Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Libya 2

I've already made some points about the UN resolution regarding Libya, however in the wake of President Obama's speech yesterday more needs to be said.

The first is that by default we've sided with the 'rebels'. Remember the resolution was intended to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly zone. It seems we're classing the anti-Gaddafi forces as civilians and the pro-Gaddafi forces as non-civilian so we're protecting only one side of the fight - we're preventing one side from defending themselves to the limits of their capability. A real test of this is when the anti-G's get their own helicopters etc. to use against the pro-G's will they be stopped from flying?

I say "by default", but  that's not quite true - "assist the opposition". Yep the USA is explicitly on the side of the anti-G's. However this is an application of the old maxim "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" - they want to remove Gaddafi, we want to remove Gadaffi; ergo we're on the same side.


Yeah that worked so well when we were arming Afghan's to fight the evil USSR. The flaw lies in that we don't know what the anti-G's want. It may well be that they want to overthrow this tyranny so they can replace it with a different tyranny; and we're helping them.

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