Tag Archives: Moammar Gadhafi’
Libya is free
The Associated Press (AP) has reported that the tyrannical despot who raped and despoiled Libya for 42 some odd years, Moammar Gadhafi, is dead; killed as revolutionary forces overwhelmed his hometown, Sirte, the last major bastion of resistance.
One more feather in President Obama’s cap of foreign policy through strength; while Bush/Cheney mollified Gadhafi – a known terrorist – President Obama supported the revolution which overthrew him and which has brought the opportunity of freedom to the people there in the last regime to fall under the wave of the Arab Spring.
The Arab Spring wave of popular uprisings that swept the Middle East, demanding the end of autocratic rulers and greater democracy has rewritten the political destinies of a number of former dictatorships including Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya; and unlike the Bush/Cheney years all were accomplished with no American invasions or pre-emptive strikes forcing western democracy upon others. These were revolutions spawned from within, not foisted from without.
“We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Moammar Gadhafi has been killed,” Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril told a news conference in the capital Tripoli.
Al-Jazeera TV showed footage of a man resembling the 69-year-old Gadhafi lying dead or severely wounded, bleeding from the head and stripped to the waist as fighters rolled him over on the pavement.
The body was then taken to the nearby city of Misrata, which Gadhafi’s forces besieged for months in one of the bloodiest fronts of the civil war. Al-Arabiya TV showed footage of Gadhafi’s bloodied body carried on the top of a vehicle surrounded by a large crowd chanting, “The blood of the martyrs will not go in vain.”
According to the AP, celebratory gunfire and cries of “Allahu Akbar” or “God is Great” rang out across the capital Tripoli. Cars honked their horns and people hugged each other. In Sirte, the ecstatic former rebels celebrated the city’s fall after weeks of bloody siege by firing endless rounds into the sky, pumping their guns, knives and even a meat cleaver in the air and singing the national anthem.
Information Minister Mahmoud Shammam said he was told that Gadhafi was dead from fighters who said they saw the body.
“Our people in Sirte saw the body,” Shammam told The Associated Press. “Revolutionaries say Gadhafi was in a convoy and that they attacked the convoy.”
So, today the world is a little brighter as one more ruthless man is sent to his reward; people in Libya can breathe a little easier, and America has helped to bring a tyrant down. In spite of what many Republican Tea Party (GOTP) politicos have been claiming, Gadhafi was not our friend; he was not our ally; he was a terrorist and he will not be missed.
McCain Offered Aid to Our Enemy?
Who has two thumbs, had aspirations of being President and promised to try to gain powerful weapons for ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi two years ago? If you said John McCain – you’re right! That’s right “my fellow Americans” – as McCain likes to say – the former GOP candidate for President told the dictator he’d help obtain American military hardware, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable posted Wednesday by WikiLeaks.
Of course it was just Sunday that Grampy McSame – his nickname from the 2008 campaign because he kept promising to do things just like George and Dick – said Gaddafi’s ouster was “so long in coming” because the U.S. did not use the “full weight of our airpower.”
Grampy travelled to Libya in 2009 with his turncoat “independent” buddy Joe Liebermann, and “pledged to see what he could do to move things forward in Congress,” the cable said.
So, Mr. “I love America” was willing to grease the skids for a known terrorist leader and sponsor of terrorism, really nice. Who’d Grampy and Joe think the weapons would be used against? They knew they’d be used against Gaddafi’s own people, against Israel and probably against Americans, but the two so-called Senators were evidently more concerned about provided defense contracts for their masters instead of protecting their constituents and our allies.
McCain and Liebermann were also accompanied by two other GOTP senators, Lindsay Graham and Susan Collins. It’s time for McCain to bow out and fade away, as well as Joe, Lindsay and Susan. How could any United States Senator talk to Gaddafi about helping to procure weapons for him? They’ve willfully attempted to aid a known enemy of the United States. It’s disgraceful and indefensible, so please Grampy; spare us your platitudes on how the President should have done things.
The future of Libya is in the hands of its people?
President Barack Obama declared Monday afternoon that Moammar Gadhafi’s 42 year rule is over, “The future of Libya is in the hands of its people,” he said.
While calling on Gadhafi to surrender and end the bloodshed, the President called on the opposition to seek a just transition into an uncertain future, “The rights of all Libyans must be respected,” he said. “True justice will not come from reprisals and violence; it will come from reconciliation and a Libya that allows its citizens to determine their own destiny.”
So, let’s see, President Obama allows United States aircraft to support the 5 month revolution, and thus far – knock on wood – we have no U.S. deaths, and an avowed enemy of our country and sponsor of terrorism is overthrown. Sounds like a pretty clear vindication of the President’s decision to limit U.S. involvement in Libya and to let NATO take control after the U.S. led the initial air campaign in March.
Unlike his predecessor, President Obama stopped well short of declaring “mission accomplished”, leaving it to a spokesman to credit U.S. strategy and “the President’s robust leadership” with producing “a lot of favorable results.” But the President highlighted NATO’s success after months of doubts about whether the alliance would be able to prevail.
“NATO has once more proven that it is the most capable alliance in the world and that its strength comes from both its firepower and the power of our democratic ideals,” he said.
The President was quick to point out that it all happened “without putting a single U.S. troop on the ground” – a policy, according to aides, that President Obama will maintain.
This is a welcomed policy after eight years of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld example of bungling the war effort against Al Qaeda, with its deploying more than a hundred thousand troops but lacking any cohesive strategy besides shooting up a lot of Afghanistan and Iraq, and failing after eight years of conflict to get Osama Bin Laden.
So, let’s recap; under the leadership of a President conservatives love to hate, Navy Seals killed Bin Laden – something Bush failed to accomplished; we’re drawing down forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and Gadhafi’s out as dictator of Libya – something Reagan could never do. Not bad for the man Limbaugh and company have claimed was soft on terror.
The Liberty Tree 
