Sunday 21 June 2015

Libya: International Pillage

This is the first part in what is hopefully to become a set of three or four articles about why the world's geopolitics are in such a mess. Admittedly, this I'm only going back as far as the fall of Gaddafi. To fully appreciate the full demise of the World into economic slavery you would have to go back centuries, but given that I haven't got six years to write a full and comprehensive re-write of popular history this will have to do.
I am also painfully aware that there may not be much time to write this for reasons that may become clear towards the end of the set of associated blog posts over the coming weeks. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that by writing this that the mere act of doing so may bring about a change in the world's zeitgeist.


In any case, the reason why I've decided to write this is because the mainstream news point-blank refuses to do proper investigative journalism on the most important issues. One of the greatest geo-political problems, which I'm sure you'll agree, are the Islamist uprisings that have happened across the Middle East. The Libyan crisis was certainly not necessarily the starting point of ISIS and islamic militancy, but it was the first glimpse into the problems which were to come.

Do you remember how the consortium of British, French and American air forces were called in to impose a no-fly zone in order to stop the nasty Gaddafi from killing innocent civilians?
Sounds all very noble doesn't it. The image portrayed of us in the media, of riding in on silvery flying steeds firing laser guided bombs of justice, is not only wrong though, its an insult to every free thinking person on the globe.
I'll try and explain why, but bare in mind that this is very in depth. I'm not asking you to believe me on all of this, but I do ask that you check out the claims yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Everyone seems to accept that originally, the reason why the civil war in Libya began was because of protesters against Gaddafi's rule were being killed or brutalised by the Libyan armed forces. Now I don't dispute that there probably was genuine protests which saw innocents being killed or injured, but one thing that is clear is that it didn't take long for these 
'protesters' to become well armed. I remember it quite well, (although worryingly it was quite a few years ago now!) one week the BBC et al were discussing how civilians were being murdered by Gaddafi's regime, the next week we saw videos of Toyota Hilux trucks with heavy weapons welded on their flatbeds parading through towns and engaging in full combat with the Libyan state. One of the reasons for the rapid military ability of those 'rebels' is attributed to Qatar who are said to have funded the initial uprising, supplied weapons for the 'rebels' and later, was even prepared to do business with local leaders who were selling crude oil before the war was even over. 
Allies were keen to bomb,
 despite civilian casualties which
they often also inflicted.
In fact, Qatar have been funding Islamist's all over the region for reasons unknown (although we can certain have our suspicions.) This started with Libya, but also spread to include support for Syrian 'rebels' too, and presumably also those operating in ISIS now. But more on that in a minute. Just to give you some kind of insight into the workings going on here, Qatar has even admitted that in actual fact, it had sent it's own military personnel into Libya to assist the Islamist's in capturing Tripoli. 

At this point you're probably thinking, 
"hey, why did the rest of the world sit idle whilst Qatar destabilised an entire region". This is real question. America in actual fact is a major ally of Qatar and whilst it's hard to believe, America houses it's U.S. Central Command’s Forward Headquarters and the Combined Air Operations Center in the countryInterestingly, even as far back as 2012, there were alarm calls that a lot of the weapons going to rebels in Libya from Qatar were falling into the hands of Islamists. In fact, despite this concern, America still approved Qatar sending US made weapons into the region. Read here if you don't believe me. Ironically, Gaddafi himself even claimed that those rebels he was fighting were terrorists. The claim originally was met with laughter in our main media, but as we later found out, the guy was right!
Even more mind blowing is the fact that despite Qatar's obvious influence in inflaming the situation in the middle east, just last year in 2014 the US signed 
an $11bn arms deal with the gulf state.
So whats going on here?!
I don't have all the answers. I mean so far, 
( and nor am I going to) I've not said anything which has not come out of the media. The main point though is that these news stories come and they go. They are forgotten very quickly, and very rarely is it that the general public get to really scrutinize long-term news trends in a way that reveals a true agenda. The evidence is there, clear as day, it's not hidden, but the way in which it is reported in broken chunks fails to educate a busy public into truly understanding about what is at stake.
So in Libya's case, violent protests broke out which turned into armed conflict, armed indirectly by the United States and it's key allies. Why? Well Libya was not an Islamist state. It was a relatively free society by the Arab world's standards. Women were educated and held property. There was state healthcare for example. Whilst I certainly don't think he is the model leader for a free society, I think we can all agree that he was certainly the only kind of leader that is capable of keeping a nation in that region from falling into mayhem. Like it has.

The real reason one assumes is really rather simple. 
Money. In 2007, Tony Blair attended a special envoy to meet Gaddafi in a yurt, in the middle of the desert to do a business deal. In that business meeting there were a few things worthy of note:
Following the financial crash where Gaddafi's investments moneys 'disappeared' it was clear that there was a change in tact from Libya's leader. He obviously realised in hindsight that he'd done a deal with the devil and gotten himself bitten, so in retaliation for this act of financial sabotage, Gaddafi campaigned for a new currency across the African continent named the Gold Dinar, and the rejection of US dollar for trade. By the way, Libya had a lot of gold pre-invasion. Some estimates had the stockpile of the precious metal as up to $6bn worth. Which is a huge amount if you consider the size of the country and its population.
Without going into the details of why, the short explanation is that if a gold backed currency had taken off across Africa 
(and there were a few nations that were quite keen on the idea) then it would have damaged the World's dollar backed economy, and badly too. The proxy US led invasion then was nothing more than the US protecting it's own interests, at the same time as making a mint in military deals, re-contruction works (like Iraq was) and as it seems, they must have begun purchasing the oil off of 'rebels' and the newly formed puppet Government for a fraction of what the original agreements were.
So these essentially are the reasons why the Anglo-Franc alliance bombarded Libyan forces and assisted in an Islamist overthrow. And by the way, despite the 
'no boots on the ground' assertion by our leaders, our own special forces teams were all over Libya like a rash directing and providing reconnaissance for Allied bomber aircraft. (You know, they had to make sure that their weapons investment was going to pay off.) It meant bigger profits for corporate interests in that region, but has had absolutely no pay off for those living in the region.

The legacy of our intervention in Libya is that:
  • The corporate rape of Libya has bankrupted the Libyan people and left only anarchy in its wake. The general population in Libya has in no way benefited from the expulsion of Gaddafi. 
  • The likely case that the golden nest egg Libya had been sitting on has been raided. News reports stated back during the intervention, that in order to pay for staff during the war, Gaddafi was forced to use 20% of the gold reserves. I suspect that this was just the initial take home from the 'liberators'. I've tried to look for figures of gold stocks in Libya today but to no avail, but my bet is that it's non-existent now.
  • With things so bad in the region due to deliberate destabilisation, thousands of refugees are attempting to claim asylum within the European Union, although this is a separate issue which I'll cover later.
And this brings us to the last point. The reason why Allied forces have not stamped out the more extreme elements within Libya's Government to bring about stability is because the situation at the moment favours destabilisation.  
Libyan rebels seem very organised
for a bunch of  armed yokels


I hope you've learnt a bit about how the situation with the Libyan war and the refugee crisis has come about. I haven't revealed any secret information, all I've done is try to place all the jigsaw pieces together in a way that makes it easier to see the trends. I'll probably cover Syria and Isis next, and hopefully get on to Russia and China.
Got a comment to say? Then say it below! Thanks for your time reading, I do appreciate it.


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