¹ “McCain calls for stronger NATO campaign,” monstersandcritics.com, April 22, 2011, link.

² Ed Hornick, “Arming Libyan Rebels: Should U.S. Do It?” CNN, March 31, 2011.

³ “Countries Agree to Try to Transfer Some of Qaddafi's Assets to Libyan Rebels,” New York Times, April 13, 2011, link.

⁴ “President Obama Wants Options as Pentagon Issues Warnings About Libyan No-Fly Zone,” ABC News, March 3, 2011, link. Earlier, on February 25, Gates warned that the U.S. should avoid future land wars like those it has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, but should not forget the difficult lessons it has learned from those conflicts.

“In my opinion, any future Defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined, ‘as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Gates said in a speech to cadets at West Point “(Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2011, link).

⁵ Alan J. Kuperman, “False Pretense for War in Libya?” Boston Globe, April 14, 2011.

⁶ America's income disparity, as measured by its Gini coefficient, is now among the highest in the world, along with Brazil, Mexico, and China. See Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, 38, 103; Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse (New York: Dutton, 2006), 159.

⁷ This is the subject of my book The Road to 9/11, 4–9.

⁸ Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 213.

⁹ Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 32. One could cite also the experience of the French Third Republic and the Banque de l'Indochine or the Netherlands and the Dutch East India Company.

¹⁰ Elizabeth Longford, Jameson's Raid: The Prelude to the Boer War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982); The Jameson Raid: a centennial retrospective (Houghton, South Africa: Brenthurst Press, 1996).

¹¹ Wikileak documents from October and November 2002 reveal that Washington was making deals with oil companies prior to the Iraq invasion, and that the British government lobbied on behalf of BP's being included in the deals (Paul Bignell, “Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq,” Independent (London), April 19, 2011).

¹² Reuters, March 23, 2011.

¹³ Saman Mohammadi, “The Humanitarian Empire May Strike Syria Next, Followed By Lebanon And Iran,” OpEdNews.com, March 31, 2011.

¹⁴ “Halliburton Eager for Work Across the Mideast,” International Oil Daily, May 7, 2003.

¹⁵ “Gaddafi offers Libyan oil production to India, Russia, China,” Agence France-Presse, March 14, 2011, link.

¹⁶ Peter Dale Scott, “Bush's Deep Reasons for War on Iraq: Oil, Petrodollars, and the OPEC Euro Question”; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 41-42: “From these developments emerged the twin phenomena, underlying 9/11, of triumphalist US unilateralism on the one hand, and global third-world indebtedness on the other. The secret deals increased US-Saudi interdependence at the expense of the international comity which had been the base for US prosperity since World War II.” Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 37.

¹⁷ “Globalists Target 100% State Owned Central Bank of Libya.” Link.

¹⁸ Ellen Brown, “Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking,” Reader Supported News, April 15, 2011.

¹⁹ Peter Dale Scott, “Bush's Deep Reasons for War on Iraq: Oil, Petrodollars, and the OPEC Euro Question”; citing “Islamic Gold Dinar Will Minimize Dependency on US Dollar,” Malaysian Times, April 19, 2003.

²⁰ “Gold key to financing Gaddafi struggle,” Financial Times, March 21, 2011, link.

²¹ Franco Bechis, “French plans to topple Gaddafi on track since last November,” VoltaireNet, March 25, 2011. Cf. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, “November 2010 War Games: ‘Southern Mistral’ Air Attack against Dictatorship in a Fictitious Country called ‘Southland,‘” Global Research, April 15, 2011, link; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 19, 2011.

²² New York Times, February 27, 2011.

²³ Executive Order of February 25, 2011, citing International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, seizes all Libyan Govt assets, February 25, 2011, link. The authority granted to the President by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose” (50 U.S.C. 1701).

²⁴ “Billions Of Libyan Assets Frozen,” Tropic Post, March 8, 2011, link (“largest amount”); Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 80-89 (Iranian assets).

²⁵ “Letter from an African Woman, Not Libyan, On Qaddafi Contribution to Continent-wide African Progress, Oggetto: ASSOCIAZIONE CASA AFRICA LA LIBIA DI GHEDDAFI HA OFFERTO A TUTTA L'AFRICA LA PRIMA RIVOLUZIONE DEI TEMPI MODERNI,” Vermont Commons, April 21, 2011, link. Cf. Manlio Dinucci, “Financial Heist of the Century: Confiscating Libya's Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF),” Global Research, April 24, 2011, link.

²⁶ Ibid. Cf. “The Inauguration of the African Satellite Control Center,” Libya Times, September 28, 2009, link; Jean-Paul Pougala, “The lies behind the West's war on Libya,” Pambazuka.org, April 14, 2011.

²⁷ Leslie Hook, “China's future in Africa, after Libya,” blogs.ft.com, March 4, 2011 ($50 billion). The U.S trade deficit with China in 2010 was $273 billion.