Cohen- Price of Delusion. Libya and Qadaffi

Roger Cohen’s column in the Times begins with his take on Qaddafi-

“Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is a vain man. Like the other Arab dinosaurs he has his dyed hair, his designer shades, his spoiled children and his compound full of sycophants. He doesn’t want, one day, to be dragged from a rat hole like Saddam
Hussein or hauled from a bunker like the Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo.”

“Qaddafi is not mad,” he writes, but deluded. And who or what helped along his delusion?

Qaddafi is a child of the United Nations, that austere body in New York City that gives the plenum to people like Qaddafi, Hugo Chavez and Ahmadinejad. It is the U.N. and its various councils that empower people like Qaddafi by giving them the veneer of legitimacy that allows them to murder their own people and to sponsor terrorism.

And of the rebels?

“Right now, three squabbling generals jostle for control. The Brits, holed up in a Benghazi hotel compound with one of the generals, are trying to help with that. The United States is offering nonlethal stuff worth millions of dollars: body armor, canteens, uniforms, wire cages for sandbags that can be used to make walls.”

But you sense from Cohen that he blames the U.S. for the rebel’s lack of progress in ousting Qaddafi.

“This embryonic force is not going to defeat Qaddafi in the foreseeable future. Nor can it, alone, apply enough pressure on him for his entourage to see the writing on the wall and act accordingly. That burden falls to NATO. But NATO hesitated as President Obama and America drew back. It is now trying to correct that lapse by escalating operations to take out supply and communications lines.”

I say that the U.N. created Qaddafi, let it now get rid of him. Small chance of that happening as its fecklessness is on display as it considers adding Syria to the UN’s Human Rights Council.

What will be in Libya will be. And I do not hold out much hope of a democratic future.

The full article is here.