But I Thought It Was a Humanitarian Mission?

We just heart the Libyan people so much more than the Syrians, Yemenis, and Bahrainis and couldn't bear to see the former being gunned down in the streets by their own government. The latter? Meh. Not so much.

On that note, Glenn Greenwald excerpts the following from this Washington Post article:

Yet even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies. . . .

When Gaddafi made his deal with Bush in 2004, he had hoped that returning foreign oil companies would help boost Libya’s output . . . The U.S. government also encouraged American oil companies to go back to Libya. . . .

The companies needed little encouragement. Libya has some of the biggest and most proven oil reserves -- 43.6 billion barrels -- outside Saudi Arabia, and some of the best drilling prospects. . . . Throughout this time, oil prices kept rising, whetting the appetite for greater supplies of Libya's unusually "sweet" and "light," or high-quality, crude oil.

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. . . .

But all was not well. By November 2007, a State Department cable noted "growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism." It noted that in his 2006 speech marking the founding of his regime, Gaddafi said: "Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money." His son made similar remarks in 2007.

Oil companies had been forced to give their local subsidiaries Libyan names, the cable said. . . .

That's more the recent history of American-Libyan interaction. The article states this on the current state of the conflict:

But Libya's oil production has foundered, sagging to about 1.5 million barrels a day by early this year before unrest broke out. The big oil companies, several of which had drilled dry holes, felt that Libya was not making the best exploration prospects available. One major company privately said that it was on the verge of a discovery but that unrest cut short the project.

With the country torn by fighting, the big international oil companies are treading carefully, unwilling to throw their lot behind Gaddafi or the rebel coalition.

Yet when representatives of the rebel coalition in Benghazi spoke to the U.S.-Libya Business Council in Washington four weeks ago, representatives from ConocoPhillips and other oil firms attended, according to Richard Mintz, a public relations expert at the Harbour Group, which represents the Benghazi coalition. In another meeting in Washington, Ali Tarhouni, the lead economic policymaker in Benghazi, said oil contracts would be honored, Mintz said.

"Now you can figure out who’s going to win, and the name is not Gaddafi," Saleri said. "Certain things about the mosaic are taking shape. The Western companies are positioning themselves."

"Five years from now," he added, "Libyan production is going to be higher than right now and investments are going to come in."

So essentially we have a war being waged for the sole purpose of deposing a dictator for the crime of being insufficiently deferent to the needs of Western oil consumption. That WaPo article should terrify anyone who reads it. To me, the fact that we're already a billion dollars deep in yet another war concocted practically overnight in an overwhelmingly toxic political environment, in a predictable complete defiance of public support, and in the midst of a vicious debate on the federal budget and deficit says that our energy supply is much more dire than our leaders are willing to admit. As Greenwald states, Britain and France are much more reliant on Libyan oil, but I still have a feeling that this does not bode well.