Libya’s Liquid Gold

Businessweek's Aug. 29 cover (image via businessinsider.com)

In the wake of Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi’s fall, as other publications detail the gold-plated guns found inside the palace or report on the rebels’ efforts to restore power and water to Tripoli, Businessweek leaves no uncertainty as to its chief concern. On the cover, splashed in graffiti-print across Qaddafi’s portrait are the words, “Now About That Oil . . . .” If Qaddafi’s disappearance into the warren of tunnels beneath the capital city echoes the subterranean post-invasion existence of Saddam Hussein, the drippy red letters conjure an uncomfortable reminder of the blood-for-oil accusations that dogged western involvement in both countries. The Times reports that oil production, which reached 1.3 million barrels per day before the revolution, has ground to a halt during the months-long conflict. It will take months to restart, and even Businessweek acknowledges that “History says Libya is not a good bet to become an oil superpower anytime soon.”

The rebellion largely followed the tribal faultlines already present under Qadaffi’s rule, and no one is sure how quickly the rebels will be able to form a government. Even if the country is not torn apart by the centrifugal forces of tribal politics, four decades under a dictator who elevated himself at the expense of any civil institutions has left little in the way of a working society. “In the aftermath of the civil war, state building will begin from scratch,” Dirk Vandewalle wrote recently in Newsweek. While Libya may not be Afghanistan, where half a century of warfare precluded any tradition of modern government and forced the American invaders to build — not rebuild — a state, it is also not Iraq, with an educated professional class and a reservoir of exiles awaiting return. Businessweek writes that “the starting gun on resuming oil production can’t be fired until there’s a recognized, central government in place able to make decisions on how to pay for repairs and cooperate with partners.”

There is also the challenge of security; the explosions that have plagued the pipeline that delivers natural gas from Egypt to Israel since the toppling of Mubarak demonstrate the difficulties of protecting infrastructure after a revolution. Oil companies from Britain, France and Italy all had contracts with Qaddafi’s Libya, as did several American companies and major multinationals like BP and ConocoPhilips. Foreign involvement, which spiked dramatically after 2003, when Qaddafi reentered the international community after renouncing unconventional weapons and paying $2.7 billion to the families of the Flight 103 bombing victims, will presumably be welcomed by the rebels as well, but no one is sure exactly what form it will take. Clifford Krauss of the Times reports that “it is unclear whether a rebel government would honor the contracts struck by the Qaddafi regime or what approach it would take in negotiating new production-sharing agreements with companies willing to invest in established oil fields and explore for new ones.” This is where the Businessweek article, which outlines the potential stumbling blocks to resumed production and muses about potential agreements with foreign companies, falls short. The physical and logistical barriers to restoring the flow of oil are indeed high, but the more interesting challenges to the industry are political, not commercial. Qaddafi and the rebels’ National Transitional Council are not merely interchangeable figureheads for Libya; the regime change will have deeper effects than a new heading on the official government stationery. The Times describes it best:

 Even before taking power, the rebels suggested that they would remember their friends and foes and negotiate deals accordingly.

“We don’t have a problem with Western countries like Italians, French and U.K. companies,” Abdeljalil Mayouf, a spokesman for the Libyan rebel oil company Agoco, was quoted by Reuters as saying. “But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil.”

Russia, China and Brazil did not back strong sanctions on the Qaddafi regime, and they generally supported a negotiated end to the uprising. All three countries have large oil companies that are seeking deals in Africa.

The fallout from the Libyan revolution may create a singular situation in Africa, where Chinese investment has lately seemed to be challenging older connections with the West. White-hot economic growth and an ever-widening trade surplus with countries like the U.S. have spurred the Chinese to look beyond the low-yield U.S. treasury bonds in which its sovereign wealth funds have long invested. In turn, the developing world is hungry for cash with which to exploit its natural resources. Under Qaddafi, Libya stood out from its African neighbors by achieving a modicum of stability and, after the country abandoned weapons of mass destruction, more than a modicum of petrodollars. Even before Qaddafi’s rapprochement with the West, however, Chinese investment might have appealed to Qaddafi for much the same reason as it attracted his impoverished neighbors. The decades of internecine conflict that followed many African countries’ independence left little in the way of infrastructure and even less in the way of good governance. Money from China helped solve the former problem without requiring such corrupt dictators as Omar El Bashir of Sudan to address the latter. In an April 2011 story on mining in Angola for Guernica magazine, reporter Scott Johnson dubbed China “the newest colonial arrival to Africa.” Johnson elaborates:

Angola was fast becoming China’s biggest advocate, touting its superiority over the standard Western donors like the World Bank and the IMF, whose bureaucratic restrictions had angered the government and, in their view, only hobbled Angola further. Angola opted for the simpler and quicker Chinese solution.

