Operation Oil Theft: Week 2. Day 5.

Foreign air attacks against Libya have continued but the rebels have retreated from the outskirts of Sirte to the outskirts of Brega. While I'm sure that all sides would like to claim that the rebels have been beaten back by Libyan government troops those troops do not appear to have advanced in any meaningful way creating something of a no mans land between Sirte and Brega. Therefore what I think has happened is that the British commanders of the rebels have ordered them to fall back in order to reduce the pressure for resolution 1973(2011) to be revoked which has increased with China and India both adding their voices to Russia's accusation that foreign forces have exceeded their UN mandate.

Meanwhile, led by the Americans, foreign powers are debating whether or not 1973(2011) allows them to arm the Libyan rebels. As the the resolution was passed in order to protect civilians by reducing conflict it clearly doesn't. However since Qatar started to act as the rebels oil merchant the Qatari based news channel, Al Jazeera has begun to vigorously campaign against what it is describing as American sanctions against the Libyan people. Therefore I suspect that while Britain hasn't worked it out yet when other foreign powers talk about arming the rebels they're using it as code for allowing the rebels to sell oil and be armed with oil revenues rather then weapons because they can quite easily use that money to buy in weapons from across Africa where NATO is not enforcing the arms embargo. On something of a side note it is a shame that as a result of action against Libya Al Jazeera appears to have lost most of it's editorial independence because it was one of if not the only independent news voices in the Arab world.

With it being almost a certainty that the situation in Libya will be referred back to the UN in one form or another I've been reading up on Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN. A career civil servant it turns out that she was on the staff of the American National Security Council (NSC) in 1994 at the time of the Rwandan genocide. If you are unfamiliar with this particularly dark period in African history it saw Hutu and Tutsi tribes in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo rise up and slaughter each other in the hundreds of thousands. As most of the killing was done with simple weapons such as machetes and rocks and were often accompanied by mass rapes the brutality of the genocide shocked even people who were familiar with African civil wars. The international community's failure to act to stop the slaughter is still considered one of it's greatest failures. In response to her role in the NSC's failure to intervene in Rwanda Susan Rice went on the record to say; "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required."

Sadly the guilt that Ms Rice clearly still feels over the Rwandan genocide made her all too easy a mark for those who wanted to pursue a war of aggression against Libya. All they needed to do was tell her a few horror stories and use a few, well placed Twitter rumours to convince her that the situation in Benghazi would be even a fraction as bad as the situation in Rwanda and she would not only vote for swift military action she would also campaign for even stronger action. It's a shame then that Libya in 2011 is not and never will be Rwanda in 1994. In fact as the newest member of the British Commonwealth Rwanda in 2011 is how Britain intends to control the flow of minerals like cobalt, copper and cadmium out of the Democratic Republic of Congo. I cannot see how allowing them to add Libyan oil to that plunder could ever be in America's geo-political interest.