With Libya providing huge percentages of the oil and gas imported by powerful European countries – especially Italy – and with the UK working hard the last several years to burnish Libya’s image so that British Petroleum could claim a privileged stake in the Libyan oil industry and General Dynamics UK could sign lucrative weapons contracts, western countries came late and soft to criticize Qaddafy’s violent assault.

The only political legacy of his investment campaign may be the alleged African mercenaries helping to keep him in power in Tripoli.

It is clear that the US diplomacy in Nigeria is also hinged on open and unhindered flows of crude oil and gas. When it comes to crude, there is no sync between diplomacy and democracy. It appears dictatorships and repression serve the interest of the volatile industry and US leaders. This explains why we do not hear any denunciations of the rampant impunity and human rights abuses recorded since Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999.

"There's no doubt in my mind that the current situation in the Middle East that this has sort of spurred in recent days opposition members to speak out," he said. "There's always an appearance of stability when there's no serious opposition... but you only need something like what happened in Egypt or Libya or Tunisia or Bahrain to see that atmosphere of contentedness and happiness on the surface doesn't go deep."

Belatedly, after the Arab League expelled Libya, the chairperson of the AU Commission, Jean Ping, expressed ‘deep concern’ about what was going on in Libya. It is in the face of the timid position of the leaders of the African states that this statement wants to forthrightly express solidarity with the peoples of Libya and their demand to end the Gaddafi police state.

It is in the midst of this confusion it is necessary to say just as how Tanzanians did not classify all Libyans as supporters of Idi Amin of Uganda when Gaddafi used his mercenaries to back up that dictator in invading Tanzania in 1979 so it is also necessary to distinguish between poor African migrant workers in Libya and mercenaries and military entrepreneurs who are the leftovers from the military adventures of Gaddafi. This kind of clarity is necessary so that Africans in Libya and in other parts of the continent can distinguish between the oppressed and their oppressors in order to form the solidarity that could bring about true revolutionary transformation of relations of peoples across the Nile and the Sahara.

Libya is supposed to be the country in Africa with the highest Human Development Index ranking in Africa. Yet, even with significant oil reserves, the wealth of Libya did little for the peoples of Libya since only a small clique around Gaddafi and his family benefited from the billions of dollars of oil revenue. Gaddafi and his ‘revolutionary committees’ did very little to address the deep exploitation and marginalisation of the peoples of Libya, especially among the country's largely young population

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America.

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator, but against a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day.

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? "It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed," observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, and "to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centered egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that ... the state capitalist order with its inherent inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is underway to convince people - particularly young people - that this not only is what they should feel but that it's what they do feel."

the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state.

Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in his book Rule of Experts (the chapter titled "Dreamland" — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best.

Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite.

Under European colonialism the Middle East had a few decades of classic liberal rule in the first half of the twentieth century. Egypt, Iraq and Iran had elected parliaments, prime ministers and popular parties. However, liberal rule was eventually discredited insofar as it proved to be largely a game played by big landlords overly open to the influence and bribery of grasping Western powers.

These governments took steps in recent decades toward neoliberal policies of privatization and a smaller public sector under pressure from Washington and allied institutions—and the process was often corrupt. The ruling families used their prior knowledge of important economic policy initiatives to engage in a kind of insider trading, advantaging their relatives and buddies.

The policies of these one-party states created widespread anxiety among workers, the unemployed and even entrepreneurs outside the charmed circle, seeming to create an insuperable obstacle to the advancement of the ordinary person.

For the US presidency and State Department and the Pentagon are now so in thrall to everything Israeli that Israeli intelligence – which, for its own reasons, wanted to keep Mubarak as dictator – carries more weight than US diplomatic reports or America's own intelligence files. Thus, Robert Gates praised the Egyptian army for its "restraint" when he should have praised the millions of pro-democracy demonstrators for their restraint.

It is the slowly-accumulating momentum of hundreds of thousands of confrontations with local officials and elites, the organizing efforts of mutual assistance (including even Egyptian soccer clubs, as Dave Zirin points out), individual and group assertions of women’s rights, tireless attempts to solidify common stands of workers against bosses (as in the great waves of strikes in the textile city of Mahalla), students’ rejection of authoritarian school conditions, and efforts to defend local neighborhoods— almost always in the shadows out of sight of foreign media—that slowly develop the courage, confidence and essential horizontal networks bubbling below the surface of seemingly fixed political landscapes.