In Libya, the “simpler and quicker” solution was not only Chinese but, as Clifford Krauss’ Times article implies, Russian and Brazilian as well. These are countries notorious for their reluctance to meddle in what they deem the internal affairs of other nations. Russia, China and Brazil have repeatedly blocked actions at the United Nations that could eventually be used to justify military intervention; they water down or threaten to veto sanctions against human-rights violators like Syria and Iran, and acquiesced to the U.N. mandate to protect civilians in Libya only by abstaining from the vote. Especially in China’s case, such behavior is rooted as much in ideology as in self-interest, as the number of issues — civil rights, media censorship, religious persecution — on which it feels threatened by U.S. criticism grows ever higher. In Russia, the rollback of democracy orchestrated by Vladimir Putin and his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, provides similar motivation to turn a blind eye to foreign corruption and atrocities. We won’t bother you, Russia and China signal to the world, and you won’t bother us. Offering money with strings attached, as the World Bank does when it mandates transparency and good governance in return for investment, is seen by Moscow and Beijing as setting a dangerous precedent.

If the restrictions that accompany western aid are increasingly driving African countries into the amoral embrace of China, Libya provides an interesting exception to the rule. With the triumph of the NATO-backed rebels, Libya is moving in exactly the opposite direction: away from authoritarian benefactors, not toward them. It is worth asking whether, as the Arab Spring topples dictators who have cozied up to China and its ilk, this turning of the tide has the potential to spread beyond Libya. So far, the outlook is not overly promising: Egypt’s Mubarak was a dependable if cool ally to the west in general and Israel in particular, but his successors may more easily swayed by anti-Israel popular opinion. However, if (and this is a big “if”) protesters in Syria, Yemen and other restless countries manage to install more democratic regimes, it’s possible that a new Middle East will prefer to exchange its oil for dollars, not renminbi or rubles.

American and European oil companies are well-positioned to take advantage of this sea change. While Italy’s Eni and France’s Total were among the companies to sign production deals with Qaddafi’s government prior to the revolution, both countries also ultimately backed NATO involvement and are likely on the rebels’ shortlist of preferred investors. The Times reports that Libya supplies more than 20 percent of Italy’s oil imports, and 15 percent of imports for France, Switzerland and Austria. France was one of the first and strongest proponents of intervention; Obama’s much-denigrated doctrine of “leading from behind” was not the product of an insufficiently ambitious president but of a Pentagon which, according to the Times, “never wanted to get into the war in the first place and felt dragged in by the exuberance of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and a number of White House advisers”. In the same article, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller contrasts the Iraq-era American disdain for the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” to the current “grudging respect” afforded to the French military, which has flown one-third of NATO’s air sorties in Libya.

Of course, Sarkozy’s interest in Libya rests on more than just the country’s oil wealth. To Americans, Africa is a distant world, scarcely more familiar than the Dark Continent of David Livingstone’s day. For France, chaos in Libya is chaos on Europe’s doorstep, and the ties between Italy and its former colony are even tighter. Tripoli and Cyrenaica are not just foreign names on a map; they are the sites of military campaigns as recent as World War II. In Italy’s case, geographical proximity has made for a complicated relationship with Libya’s rebels, as Qaddafi offered Italy not only an abundance of oil but relative stability on the Mediterranean pond. Like China, which would rather prop up dictators like Kim Jong Il than risk a power vacuum that would send a flood of North Korean refugees over the border, Italy had a vested interest in perpetuating the Libyan status quo. “Italy’s islands are just a few hundred miles from Libya’s shores,” the AP reported in August. “Rome has relied on Gadhafi to keep away waves of boat people escaping conflict or poverty.”

Silvio Berlusconi treated Qaddafi as a personal friend, though considering Berlusconi’s penchant for partying with call girls and appointing former Miss Italy contestants to government positions (see my post on the mess in Italy here), the Italian premier has a loose definition of “friend.” Rome, while not rising to the level of Beijing and Moscow in its initial distaste for intervention, was a relative Johnny-come-lately to the NATO military campaign. The AP deems Berlusconi’s sudden embrace of rebel leader Mahmoud Jibril a “remarkable about-face,” noting that “in one notorious incident last year, Berlusconi kissed Qaddafi’s hand at a summit. And when the world rushed to condemn the Libyan’s bloody crackdown on protests in February, Berlusconi held back — saying Qaddafi was too busy to be bothered.” The Times’ Steven Erlanger minces no words:

Italy is concerned about resuming its imports of Libyan oil and natural gas, one reason Rome was slower than some other countries to come out against Colonel Qaddafi.

