For Whom The Bell Tolls

WPC Yvonne Fletcher, killed outside the Libyan embassy in London,  1984, aged 25

Lt-Col Moammer al-Gaddafi, killed Sirte, 2011, aged 69

“Any (one's) death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

John Donne, 1572 to 1631

Death of a Dictator

Moammer al-Gaddafi is dead. Trapped near his hometown of Sirte by a combination of NATO drones and Libyan NTC fighters, a storm drain was his final refuge as his bodyguards fought to the death around him. Then, filmed as ever these days by mobile phone cameras, he was dragged to a truck, pleading for his life and brutalised to death. His bloodied corpse was then dragged around, still filmed, before being taken to a hospital in Misrata for crowds to come and stare, and photograph a bit more.

The photographs and video footage have been transmitted around the world already - shown on websites, TV channels, newspapers and even described in some detail on the radio. And as the world has gawped and Libyans celebrated, western leaders like Obama, Cameron and Clinton have hailed the moment, declaring their pride.

Gaddafi's regime was a harsh one, no doubt, although many others are worse and to the end the Leader clearly retained the loyalty of many of his compatriots. Thousands died or were tortured in his prisons; his agents killed his opponents at home and abroad (although it remains exceedingly unlikely that he had anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing); and he was one of the few African leaders to launch an invasion of a neighbouring state - attacking Chad four times in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He showed little mercy for sure.

And yet, in these final moments, bloodied and humiliated, pleading for his life in front of the cameras, the overwhelming sense was that here was a small, frightened and helpless old man, a human being like all the rest of us, deluded perhaps by his long years in power, but flesh and blood still. In the hands of his captors, he was no longer a threat to anyone. In the frenzy of the moment, after years of persecution, it is perhaps unsurprising that those who seized him killed him. But it does not make it right - and it certainly is nothing for David Cameron to feel proud about, or for Hilary Clinton to breathe a sigh of relief as she claims she did.

No international pariah after all...

These are the same people who happily did business with Gadaffi right up until the uprising against him began., who bought his oil and sold him his weapons and, in Britain's case, trained his security services. While it does seem to stretch incredulity given today's heated incidents to suggest any conspiracy to kill Gadaffi, Clinton's relief may well be as much to do with being spared the embarrassment of a trial and the evidence that would have come out about the West's involvement with the old regime as anything to do with an end to the fighting.

And, yet again, the western media have outdone themselves in lurid excess - the graphic pictures of Gadaffi's final minutes should make any vaguely compassionate person retch: and while in a country as inured to state propaganda as Libya has been, showing his body may serve some purpose in convincing the population that he really is gone, it raises yet more questions about how the international media use the now so readily available means of recording and transmitting the most gruesome and humiliating images to sell copy.

When Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were killed by Italian partisans in April 1945, most newspapers did not print the now infamous photograph of their dead bodies hanging upside down at a petrol station in Milan - that Il Duce's trousers were firmly buckled on and Petacci's skirt carefully pinned up was surrealistically tasteful in comparison to today's Saharan gore-fest. Even as late as 1989, when Ceaucescu was executed by a hastily organised firing squad as he tried to flee Romania, the cameras turned away as he and his wife were shot. But perhaps it was Saddam Hussein's execution in 2006 that showed at once the power of mobile technology - an initial, official video of him walking to the scaffold in apparent calm was soon superseded by several mobile captures of a baying mob remonstrating with him as he tried to pray, and then more of his body falling through the trap door and then his corpse in the hospital. of course, the media just couldn't resist...

That things went even further today with Gaddafi should perhaps be no surprise and it would without question be wrong to ban footage - but the use of frame by frame images of his treatment by his captors on tabloid websites is little more than publishing torture porn to gain an audience. Saw 7 or 8 would struggle to compete with the Daily Mail's series of snuff photos.

