Counting the gains
WHERE MONEY TALKS
| Of course, British public opinion was ostentatiously concerned with only lofty moral imperatives. Screaming "Democracy versus Dictatorship", the media consoled itself with retailing lurid charges against Muammar Gaddafi. He is a monster. He used to arm Irish Republican Army guerrillas. |
| He supports Zimbabwe's tyrannical Robert Mugabe. He was responsible for the death of a British policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, gunned down in London in 1984. He murdered 270 people when PanAm 103 crashed over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988. |
| All this made it shocking for Britain's prime minister to stroll about the desert sands with Libya's ruler, to sit beside him in his open ceremonial tent and, most hideous of all, actually to shake him by the hand. The handshake prompted hysterics. |
| But did anyone ever think that Blair was flying all that way just to nod at his host? Perhaps, he should have made a deep salaam or, maybe, even dropped a curtsy, for he made a tidy killing for Britain out of the trip. |
| Of course, Britain is not alone in clothing commerce in high-sounding principles. In 1997 when Bill Clinton supported the Congolese rebel leader, Laurent Kabila, the new regime's first act was to ignore major mining giants like De Beers and Anglo-American and grant a $1 billion concession to American Mineral Fields. |
| The little-known firm worked out of the US president's home town of Hope, Arkansas. The Texas-based oil company, Halliburton, which Dick Cheney used to head, proved the same point more recently in Iraq. It's just that the British have been longer at the game. They do it with greater finesse. Let's count Blair's pickings from this trip. |
| First, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell signed a $200 million contract for onshore exploration, developing the upstream energy sector and exporting liquefied natural gas. The Daily Mirror was jubilant when the "long-term strategic relationship" with promise of more in the pipeline cut out Norway's Statoil hesitating on the threshold.. "It surely is little coincidence," the paper crowed, "that the US was concerned about getting its hands on Iraq's oil and that Shell is already doing a deal with Libya to secure its reserves." |
| Second, British Arerospace expects a contract for "civil aviation infrastructure" and "modernising airports systems" with the hope of defence equipment in the future. BAE is Blair's baby. |
| According to Robin Cook, Britain's former foreign secretary, BAE's chairman has a key to the private garden entrance to No 10. Cook also accused Blair of rejecting human rights considerations to allow the company to sell Hawk spares to Zimbabwe and air defence radar to Tanzania. |
| Third, anticipating this upturn in relations, British Airways launched three flights a week to Tripoli. It described Libya as "a good business market and also a prospective tourist destination." |
| Fourth, Gaddafi has promised a $36 million purchase from the Virgin group of a fleet of airships designed to locate landmines in former war zones. |
| Fifth, Blair paved the way for a British business delegation to visit Libya during April. His trade secretary, Patricia Hewitt, says more deals will be signed. |
| Companies like GlaxoSmithKline and the engineering firm, AME, are waiting to pick up the lead. Libya is Britain's 58th largest trading partner, and exports rose last year by 12 per cent to $436 million even without the benefit of direct prime ministerial blessings. |
| Sixth, horror of horrors, the British are considering training Libyan military personnel (for a fee of course) at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. |
| What would Ronald Reagan, who had Gaddafi's camp bombed after an attack on a Berlin disco frequented by American servicemen, have to say? How would George W Bush react to this pandering to a key member of the axis of evil? |
| But it's in oil that the future lies. Libya is the world's eighth largest oil exporter. It's proven reserves of 36 billion barrels (according to OPEC) may be a gross underestimate for only about a quarter of the country has been properly explored. |
| Gas reserves might also be well in excess of the estimated 45.99 cu ft. Its not difficult to understand why Henry Kissinger tried to activate the sinister 40 Committee, the US inter-agency authority for covert operations, in 1969 when Gaddafi toppled Libya's pro-Western King Idris. |
| No wonder that 60 per cent of the respondents in a newspaper poll supported Blair's initiative. Not for nothing did Napoleon refer to a nation of shopkeepers. |
| The respondents may have remembered, as the Guardian recalled, that "a poll of major oil companies four years ago showed that Libya was now 'the number one preferred location' for oil exploration and production." All that held Britain back were America's dog-in-the-manger sanctions. There was no stopping it once Bush had cleared the way. |
| TAILPIECE Gaddafi is no one's fool, of course. He knows exactly what the British and Americans are up to. Oil is also his weapon as he once told the chiefs of 21 international oil corporations. |
| "People who lived without oil for 5,000 years can live without it again for a few years in order to attain their legitimate rights" he said. His change of position cannot diminish his astuteness. |