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.
The Liberty Tree 