Reply #80: Oh, no, of course oil interests exist, that's irrelevant to the people who rose up.

[joshcryer]

See, here's the problem I have with the demeaning arguments about the uprising. First it was part of the Arab Spring, you and I both saw the thousands of posts about that. Arab Spring! Another Arab country rising up against their tyrant! Then things started getting really messy. Then people started jumping ship because the people who initially rose up and put down a few tyrannical police officers and military people needed outside help.

Morally I could not simply go "oh fuck them the outside just wants their oil.

Nor morally could I look for justifications as to why their initial uprising "must" be bad. Ethically that would just be a disaster.

"It's got to be islamic militants" (a meme perpetuated to this very day).

"It's got to be imperialist oil" (yes, they were lucky that the west cared about them, look at Syria, irrelevant to the initial uprising).

"It's got to be the banks" (that was a fun one).

"It's got to be the CIA" (oh bother).

"It's racist" (yikes).

Don't you see a trend here? You're, like most every other anti-Libyan revolution person, saying similar things to discredit them, as opposed to accepting that they're trying to create something new.

What I want to see is a constitutional requirement that 90% of all oil revenue goes to the people, and given that the Technocrats behind the TNC already have laid out the 2035 plan (that Gaddafi was to implement, but reneged on), it may well work out that way (they want to be off of oil by then). If that happens everyone will have egg on their face. Including the interventionists who only intervened because there's a valuable resource to be gained.

I hate Technocrats btw, they're a recipe for disaster. And I don't care why anyone intervened, I care, ethically that they did.

edit: and let me be clear, I am not backing down from the fact that Gaddafi was opening up his entire country to western oil exploration, all said and done the oil companies prefer stability to civil war. edit again: and 2-3 million exiles from Libya would've been an equally if not preferred scenario, since it would've ended sooner arguably (had nothing happened I think it'd be winding down by now at the cost of a lot of lives and a lot of migrants).