Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
- In Arkansas, Exxon Is Threatening to Arrest Reporters But Otherwise Telling Nobody Nothing
- It’s Official: A Democratic President Proposes to Cut Social Security
- Exxon's Unfriendly Skies: Why Does Exxon Control the No-Fly Zone Over Arkansas Tar Sands Spill?
- The Corporate Betrayal of America
- Why Would Anyone Celebrate the Death of Margaret Thatcher? Ask a Chilean
- The Corporate Betrayal of America
- The Elephant in the Room: Militarism
- Why Would Anyone Celebrate the Death of Margaret Thatcher? Ask a Chilean
- Global Wealth Inequality - What You Never Knew You Never Knew
- Exxon's Unfriendly Skies: Why Does Exxon Control the No-Fly Zone Over Arkansas Tar Sands Spill?
Popular content
Today's Top News
Libya: Here We Go Again
Here we go again. The cheering crowds. The deposed dictator. The encomiums to freedom and liberty. The American military as savior. You would think we would have learned in Afghanistan or Iraq. But I guess not. I am waiting for a trucked-in crowd to rejoice as a Gadhafi statue is toppled and Barack Obama lands on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit to announce “Mission Accomplished.” War, as long as you view it through the distorted lens of the corporate media, is not only entertaining, but allows us to confuse state power with personal power. It permits us to wallow in unchecked self-exaltation. We are a nation that loves to love itself.
A rebel fighter enters the house of Al-Saadi Gadhafi the son of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi through a window. (AP / Sergey Ponomarev)
I know enough of Libya, a country I covered for many years as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, to assure you that the chaos and bloodletting have only begun. Moammar Gadhafi, during one of my lengthy interviews with him under a green Bedouin tent in the sprawling Bab al-Aziziya army barracks in Tripoli, once proposed marrying one of his sons to Chelsea Clinton as a way of mending fences with the United States. He is as insane as he appears and as dangerous. But we should never have become the air force, trainers, suppliers, special forces and enablers of rival tribal factions, goons under the old regime and Islamists that are divided among themselves by deep animosities and a long history of violent conflict.
Stopping Gadhafi forces from entering Benghazi six months ago, which I supported, was one thing. Embroiling ourselves in a civil war was another. And to do it Obama blithely shredded the Constitution and bypassed Congress in violation of the War Powers Resolution. Not that the rule of law matters much in Washington. The dark reasoning of George W. Bush’s administration was that the threat of terrorism and national security gave the executive branch the right to ignore all legal restraints. The Obama administration has made this disregard for law bipartisan. Obama assured us when this started that it was not about “regime change.” But this promise proved as empty as the ones he made during his presidential campaign. He has ruthlessly prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where military planners speak of a continued U.S. presence for the next couple of decades. He has greatly expanded our proxy wars, which rely heavily on drone and missile attacks, as well as clandestine operations, in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Add a few more countries and we will set the entire region alight.
The NATO airstrikes on the city of Sirte expose the hypocrisy of our “humanitarian” intervention in Libya. Sirte is the last Gadhafi stronghold and the home to Gadhafi’s tribe. The armed Libyan factions within the rebel alliance are waiting like panting hound dogs outside the city limits. They are determined, once the airstrikes are over, not only to rid the world of Gadhafi but all those within his tribe who benefited from his 42-year rule. The besieging of Sirte by NATO warplanes, which are dropping huge iron fragmentation bombs that will kill scores if not hundreds of innocents, mocks the justification for intervention laid out in a United Nations Security Council resolution. The U.N., when this began six months ago, authorized “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” We have, as always happens in war, become the monster we sought to defeat. We destroy in order to save. Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council estimates that the number of Libyans killed in the last six months, including civilians and combatants, has exceeded 50,000. Our intervention, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, has probably claimed more victims than those killed by the former regime. But this intervention, like the others, was never, despite all the high-blown rhetoric surrounding it, about protecting or saving Libyan lives. It was about the domination of oil fields by Western corporations.
Once the Libyans realize what the Iraqis and Afghans have bitterly discovered—that we have no interest in democracy, that our primary goal is appropriating their natural resources as cheaply as possible and that we will sacrifice large numbers of people to maintain our divine right to the world’s diminishing supply of fossil fuel—they will hate us the way we deserve to be hated. Libya has the ninth largest oil reserves in the world, which is why we react with moral outrage and military resolve when Gadhafi attacks his citizens, but ignore the nightmare in the Congo, where things for the average Congolese are far, far worse. It is why the puppets in the National Transitional Council have promised to oust China and Brazil from the Libyan oil fields and turn them over to Western companies. The unequivocal message we deliver daily through huge explosions and death across the occupied Middle East is: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you.
History is replete with conquering forces being cheered when they arrive, whether during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine in World War II, the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon or our own arrival in Baghdad, and then rapidly mutating from liberator to despised enemy. And once our seizure of Libyan oil becomes clear it will only ramp up the jihadist hatred for America that has spread like wildfire across the Middle East. We are recruiting the next generation of 9/11 hijackers, all waiting for their chance to do to us what we are doing to them.
As W.H. Auden understood:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
The force used by the occupier to displace the old regime always makes sure the new regime is supine and complaint. The National Transitional Council, made up of former Gadhafi loyalists, Islamists and tribal leaders, many of whom detest each other, will be the West’s vehicle for the reconfiguration of Libya. Libya will return to being the colony it was before Gadhafi and the other young officers in 1969 ousted King Idris, who among other concessions had let Standard Oil write Libya’s petroleum laws. Gadhafi’s defiance of Western commercial interests, which saw the nationalization of foreign banks and foreign companies, along with the oil industry, as well as the closure of U.S. and British air bases, will be reversed. The despotic and collapsed or collapsing regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria once found their revolutionary legitimacy in the pan-Arabism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. But these regimes fell victim to their own corruption, decay and brutality. None were worth defending. Their disintegration, however, heralds a return of the corporate and imperial power that spawned figures like Nasser and will spawn his radical 21st century counterparts.
The vendettas in Libya have already begun. Government buildings in Tripoli have been looted, although not on the scale seen in Baghdad. Poor black sub-Saharan African immigrant workers have been beaten and killed. Suspected Gadhafi loyalists or spies have been tortured and assassinated. These eye-for-an-eye killings will, I fear, get worse. The National Transitional Council has announced that it opposes the presence in Libya of U.N. military observers and police, despite widespread atrocities committed by Gadhafi loyalists. The observers and police have been offered to help quell the chaos, train new security forces and provide independent verification of what is happening inside Libya. But just as Gadhafi preferred to do dirty work in secret, so will the new regime. It is an old truism, one I witnessed repeatedly in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, that yesterday’s victims rapidly become today’s victimizers.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
127 Comments so far
Show AllYes, if a substantial number of us here in this country would take any comparable degree of responsibility for the general condition as compared to what Libyan citizens have done. There be despots and then there be despotic systems and setups... Hedges has shot one hell of a sophist wad. For after all, we've all witnessed how it was that Hillary (Brunhilde of the modern era) flew into Tripoli, rallied the troops, began the charge of the light brigade - all on behalf of the general condition in north Africa,
Alas, there was a time when a voice such as Mr. Hedges' wasn't a voice in the wilderness.
There was a time more recently when his voice was just another one spewing inanities in the NYT.
"Once the Libyans realize what the Iraqis and Afghans have bitterly discovered—that we have no interest in democracy, that our primary goal is appropriating their natural resources as cheaply as possible and that we will sacrifice large numbers of people to maintain our divine right to the world’s diminishing supply of fossil fuel—they will hate us the way we deserve to be hated." (from the article by Chris Hedges)
The rhetoric is ramping up exponentially - the prelude to an explosion?
Manysummits
====
Hate to say but I think Syria is next, my guess is the nauseating "patriotism" on display around 911 10th is just rallying people into a nationalistic fever for that war, and so Oily Bomber can go into the election with fresh war fever and renewed corporate profits behind him.
PUKE!
NATO and certainly the neocons in the Obama administration led by none other than the mother of the birther conspiracy Hillary Clinton have been lying throught their teeth from the word go and all the warmongering liberals who supported their coup d'etat in Libya because they believed the phony humanitarian concerns used as a cover by MATO to get the oil companies a better deal are beyond stupid.
"all the warmongering liberals"
That's war mongering NEO-LIBERALS. The distinction must be made.
"The Liberals in the government are NEO-LIBERALS."
Yup. They are.
That's "warmongers". A neo-liberal is a conservative lite, not a liberal
That's true but a lot of Dim party partisan who support Killery and Oily Bombers call themselves liberals or progs so they think they are on the left even though they aren't. That's why I prefer left activist a much harder term to coopt.
If the past ten years of hysteria since 911 have proved anything it is this: Scratch a Liberal and you will find a Fascist beneath the "Humanitarian" veneer.
Liberals and neo-liberals are totally different in kind. Liberals are about as far as a left-wing goes in the USA--which is nothing like as far as it goes in Europe. Neo-liberals are followers of the 18th century economic theory of laissez faire capitalism and these people are found on the right wing of the Republican Party.
Thank you!
>>>> Stopping Gadhafi forces from entering Benghazi six months ago, which I supported, was one thing.
>>>> But this intervention, like the others, was never, despite all the high-blown rhetoric surrounding it, about protecting or saving Libyan lives. It was about the domination of oil fields by Western corporations.
You can't pick and choose, Chris. There was absolutely no reason to believe the initital lies about saving Benghazi lives.
And the gratuitous "recruiting the next generation of 9/11 hijackers" shows how little you have internalized about the actual operations of Imperialism.
I usually like Hedges' articles, but I agree with you that sometimes his views on the Middle East are a little self-contradictory.
Actually, Hedges is right about Benghazi. Libya is a divided country, as are most former colonial fictions. The eastern half (Cyrenaica) is populated by the members and allies of the Senoussi tribe, the tribe from which the kings of Libya (installed by the Italian former colonialists) came and ruled until the coup of 1969 ran the last, King Idris, out. The Western half (Tripolitania) has other tribes of which the Gadafy tribe is a small one. Many Tripolitanians are descended from those Spanish Muslims driven out of Spain during the "Reconquista"; you'll note Gadafy's eyes and complexion are not at all Arab and that is quite common in the west, especially the northern part of the west. When I taught there I had many students with startlingly blue eyes, some, but not all, with darker complexions than Gadafy's.
Make sure to leave out all the Al Queda and CIA affiliations of faux rebels shill!
How about no to your b.s. propaganda!
"There had been no massacre in Benghazi, only the threat of an attack on the city by Gaddafi if the rebels failed to negotiate. While the threat was real, the assumption of "thousands" of deaths was Nato propaganda to justify its desire to "do something" for the Arab spring. Whether it reinforced the rebels in their intransigence must now be moot.
The threat to Benghazi was the sole basis on which UN and Arab league support was obtained for a no-fly zone. The threat was averted within days. No further resolution was gained to support a Nato advance on Tripoli, let alone to kill Gaddafi from the air, because one would not have been forthcoming. The ambition to topple the regime was based on the claim to be "protecting civilians" by installing a more democratic one.
The claim that the intervention "saved thousands of lives" was thus wholly conjectural, and must be set against the thousands that have certainly been lost, and may yet be lost, through the intervention. These deaths can be justified only on the thesis that any precipitated revolution is worth any number of lives – as is asserted by apologists for Iraq."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/26/libya-intervention-nato
I disagree with posters lumping the distinctions cited by Hedges about stopping forces and becoming embroiled in a civil war as being a virtual blind spot. It is precisely in making distinctions that the depth of the problem cited by such posts is revealed. It needs to be said, increasingly clarified, repeatedly deconstructed in permanent resistance to conflation of dynamics and content.
We face the continued abrogation of social contract in decisions such as to ignore war powers act because it makes no difference whether it is observed or not. The existence of that act is itself reaffirmation of the premise that those powers are to be applied not as last resort, but as virtual first option because - perhaps- corporations now transcend time, space and notions of integrity of human beings.
This is, to me, ultimately a spiritual crisis on the same continuum as the assumption that nature is not sentient and can be perpetually exploited. First and foremost, that the powers engaging this paradigm actually believe that they would be able to survive on a planet after it has traumatized and destroyed a basic moral compass,a fully fragmented biological continuum, and that the material wealth and power for which these actions are taken - actually has a realty separate from the life it is destroying; that "technology" industries are utterly removed from any conscience, connection, continuum other than the virtual advertisement of itself for profit.
If those industries actually had a conscience, before any new "product" were introduced, there would be full accountability in human/ecological terms, from resource to waste disposal - not some bottom line spread sheet abstract, but in the humble recognition that they are cannibalizing from a perspective of isolated exceptionalism - and calling it legitimate.
Keep the distinctions, improve the conversation and deepen the deconstruction of the morass of conflation soup.
I'm uncertain how you got from observing Hedges' typical astuteness to challenging the perpetual-growth paradigm and the ultimately fatal--to us, anyway--results...even though it's right in front of me--
But I like it.