More will mourn Gaddafi's passing than the West will ever admit to: his regime was violent and repressive, but it was not without its supporters and in the context of the Maghreb, his government led the way in provision of free health and education services, massively reducing illiteracy rates, and greatly improved the position of women and black Africans in a traditionally patriarchal, Arab society. Many Libyans were sent to the West for their higher education - I recall meeting several at both Glasgow University and Bradford University, all of them proud of their nation's achievements and complimentary of their Leader even in situations where they had no need to be. That, in time, Gaddafi so perverted the dreams of his popular revolution that he brutalised his nation is the truly enduring tragedy for Libya - because today, the violent men who have replaced him, including their western sponsors, by their eager celebration of his killing augur no better future at all for the people of Gaddafi's battered nation.

No page has been turned, no new chapter begun. There is nothing to be proud of - no refreshing rain falls on the deserts of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica tonight; only spilled blood mixes in the Saharan sands, a legacy of the hubris that has been and an omen of the hubris still to come.

In better times: the Libyan Leader with the G8 Heads of State, including his nemesis, President Sarkozy of France

Capitalism - Making A Killing

Years ago, American President Dwight Eisenhower made a speech that would simply be unheard of from any US President's lips in recent years - he warned of the growth of a dominant military-industrial complex that would view war as big business and forever drive forward opportunities for conflict in order to maximise their profits. War would be their gain. His words were prescient and remarkable as both a former army general and as a Republican.

There are examples aplenty of how his fears came true in subsequent decades, though given the essential amorality of the economics system of the free market which Eisenhower himself espoused, it really is the logical outcome of the processes inherent in its workings. And yet, the hypocrisy and brazen arrogance of many of those involved remain capable of taking any sane person's breath away.

Former US Republican Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, has in recent weeks been highly critical of President Obama's apparent reluctance to get involved in the NATO attacks on Libya. Yet a leading regional newspaper in the USA, the Tucson Sentinel, has just carried this story from Wikileaks, showing how just two years ago Senator McCain and the rightwing ex-Democrat, Joe Lieberman, visited Gadaffi in Tripoli and promised to hurry up an arms deal that the Libyan Leader was keen to get approved by the US Congress.

Indeed, the Senator even tweeted about his "interesting meeting with an interesting man". 

And so, as has happened before with both the USA and other western powers, we sell weapons to people we subsequently declare to be pariahs and we then have a war pitching our weapons against the (usually slightly inferior) ones we have sold them. Back in the first Gulf War in 1991, British subsidies to the arms industry had helped flog weapons to Saddam's Iraq, with British arms companies and Government officials rushing out to Bagdhad to represent the UK at its first legitimate arms fare for a decade. Then, as we went to war with him, he obviously stopped paying the installments agreed for his purchases and so the British taxpayer met the bill for nearly one thousand million pounds worth of Iraqi military effort in the fighting against British and other troops.

But arms merchants, as ever, went laughing all the way to the bank. In the arms trade, it seems you really can make a killing.

NATO Uses Up All Its Missiles "Protecting Civilians"

The so-called limited intervention in Libya by NATO, which started out as a minimalistic "no flying zone", has now reached preposterous proportions: in the name of "protecting civilians by any necessary means", the air attacks on the beleaguered country have been so frequent that NATO has run out of missiles.

NATO protecting civilians "by any means necessary."

Yup. The War Powers have been so careful in limiting their precision attacks on Libya, that they have no munitions left. Not even the arms industry, one of the most prolific forms of manufacturing in the world and about the only significant industry still in Britain, can keep up with the demand for munitions.

As reported lately, Austerity Britain has spent over quarter of a billion (yes BILLION) pounds on ordinance to drop on Tripoli. Nearly 500 missiles - Tomahawks costing £800,000 each being the main ones - have been fired from Brtish planes and naval vessels into Libya. The French and Americans have joined in too, with Denmark and Norway showing commitment to bombing far beyond their scale. All in, over 2,000 missiles have been fired into the country, allegedly killing over 700 people and wounding over 4,000 - though it is impossible to verify. So enthusiastically careful have they been, this last week, after some warnings from their military that they were getting short on fuses, Messrs Cameron and Sarkozy went caps in hand to Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany.

