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 sophisticated influences.”
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”.
