I haven’t been following the Libyan events nearly as closely as I did the Egyptian protests and subsequent overthrow of Mubarak, but what I have been hearing from the news coming out of Libya is absolutely ghastly.
Here we have an elderly and clearly insane individual at the reigns (though reigns that are slipping from his fingers) of a country with a vast amount of oil wealth that can afford him not only the most luxurious things in the world, but also lets him buy the deadliest of toys and people. Yesterday in the news I heard on Al-Jazeera that Gaddafi now had snipers on the rooftops of Tripoli taking random shots at people in the streets. Before that, at the beginning of the protests, he had war planes shooting protesters from the sky. Peaceful protesters being gunned down by aircraft and snipers. Let that sink in for a moment.
Now, I’m not going to come out and say the United States should unilaterally step in and take control of the situation, no, because this is a case where the international community needs to come together and show the world is not going to accept this kind of tyranny any longer.
The United States is bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq (thankfully the latter is nearly over) and a military that is heavily demoralized after so many deployments. What I would personally like to see from the United States is not political leadership on this front at all, there are plenty of other respectful countries that don’t have the recent record of human rights violations that the United States does that can take the forefront in that battle on the international stage.
No, what I would like to see is from either the United States special forces (there are so many different groups, but I think the SEALs would probably be my choice group here) or from the British SAS an effort to go in there covertly and capture Gaddafi. I certainly hope that all the billions of dollars spent on electronic surveillance and human intelligence are not being wasted. There have to be some ideas on where this guy is hiding. Why not go in there and grab him? Deliver him to the Dutch and the International Criminal Court and let them sort it out.
Sorry for the rant, but after watching the news and seeing the international community essentially dragging their heels in combination with the fact that the Austrians are still buying oil from Libya, I’ve got a lot of frustration built up about this. We have the most powerful countries in the world sitting on the UN Security Council and it doesn’t seem like anyone has the necessary pair of cahones needed to send operators in there to take this guy out of power.
The United States certainly sent a message to the rest of the world when they went into Iraq (a war I was never for and still am not for), so why not continue the message sending? We know Gaddafi is butchering his own people now and is clearly delusional and is a danger to everyone around him, so why not do something?
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