After being goaded for weeks, West descends into feel-good, gesture politics
“The only justification for putting our armed forces in mortal danger is if a country is a threat to peace in a region, or jeopardises our crucial economic interests. Iraq scored on both counts. Libya, as a minor producer of oil and gas, scores zero. Like Zimbabwe, it is up to the citizens of that country to sort out their problems, not us.”
Led by the wet, self-serving grandstanders Sarkozy and Cameron and orchestrated by the BBC’s political reporting, we are about to see military action to depose Gaddafi and replace him with ……. nobody has any idea, but it’s safe to assume that it will be another version of the tyranny Libya is today.
This is an unjustifiable intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state. If a country like Iraq is a danger to peace in the region, then there is every justification to go in and change it. But Libya doesn’t fall into this category, although it did after it blew up Pan Am 103 over Scotland.
If these politicians really cared about the people of Libya, they would seek to raise an armed force to invade, put down the mad dog Gaddafi, and impose a constitution that guaranteed democracy, freedom of speech and individual rights. But Sarkozy, Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama are simply into gesture politics. After agonizing for weeks about being seen to do something, anything, they’ve come up with this no-fly zone nonsense.
This might bring down Gaddafi, but gives no pointers at all to what will replace him.
The only justification for putting our armed forces in mortal danger is if a country is a threat to peace in a region, or jeopardizes our crucial economic interests. Iraq scored on both counts. Libya, as a minor producer of oil and gas, scores zero. Like Zimbabwe, it is up to the citizens of that country to sort out their problems, not us.
British Prime Minister David Cameron seems to have taken leave of his senses, seeking to flex his military muscles after he decided to slash the air force, break-up the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and decommission our Harrier jump jets.
“The United Nations, majority owned by dictators”
Not the least disgusting aspect of this Libyan intervention is the cowardly attitude of Lib Dems like Simon Hughes and Menzies (spell it – M-E-N-Z-I-E-S) Campbell. Both of these hand-wringing nitwits, wrong about everything for their entire political careers, said it was ok to intervene in Libya because the United Nations approved. The United Nations, majority owned by dictators, is the only arbiter for these two. Not the moral power of the case, as in Iraq, but the approval of an organization dominated by rogue states. And of course in Iraq, after the vile dictator Saddam Hussein was deposed, the allies made sure, at no small cost to themselves, that a constitution was introduced into that country that at least gave Iraqis a chance for a state governed by the rule of law and respect for individual rights.
That is not going to happen in Libya, but this is all about showing how caring, sharing and hip are French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Cameron. They and Obama really feel Libya’s pain.
The BBC would like us to believe that the Libyan “rebels” are freedom loving people just like us who desperately want the open society we have in the West. Don’t be surprised if the Libyans get something not very far removed from the despised Gaddafi regime. Watching the demonstrations as filmed by the BBC it is astonishing how the commentary often flies in the face of what you are actually watching.
There was the risible event a couple of weeks ago when the BBC reported an incident in Libya about how the freedom loving rebels, using only sticks and stones, had routed armed troops with tanks. The BBC just made that up, because it was simply unbelievable. I’m seeing ignorant, childish people with nothing better to do shouting meaningless slogans about freedom and democracy. They fire their guns in the air at the slightest hint of progress with no thought or understanding of the consequences, then burst into tears. Our useless, shortsighted leaders, and it pains me to include Foreign Secretary William Hague in this indictment, talk about how Gaddafi must be stopped from killing his own people. But if rebels take up arms against a government, what is the reaction likely to be? After you Abdul; if you are sufficiently unhappy with that nasty Mr Gaddafi to pick up that gun, we’ll roll over and play dead and let you take over. This is naïve.
The BBC has taken up lots of time showing the rebels in action, but none at all explaining what they stand for. They are against Gaddafi; that’s enough apparently. One thing we know to be true. These people are Muslims who believe their religion comes first and their citizenship second. There will no progress towards an open society in Libya, or anywhere in the Middle East, until Muslims agree that the state must be secular, and that their religion is a secondary and private matter.
No comments yet.