If Qaddafi wins, watch for the inevitable counter-revolution everywhere....
Counter-revolution already under way in Bahrain, Yemen and beyond, courtesy of USA's DOD/CIA/MOSSAD/MI6...After the uprisings are crushed, will the people of MENA be able to frame a new modernism with freedom and democracy?
For what it is worth, I draw a sharp distinction between assisting rebels in an organic revolution, already begun by the people, in which the aim is self determination as contrasted to a Jacobin revolution that operates under the pretext of spreading democracy via military conquest.
The differences are stark and cannot be overemphasized.
Self determination by those involved in the rise of Islamic awareness may not lead to the freedom and democracy as envisioned by Westerners, particularly as was espoused by Jacobins who successfully promoted engineered revolutions built upon lies, including the pretext of spreading democracy.
The notion of "deconstruction" followed by "reconstruction" has little to do with self determination.
Anytime a Jacobin speaks of spreading freedom and liberal democracy in the Middle East, one, imo, should apply a strict scrutiny standard to determine intent.
Odds are reasonable that rebel leaders who are Muslim and educated as to US foreign policy in the Middle East would do the same. Could explain why so many say, “Yankee go home” or equivalent thereof.
If we want to become the “good guys” to use good professor’s words, then, imo, the focus should stay on self determination for the Libyan people and nothing more.....
No one anywhere on earth can believe a single word that comes out of the mouth of an American "leader" at this time. Period.
Extreme? Ask the "rebels" in Libya. Ask the victims of fraudulent foreclosures okayed by the Federal Reserve in the U.S.
If elected representatives lie constantly to the people, what is left?
As Jesuits say...there is an exception to every rule....
I think the benefits to the US reputation in acting for the Libyan opposition to a mad dictator, aside from the humanitarian considerations, are that exception. We should provide what the rebels request and only what they request.
But we all know that the US AF could get rid of Qaddafi in 20 minutes if we wanted to....
Libya, Syria, Jordan, KSA and the GCC for that matter, Yemen included.
All of them should be toppled pronto.
Saudi forces came to Beirut in 1976…they quickly left with their tales behind their backs…what are they doing in Bahrain and Yemen…?
This will inflame the whole situation even further…
If the WEST has any Brains left…they should redeem themselves and help the rebels in Libya YESTERDAY…..But I think it is exactly the opposite happening from Bahrain to Libya…courtesy of the US DOD planners….
Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia, Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, Qaboos Bin Al Said of Oman, Abdullah II of Jordan, Bashar Assad of Syria – these autocrats cannot be hailed as stakeholders in Libya’s march to democracy…
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) regimes are tottering on the abyss and themselves hoping NATO will salvage them. Their rulers keep their personal wealth of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars hoarded in Western banks and the umbilical cord cannot easily be broken….
(Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Saturday: “I would like to ask NATO and the US with honor and humbleness and not with arrogance to stop their operations in our land. We are a very tolerant people but now our tolerance has run out.”)
The only “Arab revolt” Abdullah or Abdullah II ever knew is what British intelligence and Lawrence of Arabia financed in the debris of the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago….LOL…
A post-House of Saud Saudi Arabia will involve inventing a new political culture and the new economic contracts that would go with it, ones that will be indigenous and, hopefully, democratic in new and surprising ways…
Which brings us back to Turkey. It’s perfectly feasible that Islam will be one of the building blocks of something entirely new, something no one today has a clue about, something that will resemble what was, in Europe, the separation between politics and religion. In the spirit of May 1968, perhaps we can even picture an Arab Banksy plastering a stencil across all Arab capitals:
Imagination in Power!
