Qaddafi had done more than organize an African monetary coup. He had demonstrated that financial independence could be achieved. His 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.
That could explain why this critical piece of infrastructure was destroyed in 2011. NATO not only bombed the pipeline but finished off the project by bombing the factory producing the pipes necessary to repair it. Crippling a civilian irrigation system serving up to 70% of the population hardly looks like humanitarian intervention. Rather, as Canadian Professor Maximilian Forte put it in his heavily researched book Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa:
[T]he goal of US military intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US.
Mystery Solved
Hilary Clinton's emails shed light on another enigma remarked on by early commentators. Why, within weeks of initiating fighting, did the rebels set up their own central bank? Robert Wenzel wrote in The Economic Policy Journal in 2011:
This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences. I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising.
It was all highly suspicious, but as Alex Newman concluded in a November 2011 article:
Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi's overthrow . . . may never be known for certain -- at least not publicly.
There the matter would have remained -- suspicious but unverified like so many stories of fraud and corruption -- but for the publication of Hillary Clinton's emails after an FBI probe. They add substantial weight to Newman's suspicions: violent intervention was not chiefly about the security of the people. It was about the security of global banking, money and oil.
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