Portside

Workers in action

Nine years after his death, residents in the chaos-wracked country's capital have grown to miss the longtime leader as the frustrations of daily life mount.

What was the purpose of the 2011 US intervention against Qaddafi? Was it for humanitarian purposes alone? Qaddafi's greatest infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank. This project was destroyed by NATO. Ellen Brown finds the motivation to be money, oil and banking.

As Iraq tumbles into yet another civil war, it is important to remember how all this came about, and why adding yet more warfare to the current crisis will perpetuate exactly what the “Great Loot” set out to do: tear an entire region of the world asunder.