is the last continent whose people have thus far avoided being made addicts of corporate consumerism, may well be the biggest reason amerika is murdering Libyans as I write this.
Exhibit A is the Reuters article dated november 2010 which says:
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said earlier this year he was offering to invest $97 billion in the continent to free it from Western influence, on condition that African states rid themselves of corruption and nepotism. That sum is about the amount Libya holds in foreign currency reserves, according to official data. Libyan officials have given no further details about Gaddafi’s offer.
I reckon that would have been the kicker right there. “get rid of the whitefellas, create a more egalitarian society and Libya will move all its cash outta the western banks where it is being used for perverse scams against ordinary humans, and put it into your economy where we can build schools hospitals and a viable alternative to western resource parasitism.” would have had oblamblam whose appointment by the amerikan elites was at least partly based upon his perceived ability to deliver africa without too much messy shooting, (something which would likely get african amerikans up in arms, threatening to boycott ‘good amerikan corporate leeches’), looking like the spare prick at a wedding.
For the Libyans to even suggest that plan was on their minds would be enough for amerika to secretly declare war, however much they may have assured themselves the promise was unlikely to be kept. The Libyans had just provided a ‘third way’ an alternative to two options of either succumbing to amerikan imperialism or signing up for the chinese style – exploitation without overt interference.
Now african leaders had choice something that has been denied most resource producing third world nations since the collapse of the USSR. They didn’t have to go with it because the nepotism issue would likely have discouraged the elites that have controlled much of africa since the colonial powers cut their post WW2 deals, but now they had a lever to negotiate better terms outta amerika and china with.
I knew that Libya had offered support to sub-Saharan africa at a time when no one else would, and seemingly with few strings, but does that reuters article which lists Libya’s investment in Africa, and shows much bigger investments than many of us were aware of, point towards the real reason amerika is happily slaughtering yet another islamic society, so soon after Gates promised “never again”?
sorry about spelling & typos that will be worse than usual, the machine I am using doesn’t have a spell check function
Posted by: Debs is dead | Apr 1 2011 4:50 utc | 25
|
