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The Great Man-Made River Project

Libya is constructing a world-class project in the middle of the dessert, but no one even knows what it really is. Some have said that, whatever it is, this project is the Eighth Wonder of the World. What is extraordinarily odd about this particular project is that it has been progressing for over 16 years, and yet it still seems to be a long way from completion.

Now, if you asked your neighbor if he ever heard of the Great Man-Made River Project in Libya, there is not much question that he will tell you, "No". This project has a price tag of $25 billion, and currently there are 12,000 foreign workers on the job from morning to night. One would think that some intelligence agency could figure out just what this project may be, but they haven’t yet told us.

Meanwhile, the Libyan’s say that they are constructing a 2,500-mile tunnel capable of carrying 7.4 million cubic yards of water a day that will stretch from Tunisia to Egypt. The Libyans say that this tunnel, which is 13 feet in diameter, is going to carry water that will make the entire Libyan Desert bloom. This in an area where the thermometer hits over 100 degrees on a cool day, and for most of the year, there is no rain at all. There is no question that Libya will eventually run out of oil, and if Colonel Mohammar Qadhafi has not found a replacement for oil revenues, or in lieu of that, put a lot of money away for a rainy day, Libya will become another place where a desert rules.

The pipe comes in sections 25 yards long, which are carried in massive trucks that seem to buckle under their enormous loads. The drilling rigs, suspended from six-story tall portable units, are capable of boring more that a quarter of a mile into the earth in their search for water. Every fifty or sixty miles, there is a break in the pipe where it flows into a massive water storage facility made of reinforced concrete, thus making it able to withstand almost any natural force. With a great deal of the infrastructure for the project already in place, one would think that the irrigation would have already begun, at least in selected spots. However, but that is not the case, making this project all the more mysterious.

In spite of Ronald Reagan having imposed a trade embargo against Libya forbidding U.S. companies or citizens from doing any business with Libya and provides for very substantial fines and long jail terms for anyone who does, American products appear everywhere in the country and American equipment is seen everywhere on the irrigation pipeline: Caterpillar Tractors, Cummings engines, Baker Hughes drilling bits, Dowell Schlumberger cementing units, Price Brothers pipe and Brown and Root brain power. So, what is really going on?

Big American Companies are not going to break the law, at least not if they thing they are going to be caught. There are ways around the Presidential Action, and for example, a subsidiary of an American company domiciled overseas could legally do the work without any particular concern. Tractors can be purchased by European companies and then legitimately resold to Libya, as the countries in Europe that are depended on Libyan oil have no such onerous restrictions.

Some who study this subject for a living contend that in dealing with Qadhafi, one is dealing with a paranoid personality who believes he will be attacked by almost anyone at almost time. We would counter that statement by saying that within the last year, Gandhi has been far more forthcoming, if only because of his surprising decision to turn over the suspects in the Lockerbie bombing to an internationally sanctioned court in the Netherlands.

Theories as to Qadhafi’s real motives in building his tunnel are legion. For example, people say that the diameter of the pipe is over twice that which would be necessary for an irrigation project. They wonder why the pipe hooks up to Libya’s chemical weapons facility located near a mountain called Tarhuna on the Mediterranean, and they cannot fathom why the chemical plant would need irrigation. They ask why the system has been so strongly reinforced, why it is big enough for tanks to roll through it and why is so deep that even some atomic weapons could not reach it, etc, etc. Military experts say that at the very least, it will give the Libyan military the ability to conceal their activities from satellite spy networks, or from just about anything else for that matter. Others say that the water storage facilities could be used to hold a company or more of troops and the food to feed them, along with the facilities to house them.

One of the most negative comments heard on the project comes from a world-class expert in the field, Paul Beaver, a reporter with Jane’s Defense Weekly, who said, "This is the first real evidence of something which has been suspected for several years. Qadhafi seems to have taken a leaf out of Kim IL Sung’s book and created a potential military arsenal underground." The fact that the general contractor on the job for the Libyan government is Dong Ah, a Korean company that has had numerous run-ins with the American government over illegally exporting items to Iran, makes a lot of people nervous. Dong Ah has already paid a $3 million fine for illegally exporting drilling equipment from the United States to Libya. They also bought anti-corrosive pipe chemicals in Texas for this project to be shipped to Libya, and they are under investigation for that matter, as well.

In the meantime, everyone who could be interviewed for information regarding Libya’s intent has been questioned, and there are few solid answers. For the moment, let us assume that Qadhafi has created a mixed-use pipeline that can be used for irrigation, along with the storage and transportation of war material and personnel. Whatever it is, it is certainly "the Mother of All Pipelines" and is large enough to hold two simultaneous titles, until we know better. It is the longest irrigation tunnel on the face of the earth, and it is the most expensive military installation ever created, or possibly neither.