“You permitted Libya to sell oil. For what purpose? Just keep the price of oil down?” he said. “This is also a war against the Libyan people. If the west wants to protect Libyans they should protect them through every arena, economic, political and military,” he added.
Ahmed el-Sharif, Libyan Rebel Finance Minister. (HT: Financial Times)
Former Red Army Generals all across Russia must be shaking their heads in disgust. “This NATO force we lost The Cold War Too!” They perhaps yell in pained exasperation. Had the Red Army attempted to blast through the Fulda Gap, and then met the NATO Alliance that has intervened in Libya’s Civil War, the Red Star would have risen over the French Riviera after two weeks of futile and one-sided combat.
NATO’s operations to date in Libya have been a joke – David Letterman’s Stupid Human Tricks with live ammunition. Libyan Rebel Leader Abdel Fattah Younes has asked NATO to please quit the field. He wants them out of the way as he explains below.
He said: “Nato is moving very slowly, allowing Gaddafi forces to advance. Nato has become our problem.”
Mr. Younes describes how battlefield bureaucracy works. He discusses the resulting ObamaCare with jets below.
“One official calls another and then from the official to the head of Nato and from the head of Nato to the field commander. This takes eight hours.”
(Sky News ObCit.)
A part of NATO’s reticence comes from the fact that Libyan Strongman Muammar Khadafy has started taking prisoners and using them as human shields. This has slowed the NATO sortie rate and thereby allowed Khadafy’s mercenary army to regroup. The Libyan rebels are now locked in an attrition contest with one of the most ruthless dictators the world has seen come to power.
Khadafy has also invested his ill-gotten spoils quite wisely. Hedgetracker.com speculates that his reserves total $6Bn worth of the so-called “one true currency” known as gold. He can’t eat it, but he sure can continue to buy the mercs.
Plus, electronic bank embargoes do not impact physical specie held in Tripoli. They do impact all electronic balances. Anything not held in scrip or in full-bodied money is now out of circulation in Libya. Thus, according to the Libyan Rebel central bank, the freezing of Libyan assets has had the unintended consequence of harming them as well. Rebel Finance Minister, Ahmed el-Sharif explains below.
“When you get to the point of rationing liquidity, whether local or foreign currency, we are on the edge of a crisis,” he said. “We are in a cash economy; all the cash is with the public,” Mr Sharif said. “The banks will be empty in maybe two weeks.”
(Financial Times ObCit)
Meanwhile an oil tanker has docked near the contested port of Marsa el Hariga to take on cargo. It sits empty, for now. If the Libyans could sell oil, they could probably solve the liquidity squeeze that their allies stuck them with as collateral damage.
Heck, it might even motivate alliance countries such as France and Italy that used to buy 85% of Libya’s oil output before things got out of whack in the Grand Duchy of Khadafy. There’s nothing quite like cold, hard, iniquitous wealth to inspire “humanitarian” warriors. Meanwhile, the Libyan Rebels discover a truth already known to the Yugoslavians and the Iraqi Kurds. With friends like NATO, who needs an enema?
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