'Western powers are fighting for Libya’s oil like piranhas'

Months of chaos await Libya if the NATO-led operation in the country ends the rule of its embattled leader, a top American political analyst has claimed. But F. William Engdahl said the illegal regime change would still suit greedy Western oil interests.

“They are eventually going to topple [Muammar] Gaddafi," he told Russia Today TV station. “And I think what Libya is going to face after that is a period of prolonged chaos. Nobody knows the outcome.”

He added: “What emerges from that, I think it suits some of the Western oil interests, especially the British and the French, who were fighting like piranhas over grabbing the most juicy oil fields for their own companies,” said Engdahl, author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order.

Engdahl said NATO’s actions in Libya have created a very virulent precedent.

“What we have going on in Libya for some months now is a major effort by the US and NATO forces to pour at least $1 billion by various estimates into the so-called Transitional National Council,” he said. “It’s rival tribal clan warfare that is going on in Libya. This is not a democracy movement by any stretch of the imagination.”

Engdahl said it is simply an insurgency being supported covertly by US-financed armed shipments to the rebels – in order, he claimed “to simply carve up the oil fields and get them into Western hands [a thesis supported by the New York Times], rather than in Libyan state hands, which Gaddafi held firmly on to.”

David Maimela from the South Africans for Peace in Africa Initiative shared Engdahl’s pessimism about Libya’s near future.

“NATO has not achieved anything [in Libya],” he said. “Even if they are to remove Gaddafi and his government at the moment, what we are going to have is a greater form of political instability in the country and a further breakout of civil war in Libya,” he said.

Despite claims by the rebels, repeated by the Europe-based International Criminal Court seeking his arrest, that Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam had been captured, the defiant heir apparent turned up in Tripoli tonight to a cheering crowd, according to the BBC.

* Members of the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi say they plan to start work on forming a new government. They are planning to fly to the capital on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Russia remains firm in its position that it will not recognise the NTC as the sole legitimate representative group in Libya. Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that such a move would not help matters.