17.03.2016 Author: F. William Engdahl
Column: Society
Region: Middle East
Country: Libya
"She was merely another Washington political tool implementing the mandate of those oligarchs. The intervention was about killing Qaddafi’s well-laid plans to create a gold-based African and Arabic currency to replace the dollar in oil trades."
Buried amid tens of thousands of
pages of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s secret emails, now
being made public by the US Government, is a devastating email exchange between
Clinton and her confidential adviser, Sid Blumenthal. It’s about Qaddafi and
the US-coordinated intervention in 2011 to topple the Libyan ruler. It’s about
gold and a potentially existential threat to the future of the US dollar as
world reserve currency. It’s about Qaddafi’s plans then for the gold-based
Dinar for Africa and the Arab oil world.
Two
paragraphs in a recently declassified email from the illegal private server
used by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the US-orchestrated war
to destroy Libya’s Qaddafi in 2011 reveal a tightly-held secret agenda behind
the Obama Administration’s war against Qaddafi, cynically named “Responsibility
to Protect.”
Barack
Obama, an indecisive and weak President, delegated all presidential
responsibility for the Libya war to his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton, who was an early backer of an Arab “regime change,” using the secret
Muslim Brotherhood, invoked the new, bizarre principle of “responsibility to
protect” (R2P) to justify the Libyan war, which she quickly turned into a
NATO-led war. Under R2P, a silly notion promoted by the networks of George
Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Clinton claimed, with no verifiable proof,
that Qaddafi was bombing innocent Libyan civilians in the Benghazi
region.
According
to a New York Times report at the time, citing Obama Administration senior
sources, it was Hillary Clinton, backed by Samantha Power, then a senior aide
at the National Security Council and today Obama’s UN Ambassador; and Susan
Rice, then Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, and now National Security
Adviser. That triad pushed Obama into military action against Libya’s Qaddafi.
Clinton, flanked by Powers and Rice, was so powerful that Clinton managed to
overrule Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security
adviser, and John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism chief, today CIA head.
Secretary
of State Clinton was also knee-deep in the conspiracy to unleash what came to
be dubbed the “Arab Spring,” the wave of US-financed regime changes across the
Arab Middle East, part of the Greater Middle
East project unveiled in 2003 by the Bush Administration after occupation of
Iraq. The first three target countries of that 2011 US “Arab Spring”–an action
in which Washington used its “human rights” NGOs such as Freedom House and National
Endowment for Democracy, in cahoots as usual, with the Open Society Foundations
of billionaire speculator, George Soros, along with US State Department and CIA
operatives–were Ben Ali’s Tunisia, Mubarak’s Egypt and Qaddafi’s Libya.
Now the
timing and targeting of Washington’s 2011 “Arab Spring” destabilizations of
select Middle East states assume a new light in relation to just-released
declassified Clinton emails to her private Libya “adviser” and friend, Sid
Blumenthal. Blumenthal is the slick lawyer who defended then-President Bill
Clinton in the Monika Lewinsky and other sex scandal affairs when Bill was
President and facing impeachment.
Qaddafi’s
gold dinar
For many it
remains a mystery just why Washington decided that Qaddafi personally must be
destroyed, murdered, not just sent into exile like Mubarak. Clinton, when
informed of Qaddafi’s brutal murder by US-financed Al Qaeda “democratic
opposition” terrorists, told CBS news, in a sick, joking paraphrase of Julius
Caesar, “We came, we saw, he died,” words spoken by her with a hearty, macabre laugh.
Little is
known in the West about what Muammar Qaddafi did in Libya or, for that matter,
in Africa and in the Arab world. Now, release of a new portion of Hillary
Clinton’s emails as Secretary of State, at the time she was running Obama
Administration war on Qaddafi, sheds dramatic new light on the background.
It was not
a personal decision of Hillary Clinton to eliminate Qaddafi and destroy his
entire state infrastructure. The decision, it’s now clear, came from circles
very high in the US money oligarchy. She was merely another Washington
political tool implementing the mandate of those oligarchs. The intervention
was about killing Qaddafi’s well-laid plans to create a gold-based African and
Arabic currency to replace the dollar in oil trades. Since the US dollar
abandoned gold exchange for dollars in 1971 the dollar in terms of gold has
dramatically lost value. Arab and African OPEC oil states have long objected to
the vanishing purchasing power of their oil sales, mandated since the 1970’s by
Washington to be solely in US dollars, as dollar inflation soared more than
2000% to 2001.
