Libya and Its Sweet, Sweet Crude

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Did we go to war in Libya over oil? Glenn Greenwald makes the case here. As usual, I’d say the right answer is “sorta.” I doubt very much that President Obama and his trusted advisors sat around a table in March and talked about how the growing unrest in the Middle East was a great opportunity to seize a few oil fields in Libya. On the other hand, would we give a rat’s ass about the rebels in Libya if there were no oil there — or if it were under the control of a friendly autocrat instead of an unreliable one like Muammar Gaddafi? The question pretty much answers itself.

But Glenn points out something else interesting: the Washington Post ran a story on A9 today under the soporific headline “Oil firms wait out Libya conflict” that spells out just how upset U.S. oil companies have been with Libya’s increasingly truculent attitude over the past few years. And pretty much the entire source for the piece was the cache of diplomatic cables released last year by WikiLeaks. Here’s a sample in the order they show up in the story:

In late February 2008, [ConocoPhillips chief executive Jim Mulva] was “summoned to Sirte for a half-hour ‘browbeating’?” from Gaddafi, according to a U.S. State Department cable made available by WikiLeaks….A State Department cable in December 2004 said, “Conoco characterized the agreement as ‘not good,’ but said the company views it as ‘dues-paying’ in order to return to the Libyan market.”….By the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited in 2008, U.S. joint ventures accounted for 510,000 of Libya’s 1.7 million barrels a day of production, a State Department cable said.

By November 2007, a State Department cable noted “growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism.”….The Libyan leader was livid, evident in his scolding of Mulva. The equivalent of the deputy foreign minister told U.S. officials that the Lautenberg amendment was “destroying everything the two sides have built since 2003,” according to a State Department cable at the time….The U.S.-educated Libyan oil minister Shokri Ghanem — who recently left Libya and defected from the Gaddafi regime — in 2008 warned an Exxon Mobil executive that Libya might “significantly curtail” its oil production to “penalize the U.S.,” according to a State Department cable.

Was oil a significant factor in the eagerness of France, Britain, and the U.S. to go to war with Libya? It’s impossible to say for sure. But thanks to WikiLeaks, we certainly know that Libyan oil had been on a lot of minds in the months and years beforehand.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate