Libya and the US Embassy

US closes embassy in Libya

Thanks for the sage advice John Kerry

American policy towards Libya has led to the closing of the US embassy in that tattered country.
The most recent article from The New York Times can be found here. 

Secretary of State as Liberty from Dry Bones

NATO under fire after firing on Libya

The New York Times reports today on the use of disproportionate force. This time, however, the butt of the story is not Israel, long accused of that in its wars with Hamas and Hezbollah, but NATO.

The charge has been levied by Russia. The same folks who brought us the Chechen wars.

NATO’s campaign of airstrikes against Libya came under the most intense criticism yet on Sunday, with Russian officials accusing the alliance of using “disproportionate” force in civilian areas a day after a strike on central Tripoli was reported to have killed a son and three grandchildren of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

NATO obviously denied the charge.

To my mind, NATO must ask and answer two questions- Does it want Qaddafi out of power? And what price is it willing to pay?

Read the full story.

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.

Libyan Ambassador Responds to Criticism

When Abdel Baset al-Megrahi landed in Tripoli following his release from Scotland last week, the world saw a single event in two very different ways. Through the prism of the Western media, Americans saw a terrorist being given a hero's welcome by a country eager to celebrate mass murder. Libyans saw a dying man—believed to be innocent by his countrymen and many others world-wide—being embraced by his family.

These words are penned by Ali Aujali, the Libyan ambassador to Washington.

He explains,

Most of those on the tarmac were members of Mr. Megrahi's extended family and tribe who have followed his plight and know he has very little time to live. The Scottish flags they flew alongside Libyan flags were not an endorsement of the terrible deeds of which he was accused. They were a powerful sign of solidarity between two very different nations that nonetheless share the value of compassion.

Interesting column. Read the full article, Why Libya Welcomed Megrahi, from the Wall Street Journal. Then, you make up your mind.

Abdel Baset al-Megrahi

As the parent of a terror victim it has been difficult to read, listen to, and watch the reports of the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi from a Scottish prison. (Al-Megrahi was convicted of involvement in the terror bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that killed 270 people in 1988.)

Not astonishingly, al-Megrahi was given sort of a hero’s welcome upon his return to his home country of Libya. This is nothing new in the world as we have witnessed this before when Israel has released terrorists. I do find U.S. complaints about al-Megrahi’s reception a bit shallow because nothing official has ever been said previously about streets being named after murderers of al-Megrahi’s ilk.

The Scots say it was compassion that led to the release of al-Megrahi, reportedly dying of cancer, to Libya. So I ask the Scot government, “Where was the compassion for the parents, siblings, relatives and friends of the murdered when you made the decision to release a mass murderer?”