In a view from the ground in Brega, signs of bombing campaigns carried out with oil production in mind. Gaddafi loyalists say NATO attacks kills civilians, spares the oil in a dirty war.

BREGA, Libya - Invisible to the eye, an airplane buzzes through the sky above the oil complex at Brega. One, and then two deafening explosions resound.

It’s not clear whether they are part of a new NATO strike nearby or shots fired by Libyan loyalists or rebels. Either way, a hint of anxiety is felt in front of the cracking towers of the small refinery situated in the Gulf of Syrte oil port, 800 kilometers from Tripoli.

For several days now, coalition air strikes have been targeting the Sirte Oil Company complex and its surroundings, just on the outer edges of the several-kilometer-long frontline of the Libyan conflict. But the interim director of the complex, Abderrahmane Mufta, insists the oil itself is safe. “We’re safe right here,” he tells a group of journalists visiting the plant under Libyan government supervision. “NATO will never destroy the oil installations.”

Read more: http://worldcrunch.com/are-nato-attacks-libya-all-about-oil/3383

They can't profit off of it.

The Post-Gaddafi Boom: In Libya, Foreign Bankers See a Coming Bonanza

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2076467,00.html#ixzz4D1IFziD3

Goldman already wiped out billions they owed to Libya and that's just the beginning. Water, oil, capital.

Clearly that's evidence that they want to set up an orphanocracy once Ghaddafi is gone.

Their biggest customer was Italy, France took a lot, and they had that new massive contract with BP that they just signed a year or so ago. The NATO strikes have resulted in LESS oil for the west, not more.

Sorry to undermine your conspiracy theory.

Qaddafi jacked up the rates to France's "Total" in 2009, so their take of 50% of the oil they pumped went down to 27%, and they did this with the threat of nationalization. Chevron and other American companies that had gone in after the cooling of 2003 left in late 2008 because of the onerous signing bonuses demanded and the rates. Wikileaks documents show the distaste for Qaddafi and his business practices going back a few years.

There is NO substantiation that Qaddafi was being a reliable or profitable partner to the French or other Western European countries, and this is precisely the reason why he had to go.

Repeating this absolute untruth is tiresome: it's been shown to simply not be the case.

Hand-wringing pro-war interventionists cling to this myth to somehow "prove" that Obama is the super nice-guy prince-among-men who's simply doing this for purely altruistic reasons, and that they are on the side of unblemished "goodness", instead of being stooges for imperialist corporate theft at the expense of innocent lives.

This is no conspiracy theory, this is outright resource theft and violation of national sovereignty.

"Qaddafi jacked up the rates to France's "Total" in 2009, so their take of 50% of the oil they pumped went down to 27%, and they did this with the threat of nationalization."

You know that that sentence doesn't actually compute to anything, right? It's a lot of noise strung together to make it sound like facts, if someone's not listening too carefully.

Do you deny that Libya made a major oil and gas deal with BP in 2007?

What your spittle-flinging rhetoric says to me is that you think shouting loudest establishes facts. It doesn't. Libya was happy to sell oil to the west, including most of Europe. Trying to recast this as some kind of outside aggression led by the US, which didn't even lead the effort, is to my mind nothing but apologia for a dictator, and the undermining of the efforts by the Libyan people to get themselves a new government.

Unfortunately, though, there's always the possibility that the Muslim Brotherhood or some other jihadist group could take advantage of the situation and sweep in before a real democratic government can take the reins; unfortunately, this may have already happened in Egypt.

and they certainly don't control Egypt where the same entrenched military best-buds of the Pentagon are firmly in charge.

....there's evidence that there are some elements of the U.S. gov't who are actually in bed with the radical Islamists; Grover Norquist readily comes to mind.

Your whole approach is to shout down dissent. To accuse those who question your simplistic propaganda as somehow incoherent is the gasp of the desperate.

I'm talking about the realization of the western companies starting with 2008, and culminating in the power move of 2009, and you think that acts of 2007 dispute this? Get a grip.

You are the one barking to silence dissent, and when faced with serious facts, you resort to personal attacks.

We didn't lead the effort? This attack couldn't have gone through without our assent?

People are dying, and it's because a feeble revolutionary movement was propped up by foreign business interests. Back off from the mirror. People with brains see this as self-aggrandizement and idiotic simplicity for suckers.

In fact, you probably need one just to know where Libya even is, let alone give a shit what happens there.

Are people dying because foreign business interests want that to happen? I don't know. But I do know that had the international community done nothing, people would be dying because an asshat dictator thinks that 42 years in power isn't long enough. Is that any better?

