Obama’s Libyan Disaster

Hey Biden already threatened us with the same. Apparently this is the administrations policy!

Qaddafhi was better.

This is a catastrophe for our interests.

Hmm, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out after dear leader trumpets it for a bit.

When given a choice between marxism or Islam, which will we choose?
Yes, pray for our country, I fear that is all we have left. It is already too late to undo all this savage-loving leftist has done to our nation!

Remember? At first he went over there and made big speeches to his Muslim brothers. Can’t think of the exact countries but I do know he made a lot of promises, bowed down to the Saudi king, etc.

I would like to contribute to a collection to send him back over there now!

Exactly!
Bet some of those savages would like to make him squeal. He better knock it off and deal with his low poll numbers in some other way.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html>>>>>>>>>>>>

Yep, THANKS ! Sorry for the stray period.

Former MI5 Agent Annie Machon said in a report to the conflict in Libya: “They’ve had free education, free health, they could study abroad. When they got married they got a certain amount of money. So they were rather the envy of many other citizens of African countries. Now, of course, since NATO’s humanitarian intervention the infrastructure of their country has been bombed back to the Stone Age. They will not have the same quality of life. Women probably will not have the same degree of emancipation under any new transitional government. The national wealth is probably going to be siphoned off by Western corporations. Perhaps the standard of living in Libya might have been slightly higher than it perhaps is now in America and the UK with the recession,” she said. "What really was the UN & NATO trying to achieve?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k3ZLken_xk

One thing Gaddafi DIDN’T do was bow down to the Saudi ‘princes’ - he insulted them and probably signed his own death warrant there and then.

Sounds like former MI5 Agent Annie Machon had a soft spot for Gaddadfi

Libya’s thirst for ‘fossil water’
By John Watkins
BBC World Service

Phase III is now nearing completion
Libyans like to call it “the eighth wonder of the world”.
The description might be flattering, but the Great Man-Made River Project has the potential to transform Libyan life in all sorts of ways.

Libya is a desert country, and finding fresh water has always been a problem.

Following the Great Al-Fatah Revolution in 1969, when an army coup led by Muammar Al Qadhafi deposed King Idris, industrialisation put even more strain on water supplies.
Coastal aquifers became contaminated with sea water, to such an extent that the water in Benghazi (Libya’s second city) was undrinkable.

Finding a supply of fresh, clean water became a government priority. Oil exploration in the 1950s had revealed vast aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert.

According to radiocarbon analysis, some of the water in the aquifers was 40,000 years old. Libyans call it “fossil water”.

The quality of life is better now, and it’s impacting on the whole country

Adam Kuwairi, GMRA
After weighing up the relative costs of desalination or transporting water from Europe, Libyan economists decided that the cheapest option was to construct a network of pipelines to transport water from the desert to the coastal cities, where most Libyans live.
Proud nation

In August 1984, Muammar Al Qadhafi laid the foundation stone for the pipe production plant at Brega. The Great Man-Made River Project had begun.

Click here to see a map of the pipeline network
Libya had oil money to pay for the project, but it did not have the technical or engineering expertise for such a massive undertaking.

Foreign companies from South Korea, Turkey, Germany, Japan, the Philippines and the UK were invited to help.

It is impossible not to be impressed with the scale of the project
In September 1993, Phase I water from eastern well-fields at Sarir and Tazerbo reached Benghazi. Three years later, Phase II, bringing water to Tripoli from western well-fields at Jebel Hassouna, was completed.
Phase III which links the first two Phases is still under construction.

Adam Kuwairi, a senior figure in the Great Man-Made River Authority (GMRA), vividly remembers the impact the fresh water had on him and his family.

“The water changed lives. For the first time in our history, there was water in the tap for washing, shaving and showering,” he told the BBC World Service’s Discovery programme.

“The quality of life is better now, and it’s impacting on the whole country.”

To get an idea of the scale of the Great Man-Made River Project, you have to visit some of the sites.

The Grand Omar Mukhtar will be Libya’s largest man-made reservoir

Libya is opening up, but it’s still hard for foreign journalists to get visas. We had to wait almost six months for ours; but once we arrived in Libya, Libyans were eager to tell us about the project.
They took us to see a reservoir under construction at Suluq. When it’s finished, the Grand Omar Mukhtar will be Libya’s largest man-made reservoir.

Standing on the floor of such a huge, empty space is an awesome experience. Concrete walls rise steeply to the sky; tarring machines descend on wires to lay a waterproof coating over the concrete.

Further west along the coast is the Pre-Stressed Concrete Cylinder Pipe factory at Brega. This is where they make the 4m-diameter pipes that transport water from the desert to the coast.

