George Galloway is talking about Britain, but what he says holds just as true for any other Western country involved in creating a no-fly-zone in Libya:
more (partial transcript)...
Q:...duty to stop a humanitarian crisis from unfolding. Do you believe that?
Well it's the double standards that get me. There's more people being gunned down, innocent protesters, in Yemen for example. And no one would dream of invading or imposing a no-fly zone on Yemen because Yemen doesn't have oil. It's so transparently an attempt to protect British companies' and other western companies' massive investments in Libya, that it's discredited in the Arab world....
[W]e are standing by and watching the Yemen President killing his people. We're standing by watching the Bahrain king killing his people. So what's the difference between them and Libya? Everyone watching this knows the difference. It's a dirty little three-letter word called oil....
BP has 15 billion pounds worth of investments, BILLION pounds worth of investments in Libya. So don't pretend it's not a big deal. The truth is that we're not intervening in these other revolutions but we are intervening in this for our own selfish interests. Now, that has two consequences. First of all, it generates more hatred and enmity against us around the world, and we will see that believe me. Gaddafi, brute - armed brute and buttressed brute by us and other western countries - is not going to be any kind of blancmange. This is going to be a hotly contested military contest and it will be contested not just in Libya. We're generating hatred for ourselves, terrorism, terrorist attacks all over the world against our interests. Why? For the oil companies?...
Gaddafi has a long record of being involved in international terrorism. Everybody should try to remember that. He has a long record of funding terrorist organizations and he'll do it again.... But he'd only be doing it because we're attacking him....
But why are we doing it...? We're a country that can't even pay our bills. We're almost bankrupt. We're laying off hundreds of thousands of people. We can't keep our pensioners warm in the winter. How come we've got money to go to war after war after war in the interests of oil companies and arms companies?....
I'm not a pacifist. If our interests are threatened, I'll be the first at the recruiting office to defend our country and our justifiable interests. But they're not in this case, and if the neighbors of Libya are concerned about the turmoil that's being created by this dictatorship in their region, Tunisia and Egypt are perfectly entitled to take action to defend themselves as Vietnam was for example against Pol Pot in Cambodia. But the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the former colonial powers in the Arab world have absolutely no right to enter into Libyan internal affairs at all. So my solution is let the Arabs sort this matter out. But British men and women and taxes being used to put one group of people in Libya in power rather than another? No thanks.