Just looking at the conventions in polite society about what "unites" us. The powers that be "unite" in an identifiable disunity (divide and conquer), obfuscation, assertion of ersatz mandate(s) that first attempt cannibalize discourse. Part of that is to make 'apparent paradox' so intense as to be rejected out of hand - to prevent division of the advertised dividing paradigm.This can never be complete - like a lie, it must always contain grains of truth.
From peak oil, international "policing" mandates, industrial genocide, all is an attempt to control identity in a manipulated illusion of "continuum". We either love and nurture identity that transcends the dominant D&C paradigm, or we fall prey to cannibalism of the discourse.
I understand.
Divide and conquer has worked so very well.
Is there a way we can turn the elite on each other while we unite and watch the fur fly?
Old Goat, that is one of the most insightful takes I've read on these pages for years! The fact is, Hedges decided to take on the inside-the-beltway crowd, which has opened himself to attack. It is no surprise that those representing corporate hegemony in the Democratic party then disguise themselves as either leftist or progressive in an attempt to discredit Hedges while advancing their obfuscation agenda. All that we really need to be aware of is that Obama is in re-election mode and the attacks are a consequence of political campaigning. After the election is over and Obama is re-elected the trolls will crawl back down their rat-hole of Democratic party insignificance where the capitulation and sellouts are the norm. The fact that they think Obama is in jepordy tells you more about their own existential angst and fear than it does about anything Hedges has ever contributed to the debate.
You can take a conspiracy angle, or you could just listen to what some of us are saying which is Hedges doesn't go far enough in listing the faux rebels CIA and Al Queda ties, Occam's razor and all that. I am not sure we are divided, pretty much all of us here except for the occasional O-bot who pops in, oppose the Libya war, I for one just want to be more clear as to WHY we are there and what the forces are on the ground to make a MORE airtight case against this war. And yes all of that does tie into consumerism, stolen oil fuels exponential growth.
"This is, to me, ultimately a spiritual crisis." That is certainly quotable old goat.
Spiritual crisis, what bollocks, it's a "crisis" of the ownership class wanting to steal more oil, privatize water in a poor country, stop Ghadaffi from setting up his own oil trading bourse based on gold, the "rebels" setting up a west friendly central bank, etc. I prefer the old school left that said religion was the opiate of the masses. "Spirituality" is just pretend, a pipe dream for avoiding the real material in this world causality for actions.
"yesterday’s victims rapidly become today’s victimizers"
Bears repeating
*******
It's a long leap from eccentric to insane. Gadhafi is less dangerous than Dick Cheney and probably more stable than Richard Nixon.
FREE AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY (DIRECT) DEMOCRACY
*******
emschlee: Agreed!! How "insane" is it to get behind a water project to supply that precious necessity to 70% of the Libyan people? How "insane" is it to provide free education and to try to escape the venal clutches of compound interest-bearing central banking? The first thing the Benghazi "rebels" did was to establish a central bank. What's up with that, Chris? Should give you a clue about that rebellion you support. In this article, Chris Hedges mixes truth with half truth with omitted truth and false premise. The best kind of propaganda always does.
"venal clutches of compound interest-bearing central banking"--- BINGO.
Highly recommend "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins. We will raze Libya to the ground (after killing a good chunk of it's civilian population), steal their oil and water, and then graciously extend an IMF loan (with interest of course) to rebuild it's destroyed infrastructure- all cloaked in high sounding humanitarian babble.
Very rich stuff is now emerging. It turns out that the commander of the rebel army was handed over to Kadaffi by the U.K. and U.S. to be tortured, which he was. He now demands an apology. From Kadaffi? No, from the U.K. and U.S. governments!
While Gaddafi's regime used oil revenues to educate people, the Western oil companies who have appropriated this oil will use the revenues to build an even bigger war chest with which to rob other people of their education.
We're all about education here in the West.
That's education as in getting schooled. By NATO and our MICC.
Getting schooled is a theme of this Hedges commentary. Libya is about to get schooled by Western oil companies and their armies. Hedges surmises that they'll learn to "despise" us, and he's correct.
Getting schooled and getting shafted. Same difference. It's what the prez is doing to us.
Bill in Dubuque
Some points.
Six months ago, the U.N. endorsed a military assault under the guise of humanitarianism and this past week the U.N. decided that the humanitarian work of the activists on a ship from Turkey deserved to be stopped and nine of the people were killed because their humanitarianism was a threat to Israel.
Ban Ki Moon is a corporate tool.
The National Transitional Council (NTC) of Libya has been set up to be deliberately confusing.