In a newly
declassified Clinton email from Sid Blumenthal to Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton dated April 2, 2011, Blumenthal reveals the reason that Qaddafi must be
eliminated. Using the pretext of citing an unidentified “high source”
Blumenthal writes to Clinton, “According to sensitive information available to
this source, Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount
in silver… This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was
intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan
golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African
Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).” That French aspect was only
the tip of the Qaddafi gold dinar iceberg.
Golden
Dinar and more
During the
first decade of this century, Gulf Arab OPEC countries, including Saudi Arabia,
Qatar and others, began seriously diverting a significant portion of the
revenues from their vast oil and gas sales into state sovereign wealth funds,
many based on the success of Norway’s Oil Fund.
Growing
discontent with the US War on Terror, with the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan,
and with overall US Middle East policies after September 2001, led most OPEC
Arab states to divert a growing share of oil revenues into state-controlled
funds rather than trusting it to the sticky fingers of New York and London
bankers as had been the custom since the 1970’s when oil prices went through
the roof, creating what Henry Kissinger fondly called the “petro-dollar” to
replace the gold-backed dollar Washington walked away from on August 15, 1971.
The present Sunni-Shi’ite war or clash of civilizations is in fact a result of
the US manipulations after 2003 in the region— “divide and rule.”
By 2008 the
prospect of sovereign control by a growing number of African and Arab oil
states of their state oil and gas revenues was causing serious concern in Wall
Street as well as the City of London. It was huge liquidity, in the trillions,
they potentially no longer controlled.
The timing
of the Arab Spring, in retrospect, increasingly looks tied to Washington and
Wall Street efforts to control not only the huge Arab Middle East oil flows. It
is now clear it was equally aimed at controlling their money, their trillions
of dollars accumulating in their new sovereign wealth funds.
However, as
is now confirmed in the latest Clinton-Blumenthal April 2, 2011 email exchange,
there was a qualitatively new threat emerging for Wall Street and the City of
London “gods of money,” from the African and Arab oil world. Libya’s Qaddafi,
Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Mubarak’s Egypt were about to launch a gold-backed
Islamic currency independent of the US dollar. I was first told of this plan in
early 2012, at a Swiss financial and geopolitical conference, by an Algerian
with extensive knowledge of the project. Documentation was scarce at the time
and the story remained in my mental back-burner. Now a far more interesting
picture emerges that puts the ferocity of Washington’s Arab Spring and its
urgency in the case of Libya into perspective.
‘United
States of Africa’
In 2009,
Qaddafi, who was at the time the President of the African Union, had proposed
that the economically depressed continent adopt the “Gold Dinar.”
In the
months prior to the US decision, with British and French backing, to get a UN
Security Council resolution that would give them the legal fig-leaf for a NATO
destruction of the Qaddafi regime, Muammar Qaddafi had been organizing the
creation of a gold-backed dinar that would be used by African oil states as
well as Arab OPEC countries in their sales of oil on the world market.
Had that
happened at the time Wall Street and the City of London were deep into the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, the challenge to the reserve currency role of
the dollar would have been more than serious. It would be a death knell to
American financial hegemony, and to the Dollar System. Africa is one of the
world’s richest continents, with vast unexplored gold and mineral wealth, had
been intentionally kept for centuries underdeveloped or in wars to prevent
their development. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank for the
recent decades have been the Washington instruments to suppress African real
development.
Gaddafi had
called upon African oil producers in the African Union and in Muslim nations to
join an alliance that would make the gold dinar their primary form of money and
foreign exchange. They would sell oil and other resources to the US and the
rest of the world only for gold dinars. As President of the African Union in
2009, Qaddafi introduced for discussion to African Union member states
Qaddafi’s proposal to use the Libyan dinar and the silver dirham as the only
possible money for the rest of the world to buy African oil.