Without that growing accumulation of willful resistance by hundreds of thousands already at the grassroots level, no appeals by Twitter or Facebook, by liberal, radical or revolutionary organizations, or by charismatic national figures will inspire millions to risk the bloodshed and torture implied in confrontation with the harsh face of the regime’s police.

When certain “spokespeople” for the movement or independent “power brokers” become fixed in place—encouraged by negotiators for the old regime or by the media or by their own self-promotion—it is doubtful that those deep levels of revolutionary aspirations will be heard. This will be a key dynamic to watch in Egypt in the weeks to come.

They could appear in West Asia as European conquerors, who see themselves as a bridgehead of the “white” man and as masters of the “natives”, like the Spanish conquistadores and the Anglo-Saxon colonialists in America. That is what the crusaders did in their time. The second way was to see themselves as an Asian people returning to their homeland, the heirs to the political and cultural traditions of the Semitic world, ready to take part, with the other peoples of the region, in the war of liberation from European exploitation.

The most common conclusion was that democratic elections would inevitably lead to the victory of “Islamist” fanatics, who would set up brutal Taliban-style theocracies, or worse. Part of this, of course, is deliberate propaganda, designed to convince the naïve Americans and Europeans that they must shore up the Mubaraks of the region or alternative military strongmen. But most of it was quite sincere: most Israelis really believe that the Arabs, left to their own devices, will set up murderous “Islamist” regimes, whose main aim would be to wipe Israel off the map.

perhaps the political vacuum of non-military alternatives arising from the politics in civil society started with the Nasserites, as independent Egyptian scholars such as Samir Amin have observed.. Under President Hosni Mubarak the repression intensified to include not only the secular democrats, socialists and communists but also the Islamicists.

The Egyptian military, if it negotiates with the people (whatever exactly this would mean), will want to do so in the framework of the existing constitution, in which a national assembly dominated by the NDP (National Democratic Party–Mubarak’s organization) is supposed to remain in power until 2015. If the January 25 movement is not able to assert the sovereignty of the people and its special role as their representative, the chances of real democratization are minuscule.

Les Gelb, so apt a spokesman for the U.S. foreign policy establishment that he almost seems a self-caricature, sums up the reasons for worrying about any precipitous removal of Mubarak:   “The worry on Mubarak’s part is that if he says yes to this, there will be more demands,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “And since he’s not dealing with a legal entity, but a mob, how does he know there won’t be more demands tomorrow?”   When the people have been excluded from being a legal entity, then it is impossible for them to be one. This is a problem insurrectionaries have always faced and will always face. But it is up to those people to decide whether they are, in Gelb’s charming term, a “mob” or whether they are the legitimate expression of the popular will. If they do so, they will get no support from the United States, Europe, the United Nations, other Arab states (except perhaps Tunisia), the bien pensants of the “international community,” or Mark Zuckerberg. The will need support from the one place they may actually get it–what the New York Times dubbed the “other superpower,” global public opinion.   Of course, Gelb, reprehensible as he is, has a point. Who will the military negotiate with and how? Tunisia and Egypt are striking because they belong to that class of revolutions where, suddenly, as if out of the blue, “everybody” is on the same side. Seemingly, the whole country unites and wants the dictator out. Of course, this is not literally true; there are always, if nothing else, the pampered security forces, cronies of the dictator, and a small paid-off subgroup of the elite. But if a vast majority of all sectors of society outside the dictator’s small group is on one side, revolution can come very swiftly.

What is a strength in the tumultuous phase of rapid mobilization becomes a weakness once the question becomes, “What is to be done?” It is difficult and tiring to protest, deal with the disruption of daily life, see people be beaten and killed–at some point, it can be comforting to accept the word of some source of traditional authority that you can go home now, the problems will be fixed. I hope that will not happen in Egypt, but there is no use in anyone telling the people who are so heroically making this revolution what they should want next.