Far from initiating a “humanitarian” intervention to protect civilians against Muammar Gaddafi’s government, Washington backed the NATO intervention for one reason only—the installation of a regime that better serves the strategic interests of the US, as well as the operations of the giant oil and gas companies.
Libya doesn't want to steal oil from its people and give t to western corporations. So, bomb them.
The oil giants and the US government were alarmed by threats Gaddafi made, in a January 2009 video-conference to Georgetown University students, to nationalise the oil and gas industry.
Reasons for war, invasion and killing of president Quaddafi: oil
Gaddafi’s policy forced oil and gas corporations to renegotiate their contracts under the latest iteration of Libya’s Exploration and Productions Sharing Agreement (EPSA IV).
Between 2007 and 2008, major companies such as ExxonMobil, Petro-Canada, Repsol (Spain), Total (France), ENI (Italy), and Occidental (US) were compelled to sign new deals with the NOC—on significantly less favourable terms than they had previously enjoyed—and were collectively made to pay $5.4 billion in upfront “bonus” payments.
August 2009, US Senator John McCain led a high-profile bipartisan congressional delegation to meet with Gaddafi.
McCain characterised the “overall pace of the bilateral relationship as excellent”. Senator Joe Lieberman said “we never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi,” before calling Libya an “important ally in the war on terrorism.”
major “sedimentary basins with oil and gas resources had been discovered in Libya,” with seismic data indicating “much more remained to be discovered across the country.”
The scramble by dozens of international oil and gas companies to cash in on the lifting of sanctions, however, soon produced two major problems for the US government.
Firstly, in the words of a November 2007 cable, “Libyan resource nationalism”—policies designed to increase the Libyan government’s “control over and share of revenue from hydrocarbon resources.”
The cable ominously concludes that the US should demonstrate “the clear downsides” to the Libyan regime of such an approach.
second unwelcome consequence of the lifting of sanctions was that it enabled Libya to develop closer relations with US rivals, notably in Europe, China and Russia. A June 2008 cable describes a “recent surge of interest in Libya on the part of non-Western IOCs (particularly from India, Japan, Russia and China), who have won the bulk of concessions in the NOC’s recent acreage bid rounds.”
March 2009 cable describes how Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi witnessed the ratification of the Italy-Libya “friendship and cooperation” treaty, under which Italy was to pay $200 million per year for 25 years as compensation for “colonial wrong-doing,” in exchange for guaranteeing “Italian companies preference for development projects.”
An Italian official told the US embassy that the order of Italy’s interests in Libya was “oil, oil, oil, and migration.”
A May 2009 cable reports that Gaddafi told the Commander of US African Command General William Ward that “China would prevail” in Africa “because it does not interfere in internal affairs.”
WikiLeaks cables further demonstrate that the Obama administration’s bid to topple the Libyan government and its recognition of the unelected “rebel” regime in Benghazi have nothing whatever to do with “humanitarian” concerns.
