In other words, it just may be a matter of one barbarian seizing power from another. Already, for example, Egyptian pressure on Copts seems to increasing, not decreasing. Imagine how ironic it will be, if our involvement in Libya assists in the turning of Libya into an Iran-like guano-hole where oppression simply shifts focus. Western intelligence in the Middle East has proven woefully inadequate again and again, from WMDs in Iraq (where there were none) to WMDs in Libya (where there were lots), so knowing what is going on and what the most possible outcomes might be is a matter of wild guessing. I suspect that the chatter among old-timers at Tim Hortons is as knowledgeable as what passes for chatter among bureaucrats in “the know”.
Or, are we witnessing a true Arab spring, where the thirst for liberty will overcome the more base forces of Islamic barbarism?
Oops on the barbarism thingy.
Cjunk, I think your last paragraph in your blog article answers your own question regarding the root of the unrest.
My amateur thinking is that Iran is behind the unrest or at least making hay while the sun shines.
Meanwhile, a top advisor to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Henri Guaino, said he anticipated the allied military intervention in Libya would last “awhile” in an interview with France’s BFM TV, according to the Associated Press.
In an interview with SPIEGEL published on Monday, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle also sought to clarify his country’s position following its move to abstain in a vote on the no-fly zone on Thursday at the United Nations Security Council, where Germany holds a temporary seat. “We want to stop the dictator,” he said. “But military missions and air strikes are something else. I don’t want us to venture onto a slippery slope that would lead to German troops participating in the war in Libya.” He reiterated his position that Germany would not deploy its armed forces, the Bundeswehr. “No, we will not take part with German troops, no matter how honorable the motives of our partners who have decided differently.”
The intervention in Libya is the biggest in an Arab country since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Withdrawal of Arab support would make it harder to pursue what some analysts say could in any case be an open-ended campaign with an uncertain outcome.
Instigate and foment dissension among the wogs and then sell weapons to both sides.
We make money, they amuse us with wog-on-wog warfare which will keep them busy so they won’t have the time or need to bother the civilized world.
The uprisings have the stench of the Muslim Brotherhood all over them, amongst a people generally corrupted liberty cannot exist. 1400 years of stagnation and barbarity under Islamic Rule will not change until they abandon Islamic Laws and precepts.
My amateur thinking is that Iran is behind the unrest or at least making hay while the sun shines.
~Ken (Kulak)
Exactly what I surmised back when we were arguing about Egypt many weeks ago.
Iran is the big-stakes player in the region, destabilization and a rise in world oil prices all play into their hand.
Well let’s see….
“WMDs in Iraq (where there were none)”…..
300tons of yellow cake….some radio-active, wrecked, caletrons…obviously used to refine uranium……
Saddam’s stupid threats and rhetoric….
Ahmadinnerhacket claims this is “peaceful” nuclear fuel and the Mad Mullah screams of nuking Tel Aviv…..
It would be sort of ironic if Iran’s Bushehr reactor somehow went critical and then proved that reactors really can produce a nuclear blast……just sayin’.
Then Volla….suddenly somebody notices that Iran has a MATURE up-grading programme going with the obvious goal of weapons grade uranium.
A long and continuous border, mostly un-monitored,…….
CONNECT THE STUPID DOTS……..
After the dust settles on all these ME “cries for democracy”, I hope the MSM won’t do the usual and disappear from those Countries,leaving us with the impression that all is now peaches and cream.
From the Ivory Coast to Egypt, we haven’t seen a single Leader emerge who could possibly be termed a democracy advocate,and in the Ivory Coast,the MSM has somehow managed to obscure the fact that this is a tribal war, pitting a Christian President against a Muslim President Elect,and God alone knows how reliably counted were the results of that election.
This is a concerted effort to shift the balance of power in the ME,and I doubt it’s toward democracy. There a certain religion whose followers have a stake in the outcomes,but I won’t mention them in the name of political correctness.
Cue Ray Stevens:”everything is beautiful in it’s own way………….”
My best guess for the outcome of the Libyan conflict is that Qaddafi will be forced from power, but that the peace will require many years of involvement of peacekeeping forces, along the lines of what happened in the Balkans. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that the peacekeepers are still there to this day.
