Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Making Room for Al Qaeda in Libya

The Obama administration and its allies in Europe have encouraged and abetted the “Arab Spring” revolts in the Muslim world, enabling the Muslim Brotherhood to play a significant political role in North Africa after the overthrow of the old regimes. In Libya the West went so far as to apply military force to remove Col. Muammar Qaddafi from power and murder him, allowing Al Qaeda to join the new Libyan government.

As Ezra Levant and Daniel Pipes point out in the video below, this is a clear warning to other despots not to dismantle their nuclear programs. If Col. Gedhafi were to appear at a séance and speak from beyond the grave, he would surely say: “Whatever you do, boys, don’t give up your nukes!”

The second half of the video is devoted to a discussion of the re-Islamization of Turkey over the past decade, correctly identifying Turkey as the greatest threat to regional security.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

4 comments:

MRiggs said...

"the West went so far as to apply military force to remove Col. Muammar Qaddafi from power and murder him"

The west didn't murder Gaddafi.

Baron Bodissey said...

MRiggs --

NATO targeted his convoy from the air just before he was killed. The NTC people finished him off.

So, in order to be accurate, I should have said "the West went so far as to apply military force to remove Col. Muammar Qaddafi from power and be an accessory to his murder". That would have been completely accurate.

My mistake. I was sloppy.

MRiggs said...

"So, in order to be accurate, I should have said "the West went so far as to apply military force to remove Col. Muammar Qaddafi from power and be an accessory to his murder". That would have been completely accurate."

With respect, no it wouldn't have been. The air strike was an act of war against combatants. There is nothing to indicate that NATO knew Gaddafi was personally present in the convoy, nor was aware of what might happen next, or conspired to allow it to happen. NATO or "the west" was not party to anything that can be described as murder.

Let's make GoV a guilt-trip free zone. There's enough of that to go around.

Baron Bodissey said...

MRiggs, you are mistaken.

NATO's mission, as originally agreed to in order to meet Arab League demands, was explicit and limited: to protect civilian lives.

Once the new government had been installed and the last major forces of Ghadafi routed, there was no longer any significant danger to civilians (except insofar as Libyan civilians are always in danger from internecine tribal conflict).

Therefore the mission was accomplished, and NATO no longer had a mandate to bomb convoys. Of course, the mission had long since crept outside the original mandate, but that just means it had long since become an illegal operation. Targeting Qaddafi was never within the mission, as defined by the NATO commad, and early in the conflict all the major players actually stated publicly that they were not going to target him.

So it was murder, plain and simple, for all those reasons. There's no getting around it.

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