Although Merkel opposed the intervention originally, she is now happy to get some cash for the German economy as their banks face meltdown in the Greek crisis. And so German shells will tumble onto the Tripolitanian sands for the first time since Rommel's Afrika Korps beat the retreat back to Tunis in 1943.

Isn't it good to know that when there is killing to be done, with the prospect of a financial killing when the "rebels" privatise the Libyan economy, European harmony is so readily attainable? Pass the ammo, Dave...

Libya: Solar's Missing Link

An interesting article today in the New York Times on the Desertec North African solar project, which promises to harness the solar potential of the Sahara to provide Europe with guaranteed, clean, renewable energy. Under the DESERTEC proposal, concentrating solar power systems, photovoltaic systems and wind parks would be spread over the desert regions in Northern Africa like the Sahara and the Maghreb regions. Produced electricity would be transmitted to European and African countries by a super grid of high-voltage direct current cables. As much as 100 gigawatts could be produced and carried to the European mainland, around 15% of total energy requirements.

He's not the sun-king - Gadaffi blocks the new network

Desertec, it is argued, would be enough to help Europe meet its target of 20% of its energy being from renewable sources by 2020, especially when combined with other renewable sources easily tapped by the Continent, including on and offshore windfarms, barrages and ground sourced heat. The North African component is a key part of this project. And for Greens it is a controversial one too.

For while it offers to provide our Continent with clean energy, the political machinations surrounding it are substantial, and inevitably the Arab Spring poses many questions about how  and whether this project should proceed. At its core is an assumption, a need even, for the north African regimes to be friendly to Europe. From Egypt to Morocco, with the notable exception of Libya, the ancien regimes of Arab nationalism have been co-opted to provide solar sites and transmission for Europe. Hence, in part at least, the reluctance to call on Mubarak to go when the Tahrir Square demonstrations began, and the continuing support for some pretty reactionary and brutal governments, especially in Algeria.

Gadaffi's Libya opposes the planned Desertec network

It may also partly explain why the West is keen to see a new regime in Libya. Gadaffi, like his nemesis King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, has been no proponent of renewable energy. Libya has enjoyed a massive income from oil and while the solar project would doubtless convert sunlight into euros (or maybe preferably dollars), oil for now remains more profitable - indeed, tightening supplies in the years ahead promise ever higher dividends for the oil men. Consequently, Libya has declared itself officially not interested in Desertec and it has not been part of the project in spite of both its potential as a site for solar farms and its geographical centrality to the proposed solar network. Will a new Libyan regime, already in debt to Europe for its war funding, take a more emollient view of the renewable project?

Some have questioned the viability of the scheme, and many Greens have argued that it is simply not needed - smaller, more local or regional projects harnessing community and individual resources would, if fostered properly, produce enough for our needs. But the corporations that own and control our energy supplies think very differently - they want massive projects like Desertec so that their monopoly/oligopoly of energy supply will continue even beyond the age of oil. The Desertec organisation, a combination of no less than a dozen privately owned European energy companies, is no exception in spite of its green tinge - although set up as a not-for-profit foundation, its funders and partners, are private companies, making it in essence a "front company" for what is a large, profit seeking conglomerate.

By contrast, microgeneration projects, where communities and even individuals can use assets such as their homes to become producers as well as consumers of energy, threaten and actively undermine the grip of large corporate suppliers. This could well be one reason why the UK Government has effectively destroyed any prospect of significant community microgeneration by announcing the end of funding for most small scale projects.

So it is not just oil that drives energy wars and not just oil that multinational corporations seek to turn into saleable assets. Energy is key to a vast range of human activities, especially those regarded (albeit often rather questionably) as "civilised". As we stand on the threshold of a new age of clean, renewable energy, while we should not automatically turn our backs on large projects like the solar network, let's hope we can at least find politicians with the will to challenge energy companies that seek to prolong their stranglehold on the supply of such a vital resource, whether from fossil or renewable sources.

If we end up turning sunlight into a corporate commodity, what is next? Is only air sacred, or is that a dangerous question not to be asked?

