The two sides of our betrayal of Kaddafi

Diana West quotes my blog entry about the death of Kaddafi, and adds this:

Qaddafi was not killed in retaliation for his attacks on American servicemen in Berlin in 1986, or the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. He was not killed for his central role in the USSR’s terror networks going back to the 1960s and 1970s. He was killed after coming over to our side in George Bush’s “war on terror,” in the final phase of a civil war in Libya in which his regime fought al Qaeda affiliates.

Horrific as it sounds, Qaddafi was killed because we and our NATO allies joined the other side—the al Qaeda affiliates.

Diana has brought out the second side of the betrayal I spoke of: that what we did to Kaddafi was not just a selfish or ideologically driven betrayal, but a betrayal that helped our sworn enemies. But, as she shows, it’s even worse than that. We turned against Kaddafi at the very moment that he began fighting on OUR side against al Qaeda. All that the al Qaeda people needed to do was align themselves with some people who called themselves democrats, and we were at their beck and call.

As I’ve been saying all these months, I have not seen one mainstream politician or commentator denounce our immoral, criminal, and pro-Qaeda Libya policy, not one. As I wrote in “An uncertain trumpet against a criminal war,” some conservatives, like Sean Hannity and Bruce Thornton, questioned it or said that they “didn’t understand it.” But they never actually said the policy was wrong. They just whined.

Our country has lost its honor.

- end of initial entry -

Timothy A. writes:

The Bush administration’s insistence that they were spreading democracy and freedom in the Middle East seems to have rendered Republicans/”conservatives” incapable of criticizing any intervention on the side of putative democrats, no matter the damage to American interests. Remember the bitter denunciations from those quarters after Jimmy Carter’s betrayal of the Shah of Iran in favor of the “democratic” Iranian university students and mullahs? What a difference!

An Indian living in the West writes:

There is a lesson for any tyrants out there from all this. It is that if you have nuclear weapons, Uncle Sam won’t dare mess with you. The North Koreans took that lesson to heart as have the Pakistanis. The Iranians have understood this lesson and are working feverishly on acquiring nuclear weapons. It is the same message American sent to the world after Iraq War II: get those bombs before we come after you.

Kaddafi’s biggest mistake was that he trusted the West when it said that if he gave up his ambitions of acquiring nuclear weapons, the West would lift sanctions and would stop harassing him. Boy what a mistake that turned out to be!

I have seen a couple of horrific documentaries on North Korea recently. The brutality of the North Korean regime makes Kaddafi look like a believer in human rights. But did America go after North Korea? No. The brutality of the regime has nothing to do with who America goes after.

John McCain is now suggesting that Putin should be shaking in his boots after watching this. He can dream on. If Russia were to simply stop selling oil, America’s economy would tank and Obama will be toast. In addition, Russia also has nuclear weapons and a serious army. And what about the world greatest dictatorship, the People’s Republic of China? When it comes to China, its occupation of Tibet, its support for the brutal regimes in Myanmar (previously Burma) and North Korea, what does the West do? Nothing. It is worse than that because the West exports jobs to China and imports Chinese goods on a massive scale.

It is a disgusting spectacle.

LA replies:

And the worst part of it is, the absence of any real challenge to it anywhere in our mainstream politics. If someone has seen a real challenge to it (and I mean real opposition, not just impotent quibbles), let me know.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 21, 2011 09:42 AM | Send