The Mole reports:
The Daily Telegraph has calculated that patrolling the no-fly zone is costing Britain about £3.2 million a day, before a weapon is fired. At that rate, the no-fly zone has cost British taxpayers £17 million so far.
The opening of the assault with 112 Tomahawk missiles which thudded into targets at the weekend, each costing around £500,000, burned up another £56 million.
Did you see George Osborne interviewed on Breakfast tv this morning? On being asked why the government was cutting the winter fuel allowances for pensioners, he came out with the old neoliberal claptrap about there being no money left in the kitty and that tough decisions on spending had to be made.
A decent interviewer would surely have asked him ‘what about the money for bombing Libya, George?'
On the subject of Libya, great pieces today by the Guardian's Seumas Milne, on why there is nothing moral about NATO's intervention, and Sasha Cockburn, in the First Post.
Cockburn writes:
The war on Libya now being waged by the US, Britain and France must surely rank as one of the stupidest martial enterprises, smaller in scale to be sure, since Napoleon took it into his head to invade Russia in 1812.
The war on Libya now being waged by the US, Britain and France must surely rank as one of the stupidest martial enterprises, smaller in scale to be sure, since Napoleon took it into his head to invade Russia in 1812.
3 comments:
I guess all of those defense contractors need the money more than the pensioners, or perhaps there are some state-owned enterprises in Libya that the vulture capitalists have their eyes on?
The Western intervention is, of course, crucially about ensuring that Libyan oil production is not crippled at a time of rising oil prices.
Osborne's "Ford Focus" budget shows the centrality of petrol fuelled consumerism to Britain's economy.
Blair's panic about the road haulier strike in 2000 was a crucial reason for his decision to back the Iraq War in 2003.
When that went disastrously wrong Blair effected a rapprochement with Gaddafi in 2004, with the Libyan dictator fearing what happened to Saddam.
That's why Gaddafi gave up his weapons programme. The current intervention reflects the fact he had, de facto, lost control and was set to cuase a bloodbath in Benghazi.
Whatever the arguments about "humanitarian intervention" to prevent the massacre of civilians, the West needs to make dependence upon oil a strategic priority.
OOOPs
"Whatever the arguments about "humanitarian intervention" to prevent the massacre of civilians, the West needs to make dependence upon oil a strategic priority".
Should be "the West needs to make ending the dependence upon oil a strategic priority".....!!!!!
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