Having said that, it’s only a guess. Maybe Libya will be effectively partitioned, with Qaddafi holed up in Tripoli embargoed by useless sanctions while a parallel government operates out of Benghazi under the protection of a no-fly zone. This is what happened in Iraq with the Kurds for many years. Admittedly, the Kurds were quite grateful for the protection, but we have to ask how many such adventures Western nations can afford, before you run out of troops and/or money.
On the other hand, I’m not naive enough to believe that peace is something that happens whenever the Americans cease to intervene in a nation’s affairs. Plenty of nations have more than enough “organic” material for home-grown tyranny absent the intervention of any foreign power.
You folks are so pessimistic. A bomb here, a missile there, a round or two of Kumbaya and there will be yet another democratic muslim nation embracing individual rights, separation of mosque and state, equality and safety for women, gays and even the joos. Why wouldn’t you help out? What could pissbily go wrong?
No WMD’s in Iraq? With the collusion between Kofi and Saddam, I’ve never been convinced that Saddam was as innocent as the protesters said. He had WMDs. He also had time to hide them and/or export them.
gee, imagine what might happen if ‘mercuns stop propping up tin pot dictators in exchange for zealous anti-cummuniiiiiiiist rhetoric and plentiful oil.
maybe, just *maybe* the situation described in this post would never arise in the first place.
who exactly was it the first to come up with the phrase ‘insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result’? or words to that effect.
oh, and another little history lesson and example: google ‘CIA project merlin’ to find out who it was filled in a lot of details for the Iranians on how to build a nuke.
Who do you replace Gaddafi with? Another madman?
As long as you have madmen, a lasting peace and stability is questionable. One hopes for it and- under the right circumstances- it could work to some degree but until we are willing to accept that some political and cultural environments need changing NOW, Libya might be another Iran.
Just my quick thoughts.
Without going into a long rigamarole about justifications, this needs to happen, faster rather than slower, and personally I would take my chances on almost any group running Libya being less hassle than Gadhafi over the long term. And in any case, now we have to follow through, or make it look as though we (the west) don’t care if protesting civilians are slaughtered by dictators. We can take this one relatively contained situation and demonstrate that we do care about it. As for “Islamists” taking over Libya, in that part of the world, almost everyone is to some extent an Islamist. Since nobody really knows who the members of this rag-tag opposition coalition really are, how can we say they are relatively more Islamist than the average citizen? Unless people are willing to go back to the colonial model, these countries are going to be run by their own citizens, we might as well remove the ones who like to bring down civilian airliners and blow up hotels.
Veterans stationed in Libya before 1970 tell me that Kdaffy has hundreds of tons of nerve gas and other chemical agents.
Saddam didn’t use his.
Any guesses what Kdaffy might do?
He knows if taken alive,
he will be dropped kicked at the end of a long rope.
I wonder how thousands of dead Libyan citizens and dozens of MSM journalists will look in Obamas playoff playbook brackets?
Sasquatch, it was actually 500 tons of refined yellowcake if memory serves. Cameco ended up buying it. No WMD’s my arse! Hopefully, Bush will be vindicated by some historian!
If Churchill were still alive, the Multi-culti British would have to imprison him for hate speech crimes against the “Mohammedans”.
Gaddafi isn’t even our son-of-a-bitch so we are assisting the other Muslim tribes to take power so that the Islamists that Gaddafi bought-off to stay inactive can now participate in an unknown ascendant regime. That sounds like an expensive zero sum gain at best.
The only Mid East policy that makes any sense is to get out while ensuring Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile is in good shape. They’re going to need it.
My reason for not wanting us involved in this is simple. Libya is having a civil war. No other country has any business getting involved. After this is over we have set a president for interjection in civil wars. How are we going to protest when China, Russia or even other Islamic states start doing the same using it as a backhanded way to take over a country. We are opening a very ugly can of worms here.
I agree with Peter O’Donnell. Make Ghadaffi pay for terrorism; the example might save us grief in the future.
Baby Seal Clubber: In his recent book, G. W. Bush states clearly that Saddam “DID NOT” have WMD at the time of the invasion. He had had them; and could ramp up production, but Bush makes it clear that it was a failure in spy services that they did not detect this. He also says that under interrogation, Saddam stated that he never came clean out of fear of Iran; so he wanted to maintain the impression of having WMDs.
The problem in Libya isn’t Ghadaffi. He had ruled a petro nation for forever and has been pumping oil happily. Have a look at how much of Europe’s oil comes from there.
There is national health care, national education and the state supplies gifts for citizen’s first weddings. Women are able to move and work and not fear being gang raped by their families.
The down side, depending on who you ask is that the state will NOT tolerate burkhas, men with beards or any kinda of fundamentalism.
It didn’t always work perfectly, but it worked pretty well with Ghadaffi.
Now, ‘suddenly’ there is this movement, but where did it come from? and why was the first steps to crack the prison’s and free all the religious prisoners?
Ghadaffi is a turd, but he was our turd, who liked wine, women and song, and who had no truck with the savages.
After all these years, why hasn’t he promoted himself past “colonel”?
(Whether Saddam had WMDs or not, he would not let the U.N. inspectors do their job; God, I would have assumed bribing them would have been easier than locking doors. We are talking the horrible, corrupt U.N. At any rate, that was enough for a presumption of guilt.)
I was a little kid during the first Gulf War, and even then I knew that they should have pushed into Baghdad and taken out Saddam. Noone talked to me about it or anything; it was just obvious. I would have made a better CIC, barely into the double didgets, than Bush Sr. My native brilliance aside, how does one explain such a thing?
The status quo was not going to fly. Iran can’t cook up massive street demonstrations in a happy populace.
CJunk, I take exception to your allegation that GWB said Saddam didn’t have WMDs. He cleary stated that he didn’t know fore sure, however the Brits assured him that they did. He further stated that he would have gone ahead with the invasion anyways.
I have his book looking at me square in the eye from my book shelf here, as we speak.
Could look it up if you wish.
atric: Page 268, bottom of page
Also, recall the Duelfer Report, which cleared Bush of misleading Congress on WMD, citing intelligence failure but making it clear there were no WMD, only the capacity to make them.
yeah, those Kurds all died from…. global warming?
Texas Canuck: I’m talking strictly about the fact that WMD no longer existed by the time of the invasion. Of course Saddam had them at one time, and could have restarted a program at anytime.
There were some “WMD” – they just happened to be old and useless (stuff even the Iraqis didn’t know was there), so they don’t get mentioned in the report and Bush doesn’t count them in his book.
As for the yellow-cake … claiming that to be a “WMD” is like saying that a bar of copper is an ammunition cache. No need to play silly games – there’s plenty of reasons to hate Saddam without having to make up claims about “WMD”.
Every Arab country has a dictator in power in one form or another. Gaddafi is simply the most eccentric and stands out like an Arab Dennis Rodman. The MSM has done a very good job in convincing the world that he is some sort of “special madman” due to his appearance and theatrics.
Gaddafi has never killed his people en masse as people seem to think. He’s a blowhard making crazy speeches and grandstanding when he gets an opportunity. He offered no threat to western countries, he was active in keeping mass immigration to Europe under control, and despite news reports he kept Muslim extremists out of his country. He wasn’t about to share power with anyone on Libyan soil.
At the moment other Arab dictators are killing their people in the streets, Yemen and Bahrain. There’s no oil in those countries, so the MSM and their handlers are not interested in telling you about it.
This attack on Libya by US coalition forces is going to bode very badly for the west in the future. It will unite the Arab people, then further moderate Muslim bad sentiments and place China and Russia in more aggressive positions towards the west.
There was no need to get involved in a Libyan civil war. Most probably this was an instigated civil war by western interests in the oil fields, full stop. Meaning it’s our tax dollars helping enrich oil companies by force, when we easily could have bartered deals for oil country to country.
Libya is a bloody empty sandy desert with 6 million people and nothing to offer but oil. I doubt they could grow enough food to feed the population without foreign trade or aid.
We can’t work with that?
CJunk-Still not convinced. Don’t want to go OT here but…
page 268…..
“The other error was the intelligence failure on Iraq’s WMD.Almost a decade later, it hard to describe how widspread an assumption it was(pg 269) that Saddam had WMD”…….
I interpret that as saying that the jury is still out on whether or not he had WMD.
