I’ve never understood the desire of our politicians to involve the people and resources of this country in things that don’t concern us in the slightest. Libya is a perfect example, out of the blue we decided that Gaddafi was the so horrible that the United States had to start hurtling expensive missiles into the country. Now Hillary Clinton came on and said the United States has declared the Libyan rebels the legitimate government of their country:
The United States has recognised the Libyan opposition as the country’s “legitimate governing authority”.
That means billions of dollars of Libyan assets frozen in US banks could be released to the rebels.
First of all what right do we have to declare who is and isn’t the “legitimate” government of a country? We aren’t Libya and Libya has done nothing to provoke us yet we’re not declaring that the rebels are the legitimate government of Libya because we fucking say so.
I wonder what sweetheart deal we’ve made with the Libyan rebels. Do we have some kind of agreement with them that they’ll give use cheap oil once they are running the country? We obviously aren’t there for humanitarian reasons because if that’s what the United States was all about we’d be bombing the Hell out of Syria and Darfur. The United States government may claim humanitarian reasons for bombing Libya but that justification doesn’t hold water since there are other countries where far worse things are happening to civilian populations.
Maybe Gaddafi just holds enough wealth that we wanted to get it. It would make sense to make some excuse to freeze Gaddafi’s assets, claim some organization we can’t control is the legitimate government of Libya, then charge the rebels for our expenses in helping them which would involve transferring Gaddafi’s assets to United States coffers. The guy does have a shit ton of gold after all.
If the story about Gaddafi’s gold holdings is using metric tons (I’m not sure if a tonne is metric or if it’s a long ton) then Gaddafi holds 5,044,176.5517 ounces of gold. The price of gold as of this writing is $1588.57 and ounce meaning Gaddafi’s gold fortune is worth $8,013,027,544.734069. Fuck! In the terms of our debt that’s very small potatoes but combining that with Libya’s oil holdings would paint a rather sinister picture of why we’re there.
Personally if the United States government feels the need to steal money from my in the form of taxes I would like it if they would stop using so much of that money on bombing foreign countries.