Libyans are gaining experience and know-how, and now more than 70% of the manufacturing is done by Libyans

Ali Ibrahim, Brega pipe factory
It’s a modern, well-equipped factory, built specially for the Great Man-Made River Project. So far, the factory has made more than half a million pipes.
The pipes are designed to last 50 years, and each pipe has a unique identification mark, so if anything goes wrong, engineers can quickly establish when the pipe was made.

The engineer in charge of the Brega pipe factory is Ali Ibrahim. He is proud that Libyans are now running the factory: “At first, we had to rely on foreign-owned companies to do the work.

“But now it’s government policy to involve Libyans in the project. Libyans are gaining experience and know-how, and now more than 70% of the manufacturing is done by Libyans. With time, we hope we can decrease the foreign percentage from 30% to 10%.”

Opening markets

With fossil water available in most of Libya’s coastal cities, the government is now beginning to use its water for agriculture.

Over the country as a whole, 130,000 hectares of land will be irrigated for new farms. Some land will be given to small farmers who will grow produce for the domestic market. Large farms, run at first with foreign help, will concentrate on the crops that Libya currently has to import: wheat, oats, corn and barley.

Libya also hopes to make inroads into European and Middle-Eastern markets. An organic grape farm has been set up near Benghazi. Because the soil is so fertile, agronomists hope to grow two cereal crops a year.

Water is seen as key to the country’s future prosperity
It is hard to fault the Libyans on their commitment. They estimate that when the Great Man-Made River is completed, they will have spent almost $20bn. So far, that money has bought 5,000km of pipeline that can transport 6.5 million cubic metres of water a day from over 1,000 desert wells.
As a result, Libya is now a world leader in hydrological engineering, and it wants to export its expertise to other African and Middle-Eastern countries facing the same problems with their water.

Through its agriculture, Libya hopes to gain a foothold in Europe’s consumer market.

But the Great Man-Made River Project is much more than an extraordinary piece of engineering.

Adam Kuwairi argues that the success of the Great Man-Made River Project has increased Libya’s standing in the world: “It’s another addition to our independence; it gives us the confidence to survive.”

Of course, there are questions. No-one is sure how long the water will last. And until the farms are working, it’s impossible to say whether they will be able to deliver the quantity and quality of produce for which the planners are hoping.

But the combination of water and oil has given Libya a sound economic platform. Ideally placed as the “Gateway to Africa”, Libya is in a good position to play an increasingly influential role in the global economy.

IMAGES AT LINK:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4814988.stm

AND TO TOP IT OFF, HE INSULTED THE SAUDI ‘PRINCES’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k3ZLken_xk

GREED OVER LIBYAN SECRET TREASURE: BLUE GOLD excerpt:

Gaddafi and the Neighborly issues.

Mubarak spoke at the 1996 Great Man-Made River Inaugural ceremony and stressed the regional importance of the project. Gaddafi called on Egyptian farmers to come and work in Libya, where there are only 4 million inhabitants at the time. Egypt’s population of 55 million is crowded in narrow bands along the Nile River and delta region.

In the 1970s, Qaddafi expelled many Egyptian families from Libya, but over the recent years the two countries have become close once again. There were plans to build a railway line to facilitate the two nations travel back and forth. There was also a standing commission plans between Sudan and Libya for integrating economic activity.

But even with that 1,800 miles of giant hydrological enterprise in operation, Libya still depends on foreign markets for three-quarters of its grain. To make his desert nation self-sufficient in food, Gaddafi made some long-term deals with nearby countries to grow food for Libya.

The Western African state of Mali has become dependent on Libya for aid and investment, funding its government buildings, hotels, and other high-profile infrastructure. Thus, a secret deal was struck between Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Toure, and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi became the solution to enhance Libyan food security by receiving 50 years worth of undisclosed rights, paid by the Libya Africa Portfolio Fund for Investment. Libyan-controlled organization called Malibya oversees the Libyan enterprise: A canal stretching 25 miles north from the River Niger to 250,000 acres of proposed irrigated land at the edge of the marshes, to divert large amounts of Niger River water for extensive irrigation upstream. It was dug in 2010 by Chinese contractors, who are now preparing the first 15,000 acres of fields.

The scale of the project is astounding. The director general of Malibya, Abdalilah Youssef, boasted in 2008 that the canal could supply up to 4 cubic kilometers of water a year to the enterprise’s fields of rice, tomatoes, and fodder crops for cattle. The current take for all other existing irrigation projects is 2.7 cubic kilometers a year, it grabs as much as 210 cubic meters a second, potentially more than doubling the amount of water taken from the river for irrigation.

Larger than Belgium, it is Africa’s second-largest floodplain and one of its most unique wetlands. Seen from space, it is an immense smudge of green and blue on the edge of the Sahara.