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Saudi Prince frets about the need to keep oil prices low to choke off renewable investment

Killed Because They Are Black - The Racist Rebels of "Free" Libya

The terrified man is hung upside down as a mob chant abuse at him, many filming his torture on mobile phone cameras. After some time, a man steps forward and begins to hack off the prisoner's head, the mob cheering as his blood spurts to the ground. It is the latest of many videos to come out of war-torn Libya showing people brutally killed, homes destroyed and refugees expelled. Misery and death seem ubiquitous.

But the air forces of the coalition of western countries - France and Britain at their head, with an allegedly reluctant USA following up - were nowhere to be seen in their mission to protect civilians.

Why not? Simply because the people carrying out the lynch mob executions and torture are our allies, the so-called Libyan freedom fighters based in Benghazi to whom President Sarkozy and Premier Cameron have pledged apparently unending support. On so many levels, our intervention, originally sold as a very limited no-fly zone, has become a full-on support to a coup d'etat against the secular Gaddafi regime by a coalition of regionalists, tribal leaders and religious zealots. Within these groups, there is now also an increasingly racist streak, with Arab supremacists targeting Libyans descended from the black African slaves of previous centuries, as well as black African migrant workers.

Black Africans are targetted indiscriminately by rebels

Because of their slave history, just as blacks in America were denied rights for decades by the white majority, black Libyans have traditionally occupied the place of an underclass in Libya. Gaddafi's regime, violent though it has often been, did much to alleviate their position and oppose the traditional marginalising of blacks. Now, with the east of the country "liberated", this seems to be changing. Under the ruse that Gaddaffi has flown in black African mercenaries from the sub-Sahara, black people throughout Libya are being indiscriminately  targeted in their droves to be beaten, robbed and murdered by the rebels.

Britain's support for the rebel National Transitional Council has deepened continuously since the UN resolution permitting action to protect civilians was approved, both financially and militarily. Whilst the Gaddafi regime appears to have exaggerated some of the strikes by the West, it is very much the case that western intervention has gone far beyond its original claimed intent and the remit granted by the UN.

Yet throughout all this, the NTC appears to be far from the champion of democracy it is made out to be - it contains many former political leaders from the Gaddafi regime, as well as many military men - seven former regime generals were paraded before the cameras today as the latest defectors. Islamic fundamentalists from  the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition are also prominently involved - and as posted earlier, it was demonstrations they called to commemorate the Danish cartoons of Prophet Mahommed that sparked off the revolt against Gaddaffi's secular regime.

Ever since the Chavez Initiative back in April, the Gaddaffi regime has repeatedly offered to accept an internationally monitored ceasefire, an offer repeated last weekend during the visit of President Zuma of South Africa. Although this would, presumably, be the best means of ensuring the protection of civilians which is meant to be the purpose of western intervention, the rebel council has repeatedly refused to even consider a ceasefire and rejects out of hand the idea of peace negotiations with Gaddaffi. And this refusal is repeatedly accepted, indulged and even rewarded by the West, which has announced ever more powerful weapons and, in spite of our alleged age of austerity, financial support to the Benghazi junta. Attack helicopters are in the process of being deployed, and al-Jazeera has run footage of what appears to be European ground troops liaising with Libyan rebels - a flagrant breach of the UN resolution.

What is playing out here is an alarming example of rightwing revenge - Cameron and Sarkozy come from conservative traditions that have always detested the Gaddafi regime, recalling its sympathising back in the 1970s and 1980s with the Soviet bloc. That is why they have intervened so unquestioningly in support of his opponents while ignoring the brutality of the Bahrain regime (still enjoying the welcome of David Cameron when its Crown Prince visited the UK the week before last). Undoubtedly, they are also salivating at the prospect of the ill-gotten gains to be made by western corporations if the large state sector was to be privatised post-Gaddafi - in France's case making up for missing out in the huge public assets sell-off to American, British and even Israeli companies in post-Saddam Iraq.

As before, in the warped name of warped democracy, Britain is bunking down with some distinctly odd bedfellows. And the people who suffer are those driven from their homes and lynched by "free Libya" rebel mobs, for no reason other than because they are black. Where is the West's intervention to protect them? Or are they just the wrong sort, or wrong colour, of civilians in this very uncivil war?


