Hillary Clinton’s “private” email correspondence with Middle East wheeler-dealer Sidney Blumenthal discusses France’s motives in pushing for a NATO attack on Libya, in 2011 – including Muammar Qaddafi’s intention to use Libyan gold to “provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).” Meanwhile, the Sunni Arab monarchies were eager for war because most of the region’s oil lies in Shia-populated territory.
This article previously appeared in Washington’s Blog.
“Almost all the Persian Gulf’s fossil fuels are located underneath Shiites – even in Sunni Saudi Arabia.”
On New Year’s Eve, 3,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were released.
One of them confirms – an email dated April 2, 2011 to Clinton from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal – that:
“Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli.
“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).
“(Source Comment [This is in the original declassified email, and is not a comment added by us]: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:
a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,
b. Increase French influence in North Africa,
c. Improve his internal political situation in France,
d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa).”
“This plan was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.”
This may confirm what some of us have been saying for years:
The REAL Reason Sunni Governments Like Saudi Arabia Are At War Against the Shias
While the Sunnis and Shias have been competing for more than a thousand years, they have largely co-existed peacefully until recently.
Why are they involved in an open war across multiple countries now?
Much of modern geopolitics is driven by hydrocarbons … i.e. oil and gas.
Is this true of the Sunnis-Shia war?
Yes, the U.S. and its allies are backing the Sunnis against the Shias … in order to wage war for oil.
And it turns out that the lion’s share of oil in the Middle East happens to be located in Shia countries … and in the Shia-minority sections of Sunni-majority countries.
Specifically, as Jon Schwartz reports this week at the Intercept:
Much of the conflict can be explained by a fascinating map created by M.R. Izady, a cartographer and adjunct master professor at the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School/Joint Special Operations University in Florida.
What the map shows is that, due to a peculiar correlation of religious history and anaerobic decomposition of plankton, almost all the Persian Gulf’s fossil fuels are located underneath Shiites. This is true even in Sunni Saudi Arabia, where the major oil fields are in the Eastern Province, which has a majority Shiite population.
As a result, one of the Saudi royal family’s deepest fears is that one day Saudi Shiites will secede, with their oil, and ally with Shiite Iran.
This fear has only grown since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq overturned Saddam Hussein’s minority Sunni regime, and empowered the pro-Iranian Shiite majority. Nimr himself said in 2009 that Saudi Shiites would call for secession if the Saudi government didn’t improve its treatment of them. (See full map at: https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/01/Shia-and-Oil-lg.jpg)
“If this section of eastern Saudi Arabia were to break away, the Saudi royals would just be some broke 80-year-olds with nothing left but a lot of beard dye and Viagra prescriptions.”
The map shows religious populations in the Middle East and proven developed oil and gas reserves. Click to view the full map of the wider region. The dark green areas are predominantly Shiite; light green predominantly Sunni; and purple predominantly Wahhabi/Salafi, a branch of Sunnis. The black and red areas represent oil and gas deposits, respectively.
Source: Dr. Michael Izady at Columbia University, Gulf2000, New York
As Izady’s map so strikingly demonstrates, essentially all of the Saudi oil wealth is located in a small sliver of its territory whose occupants are predominantly Shiite. (Nimr, for instance, lived in Awamiyya, in the heart of the Saudi oil region just northwest of Bahrain.) If this section of eastern Saudi Arabia were to break away, the Saudi royals would just be some broke 80-year-olds with nothing left but a lot of beard dye and Viagra prescriptions.
Nimr’s execution can be partly explained by the Saudis’ desperation to stamp out any sign of independent thinking among the country’s Shiites.
The same tension explains why Saudi Arabia helped Bahrain, an oil-rich, majority-Shiite country ruled by a Sunni monarchy, crush its version of the Arab Spring in 2011.
Similar calculations were behind George H.W. Bush’s decision to stand by while Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in 1991 to put down an insurrection by Iraqi Shiites at the end of the Gulf War. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained at the time, Saddam had “held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia.”
So the Sunni Gulf monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait are single-mindedly going after Iran and the Shia world – because the Shias are sitting on the oil and gas resources – and doing everything they can to start a Sunni-Shia war across the entire MENA area (Middle East and North Africa) in order to “justify” a resource grab.
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