The Great Man-Made River of Libya.

The world’s biggest effort to reclaim deposits of fossil water is the Great Man-Made River in Libya, for which Gaddafi has spent $30 billion over the past three decades building for his people and given as a gift to the Third World without any financial or help from the USA, World Bank or IMF.

source

For your reading pleasure, check out these sections...

Alliances with other authoritarian national leaders

State-sponsored terrorism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi

“On the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s birthday in 1973, Gaddafi delivered his famous “Five-Point Address” which officially implemented Sharia.”

As I said in my earlier post, sharia is nothing new to Libya.

The new society under GaddafiThe roles and status of women had then become the subject of a great deal of discussion and legal action in Libya after the change of rule, as they have in many countries of the Middle East. Some observers suggested that the regime made efforts on behalf of female emancipation because it viewed women as an essential source of labour in an economy chronically starved for workers. They also postulated that the government was interested in expanding its political base, hoping to curry favour by championing female rights. Since independence, Libyan leaders have been committed to improving the condition of women but within the framework of Arabic and Islamic values.[1] Central to the revolution of 1969 was the empowerment of women and removal of inferior status.[2]

[edit] EmancipationIn the 1970s, female emancipation was in large measure a matter of age. One observer generalized that city women under the age of thirty-five had discarded the traditional veil and were quite likely to wear Western-style clothing. Those between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five were increasingly ready to consider such a change, but women over the age of forty-five appeared reluctant to give up the protection their veils and customary dress afforded. A decade later, veiling was uncommon among urban women - though this has changed in recent years with the levels of unveiled women almost being negligible in modern day Libya.[1]

During this era, women were also increasingly seen driving, shopping, or travelling without husbands or male companions (known as Mahrams).

[edit] Voting and governmentSince the early 1960s, Libyan women have had the right to vote and to participate in political life. They could also own and dispose of property independently of their husbands, but all of these rights were exercised by only a few women before the 1969 revolution.

Since then, the government has encouraged women to participate in elections and national political institutions, but in 1987 only one woman had advanced as far as the national cabinet, as an assistant secretary for information and culture.[1] However, from 1989-1994 Fatima Abd al-Hafiz Mukhtar served as Minister of Education. From 1992-1994 Bukhanra Salem Houda served as Minister of Youth and Sports; Salma Ahmed Rashed from 1992-1994 served as Assistant Secretary of Women, then as Secretary in the General Secretariat of the General Peoples’ Congress for Women’s Affairs from 1994–1995, and was eventually the Ambassador to the League of Arab Nations in 1996. Others serving as Secretary in the General Secretariat of the General Peoples’ Congress for Women’s Affairs included from 1995-1998 Thuriya Ramadan Abu Tabrika, Nura Han Ramadan Abu Sefrian from 1998–2000, Dr. Shalma Chabone Abduljabbar, and Amal Nuri Abdullah al-Safar from 2006-2009. Women serving as Secretary in the General Secretariat of the General Peoples’ Congress for Social Affairs have included Dr. Shalma Chabone Abduljabbar and Abd-al-Alim al-Shalwi, while from 1995-2000 Fawziya Bashir al-Shalababi served as Secretary for Information, Culture and Mass Mobilization. Dr. Huda Fathi Ben Amer began serving as the Secretary of People’s Committees Affairs in 2009, and also served as President of the Transitional Arab Parliament.[3] Dr. Salma Shabaan Abdel Jabar began serving as Secretary of Woman Affairs in 2009.[4]

[edit] AssociationWomen were also able to form their own associations, the first of which dated to 1955 in Benghazi. In 1970 several feminist organizations merged into the Women’s General Union, which in 1977 became the Jamahiriya Women’s Federation. Under Clause 5 of the Constitutional Proclamation of December 11, 1969, women had already been given equal status under the law with men. Subsequently, the women’s movement has been active in such fields as adult education and hygiene.[1]

[edit] EmploymentWomen had also made great gains in employment outside the home, the result of improved access to education and of increased acceptance of female paid employment. Once again, the government was the primary motivating force behind this phenomenon. For example, the 1976-80 development plan called for employment of a larger number of women “in those spheres which are suitable for female labour”, but the Libyan identification of what work was suitable for women continued to be limited by tradition. According to the 1973 census, the participation rate for women (the percent of all women engaged in economic activity) was about 3 percent as compared with 37 percent for men. The participation was somewhat higher than the 2.7 percent registered in 1964, but it was considerably lower than that in other Maghrib countries and in most of the Middle Eastern Arab states.[1]

