Leaning back against the cushions amid the billowing smoke of a dimly lit shisha lounge in the lavish 16th Arrondissement of Paris, I listened attentively to my new friend, a Moroccan in his late twenties, who like so many other North Africans, had come to France to make a better life for himself.
Though young, he was a small business owner who worked long hours to fund his passion for world travel when off the clock. It was early 2011 and the “Arab Spring” was sweeping through the Middle East and North Africa.
During my six week stay in Paris, my most urgent interest was in spending as much time with North African immigrants as possible, to learn about their culture, their politics, and their thoughts on the upheaval happening in the lands they called home.
As the conversation turned to NATO’s aggressive air war against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, my Muslim friend pulled an iPhone out of his jean pocket and browsed Google for an image of French President Nicolas Sarkozy shaking hands with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi as recently as 2008.
“See this?” he intoned in fluent English with a thick French accent, “If you look at it from a distance,” he held the iPhone back, “you might think they are friends.” Then he held the image just inches from my face, “But if you look close, you can see Sarkozy is not comfortable. He is not giving a good handshake. He is standing away from Gaddafi a little. And look at his eyes. He knows. He knows what the West is going to do to Gaddafi.”
It might all certainly seem puzzling to the casual observer. Gaddafi was warmly welcomed into the world community in 2003 after announcing an end to his “weapons of mass destruction” programs. George W. Bush called Gaddafi “an important ally in the war against terrorism,” and the U.K.’s Tony Blair echoed these same sentiments.
The U.S. and Gaddafi maintained close relations ever since, often using Libya as a destination point for the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program to “interrogate” terror suspects off the record and offshore in third world countries (a program that the Obama Administration has publicly admitted to continuing after taking the reigns from Bush and company).
So why the sudden regime change in Libya? Was my friend in Paris right? Had the governments in Paris, London, and Washington been planning this for some time already?
The answer is likely yes, and the reasons are not hard to divine. Note, to begin with, the difference in Western governments’ response to Libya and their response to other protest movements of the Arab Spring. While protesters were shot and beaten in the streets of Egypt and Tunisia (and Iran two years earlier, during Mousavi’s Green Revolution), NATO governments sat by and watched. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even counseled the peaceful protesters in Egypt to remain calm and nonviolent.
Then when an armed rebellion– unlike the peaceful protests elsewhere– broke out in Libya, the Western media and political establishment waxed indignant about the violence of Gaddafi’s regime, proclaiming that he “had to go.”
The glaring inconsistency gives lie to the claims of “humanitarianism” and NATO’s alleged desire to protect civilians in Libya. Likewise does the fact that NATO forces did not merely enforce no-fly zones and protect civilians.
They quite clearly and actively undertook most of the heavy fighting for Gaddafi’s opponents, bombing strategic targets from the sky using information reported by French and English forces on the ground. The successful overthrow of Gaddafi would not have been possible without NATO’s air war.
This was an aggressive intervention and regime change operation, not a humanitarian mission to protect civilians. That much is certainly clear. But why?
Follow the money. It goes so much deeper than fighting over oil interests in the Middle East, though that is a big part of it. It is actually about protecting the supremacy and hegemony of the U.S. fiat dollar. In the years and months leading up to the NATO intervention in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was urging African nations to join together and begin trading in a currency other than the world’s reserve currency (the U.S. dollar), and move to use a gold-backed African “dinar” instead.
It is no coincidence that sanctions and a full invasion of Iraq– also once a strong U.S. ally in the Middle East– occurred after Saddam Hussein announced plans to trade oil in Euros instead of dollars.
The power to print the world’s money is an enormous power. It allows the printers to use that money first for the resources they want to buy and the investments they want to make. Then once that money circulates and devalues the rest of the currency, everyone else gets to spend it. That power is currently the U.S. government’s last and only resort to sustain present out-of-control spending levels.
That power is the only reason why food and gasoline prices have not risen as dramatically in America as they have elsewhere in the world. Once world governments stop trading in dollars and settle on some other kind of money for international commerce, the dollar’s collapse will be dramatic and final.
The U.S. economy will take a catastrophic hit and its federal government will finally have no means to finance its enormous welfare state, warfare state, and regulatory state. It will finally have to deal with the reality that it is broke.
And that is why it is so crucial for the government in Washington and its client governments in London and Paris to immediately remove any world leader who speaks of trading in anything other than the dollar, putting a giant crack in the hegemony of the dollar as the world’s money. That is the real reason why NATO, led by Washington, went to war in Libya.
And PS: If you want to hear something that should make your hair stand on end after reading the above, note how as early as March, in the middle of the fighting, before the rebels in Libya had any idea (or had they?) of the outcome of their uprising, they actually created a central bank and designated a new central fiat currency for the new regime they were fighting to create.
If that doesn’t reek of Western influence and advanced planning, if that doesn’t signal the real reason for the regime change in Libya, then all my powers of deduction are in vain:
Asia Times Online -Libya all about oil, or central banking?
‘Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank – this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:
“I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.”Alex Newman wrote in the New American:
In a statement released last week, the rebels reported on the results of a meeting held on March 19. Among other things, the supposed rag-tag revolutionaries announced the “[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”Newman quoted CNBC senior editor John Carney, who asked, “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.”'
