Canada's 'responsibility to protect' US oil bidness

"He simply will not last very long," Harper said of Gaddafi back in March, as Canada prepared to drop $27-million of smart money smart bombs on Libya in order to oust him.
As of now Gaddafi controls most of the country including the capital.

On Tuesday Parliament will debate Steve's resolution to support NATO's proposal for another three month extension, supported last time by all opposition parties.
One will recall that Steve does not like to miss a parade :

"I noted that there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein operates programs to produce weapons of mass destruction. Experience confirms this. British, Canadian and American intelligence leaves no doubt on the matter.

In my judgment Canada will eventually join with the allied coalition if war on Iraq comes to pass. The government will join, notwithstanding its failure to prepare, its neglect in co-operating with its allies, or its inability to contribute. ...  It will not join as a leader but unnoticed at the back of the parade."

As we wait for this war's versions of uranium yellowcake and "he gasses his own people" to go into spin overdrive, perhaps our opposition politicians - so eager to be onboard this latest 'coalition of the willing to protect the people of Libya while ignoring the similar plight of the peoples of Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria' - could take a moment to read Glenn Greenwald's perusal of the WikiLeaks cables info found in a Washington Post article :

In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war

"The relationship between Gaddafi and the U.S. oil industry as a whole was odd. In 2004, President George W. Bush unexpectedly lifted economic sanctions on Libya in return for its renunciation of nuclear weapons and terrorism. There was a burst of optimism among American oil executives eager to return to the Libyan oil fields they had been forced to abandon two decades earlier. . . .


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. ...

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. . . .

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. ... Libya's oil production has foundered, sagging to about 1.5 million barrels a day by early this year before unrest broke out.

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."

End of Greenwald.

So let's hear a rebel yell for the Harbour Group, the Washington public relations firm whose leadership includes former staff director for Hillary Clinton Richard Mintz, and for the Benghazi coalition, represented by former Libyan Ambassador Ali Aujali, seen here with Paul Wolfowitz in his April speech to the American Enterprise Institute.

In another pure coincidence, neocon Wolfowitz and his AEI buddies at PNAC, the Project for the New American Century, were the original architects of the war on Iraq, arguing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein back in 1998.  Later Wolfowitz and AEI were supposedly hoodwinked by Iraq's Ahmed Chalabi and Curveball into thinking the Iraqis would greet their US liberators with roses.  Nudge, nudge, wink, hoodwink.

Speaking of Hillary and Iraq :

"Hillary Clinton hosted a meeting of top executives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Halliburton, GE, Chevron, Lockheed Martin, Citigroup, Occidental Petroleum, etc. etc. to plot how to exploit "economic opportunities in the new Iraq." 

And so it goes ...
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Canadian Project for a New American Century

In July 2005, Canada's Chief of Defence Rick Hillier explained our new relationship to the people of Afghanistan :

"These are detestable murderers and scumbags. They want to break our society. If Canada is attacked, it will be only because it is a free country.
They detest our freedoms. They detest our society. They detest our liberties."
By sending troops to Afghanistan, he argued, Canada is actually protecting itself : "We are the Canadian Forces and our job is to be able to kill people."

Our job is also, he might as well have added, to placate the US for having foolishly avoided public advocacy for its adventure in Iraq.

Four years and many platitudes about little girls going to school later, the Canadian military manual of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations doctrine begun in 2005 and spanning the Bush and Obama presidencies is now complete.
Authorized by the head of the Canadian army Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, it is, Anthony Fenton writes at The Dominion, "a synthesis of two recent US Army Field Manuals" and a model of US-Canada "synergy":

Obama's administration has sent clear signals, through political appointments and holdovers (such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates), that the US military and national security apparatus' transformation toward fighting smaller, "irregular wars" begun under Bush will continue apace.

Only a week before Bush left office, Gates, together with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Director of USAID, Henrietta Fore, co-signed the US Government Counterinsurgency Guide.

Neo-conservative historian Eliot Cohen, who oversaw the Guide's creation, wrote in its introduction:
"Insurgency will be a large and growing element of the security challenges faced by the United States in the 21st century...Whether the United States should engage in any particular counterinsurgency is a matter of political choice, but that it will engage in such conflicts during the decades to come is a near certainty. This Guide will help prepare decision-makers of many kinds for the tasks that result from this fact."

Thank you, Eliot Cohen, charter member of the Project for the New American Century, signatory to the 1998 white paper on "regime change" in Iraq, and all-round advocate of US military imperialism.

Although PNAC was disbanded in 2006 when its founding members decamped to the Foreign Policy Initiative, both its membership and its objectives of an imperial US COIN agenda continue through Obama and into a Canadian manual on military doctrine.

Suddenly this picture becomes less amusing.

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Fenton :

"According to Lt. Gen. Leslie, the Canadian Army is "at the cutting edge" of Western armies readying themselves to fight 21st-century wars.

Since General Leslie signed off on the COIN manual last December, the COIN Center and Canada have collaborated on more than 20 exchanges, including "COIN Leader Workshops" and "COIN Integration" meetings.
Members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command (CEFCOM) met with the [US]COIN Center for discussions about "US-Canada COIN synergy" five days after Leslie wrote in his issuing order for the new COIN doctrine that it is "complementary to our allies."
In April, the US COIN Center "visited military installations and think-tanks in Canada to inculcate the Canadian military establishment with COIN doctrine and best practices."

Recent meetings have concentrated on how best to sell this idea to the Canadian public.

Maybe they could brand it as the Canadian Project for a New American Century.

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Anthony Fenton at The Dominion. Go.

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Edited to fix link - thanks, Chris

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