Not trying to be a prick here, just that I have a different interpretation of the text.
atric: You’re not being a prick … lol. Both of us are way O.T. (otherwise I’d be one too)
pg. 269, Bush says … I decided early on that I would not criticize the hard working patriots at the CIA for the faulty intelligence …”
Anyway, I’ll drop it here as well, lest I have to slap myself for being O.T.
Cheers!
What if this is as good as it gets?
CJunk- acknowledeged. Keep up the good work on your blog.
For the West, the best it got, was back in the 80’s, it’s been all down hill since then. And the slide is getting faster.
The left is doing it’s level best to coalesce all the different muslim groups into one monster, and no one seems inclined to stop them.
The damned boomers have bankrupted our ability to respond with their fat happy debt load.
And that was the good news.
Gadhaffi was responsible for the Pan Am bombing. I have no problem with reducing him to a smoking crater.
We can worry about who replaces him later on.
Its just the Muslim Brotherhood using the West to clean up these Countries of Autocrats to make way for a real Islamic society dedicated to the destruction of Israel & beyond.
Of course the West is not only fighting for the Muslim & dying, its arm in the left is deceiving us.
Wikileaks: “All of Our Problems Come from the Muslim Brotherhood”
http://tinyurl.com/66p6oct
There is no evidence of MB influence among the Libyan freedom fighters.
Revnant, exactly.
can we put the “WMD” in Iraq canard to bed please
and smother it with a pillow…
hussein used poison gas and murdered 10s of thousands of innocent men women and children to death in the space of an hour….shall i show you the pictures?
without having to go all hyperproofy and squeaky anal i think that one instance of his propensity to ‘massily’ rub out people with all the vigour of a himmler is da proof he had and used poison gas as a WMD.
most of the time he used machine guns to mow down thousands of innocent men women and children…
anyone know how many MASS GRAVES of innocent men women and children they’ve found in Iraq to date?
well into the hundreds i believe.
There is no evidence of MB influence among the Libyan freedom fighters.
There is no evidence that the rebels in Libya are freedom fighters.
Fire Fighters fight fires
Crime Fighters fight crime
Freedom Fighters fight…
Remember the moral outrage over the Iraqi forces ripping preemie babies out of Kuwaiti incubators in hospitals that led to the justification for coalition invasion of Kuwait in the First Gulf War….the particular incident that led to that moral outrage never even happened.
Think about the moral outrage over the Israeli Defence Forces massacring 6000 civilians in Jenin that never happened.
With this precedent of the UN directing NATO forces to interfer in the Libyan civil war, where is the next UN directed attack likely to occur given that the majority of the UN’s efforts are focused against Israel?
Where really is the proven justification here for interferring in Libyan internal affairs?
Where is Canada’s defence or strategic interest in this war?
Are we to take the word of the same MSM that has been lying to us about so many things, among them Global Warming?
Are we to take the word and direction of the UN that so many here have called for Canada to get out of because this institution is so corrupt?
Who really are these rebels that want to overthrow the K-Daffy regime?
Name their spokesman.
Who will be interim President in K-Daffy’s place?
barbarians…animals…..a thuggish culture…law of the jungle….all glued together with fear and an ideology that defies belief to anyone with a heart and a soul…
my dog has more sympatico than these savages…these inbred yet underbred murdering uneducated primitifs…
it would take generations to eliminate the amoral squalid propensities these muslimos consider the state of man…
so i’m with la shaidle…stop muslim immigration now…there is not one precinct in the occidental nor the oriental world where these poisoned deformed people have ever done anything to deserve praise or recommendation…in matters great or small….socially politically philosophicaly musically artistically economically …religiously….
religiously..hmmph…magine a ‘religion’ founded and perpetuated on hate and murder…a disgusting force to be sure…
and they underestimated us kuffars…soon the suitable emetic will be administered…then they will jet forth from our body politic.
i mean really now…just LOOK at the islamist clowns performing here in our poor benighted Dominion.
Um yes there is evidence that the leader of the Freedom Fighters in Libya is a hard core supporter of Al Quacka and his brother is a commander in that terrorist organization. Al Quacka is an arm of the Muslim brotherhood.
Article detailing the rebel’s links to Al Quacka.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8391632/Libya-the-West-and-al-Qaeda-on-the-same-side.html
yeah well…
New systems to be tested…
Lotsa ordinance with it’s best before date approaching….