…self-directed economic development aimed at giving Libyans a stake in their economy.
I’m not saying Gaddafi’s Libya was a model society, but it did offer its own citizens advantages that are conspicuously missing in Washington’s Third World satellites.
Margaret Coker, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal (“Libya speeds oil output but sees hurdles ahead”) serves up an example of Gaddafi’s friendly-to-Libyans, not-so-friendly-to-overseas-investor policies. Among “many of (Gadaffi’s) heavy-handed state policies” were “foreign-currency exchange limits and a law that forced private enterprises to make Libyan employees shareholders of the business.” These policies “crimped corporate work during the Gadhafi regime,” writes Coker, by which she means encroached on the profits of Western banks, corporations and investors. Bad man.
In the same issue of the WSJ we learn that Washington is quietly funnelling bunker buster bombs and other ammunition to the group of anti-democratic oil monarchies that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council. The aim is to build up these despotic regimes as “a unified counter-weight to Iran” (“U.S. plans bomb sales in Gulf to counter Iran.”)
The GCC, it will be recalled, dispatched tanks and troops to crush a popular uprising in one of its member states, Bahrain, while it was also helping rebels oust the Gaddafi government in Libya. GCC member, Qatar, an absolutist state, was particularly helpful to the Libyan rebels, dispatching hundreds of ground troops to aid the cause of…
• (A) Building democracy in Libya?
• (B) Ending Gaddafi policies that crimped corporate work?
You decide.
Finally, yesterday’s WSJ ( “U.S. to build up military in Australia”) points to plans for “a new and permanent U.S. military presence in Australia…a step aimed at countering China’s influence and reasserting U.S. interests in the region.” Notes WSJ reporter Laura Meckler, the “South China Sea, which China considers as its sovereign territory…is important economically.”
Indeed it is.
Fortunately, the combined forces of the US Army, US Navy, US Marine Corps, US Air Force and the CIA exist to make sure the South China Sea—and every other economically important region of the globe—is available to Wall Street for its aggrandizement…and free from anyone who might exercise their sovereignty to impose policies that crimp corporate work.
What's Left 
libya under the jamahirya was a nearer thing to amodel society than any eu state let alone the us!
Eria.This will be the historic task of the American proletariat.There is no one else.Only the proletariat can defeat imperialism.
I see the islamo/monarchist fascists of Libya are turning their guns on each other now.good,a fitting senario and certainly no surprise….on a different note,it is interesting to see the political deck chairs been shuffled on the capitalist titanic as it slips beneath the waves of the overproduction and accumulation crisis.as if the depression can be solved by changing the managers of capitalism whilst leaving the profit system untouched,as stated in one of your earlier pieces Stephen,its time to put socialism back on the agenda.we live in interesting times indeed…
So who is going to stop this american aggression? Can china be the answer?
A lot of people, including anti-war Americans who condemned Bush’s invasion of Iraq, seem to give Obummer a free pass on Libya, because no large numbers of US troops were deployed there and it was done in the name of “humanitarianism.”
But it is still a war crime based on lies. It seems that these Obama supporters have learned nothing.