It has two forms and several websites. Two begin "ntclibya" and then .org or .com (the .com is where you find the executive committee).
One is called the executive committee of the NTC and both its chair, Jabril, and vice-chair, Al Issawi, are proudly devoted to privatization.
While the NTC is headed by a (Sharia?) lawyer named Jalil.
So, it's a matter of watching your Jebril and your Jalil and who they seem to represent.
Good catch, my guess is the puppet government is Libya will be a Sharia law for privatizer corporate dominance quid pro quo. Many of the "rebels" are Islamic extremists, ie Al Queda, which just means the base in Arabic.
I admire Hedges' work, but this is probably the worst article he has ever written. Orientalist, imperialist, supremacist, and a bunch of other ists.
"Stopping Gadhafi forces from entering Benghazi six months ago, which I supported, was one thing."
Now would have been a good time for Hedges to say, "Oops, I fucked up...I got snookered by black ops and bought into the ol' 'humanitarian intervention' line in the wake of the Arab Spring...this goes to show how powerful disinfo and war propaganda remains".
As usual, the comments are more enlightening than the article itself. Thanks to all.
That I can agree with you on.
DURRU: I agree. It's tepid, and leans towards certain status quo interests. Most unusual. And no one mentioned Chris giving the 911 story his endorsement. Makes you wonder if he's reconsidered his fate in light of the "treatment" of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and the various inside-the-beltway whistle-blowers?
Durrutix, I think Hedges is too bright to be affected by disinfo and war propaganda.
One has to wonder if he has pulled a Christopher Hitchens and gone over to the bad and brain damaged for cash or other emoluments.
I will never again be able to read Hedges without looking for clues that he has sold out.
He has written a string of bloopers IMO. His hit piece on atheists after the radical Christian terror bombing in Norway was no winner either IMO. A shame because I think his brand Obama concept is so useful, and thought his book "American Fascists," about Christian fundamentalists, and the book "War is a force that gives us meaning," were both excellent. I hope he is just tired and needs a vacation and not losing it. :(
And Libyan women will go from becoming doctors, lawyers and teachers to being sold into prostitution and riding the evening bus to the American, Englisn, French and Italian military bases.
Just like in Iraq. Saddam and Qadaffi had much in common. They did a lot of very bad things, like kill and torture people (Saddam more than Qadaffi, but I don't think you can parse evil and say for example that Jeffrey Dahmer was worse than Ted Bundy), but they also did lots of good, like bring real prosperity to their countries and they allowed women to get real educations. Will that continue in Libya, or will Libya become another Iraq. Who knows? I certainly don't and I doubt anyone in the US military or "intelligence" establishment knows either.
"But this intervention, like the others, was never, despite all the high-blown rhetoric surrounding it, about protecting or saving Libyan lives. It was about the domination of oil fields by Western corporations."
Then why did you support the initial rhetoric of supposedly protecting civilian lives? I am a huge fan of your work Chris, but it was obvious from the beginning that the initial justification was all lies, a pretext for invasion. How could you not see that?
Many other writers exposed the exaggerations about the threat to civilians from Gaddafi forces. Where were you?
The one area you should focus on is understanding black ops. Sadly, you still believe the rhetoric and lies around 911. Please pick up a copy of scholar Danielle Ganser's book NATOs Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe.
It explains how NATO/CIA used terrorism against civilians to prevent the communist left from being elected into state power. It is the MO of intelligence agencies to kill it's own in order to justify it's imperial policies. 911, and Libya, are no exception.
When perusing comments threads to Hedges articles, I tend to get diverted into watching for those who turn up to stomp on Hedges with both feet.
But this time, for a change, I'm stomping on him with at least a toe or two.
I share Hedges' disgust and disdain for the Amerikan Imperium's mendacious, hypocritical, and malignant exceptionalist and triumphalist rhetoric and spin accompanying the heinous intervention in Libya's civil war.
Ever since the initial pretextual justification of "humanitarian intervention" and the associated propaganda coupling events in Libya to "Arab Spring" uprisings, the US, its allies and clients, and the international organizations that front for them have doused the putrefying corpse of unilateral military aggression with eye-watering clouds of righteous rhetorical incense.
Interventionist hawks and buzzards across the political spectrum have kept their beaks pointed in the air and inhaled the fragrant clouds deeply, willfully oblivious to the stench it sought to obscure or counteract.
But I agree with criticisms expressed by thepuffin, clovis, WonderWoman, actualleftist, Brian Brademeyer, malatesta1936, et al.