It doesn’t take a high level of cyncism to attribute Berlusconi’s sudden change of heart to the rebels’ equally sudden shift in fortune. Twenty percent of imports is a lot of oil, and Italy does not want to find itself in the company of China and Russia, which waited until September 1, when more than 60 nations convened in Paris to offer assistance for Libya’s fledgling government, to recognize the legitimacy of the rebel council. “Council leaders have said that they want to preserve existing contracts,” the Times writes in an article about the conference, “but that new ones will favor the countries that helped them defeat Colonel Qaddafi.” Even countries that declined to support the U.N. mandate for intervention — China and Russia, but also countries like Algeria, which is reportedly sheltering members of Qaddafi’s family — sent representatives to Paris, suggesting that they have bent to the reality that the rebels, not Qaddafi, will be the ones handing out oil contracts in the near future. As the heady disorder of the revolution is molded into a workable state, it will be instructive to see whether the “political issues” the rebels have with Quaddafi’s former backers really amount to a blacklist. Idealism overthrows governments but realpolitik sustains them, and the National Transitional Council may not have the luxury of saying no to Chinese investment.

The political fallout of Italy’s early support for Qaddafi is even less clear. The AP quotes Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister, as stating that the rebels “have committed to honor all of the contracts, also those of Italian businesses, that were signed by Libya. They weren’t contracts with Qaddafi.” The article provides no confirmation by the Transitional Council of Frattini’s claim, however, and it is an open question whether the rebels will see a similar equivalence between Qaddafi and the Libyan state. But when push came to shove, Berlusconi backed the anti-Qaddafi forces, despite acknowledging “the personal difficulties that this decision entailed for me.” Will the new government reward Italy for its eventual support or punish it for its initial hesitation? The likeliest outcome seems to be one in which the rebels make peace with Italy — which, in the end, got in line behind the NATO campaign — but deal more cautiously with countries like China and Russia that have, a la William Buckley, stood athwart history, yelling “stop,” in nearly every outbreak of the Arab spring. China’s strategy of currying favor with its client states via no-strings-attached investments may for the first time prove unsuccessful. If the Arab Spring — which began in Tunisia, spread to Egypt and has now swamped Libya — continues to upend the status quo across the Middle East, the so-called Red Dragon would be advised to look elsewhere for the oil to fuel its fire.

The Embarrassment of Italy

“Basta Bunga Bunga” (The New Yorker, 6/6/11)

“La Dolce Viagra” (Vanity Fair, July 2011)

The New Yorker likens Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to an aging Hugh Hefner, but the more appropriate comparison may be between Berlusconi and Charlie Sheen. Both the politician and the actor are train wrecks convinced of their own importance and attractiveness; we can hardly bear to look at them — but then again, we can hardly bear to look away. Sheen has his “goddesses” and his Tiger’s Blood; Berlusconi has his veline (showgirls) and his “bunga bunga” parties, at which he is supposedly serviced by a parade of prostitutes. Both men also have a way of commanding media attention, though the recent profiles of Berlusconi published in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair are a far cry from the sort of television coverage the prime minister receives in Italy, where he is the owner of the country’s largest private broadcaster. Written for American consumption, these profiles not only reveal Berlusconi’s ridiculousness but revel in it. Snark is barely necessary; the casual misogyny and flagrant intermingling of the sexual with the political require no embellishment to make the reader shake his — or her — head in disbelief.

The Vanity Fair piece, by Evgenia Peretz and Federico Rampini, is the less serious of the two articles. What it lacks in seriousness it makes up for in salaciousness, and though Peretz is long on description and quotes heavily from wiretapped phone conversations that seem taken straight from a porno movie, her analysis of the Italian political scene is short and shallow. She makes the major point, the one shared by most American coverage of Italian politics: Berlusconi, who is facing criminal charges for soliciting sex from an underage girl nicknamed “Ruby Rubacuori,” has made a mockery of his country’s political system.

Peretz takes us through the rise of Berlusconi’s media empire and his subsequent entry into politics. Amid accusations of corrupt business practices — bribery seems to have been standard operating procedure among Berlusconi’s companies — the future prime minister launched his campaign not because he “loved Italy so much. He got into politics to keep himself out of jail and his business empire intact.” Peretz writes, “As Berlusconi told the legendary Italian journalists Indro Montanelli and Enzo Biagi, ‘I am forced to enter politics, otherwise they will put me in prison.'”

