Libyan Rebels Dismiss Entire Cabinet

Source: The New York Times

BENGHAZI, Libya — Rebel leaders dissolved their own cabinet on Monday, in an effort to placate the family of an assassinated rebel military leader and quiet discord in a movement already struggling to remove the country’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, from power.

A rebel spokesman said that the prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, the only member of the cabinet who kept his job, would have to present a new slate of cabinet members to the rebel legislative body, the Transitional National Council, for approval in the coming days. The cabinet was dissolved, the spokesman said, “for improper administrative procedures” that led to the arrest and subsequent killing of the military leader, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, a former top Libyan commander who defected to the rebel side.

The move left the rebels without several of its leaders — including the ministers of defense, finance, interior and justice — as they try to fight a three-front war, run dozens of cities under their control and rein in armed militias that have multiplied since the February uprising.

And it threatened to halt a flurry of financial negotiations between the rebels and foreign governments, just as the rebels have started to wrest millions of dollars in loans and other grants from their allies, who hold billions of dollars in frozen Libyan assets.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/world/africa/09libya.html

for their own enrichment. They are even treacherous to each other. A world class CIA misstep/overreach.

assets abroad. Now the fight for the spoils has begun. Expect more killings and dismissals. A real shitload of money
is at stake.

"Everyone gets $20k to stop fighting."

and miss the best pretext ever to line their own pockets - war.

:rofl:

The fact that he decided against the oil redistribution policies that some in the opposition wanted is telling (they were going to give everyone an equal stipend from the oil revenue but instead it went to line Gaddafi's pockets and into foreign investment).

Norway does it. Qatar does it. Even Venezuela does it. Are you saying that Gaddhafi shouldn't, why? Who the hell gives "equal oil stipends" to everyone?
Name one country that does it. That's the surest way to piss away the oil wealth and be left with nothing when reserves run out. If the opposition
really advocates such policy, they are even more irresponsible populist demagogues than I have originally thought. And Libyans are even more right
in fighting to keep those hacks away from power.

They suggested it to Gaddafi's people but it was rejected outright, because it was by being open to the world community, and Gaddafi knew his hold on power would be stymied by that.

And the stipend would only be a bad idea in an environment where free monetary flow was disallowed, ie, you get a lot of money but you can't hire some foreigner to spend it, etc.

"30 year plans". The Libya's dependency on oil will rid itself of in less than 30 years simply by virtue of that oil running out.
To prepare for that eventuality a country needs to invest its surplus oil money wisely and globally into assets which will
appreciate and yield good returns for future generations. Equal stipends for everyone ain't it.

Libya would be able to power all of Europe and Africa if it was able to build out its solar infrastructure, and that was part of their plan. They wanted to be able to have an educational system that people from foreign countries would want to come to, as opposed to sending their elites to the UK to be educated. Investing in globalization is the last "anti-imperialist" method you can possibly conjure, the oil money needs to be invested locally, for the people themselves and for the technology there. If they go and invest in Chinese solar tech then they aren't building the tech up there, for example.

As it stands now their entire infrastructure is based on oil, from desalination to power, and they know that this will end soon (as you said, "Libya's dependency on oil will rid itself of in less than 30 years"). As such a 30 year plan is absolutely necessary to maintain their level of development and their standard of living, otherwise when that 30 or so years are up, they'll be reliant on investments that may or may not be profitable, and their entire way of living would be in jeopardy, and indeed, prone to imperialism. Foreign investors hold all of your capital, it's easy enough, as the current situation has shown, to freeze those assets and even make up a reason to do so.

Ironically if Gaddafi really was an anti-imperialist as he loves to claim (and as so many here buy), then none of his money would've been in foreign investments to any significant extent and he wouldn't be hurting as badly for fuel and other necessities in the few cities he still controls. (NATO cannot legally stop a fuel or aid shipment.)

invest $300 billion within Libya and get an acceptable return on that investment. It is a small country with no infrastructure (and no human capital) for
such an investment. Even Norway, a way more advanced and better managed country with similar population, don't engage in such utopian fantasism
as you describe. If your post even remotely reflects the actual TNC economic program, your precious rebels are either delusional naives or cynical
calculating liars pushing right buttons on their naive supporters. In either case, god save the Libyan people if those con men somehow manage to
come to power.

Far better than playing with national markets, that's for damn sure.

Read their 30 year plan, their focus is more about education and servicing industries (that requires opening up their borders and allowing free commerce flow, which Gaddafi was against). The energy idea was proposed but was not central. I think they should make it central though, they're sitting on one of the sunniest places on the planet.

"30 year plan"? It is not going to be implemented anyway. They would put massive
conversion of Libyans to Catholicism in there, if they thought it would get them
more Western support. Even if they were sincere in their claims and by some freak
occurrence were forced by NATO onto Libyan people, their puppet government would
not last for two years, forget about thirty. Two years may be enough for them to
split the spoils and run, and certainly enough to fuck up the country in a way
obvious to all its inhabitants. Renewable energy, eh? A good one, now they are
saving the planet no less.

The uprising in Libya was predictable, Gaddafi had reports about it, wikileaks talks about how Gaddafi actually put the stipend idea out there to quell unrest in the country. I'm saying some of the people in the TNC and some of the people involved in the local councils liked the plan that was given to Gaddafi because it opened their society up and made it less of a North Korea.

Please drop the paranoia without one bit of evidence to those ends. It's just like another poster here (many in fact) who claimed again and again that the TNC was influenced by "Islamists." Then what happened? Oh boy, they routed the islamists from having weapons and arrested a whole bunch of them. Funny that.

Dozens of OPs about bad stuff with the rebels, but all the positive stuff gets flushed down the drain (actually, it's all posted in the Libya Revolution thread, but many people don't read it because it hurts their sensibilities).

because it reeks of cheap propaganda of the kind found on Pravda's pages in old times.
It does indeed hurt my sensibilities to read such transparently sycophantic crap. It is
hard to believe that anyone would be posting such drivel without getting properly compensated
for the deed.

Oh, wait, Alaska hasn't seceeded.... yet. (Sorry, Todd.)

With all of the posturing of "righteousness" and "decency", the world still won't condone the looting of the Libyan assets. This says something to anyone who isn't ego-deluded into following the huge lie that this is a "real" popular uprising. It isn't. It never was.

There's a reason why even the players (like France, the UK and the US) who are cynically able to twist reality to justify intervention won't fuck with the MONEY of a sovereign nation: they fear it could happen to them and their less muscular allies.

The sheer ugliness of this whole escapade is quite impressive, and it may well work in the long run, but it's already a rather long run...

Shame on the interventionists. Deep, moral shame.

Assuming Libya even gets through this without counter-revolutionaries spoiling things for them, they'll still have to earn international recognition, at which point in time the funds could be distributed.

Shame on anyone who pretends moral superiority while having in the past pretended that Gaddafi would've just peacefully arrested protesters and was right in killing those who were defending themselves against his aggression.

Basically the TNC has had a lot of issues for many months because many of the top cabinet members were and continue to be Gaddafi supporters. Jalil is the only one of them who was critical of Gaddafi for years before Feb 17 and who supported dissidents openly.

The house cleaning is a good thing.

:sarcasm:

they do know). I doubt even Libyans know the full truth (whatever that may be).

Good thread, though.