Interesting thoughts offered below by Johann Hari:
We Are Not Being Told The Truth About Libya
Johann Hari. Columnist, the London Independent
Most of us have a low feeling that we are not being told the real reasons for the war in Libya. David Cameron's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to jump on a plane and tour the palaces of the region's dictators selling them the most high-tech weapons of repression available. Nicholas Sarkozy's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to offer urgent aid to the Tunisian tyrant in crushing his people. Barack Obama's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to refuse to trim the billions in aid going to Hosni Mubarak and his murderous secret police, and for his Vice-President to declare: "I would not refer to him as a dictator."
So why are our governments really bombing Libya? We won't know for sure until the declassified documents come out many years from now. But Bill Richardson, the former US Energy Secretary and then US Ambassador to the UN, is probably right when he says: "There's another interest, and that's energy... Libya is among the ten top oil producers in the world. You can almost say that the gas prices in the US going up have probably happened because of a stoppage of Libyan oil production... So this is not an insignificant country, and I think our involvement is justified." For the first time in over sixty years, Western control over the world's biggest pots of oil was being rocked by a series of revolutions our governments couldn't control. The most plausible explanation is that this is a way of asserting raw Western power, and trying to arrange the fall-out in our favor. But if you are still convinced our governments are acting for humanitarian reasons, I've got a round-trip plane ticket for you to some rubble in Pakistan and Congo -- they'd love to hear your argument.
General says US may consider sending troops into Libya as part of any international force
By Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press
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