Unfortunately, however, perhaps certain members of the U.S. & NATO top brass may have a very different mindset indeed.

It is about the World Wide implementation of NeoLiberal Economics (Disaster Capitalism),
the privatization of ALL natural resources.

NATO long ago became the Enforcement Arm of the IMF and G-20.
Libya is merely the latest Target of Opportunity.



Welcome to the New American Century.
SEE: PNAC (Project for a New American Century).
"THEY" started the DLC,
and have thoroughly infiltrated the Democratic Party
with their Free Trade/Deregulation/Privatization nonsense.


The DLC New Team
FDR/LBJ Democrats need NOT apply.

(Screen Capped from the DLC Website)
http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=254886&kaid=86&subid=85

There IS some "hope".
Look South.
Our neighbors to the South have given us a Blue Print for
successfully taking our government away from the RICH predators.



Cheers.
See ya on the barricades!

deposit on the continent and England and France deserve their cut from third world oil, after all they deserve our assistance from all the effort and headache they got from joining us in Iraq

Just general imperialism, not oil specifically.

If you mean preventing non-Muslim Brotherhood{i.e. actually democratic} elements to power, then yeah, you'd have hit the nail on the head.

has anything to do with concern for civilians, or anything even remotely "humanitarian".

Those who need to have a pat answer to complex situations like this do nobody any good.

It's certainly not about the protection of innocent civilians; the death toll before our intervention was somewhere around a hundred, and many of those incidents were not form peaceful protests, but violent and armed encounters.

It simply doesn't pass the sniff test, and the rancor of the Obama partisans can't change that.

http://www.juancole.com/2011/06/libya-not-a-war-for-oil.html

The allegation out there in the blogosphere that the United Nations-authorized intervention in Libya was driven by Western oil companies is a non-starter. The argument is that Muammar Qaddafi was considered unreliable by American petroleum concerns, so they pushed to get rid of him. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bloomberg details the big lobbying push by American oil companies on behalf of Qaddafi, to exempt him from civil claims in the US.

The United States in any case did not spearhead the UN intervention. President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, along with the Pentagon brass, considered the outbreak of the Libya war very unfortunate and clearly were only dragged into it kicking and screaming by Saudi Arabia, France and Britain. The Western country with the biggest oil stake in Libya, Italy, was very reluctant to join the war. Silvio Berlusconi says that he almost resigned when the war broke out, given his close relationship to Qaddafi. As for the UK, Tony Blair brought the BP CEO to Tripoli in 2007, and BP had struck deals for Libya oil worth billions, which this war can only delay.

Not only is there no reason to think that petroleum companies urged war, the whole argument about UN and NATO motivations is irrelevant and sordid. By now it is clear that Qaddafi planned to crush political dissidents in a massive and brutal way, and some estimates already suggest over 10,000 dead. If UN-authorized intervention could stop that looming massacre, then why does it matter so much what drove David Cameron to authorize it?

An argument you sometimes here is that the new Transitional National Council in Benghazi will be pliant toward Western interests. But Qaddafi himself had come back in from the cold and all sorts of deals were being struck with him by Western powers. Those who more or less support Qaddafi and wanted to let him roll tanks on civilian protesters has weaved itself into a pretzel with all these conspiracy theories, while conveniently managing to leave out of the account ordinary Libyans, so many of whom are willing to risk their lives to bring about the end of Qaddafi’s murderous and mercurial regime.

He doesn't account for the $37 billion dollars in frozen assets, the massive gift to Goldman Sach which is now off the hook for a billion dollars, he doesn't account for the immediate rush to cut oil deals with the "rebels", he doesn't account for all kinds of things. Those aren't conspiracy theories as he says, they are facts. Also fact, the TNC is full of Western trained finance people. They won't be pliant toward the West as much as they are the West.

Finally, his claim of a massacre averted by pointing to the dead is very self serving because he implicitly attributes all those deaths to Gaddafi and not to the rebels who were engaging in violence almost immediately.

Juan Cole is usually much more careful than this and I don't remember him resorting to insults as he does in this piece. That's beneath him.

the primary motivation.

Who really knows. It certainly shows the "return with a vengeance" the European propensity for self-righteousness, arrogance and ruthless domination.

There certainly has been a strategy in place to reduce European dependence on Russia for energy and it has a lot to do with North Africa. Is it just a coincidence that Libya has the largest, and mostly untapped, reserves of oil and gas in Africa?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1111747


http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/05/16/114269/wikileaks-cables-show-oil-a-major.html

WikiLeaks cables show that it was all about the oil