The Evidence

Video of African Workers Hiding Out in Benghazi from Racist Mob Violence

The Ugly Face of the Benghazi "Liberation" - Racism against Black Africans

More links (warning; extremely graphic)-  Rebel lynch mob murders black African   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRM-OH1cQQE&feature=related

- Nigerian migrant civilian worker killed by rebels
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQHBq8-xyLs&feature=related

Bloody Oil

So, in one sense it is not news. Ask anyone why the West gets involved in overseas wars and the answer nine times out of ten is "oil". The public know this, and somehow cynically accept it, bemoaning the fact, but often simultaneously setting it to one side, perhaps in the hope that, while it is necessary for the sake of our current carbon fuel-dependent societies, it can't really be that bad. Can it?

Well, yes it is, and worse. We heard earlier this year, Tony Blair's sanctimonious defence of his toadying up to George Bush over the bloody war in Iraq, shifting from his original claims about weapons of mass destruction to defending the objective of regime change, allegedly because this would be good for the Iraqi people. The tens of thousands of deaths, the millions of refugees and the immense damage to infrastructure caused by his activities were all apparently worth it on these grounds.

And this week, we have found out for certain just exactly who all this mayhem was for.

The "Independent" newspaper in the UK published a series of emails showing how in the months up to the Iraq invasion - when Blair was publically insisting that war might still be avoided - BP and other oil companies were busy petitioning the UK Government for a slice of the anticipated post-war bonanza. They even went so far as to claim that if the Iraqi oil fields were privatised (rather than kept in the hands of the new supposedly democratic government to hel rebuild the country) this would represent an apparent reward for the UK's support of the American invasion.

So now we know, our troops were there to kill and be killed so that, in return, BP, a big multinational company with a deeply tarnished history of involvement in killings and corruption in the Middle East, could get a reward.

And it duly has. Unreported, unfocused on by the complicit western media, the Iraqi state was dismantled following the war. Its assets were sold off to foreign companies and individuals - many of them Israelis - and among these BP benefited with good deals on acquiring huge stakes in large tracts of the rich Iraqi oilfields. Even where they don't own the fields, the oil companies make a killing, extracting oil at less than $1.15 per barrel and selling them on at over one hundred times (or, put another way, 10,000%) that cost. They were by no means the only oil company involved, and the American government was even more generous to its friends, such as Halliburton and Blackwater, in doling out Iraqi money, largely unaudited and unaccounted for. But Blair's sickening insistence that he acted out of pure motives and a desire to do the right thing finally stand exposed as nothing more than a squalid deal with big corporations - both of the oil and non-oil varieties.

And what of now, in Libya? Again and again in recent weeks, the Gaddafi regime has been portrayed as somehow uniquely brutal among Middle Eastern despots and so deserving of unique treatment by the West. Even although Gaddafi's government has now offered an internationally monitored ceasefire and elections for the leadership of the country run by the UN, the mysterious coalition of rebels continue to receive unqualified western aid in spite of rejecting the offer. We are indefinitely underwriting a bloody war with allies of dubious provenance even although the other side have accepted more than the original demands of the United Nations.

Why? It could be for oil - but with just 2% of the world's reserves, while rich, Libya does not represent to carbon cornucopia that Iraq offered. And BP was already well-ensconced with the Gaddafi regime, so regime change could potentially disturb rather than assist their exploitation of the country's richest natural resource (although, of course, any Middle Eastern war is handy for oil companies in facilitating a rise in prices at the pumps - entirely unnecessary and unjustifiable, but easily sold to an unsuspecting public).

Libya offers other delights for western companies, however, just as Iraq did but other states like Bahrain and Egypt did not. Both Saddam and Gaddafi, for all their brutal faults, came from socialist backgrounds. Acquiring power was not purely about self-aggrandisement, though both men clearly revelled in it. It was also about using the state for the benefit of the citizens, however totalitarian in their control of their citizens they sought to be. Consequently, both Iraq and Libya under their respective tyrants had large public sectors and enjoyed some of the best education, health and welfare systems in the world - all free of charge. And, of course, all hanging like ripe fruit to fall into the bags of privatising privateers when the American juggernaut crashed into town.

