Libyan troops defy Gadhafi, side with protesters

[Dominikos]

"Is it me or does Gadhafi look like an evil Willy Wonka with some sexy umpa lumpa bodyguards?" [Posted somewhere on the net]

And you have to wonder as to what's going to happen to those sexy Amazons.

~ Dominik ~

[Provost Harrison]

Well I shouldn't worry, Gadaffi won't be around too much longer as he appears to be melting anyway

And we need a poll - how do you spell his name exactly...I read two papers last night and both spelt his name incorrectly. Gaddafi, Gadaffi, Gadhafi...although it is probably something different in squiggles anyway...

[germanos]

There is obviously only one correct spelling: القذافي
If you want to quible over a transliteration, have fun.

[Kitschum]

The man himself spells it Gadhafi or he did in a letter to some American schoolchildren in the 80s or at least that's what I read.

[EPW]

Is Barack Obama Secretly Swiss?

The administration's pathetic, dithering response to the Arab uprisings has been both cynical and naive.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Friday, Feb. 25, 2011, at 11:41 AM ET

---

However meanly and grudgingly, even the new Republican speaker has now conceded that the president is Hawaiian-born and some kind of Christian. So let's hope that's the end of all that. A more pressing question now obtrudes itself: Is Barack Obama secretly Swiss?
Let me explain what I mean. A Middle Eastern despot now knows for sure when his time in power is well and truly up. He knows it when his bankers in Zurich or Geneva cease accepting his transfers and responding to his confidential communications and instead begin the process of "freezing" his assets and disclosing their extent and their whereabouts to investigators in his long-exploited country. And, at precisely that moment, the U.S. government also announces that it no longer recognizes the said depositor as the duly constituted head of state. Occasionally, there is a little bit of "raggedness" in the coordination. CIA Director Leon Panetta testified to Congress that Hosni Mubarak would "step down" a day before he actually did so. But the whole charm of the CIA is that its intelligence-gathering is always a few beats off when compared with widespread general knowledge. Generally, though, the White House and the State Department have their timepieces and reactions set to Swiss coordinates.
This is not merely a matter of the synchronizing of announcements. The Obama administration also behaves as if the weight of the United States in world affairs is approximately the same as that of Switzerland. We await developments. We urge caution, even restraint. We hope for the formation of an international consensus. And, just as there is something despicable about the way in which Swiss bankers change horses, so there is something contemptible about the way in which Washington has been affecting—and perhaps helping to bring about—American impotence. Except that, whereas at least the Swiss have the excuse of cynicism, American policy manages to be both cynical and naive.
This has been especially evident in the case of Libya. For weeks, the administration dithered over Egypt and calibrated its actions to the lowest and slowest common denominators, on the grounds that it was difficult to deal with a rancid old friend and ally who had outlived his usefulness. But then it became the turn of Muammar Qaddafi—an all-round stinking nuisance and moreover a long-term enemy—and the dithering began all over again. Until Wednesday Feb. 23, when the president made a few anodyne remarks that condemned "violence" in general but failed to cite Qaddafi in particular—every important statesman and stateswoman in the world had been heard from, with the exception of Obama. And his silence was hardly worth breaking. Echoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had managed a few words of her own, he stressed only that the need was for a unanimous international opinion, as if in the absence of complete unity nothing could be done, or even attempted. This would hand an automatic veto to any of Qaddafi's remaining allies. It also underscored the impression that the opinion of the United States was no more worth hearing than that of, say, Switzerland. Secretary Clinton was then dispatched to no other destination than Geneva, where she will meet with the U.N. Human Rights Council—an absurd body that is already hopelessly tainted with Qaddafi's membership.
By the time of Obama's empty speech, even the notoriously lenient Arab League had suspended Libya's participation, and several of Qaddafi's senior diplomatic envoys had bravely defected. One of them, based in New York, had warned of the use of warplanes against civilians and called for a "no-fly zone." Others have pointed out the planes that are bringing fresh mercenaries to Qaddafi's side. In the Mediterranean, the United States maintains its Sixth Fleet, which could ground Qaddafi's air force without breaking a sweat. But wait! We have not yet heard from the Swiss admiralty, without whose input it would surely be imprudent to proceed.
Evidently a little sensitive to the related charges of being a) taken yet again completely by surprise, b) apparently without a policy of its own, and c) morally neuter, the Obama administration contrived to come up with an argument that maximized every form of feebleness. Were we to have taken a more robust or discernible position, it was argued, our diplomatic staff in Libya might have been endangered. In other words, we decided to behave as if they were already hostages! The governments of much less powerful nations, many with large expatriate populations as well as embassies in Libya, had already condemned Qaddafi's criminal behavior, and the European Union had considered sanctions, but the United States (which didn't even charter a boat for the removal of staff until Tuesday) felt obliged to act as if it were the colonel's unwilling prisoner. I can't immediately think of any precedent for this pathetic "doctrine," but I can easily see what a useful precedent it sets for any future rogue regime attempting to buy time. Leave us alone—don't even raise your voice against us—or we cannot guarantee the security of your embassy. (It wouldn't be too soon, even now, for the NATO alliance to make it plain to Qaddafi that if he even tried such a thing, he would lose his throne, and his ramshackle armed forces, and perhaps his worthless life, all in the course of one afternoon.)
Unless the administration seriously envisages a future that includes the continued private ownership of Libya and its people by Qaddafi and his terrible offspring, it's a sheer matter of prudence and realpolitik, to say nothing of principle, to adopt a policy that makes the opposite assumption. Libya is—in point of population and geography—mainly a coastline. The United States, with or without allies, has unchallengeable power in the air and on the adjacent waters. It can produce great air lifts and sea lifts of humanitarian and medical aid, which will soon be needed anyway along the Egyptian and Tunisian borders, and which would purchase undreamed-of goodwill. It has the chance to make up for its pointless, discredited tardiness with respect to events in Cairo and Tunis. It also has a president who has shown at least the capacity to deliver great speeches on grand themes. Instead, and in the crucial and formative days in which revolutions are decided, we have had to endure the futile squawkings of a cuckoo clock.