As far as sins go, Berlusconi’s sexual escapades are secondary to his manipulation of the judicial and political system to aid and abet his own crimes. Peretz points out that, as prime minister, Berlusconi was able to rewrite any law he found troublesome: “He stood accused of tax evasion. Suddenly there was amnesty for tax evaders. He was facing the charge of having bribed a judge: Parliament passed a new law granting immunity to Italy’s highest-ranking leaders.” The prime minister likes to play the victim instead of the puppet-master; the Vanity Fair article refers us to his oft-quoted statement that ““I am the Jesus Christ of politics . . . I sacrifice myself for everyone.”

Whatever sacrifices Berlusconi may have made in his quest to become Italy’s leader, he has certainly not given up his sexual appetite. Even in America, where a semen-stained blue dress is evidence in the trial of a president and John Edwards is accused of paying nearly $1 million in hush money to his mistress, there is still something uncouth about journalists showing prurient interest in politicians’ sex lives. In Italy it is unavoidable; one cannot report on Berlusconi without reporting on the proclivities that have made his reign — and there is little doubt he considers himself a king — such a laughingstock. What an elected official does on his own time in his own bedroom is no one’s business but his own, but this is a country in which topless models, former Miss Italy contestants and sexy television hosts are regularly appointed to plum parliamentary and ministry jobs. Ariel Levy’s New Yorker article notes that, “most notoriously, in March, 2o1o, [Berlusconi] secured a position on the powerful Council of Lombardy for Nicole Minetti, a former dancer on the show ‘Colorado Cafe,’ who is now charged with providing him with prostitutes.” After Ruby, the underage call girl who features prominently in Berlusconi’s criminal charges, was arrested by the police, Minetti was sent to collect — and ostensibly to keep silent — the teenager.

Vanity Fair quotes liberally from the wiretapped phone calls and text messages that have been entered as evidence in the case. The transcripts indeed read like conversations between prostitutes and pimps; two of Berlusconi’s lackeys express exasperation over girls who claim to be too shy to thank the prime minister for his “bunga bunga” parties:

[Fede] passed this tidbit along to Mora, saying, “Fuck that! Shyness?! You should know how to say thank you.”“When they’re taking your dick they don’t seem to be overcome with shyness, right?” replied Mora.

“Exactly!” said Fede. “When they’re taking your dick, in exchange for money, right? Shit!”

Toward the end of the article, under the subhead “The End of Tolerance,” Peretz mentions the recent anti-Berlusconi protests and the general sense that Italians are sick of their leader’s law-bending exploits. The article, however, is largely an explanatory “how we got here” piece that narrates Berlusconi’s rags-to-riches-to-indictment story without probing beneath its surface. Berlusconi is ridiculous, of course, but that was a given before Peretz even began to write. For deeper — and ultimately more compelling — analysis, one must turn to “Basta Bunga Bunga,” Ariel Levy’s examination of the chauvinist, patriarchal culture in Italy that gave birth not only to Berlusconi but also to his opposite: the women who fill the streets of Rome carrying signs that read “If Not Now, When?”

Levy quotes opposition politician Rosy Bindi as remarking that many Italians see “a metaphor in Berlusconi’s abuse of power, these constant attempts to manipulate everything, to subjugate everyone.” Tellingly, Levy writes, “until 1981 a ‘crime of honor’ — killing your wife for being unfaithful or your sister for having premarital sex — could be treated as a lesser offense than other murders.” She catalogs the ways in which the feminist revolution never quite made it to Italy’s shores. Berlusconi’s carnal escapades thus become a symptom of a greater cultural malaise, one in which it’s acceptable to treat women as objects and to dismiss the sexual appetites of a 74-year-old man as evidence of his virility and prowess. It is an environment in which the prime minister not only compares himself to Jesus but makes cracks like, “We don’t have enough soldiers to stop rape because our women are so beautiful.” This is not a compliment to Italian womanhood; it is an insult, a degradation.

