Why we intervened in Libya, from January 28th

Snippets from our January 28th broadcast/stream:

We didn't intervene in Libya to stop a massacre. We don't stop massacres all the time, like in Syria. And we cause massacres of our own. We intervened [in Libya] because of our perceived material interests in Libya and the region. The evidence for this is overwhelming, including from our own Ambassador to Libya's mouth in a New York Times article from September of last year.

Here is the quote:

"We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources, but even in Qaddafi’s time they were starting from A to Z in terms of building infrastructure and other things”
after the country had begun opening up to the West six years ago, he said.
“If we can get American companies here on a fairly big scale, which we will try to do everything we can to do that, then this will redound to improve the situation in the United States with respect to our own jobs.”
[Ambassador Cretch's] remarks were a rare nod to the tacit economic stakes in the Libyan conflict for the United States and other Western countries, not only because of Libya’s oil resources but also because of the goods and services those resources enable it to purchase."

-US embassy reopens in Tripoli, ambassador eager to get American businesses into the country to exploit new opportunities there
article
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/world/africa/us-reopens-its-embassy-in-libya.html?_r=1

So what we have is a pretty ugly picture, one where US empire is reaching out to consolidate its grasp on the world's dwindling oil reserves and unexploited markets; where US empire announces its role as protector of human rights, while ignoring more pressing problems of human rights around the world; where US-built bombs, guided by US trained forces, were dropped on innocent civilians; and where the new regime, empowered by our violence and killing, is now committing the same human rights violations that we claimed as justification to intervene militarily in the first place.

If this process seems familiar, you're catching a whiff of the core of US foreign policy, the stuff that Wikileaks showed was the real focus of state department internal memos...on the surface we say we're about democracy, development, and protecting human rights, but in insider emails we see that's just the window dressing. Our foreign policy is really about securing oil reserves and projecting power in oil rich regions, expanding US business interests abroad, and destroying any resistance regardless of the human misery caused. For more recent examples, see Iraq and Afghanistan.