Oil Lobby Fights Libya Sanctions
Suzy Khimm at Mother Jones writes:
As Muammar Qaddafi's violent backlash against protestors has intensified, the US has swiftly taken action to punish his brutal response to Libya's popular uprising. Earlier this week, President Obama announced that he would pursue harsh, unilateral sanctions against the Libyan government in an effort to choke off its funds and resources. Qaddafi's regime has drawn nearly universal condemnation, and the move has drawn rare bipartisan support in Congress. But one Washington lobbying group—which represents some of the nation's biggest oil companies—has opposed the Obama administration's strategy.
USA*Engage—a business coalition whose members include Halliburton and, reportedly, ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Shell—criticized unilateral sanctions as a "failed strategy" when Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) began pushing this approach last month. Instead, the group argues, the US should only pursue a multilateral strategy, working through the United Nations. USA*Engage insists that "a go-it-alone approach" simply isn't an effective plan. "When you act unilaterally, the odds of success are much lower—too many people out there are not on board," Bill Reinsch, the group's co-chair, told Mother Jones. "The goods and services being withheld from the target country by the US are readily available from other sources."
But critics say USA*Engage has a history of opposing unilateral sanctions in order to make it easier for US companies to operate in rogue regimes. Given the lack of international consensus, simply waiting for a strong multilateral response is often unrealistic, they charge. And even when the international community does take action—as the UN Security Council moved to do this week, with American support—it tends to be weaker than the punishment countries like the US dole out.
"USA*Engage has always said they're against unilateral sanctions," noted Arvind Ganesan, director of Human Rights Watch's business and human rights program. "They think it disadvantages US companies to their detriment. To call for multilateral sanctions is to call for no effective sanctions at all."
Established in 1997 by the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), the country's oldest free-trade lobbying group, USA*Engage was among the organizations that pushed to lift US sanctions in Libya in 2004 as European countries began to do business in the country. The group similarly lobbied to open up Burma, Nigeria, and other repressive regimes to American companies. USA*Engage's powerful, deep-pocked members have actively supported its work: as CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney helped the group lobby against sanctions on Libya, Iran, Syria, and Pakistan, criticizing the US as "sanctions-happy."
USA*Engage frequently cites a host of reasons—political, humanitarian—for supporting diplomatic solutions over punitive ones, but the group's bottom line is to support business interests. "The sole result of US sanctions will be to multiply opportunities for foreign companies in Libya," Reinsch, a former Clinton administration official, said in 2003. Echoing the arguments of US lobbyists for Qaddafi, USA*Engage maintained that Libya, having surrendered its WMDs, was no longer a pariah state even if it remained an autocratic one. ...
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