As Colonel Gaddafi, with his army and air force, his tribal supporters and his propaganda machine, begins to counter-attack, only one thing is certain. He is a man utterly without mercy. The history of his regime demonstrates how he deals with opponents: hanging them from lamp-posts, sending death squads to assassinate them as ”stray dogs”, killing them in their jail cells. His offer of amnesty is not believable and will not, in any event, be believed by the insurgents. Will the world stand idly by once he starts to deliver on his threat to ”fight to the last man and woman”?….
The lesson of Iraq ’03 is not that the US and its allies should never use force against another country, but that never again should they do so in breach of international law.
Which begs the big question, namely the circumstances in which there is a right – or, more importantly, a duty – to use force to relieve a humanitarian nightmare….
“The lesson of Iraq ’03 is not that the US and its allies should never use force against another country, but that never again should they do so in breach of international law.”
Factually incorrect. You can argue over whether our decision to take military action was wise or foolish. But facts are stubborn things. The US led a coalition of forces in 2003; the use of force was authorized by the United Nations and the US Congress. What part of international law was violated?
Ah yes — the predictable cries from the non-US left about how *now* the US should take up arms and expend the blood of its soldiers to go and help yet another country get rid of yet another evil dictator.
The real lesson is that the US should never use force when it has to do with defending itself or with its interests, but always use force when the non-US left make their predictable entreaties.
But wait — I thought that just a year or two ago we weren’t supposed to brutally use our military might to interfere in a country’s sovereign business, *particularly* when it had anything to do with us.
Hypocrites.
Go deploy your own country’s army, Mr. Robertson. Good luck with that.
As all politics is local, it’s important to understand that Libya isn’t even coffee table talk at work. I think President Obama realizes this and doesn’t care to make himself the subject of such discussion.
[url=http://anglicanprayer.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/middle-east-menu/]Prayers[/url].
Libya is a tragedy, but it is hard to believe that there is sufficient reason for the US to intervene in what is for now an internal conflict. We can only pray that grace will fall on the people who have been oppressed there for so many centuries.
Of much more pressing concern to me is Mugabe selling uranium ore to the Iranian mullahs. The middle east may continue to implode, and leaving Iran standing over it with a stockpile of Nuclear weapons would be a catastrophe for the entire world.
If is acceptable to intervene in failing states to replace dictators, then why do we ignore Zimbabwe?
Zimbabwe is not a sponsor of international terrorism, has not blown up any airliners over Scotland.
#3–You are correct about one thing : Obama “doesn’t care.” As with every other crisis in this adminsitration he votes “present”.
Robertson QC only mentions the US in passing. I doubt that this piece is really aimed at the US at all (difficult as that may be for some to accept, who assume that everything must be focussed on the US!) Libya is mainly a European issue and it probably would be better if the US just minded its own business, for a number of reasons. Its not nearly as important in international affairs as it once was.
It is interesting to watch a trendy leftie (which Robertson definitely is) squirming as he is confronted with the reality that there are no easy moral categories in these things, as the trendy left likes to assume. He can already see the writing on the wall – a genuine popular uprising may well be crushed by a brutal Libyan dictator, while the powerful west (in particular Robertson’s own country) which could easily intervene, instead wrings its hands and does nothing.