Under the neoliberal philosophy that continues to inform American and British foreign policy, "freedom" is not at the end of the day expressed via the ballot box or by the mass of citizens. When they talk of freedom, it is in  fact about free markets - about private enterprise and the supposed freedom to buy and sell, accumulate, speculate and profit. Hence, under this philosophy, oil as a bounty for blood is more than acceptable - indeed, it is necessary, it is the whole purpose of the exercise. And not just oil - just as whole segments of Iraqi public services have been auctioned off to western-owned interests, so Libya now holds the same tempting prospect.

It is for this reason that so much of the opposition to the West in the Arab world stems from a religious starting point. Although castigated in the West as wild-eyed bearded ones lusting for blood and vengeance for ancient slight, groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hizbollah in the Lebanon are widely supported by their people because they are grounded in ethics and principles diametrically opposed to the corrupt regimes such as Mubarak's sponsored and sustained by the West (the USA for example, paid for Mubarak's brutal security services for most of his rule).

Old Friends - The British Queen & The Blood-soaked Emir of Bahrain

It is also why the West is so deeply distrusted in the Arab world - every time Arab people have agitated for freedom, they have been opposed by dictators whose strings have been pulled very firmly either by western governments or by western oil companies or, more often than not, by both. The brutal regime in Bahrain is probably the epitome of this, but in the West, it is exempted from the fate of the Libyan regime. Bahrain is sanitized by the approval of its regime by the British monarchy and the repeated visits by members of the Royal Family (who invited the ruler of Bahrain to kate and William's Big Day just hours after the massacre of 45 protesters on the streets of his capital city), - and besides, we already own everything there anyway; there is nothing left to sell.

But in Benghazi...never mind the crosshairs; its dollars that are in western sights.

Libya war IS about regime change / Britain / Home - Morning Star

Libya war IS about regime change / Britain / Home - Morning Star (click for full M.S. article)

The West has gone far beyond the concept of a protective no-fly zone and is now advocating regime change - even although the rebels are a very uncertain band containing some rather unpleasant passengers. In addition, they have refused to even contemplate any negotiations with Tripoli and gave the recent African peace envoys an incredibly hostile and violent reception when they visited Benghazi to sound out the possibility of peace talks.

Why is such intransigence now being underwritten by an open-ended guarantee to the rebels from Britain, France and the USA for continuing and increasing military support and aid with arms supplies?

What has gone largely unreported is that the revolt against the Gaddafi regime developed from rallies called by religious groups to commemorate the 2006 publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, which upset Muslims around the world given their faith's injunction not to make representations of any human form, let alone such an important one. Most fundamentalist Muslims see Gaddafi as an enemy of their faith given his closure of Islamist schools, his taunting of the veiling of women and his call for Arabs to "put the Koran away on the bookshelf" as a relic of a former age.

Whilst the Transitional Rebel Council is composed of a rather motley bunch of academics, lawyers and army commanders, many of whom were senior members of the Gaddafi regime until just a few weeks ago, there is much evidence of more radical religious elements running through the revolt. What is for sure is that this is no democratic uprising like the ones in Tunisia and Egypt - where, especially in the latter case, the West were so incredibly hesitant about calling for Mubarak to resign. But, of course, as history has shown time and again, the West's interests and frequently violent intervention in the Arab world has never been about democracy, and indeed as often as not has been to squash the demands of the Arab people for reform.

Gadaffi, of course, is no democrat either. But the West is not concerned about that. His sin, unlike Mubarak and the Saudis, has been to not always toe the line with the West. That makes him no saint, but equally, it begs the question as to why Libya is such a special case as to now require our active intervention, not merely to provide some sort of protective no-fly zone around Benghazi, but to continue every day to bomb large tracts of Libya and say that this will continue until Gaddafi is gone.