Obama's passing up the opportunity to help change the world in a really positive way, and at an extremely low price compared to iraq/afganastan. I guess we can only hope that the protesters will succeed without any outside support.

[SlowwHand]

Adios, Gadaffy.

US freezes Gadhafi assets, closes Libya embassy (AP) - 2 hours ago

[Wezil]

It would take the dark menacing imagination of Flann O’Brien, the fabulator of the absurd terrible world of his greatest novel, The Third Policeman, to be capable of equal encounter with some of the collateral absurdities that touch on the brutal crisis in Libya.

As we in the West hear of the tyrant (funny how that word is so much more visible in the last week or so than it has been in the dispatches prior to the uprising) threatening, or having ordered, strafing raids from jet aircraft against his own citizens; of helicopter gunships being called up for — grim euphemism — crowd control; talk of rivers of blood from Gaddafi himself and his reptile offspring — I am still, in the midst of all these greater matters of direst consequence, struck by the consideration that Libya, this Libya, (as of this writing) is still on the UN Human Rights Council.

The UNHRC is not just any old UN human rights quango, the wonderful Brit term for those perpetual motion bureaucratic machines, which in one guise or another, under various palate-crushing acronyms, pullulate in the UN like flies on four-day-old fish left in the sun. This is, make no mistake here, the UN’s top Human Rights organization. This is the one with clout. The one with prestige. This is the one, if I may deploy a Dowdism, of “unquestionable moral authority.”

So it was that, with reports coming out of Libya of the madman-dictator threatening ruin on his country, vengeance on his enemies, the country about to go up in flames (there are unceasing rumours about firing the oil fields), even an imminent prospect of civil war, I read just two days ago, as all this was going on, that: “Libya’s seat on the UN’s top human rights body looks secure for now, as a Western-led initiative to condemn it for its violent response to anti-government protests stops short of calling for its expulsion.” In the entire universal history of pathetic gestures is there one to top this?

That as of Friday, the position of Libya on the UN’s top human rights body was still secure.

Some states since that moment have awakened from their customary torpor, and indeed called for its expulsion, but after what the world has seen this week, and known for decades, does anyone have the slightest belief that efforts now to haul Libya off the UN Human Rights Council is anything more than the callous waste of time and desperate hypocrisy that putting Libya on the Human Rights Council was to begin with?

Why was the tyrant’s chamber of Libya ever, ever on a UN Human Rights council is the real question. A question that speaks to the moral ambiguity, even moral blindness of the entire United Nations apparatus. The action negated, nullified the very point of such a council. Imagine constituting a Human Rights Council with such members: with Libya, a prison presided over by a decaying dictator, with Cuba, another prison presided over by another decaying dictator, and then pair these two with the grand exemplar of their kind, China — the last great communist despotism.

One reason why tyrants have so long a lease in our brave new world is that temporizing, accommodating, trimming organizations like the UN give them, over the years, the bureaucratic sheen that allows them to present themselves as somewhat normal. These moral hell-holes are seen or read to be in public concert with the “better nations” of the world, that overtime it erases in the eyes of the world the great gulf that should separate evil or cruel states from the better, civilized ones. They earn a slovenly, lazy pass. Come crisis times, as this week, and everybody is suddenly ready with a unanimous cry of Horror! Horror!

And so it went with Libya, a kind of diplomatic varnishing via the goodwill of the United Nations. Libya was on this committee or that committee. But most of all, Libya was a giant of human rights’ supervision. Why, was not Libya a member in excellent standing of the world’s most esteemed arbiter of international morality — the UN Human Rights Council?

Well, it’s kind of pathetic now to be hearing the mewling from certain human rights’ advocates trying to “alert” the world community to the depth of Gadaffi’s depravity, and the extinction of human rights under his regime. Real concern would have manifested itself differently: for example, when all the NGOs of conscience and all their allied associations were so busy mapping the failings of Israel over the decades, where was the equal diligence, the equal industry and passion in mapping the real and massive horrors of a state which actually deserved such attention?

That so many people are now affecting surprise and shock at the turn of events in Libya, and especially over the cruelty and madness of Gaddafi is wearying. How is either surprise or shock possible, except from the wilful blindness of years past, and the plastic hypocritical games that kept the real truth subdued and out of sight at the world’s greatest forum, the United Nations.

Seen as part of an effort to camouflage what it professes to investigate, the UNHRC is a perfect emblem and symbol of the entire organization to which it belongs. The UN does not help the world any longer. As the Libya case manifests, it is an impediment.

National Post

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/02/26/rex-murphy-un-offers-a-tyrants-last-refuge/

[germanos]