What in the world? Yet another big, bad Middle Eastern dictator has been captured in a ditch, what is about ditches and dethroned dictators? The latest to be pulled bloodied and beaten and about dead was Gaddafi, eight years earlier it was Saddam Hussein. Needless to say both are dead and both had a love-hate relationship with America. Remember that photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam when he visited Baghdad as Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Middle East. Rumsfeld was there to restore diplomatic relations with Iraq and to largely unite against Iran who was in an active war with Iraq.
It worked too because relations were restored by November of 1984 in spite of the fact that Saddam was then alleged to be using chemical weapons on Iranians. Four years later he would use chemical weapons on the Kurdish people in his own country. Remember that! He was once our buddy, we made sure could buy helicopters and gifted him pistols, medieval spiked hammers and a pair of golden cowboy spurs. A few years later we got tired of him and when he invaded Kuwait he became our enemy. Many years later(in 2003) we imagined he had weapons of mass destruction and went after a crazy, old despot who wasn’t really a huge threat. Good news on that front though the troops are finally coming home from the nearly nine-year war. NINE YEARS and there weren’t even any weapons. But I digressed as I was talking about pulling disposed dictators out of ditches.
And so it was on Thursday that news broke that Gaddafi had been shot in both legs, but was he alive or dead, it was unclear at first. I bet you had forgotten that he was even on the loose, too many battles going on for Americans to focus too much on another crazy middle eastern leader. They have, after all, been falling like dominoes starting with Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Everyone knows about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and that Gaddaffi for three years refused to extradite two Libyan intelligence agents indicted for planting the bomb. Sanctions were the norm under his rule but after Bush II took office Libya was removed from the list of nations supporting terrorism and they really weren’t on the terrorism radar or any radar for that matter. But the Libyans in Benghazi got tired of his more than 40 year rule and his daily speeches and started to rise up against his regime. Unlike Mubarak, Gaddaffi was not trying to talk things through, from the start he said he would kill the rebels prompting NATO to jump in and the rest is history.
But again it was our (as well as other western leaders) coziness with him that is mind-boggling to me. There are countless pictures of him schmoozing with Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin and old man John McCain who tweeted from Gaddaffi’s ranch…”Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his ‘ranch’ in Libya – interesting meeting with an interesting man.” Interesting if you like mad men but wait most dictators are mad men.
All I’m saying is America need to be consistent in dealing with the Saddams and Muammars of the world. We don’t look good when we are friends with them(usually because they are sitting on a big pot of oil) and look away while they commit atrocities and then suddenly get a conscious when they get unruly. Our complicitness in such matters has got to stop.
Posted by Libergirl
TheConfirmationFiles 