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The ‘Sting’ 385

Company. Flanked by President Sadat of Egypt and President Field-Marshal
Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, the Libyan Pericles harangued the assembled

throng at length about the evil machinations of the Western oil companies and
the wickedness and rapacity of the United States. Tossing into the wastepaper
basket of history the assurances he had given at the time of his nationalization
of BP’s concession (‘We nationalized BP for political reasons.... We have no
intention of nationalizing American oil companies’), he declaimed:

The time has come for the Arabs to face up to the United States. The time has come for
the Arabs to take serious measures to undermine American interests in our region....
No power in the world can impair our right to nationalize our own oilfields, or to stop
pumping oil to the world.... It is about time the Americans took a hard slap in their
cool, arrogant faces. American imperialism has exceeded every limit.

To everyone’s surprise (not least Qaddafi’s) the United States reacted promptly
to the nationalization of Bunker Hunt, condemning both the act and the
motives behind it, which were categorized in a formal note to the Libyan
government on 5 July 1973 as ‘political reprisal against the United States

Government and coercion against the economic interests of certain other U.S.
nationals in Libya’. Gone, it seemed, at least for the moment, was the compla­
cent attitude towards nationalization personified by Akins only the previous
year. Instead, the State Department protested strongly against the action of the
Libyan government which, the note of 5 July insisted, violated established
principles of international law. ‘Measures taken against the rights and property

of foreign nationals which are arbitrary, discriminatory, or based on con­
siderations of political reprisal and economic coercion are invalid and not
entitled to recognition by other states.’ It was little use, however, quoting
international law at Qaddafi. He acknowledged only one system of law, the
sharia, the law of Islam, and then only when it suited his mood or purpose. He
spurned the State Department’s protest, confident from his observation of the
United States’s ineffectual reaction to every one of his swashbuckling stunts
over the preceding three years that nothing would be done to give the protest

teeth. To emphasize his contempt for the protest, and for the United States in
general, the following month he unilaterally assumed 351 per cent interest in
all the independent oil companies operating in Libya, declaring at the same
time that he intended to acquire a similar shareholding in the assets and
operations of the other Libyan producers - Esso, Mobil, Shell, Texaco and
SOCAL. Though the State Department called upon the customers of the

companies whose assets had been expropriated to refrain from purchasing oil
rom the Libyan government, nothing was actually done, when it came to the
point, to prevent domestic American fuel companies from rushing, as they did,
to buy the nationalized oil.
Greatly excited by the frolics going on in Libya, the Kuwaitis rushed to join
ln e fun. It may be recalled that at the beginning of the year the Kuwaiti