Usual suspects take familiar line on UN's Libya intervention

The usual characters have lined up to denounce the UN humanitarian intervention in Libya as a thinly disguised war for oil.

"What they want is to seize Libyan oil," says Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president. Fidel Castro, the UK activist George Galloway and even the Democratic US congressman Edward Markey concur.

But proponents of the "oil war" theory must explain why western powers would spend substantial sums of money and risk military personnel, political capital and reputations to fight for oil that they already have.

Before the uprising against Col Muammar Qaddafi, European and American companies - including the US's Marathon, Hess, Occidental, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil; Suncor of Canada; Italy's Eni; Repsol of Spain; the UK's BP; Anglo-Dutch Shell; Total of France; and Germany's Wintershall and RWE Dea - were the leading operators in Libya. And the UAE, which is assisting in enforcing the no-fly zone, is represented by an oil exploration unit of Mubadala Development, a strategic investment company owned by the Abu Dhabi Government.

Chinese and Russian oil companies are also active in Libya, but they are dwarfed by western involvement. More than 85 per cent of Libyan oil exports, and all its gas exports, go to Europe.

Any Libyan government, of whatever type, will be reliant on hydrocarbon exports to maintain the economy and keep itself in power. Imagine that, post-war, the Chinese, Russians and Venezuelans ended up running all Libyan oil production. For logistical and economic reasons, the petroleum would still go to Europe.

If the Chinese were to ship it instead to Shanghai, Europe would simply buy from Nigeria or Angola. Logic and history teach that for either consumers or producers to enforce selective oil boycotts is impossible. At worst, such attempts create modest logistical problems.

Indeed, prolonging the fighting extends the time that Libyan oil is out of the market, risks damage to facilitiesand virtually ensures that Col Qaddafi, if victorious, will expel western companies. If the West wanted Libya's oil, the cynical route would have been to give the colonel the green light to overrun Benghazi, with the massacre that would inevitably have followed.

Far from begging for oil, the US maintained sanctions on Libyan oil throughout the 1980s and 1990s that shut its firms out of the market. We might be suspicious of the West's subsequent dealings with Col Qaddafi, but decades of isolation had shown no signs of loosening his grip.

Of notable recent western military interventions, several were in places with no oil (Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone). This is not to say that the western nations did not have their own self-interest at heart in deciding for or against such involvements - just that, whatever that interest was, it was not oil.

Conversely, there was no action in three petroleum-rich countries that presented opportunities - Venezuela, at the time of the failed 2002 coup against Mr Chavez; Nigeria, during unrest in the Niger Delta that often interrupted 1 million barrels per day of output; and Myanmar in 2007's abortive "Saffron Revolution".

The great counter-example is Iraq. Its vast oil resources, its pivotal role in the Middle East and in Opec, obviously played a role in encouraging that invasion. But not in the simple sense, as presented by naive conspiracy theorists, that the US and UK simply planned to steal Iraqi oil or cut off sales to China or someone else.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates the cost of the Iraq war to the US alone as more than $3 trillion (Dh11tn). Even if the US could appropriate all Iraq's oil production, it would not serve to pay even the interest on this bill. If we had forgotten the lessons of the Japanese invasion of Indonesia during the Second World War and of Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran in 1980, this would have reminded us that such "resource wars" never pay for themselves.

As Juan Cole, a Middle East expert, puts it, the political left needs to "learn to chew gum and walk at the same time", not reflexively opposing humanitarian intervention where it is justified. He argues that "the UN allies now rolling back Qaddafi are doing a good thing".

Conversely, right-wingers, those not shamed into silence by the fiasco in Iraq, should accept the benefits to the US's tarnished reputation of a genuine humanitarian operation and stop seeing phantasms among the Libyan opposition of any Islamist group they may have heard of on Fox News.

If this war does end with the ousting of Col Qaddafi, one key task for the international community will be to repair the oil industry, and to set up an accountable, democratic system for managing the revenue. No new dictator must be allowed to use petrodollars to entrench his rule, enrich a corrupt coterie and buy weapons to slaughter civilians. One war aim on which all should be able to agree is ensuring Libyan oil is not stolen but instead benefits its true owners.

Robin Mills is an energy economist based in Dubai, and the author of The Myth of the Oil Crisis and Capturing Carbon