“So it was all about oil” skeptics had a heyday, as the Liberian-flagged oil tanker departed the northeastern Libyan port of Marsa Al-Hariga, carrying one million barrels of oil. The shipment marked the first sale of oil by the rebel government since the uprising that began on Feb. 17.

Traders said they believed that the payments for the sale will be made via an offshore bank account.

“The value of this first shipment is around $112 million and will be made in a bank account outside of Libya that the rebels would have access to,” one of the traders was quoted as saying.

Reports also confirmed that the first cargo from the rebel held region was destined for China. The trial deal via trading house Vitol was likely to clear the way for Europe to resume badly-needed purchases of the light Libyan oil - definitely difficult to compensate for.

“Given that several governments, including some in Europe, now recognize it as the legal government of the country, there would be no legal obstacle to buying oil from it or even paying it directly,” said J. Peter Pham, Africa director with the US think tank Atlantic Council.

Earlier, the rebel-led government said it had concluded a deal with Qatar to market crude oil and had discussed plans with a UN envoy to exempt its oil exports from sanctions that have been imposed on Libya. However, officials from Qatar’s Oil Ministry denied that the Gulf state is involved in the transfer or marketing of this shipment.

And in the meantime, in an attempt to deprive the opposition of the oil revenue, rebels claimed that Qaddafi forces attacked another rebel-controlled oil installation in the desert in southeastern Libya Wednesday, the third consecutive day of such strikes. Libyan government sources though denied the report. Deputy Foreign Minister Khalid Kaim in Tripoli said British fighters had hit (rebel) sites.

However, the impact of Libyan outage is severe. Shokri Ghanem, chairman of Libyan National Oil Corporation, said on Thursday that its oil output had fallen to 250,000 to 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) from about 1.6 million bpd. He also called the reported sale of Libyan oil by rebels as “very sad” and said it would only contribute to divisive tensions in the country.

“It does not help by disintegrating and dividing the country. We always wanted one country, one oil company,” he said.

Ghanem also expressed concern about the potentially wider implications of an air strike on the Sarir oilfield which the Libyans have blamed on British warplanes.

“I have heard the news that the Sarir oilfield was bombed. This is very bad. It is near the man-made river which supplies Libya with 70 percent of its water.”

Yet energy geo-politics continue to overshadow the Libyan situation. Despite the first cargo from the rebel held area heading toward China, former Libyan Energy Minister Omar Fati ben Shatvan who fled to Malta in the wake of the turmoil, told RIA-Novosti that Russia and China have lost the chance to take part in developing oil and gas fields in Libya by not supporting Libyan rebels.

The former top Libyan energy official insisted, “The new democracy will be good for those who helped it”. He hinted that French and Italian companies could be rewarded with oil and gas contracts as those countries were the first to recognize the transition National Council set up by the rebels. “Russia and China have lost. They should not have done that,” Ben Shatvan said, explaining that he meant their abstaining from the UN vote on foreign military aid for the Libyan opposition.

“Qaddafi has no future now,” emphasized Shatwan, who was instrumental in Libya’s bid in recent years to rehabilitate itself with the West following the lifting of sanctions, including by opening up its vast oil wealth to a growing number of foreign energy majors. He dismissed Qaddafi’s threats to grant oil contracts to Russia and China as “a sort of game” by a desperate man.

From the very beginning of the Libyan uprising, the West continued to view the developments with a different prism. Theorists all around kept pointing to the glitter of the black gold as the very reason for this urge, the itch to get into action. Yet, the debate about why continues to this day. Now the iconic political activist and MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky has come out with his findings, confirming the fast held beliefs that it was basically oil that perked the west into action against Tripoli.

‘The world of oil is rarely far in the background in affairs concerning this region,’ he says and indeed rightly so. And then he emphasizes: ‘The world of oil provides useful guidance for western reactions to the remarkable democracy uprisings in the Arab world.’

Commenting further Chomsky says, “Libya is a different case, an oil-rich state run by a brutal dictator, who, however, is unreliable — a dependable client would be far preferable.”

When nonviolent protests erupted, Qaddafi moved quickly to crush them. On March 22, as Qaddafi’s forces were converging on the rebel capital of Benghazi, top Obama Middle East adviser Dennis Ross warned that if there is a massacre, “everyone would blame us for it,” an unacceptable consequence.

And the West certainly didn’t want Qaddafi to enhance his power and independence by crushing the rebellion. So the US joined in the UN Security Council authorization of a no-fly zone to be implemented by France, the UK and the US, Chomsky underlined.

The intervention prevented a likely massacre but was interpreted by the coalition as authorizing direct support for the rebels. A cease-fire was imposed on Qaddafi’s forces, but the rebels were helped to advance to the west. In short order they conquered the major sources of Libya’s oil production, at least temporarily, the learned professor commented.

It is commonly argued that oil cannot be a motive for the intervention because the West had access to the prize under Qaddafi. True but irrelevant, he says. The same could be said about Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or Iran and Cuba today.

What the West seeks is what Bush announced: control, or at least dependable clients, and in the case of Libya, access to vast unexplored areas expected to be rich in oil. US and British internal documents stress that the “virus of nationalism” is the greatest fear, since it might breed disobedience.”

An interesting insight indeed - coming for a person who reads the intricacies of the modern geopolitics much better than most of us. And indeed Chomsky cannot be written off as another regime loyalist.

Geopolitics is definitely in play. Thank you professor for another powerful insight!