Along with
the Arab OPEC sovereign wealth funds for their oil, other African oil nations,
specifically Angola and Nigeria, were moving to create their own national oil
wealth funds at the time of the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya. Those sovereign national
wealth funds, tied to Qaddafi’s concept of the gold dinar, would make Africa’s
long-held dream of independence from colonial monetary control, whether of the
British Pound, the French Franc, the euro or the US dollar, a reality.
Qaddafi was
moving forward, as head of the African Union, at the time of his assassination,
with a plan to unify the sovereign States of Africa with one gold currency, a
United States of Africa. In 2004, a Pan-African Parliament of 53 nations had
laid plans for an African Economic Community – with a single gold currency by
2023.
African
oil-producing nations were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand
gold payment for their oil and gas. The list included Egypt, Sudan, South
Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tunisia, Gabon,
South Africa, Uganda, Chad, Suriname, Cameroon, Mauritania, Morocco, Zambia, Somalia,
Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Cote d’Ivoire, plus Yemen which
had just made significant new oil discoveries. The four African member-states
of OPEC–Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, a giant oil producer and the largest natural
gas producer in Africa with huge natural gas reserves, and Libya with the
largest reserves–would be in the new gold dinar system.
Little
wonder that French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was given the up-front role
in the war on Qaddafi by Washington, went so far as to call Libya a “threat” to
the financial security of the world.
Hillary’s
‘rebels’ create a central bank
One of the
most bizarre features of Hillary Clinton’s war to destroy Qaddafi was the fact
that the US-backed “rebels” in Benghazi, in the oil-rich eastern part of Libya,
in the midst of battle, well before it was at all clear if they would topple
the Qaddafi regime, declared they had created a Western-style central bank, “in
exile.”
In the very
first weeks of the rebellion, the rebel leaders declared that they had created
a central bank to replace Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority. The rebel
council, in addition to creating their own oil company to sell the oil they
captured announced: “Designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary
authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor
to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”
Commenting
on the odd decision, before the outcome of battle was even decided, to create a
western-style central bank to replace Qaddafi’s sovereign national bank that
was issuing gold-backed dinars, Robert Wenzel in the Economic Policy Journal,
remarked, “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a
matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more
than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty
sophisticatedinfluences.”
It becomes
clear now in light of the Clinton-Blumenthal emails that those “pretty
sophisticated influences” were tied to Wall Street and the City of London. The
person brought in by Washington to lead the rebels in March 2011, Khalifa
Hifter, had spent the previous twenty years of his life in suburban Virginia,
not far from CIA headquarters, after a break with Libya as a leading military
commander of Qaddafi.
The risk to
the future of the US dollar as world reserve currency, if Qaddafi had been
allowed to proceed–together with Egypt, Tunisia and other Arab OPEC and African
Union members– to introduce oil sales for gold not dollars, would clearly have
been the financial equivalent of a Tsunami.
New Gold
Silk Road
The Qaddafi
dream of an Arabic and African gold system independent of the dollar,
unfortunately, died with him. Libya, after Hillary Clinton’s cynical
“responsibility to protect” destruction of the country, today is a shambles,
torn by tribal warfare, economic chaos, al-Qaeda and DAESH or ISIS terrorists.
The monetary sovereignty held by Qaddafi’s 100% state-owned national monetary
agency and its issuance of gold dinars is gone, replaced by an “independent”
central bank tied to the dollar.
Despite
that setback, it’s more than notable that now an entirely new grouping of
nations is coming together to build a similar gold-backed monetary system. This
is the group led by Russia and China, the world’s number three and number one
gold producing countries, respectively.
This group
is tied to the construction of China’s One Belt, One Road New Silk Road
Eurasian infrastructure great project. It involves China’s $16 billion Gold
Development Fund, and very firm steps by China to replace the City of London
and New York as the center of world gold trade. The Eurasian gold system
emerging now poses an entirely new quality of challenge to American financial
hegemony. This Eurasian challenge, its success or failure, could well determine
whether we allow our civilization to survive and prosper under entirely different
conditions, or whether we decide to sink along with the bankrupt dollar system.
F.
William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a
degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author
on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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