• "He is as insane as he appears and as dangerous."
Not long ago, I was chatting with someone who'd gotten a first-hand account of a visit to Libya from a European diplomat on official business.
Much of the diplomat's story, which sounded credible enough, related how the diplomat was coolly received and subjected to unusually inconsiderate treatment by normal diplomatic standards-- repeatedly shuttled around from location to location and made to "hurry up and wait" while promised and scheduled meetings with Gadhafi were abruptly and inexplicable postponed, etc.
When the brief audience finally took place, the diplomat described Gadhafi pretty much as Hedges does; he proved irrational and inscrutable-- by turns courteous and deferential, then irascible and argumentative.
Ultimately, the long-sought meeting proved to be a waste of time-- which, the experienced diplomat well understood, might have been the intentional message of the diplomat's trying ordeal.
It's futile to challenge a reasonable witness's first-hand experience, or rebut their conviction that hey, this guy really IS a loon. But in the context of geopolitical relations, this conclusion still begs the question.
That is, by asserting that a given political leader truly is a madman, it implicitly assigns him an inferior status vis-à-vis other political leaders, who are presumably "sane" and therefore superior and more creditable and sound.
It's comparable to decrying a professional athlete as a "cheap-shot artist", "dirty player", or "goon". Even if Hedges is correct to denounce Gadhafi as "clinically insane", that's actually irrelevant when one considers the pathological personalities of the other narcissistic powermongers on the field of play, and the corrupt and vicious nature of the game-- which Hedges ironically dilates upon throughout the rest of the article, and elsewhere.
___________
• "Stopping Gadhafi forces from entering Benghazi six months ago, which I supported, was one thing."
It's facile to note in passing that it's "one thing", because the devil's in the details. One might as well write, "Becoming a little bit pregnant, which I supported, was one thing".
To be less facetious, Hedges might as well have written, "Staging a humanitarian intervention six months ago, which I supported, was one thing."
This kind of thinking strikes me as a wistful, idealistic, lingering belief in the liberal fantasy of "surgical" or generally antiseptic and therapeutic interventions.
It sounds so "right", but those implicitly "sane" political and military leaders of the "good" or "benevolent" nations are manifestly unwilling, unable, and incapable of the kind of altruistic restraint and circumspection that would allow for just the right modicum of disinterested therapeutic intervention.
___________
• "We are recruiting the next generation of 9/11 hijackers, all waiting for their chance to do to us what we are doing to them."
Another unfortunate use of a bogus received-narrative factoid in a fallacious and misguided attempt to point up the very real evil of "blowback".
___________
Still, if you cut out these worms, it's not a bad tomato for a salad.
But how much of the pulp will be left, OS, after the worms are cut out? (Cuz them's some pretty big worms.) And won't there be a lingering sourness nonetheless?
Great points. It always bothers me when I hear direct comparisons being made between "us" and "them", given that such statements are usually deeply hypocritical. But, I never thought that way about the implicit comparison being made between diplomats/heads of state when negative statements are made referring to only one party in the conflict. You've opened my eyes.
Old boss, meet the new boss!
The rebels are mass arresting black people:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/09/04/libya-stop-arbitrary-arrests-black-africans
The rebels are also looting and smuggling weapons, to the point where NATO has had to warn them:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/02/west-warns-smugglers-looting-libya-arms
Even worse, many of those smuggled weapons are ending up in the hands of a right-wing Islamist group that's an affiliate of al-Qaeda. This has pissed off neighboring Algeria:
http://af.reuters.com/article/senegalNews/idAFLDE75015Y20110601
WayneRF must be loving the mass arrests blacks in LIbya, because at least it's not Gaddafi doing it! He uses Bush Jr.'s logic too, that if you don't support Obama then you must support Gaddafi. Typical neo-con, chickenhawk attitude.
The rebels were never the "good guys". They're not even a "lesser evil". They're simply a different pile of the same shit.
Civil War?
When a rag-tag bunch of revolutionaries is supplemented with mercenaries, training, equipment and financial/military support from countries opposed to the country's ruler(s), is it still a civil war?
Perhaps it would be better to call it a Purchased Revolution (PR).
Point taken, ctrl-z.
I agree that it's fudging it to call it a "civil war"; I just reached for the handiest term to distinguish the conflict from the spurious characterization of "Arab Spring" popular uprising against a heinous dictator.
And even in legitimate rebellions and civil wars, there are always third parties intruding, or being invited, to put their thumbs on the scale.