Feminism in Italy is an evolving concept, Levy points out. The bland statement by Rosy Bindi that “Italians are very tied to the idea of family and the traditional concept of womanhood” plays out more poignantly in an interview with the sisters who initiated a recent anti-Berlusconi protest. Old-school feminism, the kind associated with the Communist Party and the right to abortion, holds little appeal for Cristina and Francesca Comencini. They have a response to Berlusconi’s assertion, quoted by Evgenia Peretz, that the opposition among some members of parliament to serving alongside former showgirls demonstrates that “the left has no taste, even when it comes to women”:

“We were attractive!” Francesca burst in. “Berlusconi has always said, ‘I am more attractive than the left,’ and in a way he was right! Because they are sad. We tried to be more attractive. And in fact we are — more modern, more happy.”

Levy identifies this “traditional concept of womanhood,” which she hardly undermines by describing (in typical New Yorker fashion) Francesca Comencini as “glamorous even in sweatpants,” as the root of the culture that has accommodated and even celebrated Silvio Berlusconi. The national obsession with mammismo, or mother worship, means that a woman’s worth is predicated on producing children. It is not, she declares, “a culture that understands women as fully human. You can have an intense case of mammismo and still fail to grasp why sexual assault, or gender discrimination in the workplace, or the relentless depiction of women as bimbos on television is a problem.”

The problem is not restricted to Italian politics; it permeates every aspect of life, and Berlusconi’s boast that ““If I sleep for three hours, I still have enough energy to make love for another three,” does not exist in a vacuum. He is able to say such things because the man on the street agrees, and the woman on the street, if not agreeing, at least does not often speak up. Levy reports that the age of consent in Italy is fourteen. The prime minister is therefore on trial not for having sex with a minor but for paying for it — because prostitution is a crime. A Berlusconi supporter at a recent demonstration is quoted as saying, “If a woman comes with no clothes on, with her tits showing, you can’t say he has committed violence.” This attitude, which excuses and even celebrates domination of women, merges with official policies (like the notion that a fourteen-year-old can consent to a relationship with a man twice her age) to create a perfect storm.

Though Levy’s New Yorker piece is weightier than Vanity Fair’s invitation to goggle at Berlusconi’s corruption and misogyny, it too loses heft from roads not taken. Levy touches on, but does not explore, the feeling in Italy that Berlusconi has humiliated the country on the world stage, what she refers to as “the national anxiety about being perceived as not quite European, not quite a legitimate First World country.” This throwaway statement is fascinating, and offers material for an entirely different article. Is this inferiority complex a result of being seen as one of Europe’s poorer countries, a place more akin to Spain or Greece than France or Germany? It is interesting that, despite Italy’s historical contributions to Western civilization, it is not Rome but Paris and Berlin that are today seen as the capitals of Western Europe. Possibly, however, a backwards attitude toward women is not unique to Italy. In the wake of the rape allegations against IMF leader and erstwhile French presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn, France’s women are also reevaluating how far their society has come. One woman described in a recent Times article echoes Francesca Comenici when she asserts that “there is a problem with the image of French feminism itself.” She says, “If you’re a feminist, it means you are not feminine.” The Times notes that “the case has also sharpened the debate here about a French way of life, one of tolerance for a male-centric attitude in gender relations.”

Another door that Levy cracks but does not push open is broached in her observation that, “to some extent, what is on trial in Rubygate is not just Berlusconi’s abuse of power but also his decisions about the people with whom he surrounds himself.” Is it fair to judge a man by his friends? There is the chestnut, itself suggesting something about a woman’s reputation, that those who lie down with dogs will wake up with fleas. More convincing is the fact that, while Berlusconi may be in trouble for associating with prostitutes and pimps, he is on trial for adopting their behavior, not their company. Perhaps Berlusconi has awoken with fleas — or perhaps he is one of the dogs. The reality is that people of all countries, not just Italy, feel entitled to judge a leader by his companions. In the United States, palling around with country-club elitists was once a liability for a politician; the Roosevelts and the Kennedys were the exception that proved the rule, until Congress filled up with millionaires, and “elitist” became a codeword for “liberal.” As recently as 2008, Barack Obama was forced to denounce the controversial sermons of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and Hillary Clinton has been haunted by her college thesis on radical activist Saul Alinsky. On the flip side, former vice president Dick Cheney managed to prevent his energy-policy meetings with Big Oil executives from making the leap from leftist bete noire to mainstream outrage. There is the seed of another New Yorker article in Levy’s treatment of Berlusconi’s allies.

Perhaps the bluntest statement in either the Vanity Fair article or the New Yorker piece is a line from comedian Sabina Guzzanti, quoted by Levy, that encapsulates the feverish anger that follows Silvio Berlusconi wherever he goes. She says, “One cannot appoint someone to be Minister of Equal Opportunity simply because she is sucking your dick.” That, my friends, is speaking truth to power.