Gadhafi: He might be an SOB, but he is our SOB




















Now... if Castro had a nuclear program we might have been opening an embassy in Havana...

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmpolitan challenges the conventional wisdomabout ourour new love affair:
If President Bush’s immigration speech was an attempt to divert attention from his failures in Iraq, then Condi Rice’s announcement this week that the U.S. would restore diplomatic ties with Libya — and that Iran and North Korea should take note — may have been a useful distraction of attention from the fact that in the course of a single week, she’d suffered two significant diplomatic setbacks (on the quest for Iran sanctions and on the attempt to financially throttle the Palestinian Authority). Most of the media seemed to lap up her explanation that Libya had been suddenly cowed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq into renouncing terrorism, WMD and seeking to rehabilitate itself in the international community.
That revisionist account, of course, ignores the fact that Libya had been strenuously attempting to restore ties with the West for more than a decade — that was the intention of all those talks over taking responsibility for Lockerbie, which were mediated by the South Africans in the mid 1990s. Libya had longsince begged off sponsoring terror attacks against the West, although part of the Colonel’s grand ambition to style himself as a Pan-African liberator had seen him back some of the most vicious war criminals (think Charles Taylor or Foday Sankoh) that the continent has ever seen. Yes, it was only in 2003 that Gadhafi declared his nuclear program and shipped it off to Washington. But that simply completed a process that had already begun years before, during the Clinton administration.read more

And apropos Gadhafi's(doomed) love affairs...She's Baaack... Judith Miller writes in the WSJ about the guy she used to milk in his tent at the desert once upon a time for news and more read. And too bad that Andrew Solomon's fascinating report from Libya in the New Yorker is not available online.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pundits who screw-up: No big deal...

Image
Matt Barganier desconstructs Andrew Sullivan's mea sorta culpa on Iraq in Time magazine (Sullivan seen above in a thoughtful pose on Bill Maher's "Real Time"). There have been many of those in recent weeks (including by WFB and Fukuyama ). In an commentary published last year, Oops! I helped start a War which was about one of the earlier apologizing-war-aplogists, I pointed out to the contrast between the way the losers who operate in the market (including financial analysts) are punished and the reality in which the losers in the political game (including foreign policy analysts) rarely get punished: Imagine: for a few years you were investing the money you had saved for your daughter's college education in one of those moderately conservative plans that provided some increase in the value of the investment without exposing it to major risks. But then your financial planner – let's call him Ken P. – got in touch with you and came up with a really great ide
Read more

When will Israel attack Iran?

Image
I'm not an "Intelligence analyst" and I don't play one on television. But I urge you to study the following items: 1. Seymour Hersh new piece in The New Yorker, "The Next Act: Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?" 2. Tony Karon's "Israel's Domestic Political Games Raises the Danger of a U.S.-Iran War." 3. Aluf Benn's "Olmert's Drums of War" in Haaretz . 4. Bush:I would understand if Israel chose to attack Iran. 5. Michael Oren's op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on November 16 which is only accessible to subscribers. So here are a few interesting quotes: Much like 1967, Israel faces a Middle Eastern leader who has repeatedly sworn to wipe it off the map, and to that end is assiduously trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Like Nasser, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can cripple Israel economically by keeping it in a state of alert, driving away foreign investment and tourism. In the absence of interna
Read more