Our Masters have decided Gaddafi must go, but sit on their butts in Bahrain as the political opposition is destroyed and people shot on the streets - in the same city as the largest overseas US naval base in the world.

Yet there again, they're Our Bastards, and he isn't.  At least, not one of Ours.

No Flying Into Oblivion

The United Nations "No Fly Zone" has today seen rather a lot of flying by the planes and missiles of the western allies, unsurprisingly bombing Libyan Government airforce and radar installations, but more controversially bombing military columns to create a defensive cordon around the rebel held city of Benghazi and last night bombing the Government compound in Tripoli in spite of the hundreds of civilians camped around its walls. For those of us who supported, tentatively, a "No Fly Zone" when it was repeatedly called for by the rebels and after increasingly bloodthirsty threats from the regime, the instant escalation to significantly greater military involvement than a "no-fly-zone" raises grave concerns as to what the endgame is going to be. This is especially the case when the rebel faction has made clear it is not willing under any circumstances to consider a negotiated settlement, which rather suggests we might be there a very long time indeed. 

Armed intervention, unless you are a pacifist, needs always to be a very final option in a handful of cases. And yet, genuinely humanitarian interventions are few and far between. The Bosnian intervention came three years too late to save tens of thousands of innocent Bosniac civilians - 90% of them Muslims; and although the Kosovan intervention did undoubtedly prevent a repeat massacre, the wide range of targets hit in civilian areas hinted at darker motives than purely protecting civilians. By contrast, the wars more enthusiastically waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the secret war against Iran, have somewhat more questionable motives. Ones rooted in self-serving business interests and where humanitarian concerns, including democracy, are very far removed from the real priorities of securing profitable energy resources for our oil-addicted world.

What then of Libya? What is the motive here? Given that we gladly did business with Libya in spite of previous bloody massacres of sometimes hundreds of opponents, humanitarian concerns have not been the top of the West's agenda in this relationship for a very long time. So what is the real driver now?

Oil again seems obvious, except for the fact that Libya's dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi has pretty happily engaged with western oil companies since the great rapprochement of 2004. If anything, the oil industry would be perfectly happy for him to stay - any new regime, especially a democratic one, would be likely to disturb their modus vivendi in a country where oil extraction is about as cheap and profitable as anywhere in the world.

Our man in Tripoli

Former British Premier, Tony Blair, has come under criticism for his visit to Qaddafi back in 2004, when Libya was allowed to open up to international trade after years of sanctions. In recent weeks, Coalition politicians in Britain have been queuing up to denounce him; yet their wisdom is somewhat one of hindsight. Take a look back at their words at the time and, while some were hesitant, nearly all of them supported Blair's move:

"The potential prize of helping Libya in from the cold makes Mr Blair's risk worth taking,"- Menzies Campbell, Lib Dem Foreign spokesman, 2004

Conservative leader at the time, Michael Howard, condemned Blair's visit only because he felt it was at too high a level. He supported the overall process of re-engagement.

Infamously, current Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, worked for p.r. firm GJW during the 1990s, when it was hired by Qaddafi to improve the Libyan regime's image.

The truth is that Qaddafi is one side of the capitalist coin that governs our world. Many on the Left have been seduced for years by his eclectic and self-serving adoption of supposedly progressive causes. Yet all the  while, he has ruled with a brutal iron fist at home and cavorted at every chance with the oil companies and international businessmen who have made him personally a very rich man indeed.

What has happened is this - Qaddafi has not been strong enough to crush the revolt quickly enough; had he suppressed the rebels in a few days then, as Bahrain is doing now, no matter how savage his retribution, after 18 months of purdah, he would have been welcomed back to his corporate family. As it is, he has taken too long to reassert himself and so has outlived his usefulness - Capital abhors a vacuum and so he must go. Hence the intervention has quickly become far more than a No Fly Zone. With the Chavez Peace Initiative ignored by the West and any and all prospects of a negotiated settlement compehensively rejected by the Libyan rebels, the agenda is clearly now one of regime change.

Strange as it may seem, but at least for the last decade, Qaddafi has been the West's creature - perhaps more obviously an untamed Frankenstein than the royals in the Gulf that Cameron gently admonishes for their civilian massacres - but our creature nevertheless. Just last year Britain sold £200 millions of "crowd control" equipment to him and the SAS trained his elite guard on surveillance techniques, while the French provided him with a wide range of military support.

That is why the West has in truth been reluctant to do what it is doing - until now. Qaddafi and Big Oil have profited very nicely from their mutual dealings. How annoying that the Libyan people have spoiled and confused things so terribly by getting in the way of this most symbiotic of relationships. They deserve better than this bastard of a twin-headed hydra that has buried itself deep in their troubled land. Sadly, whatever the outcome, just as Iraq is slipping back into dictatorship and Afghans are governed by a western-sponsored kleptocracy, it seems unlikely that they will get it.

From 2009:

Spies Like Us

The advent of box sets of old TV series can create new addicitons. Having made my way through four years' worth of Battlestar Galactica and all five seasons of Babylon 5, my more recent viewing has been the BBC historical drama "Fall of Eagles" from 1974. A little dated now, but with some solid turns by Charles Kay as Czar Nicholas, Barry Foster as Kaiser Wilhelm and the truly inspired casting of a young, but apparently ageless Patrick Stewart as Lenin, it charts the decline and fall of the European Empires of the 19th century.

Britain doesn't figure much in the series as our crumbling Empire dragged on for another three decades after Austro-Hungary ceased to exist, but we were reminded today that in one respect parts of our Government still apparently haven't quite got the message that the Great Game is long over.

A rather bizarre affair has emerged from Benghazi in Libya, the centre of the rebel revolt against Colonel Gaddafi's regime. Six members of the Special Air Squadron (SAS), Britain's elite military unit, were arrested along with two diplomats when they turned up uninvited. Suspicious locals apprehended them and took them in for questioning. Their nervousness about these strangers would be understandable given the repeated assaults on the city by the regime, but what was truly bizarre was that the SAS arrived, unannounced, by helicopter, landing on the edge of the city to proceed on foot. No surprise at all then that they were arrested - more surprising perhaps was the fact that they were not fired on or their helicopter shot down.

The Empire Strikes Back - Hague's hubris

There was at least a grain of comedy to be had in this grim situation - the British Ambassador to Libya phoned from London to a rebel leader in Benghazi and had his conversation hacked by Gaddafi's officials, who recored it and promptly played it on Libyan TV. The hesitant diplomat explained to the rebel that the British Government was keen to make contact and see what sort of humanitarian help might be needed and so wanted to send some diplomats for talks. But, he explained, they had sent a small party ahead (the SAS men in their helicopter) to find a hotel!  Yes, that's right - these gun-totting commandos were dropped out of the sky to make their way into Benghazi to check out the bed and board rates and book some rooms for the mandarins.

Now, I know the Government wants to save costs in these supposedly hard economic times, but was this the most effective way to ensure they got the best deal for the diplomats' stay? Couldn't they have used Google or lastminute.com or something like that? The episode is all the more incredulous given that a British navy destroyer was docked in Benghazi port at the very same time. Couldn't the Captain just have popped ashore and asked around? No wonder UK Foreign Secretary William Hague was so circumspect when asked about the incident.

But of course, the very presence of the destroyer, albeit to help evacuate people, raises questions about how even now we conduct our business in places like Libya. We happily arm the regime to the teeth - selling Gaddafi £200 millions of "crowd control" equipment last year alone - and then think when there is trouble we can arrogantly send not only ships but armed men into foreign countries to act with impunity. How would we have reacted if a group of armed Arabs turned up in London during the chaos of the student fees protest? Somehow, I suspect, with rather less restraint than that shown by the beleaguered Benghazis.

Yet aside from the farcical nature of this incident, there is one positive note - that nowhere have any of the protestors or rebels asked for any outside help, other than that we should stop our enthusiastic business dealings with the dictators. Mr Hague may like to sit in his office imagining some sort of steampunk fantasy where Britain still rules the waves and gunboat diplomacy gets results; but the rest of the world has moved on.