In the 1980s, in spite of the gain registered by women during the prior decade, females constituted only 7 percent of the national labour force, according to one informed researcher. This represented a 2 percent increase over a 20 year period. Another source, however, considered these figures far too low. Reasoning from 1973 census figures and making allowances for full and part time, seasonal, paid, and unpaid employment, these researchers argued convincingly that women formed more than 20 percent of the total economically active Libyan population. For rural areas their figure was 46 percent, far higher than official census numbers for workers who in most cases were not only unpaid but not even considered as employed.[1]

Among non-agricultural women, those who were educated and skilled were overwhelmingly employed as teachers. The next highest category of educated and skilled women ware nurses and those found in the health care field. Others areas that were open to women included administrative and clerical work in banks, department stores, and government offices and domestic services. Women were found in ever larger numbers as nurses and midwives, but even so, Libyan health care facilities suffered from a chronic shortage of staff.[1]

By contrast, in clerical and secretarial jobs, the problem was not a shortage of labour but a deep-seated cultural bias against the intermingling of men and women in the workplace. During the 1970s, the attraction of employment as domestics tended to decline, as educated and ambitious women turned to more lucrative occupations. To fill the gap, Libyan households sought to hire foreigners, particularly Egyptians and Tunisians.[1]

Light industry, especially cottage-style, was yet another outlet for female labour, a direct result of Libya’s labour shortage. Despite these employment outlets and gains, female participation in the work force of the 1980s remained small, and many socially female jobs were filled by foreign women. Also, in spite of significant increases in female enrollments in the educational system, including university level, few women were found, even as technicians, in such traditionally male fields as medicine, engineering, and law.[1]

Non-urban women constituted a quite significant, if largely invisible, proportion of the rural work force. According to the 1973 census, there were only l4, 000 economically active women out of a total of 200,000 rural females older than age 10. In all likelihood, however, many women engaged in agricultural or domestic tasks worked as unpaid members of family groups and hence were not regarded as gainfully employed, accounting to at least in part for the low census count. Estimates of actual female rural employment in the mid 1970s, paid and unpaid ranged upward of 86,000, as compared with 96,000 men in the rural work force. In addition to agriculture, both rural and nomadic women engaged in the weaving of rugs and carpets, another sizable category of unpaid and unreported labor.[1]

Beginning in 1970, the revolutionary government passed a series of laws regulating female employment - equal pay for equal work and qualifications became a fundamental precept.[1] Other statutes strictly regulate the hours and conditions of work, specifically the prohibition of hard labor, and 48 hours.[5]

[edit] Childcare and retirement benefitsWorking mothers enjoyed a range of benefits designed to encourage them to continue working even after marriage and childbirth, including cash bonuses for the first child and free day care centres. A woman could retire at age fifty-five, and she was entitled to a pension.[1]

[edit] Business and financeWomen are free to engage in the private business and finance sectors, and banks to not require the consent of the husband to obtain a loan.[5]

[edit] 21st centuryEmployment was estimated at 22% for Libyan women by the early 21st century,[6] and 27% by 2006, relatively high for an Arab nation.[7] This marked a 14% increase since 1986.[7] Employment by women in Libya is largely influenced by choice.[5] Positions in all fields of the economy were held, including lawyers, doctors, judges, and senior government positions.[6]

In May 2011, the New York Times reported during the Libyan Civil War that the rebels had begun rolling back this progress as their size increased. One Libyan woman, a 23-year old therapist, quit the rebel National Transitional Council saying when the revolution started, women had a big role, but it had disappeared.[6]

[edit] EducationUnder King Idris, educating women was considered suspicious. During the last decade of his rule, females enrolled in primary education was only between 11-19%. Under Article 14 of the Libyan Constitutional Declaration in 1969, education was made a right, and by 1990 the figure stood at 48%. Enrollment in higher education stood at 8% in 1966, but reached 43% by 1996, equal to males.[8]

By 2001, 16% had a university degree or higher, and 48% a secondary school certificate, in which there is no prohibition on choice educational studies.[5]

[edit] HousingAt the time of the revolution in 1969, 40% of the population lived in tents or shanty houses and was one of the worst in the Arab world.[9] The revolution promised “housing for all”, and by 1997 virtually every Libyan owned their own home through government laws which supported such. Criticized by opponents of the government for not creating a mortgage market,[10] women obtained equal rights as men to own and have independent use of their property.[5]

[edit] HealthcareFollowing the revolution in 1969, universal healthcare services were created through the National Social Insurance Institute, with women having equal access.[11] Between 1969 and 1978, the number of physicians increased by 4-5 times. Libya had one of the best healthcare systems in Africa before the 1992 U.N. sanctions, which rapidly declined the quality of medicine and supplies.[2]

[edit] CultureBy the 1980s relations within the family and between the sexes, along with all other aspects of Libyan life, had begun to show notable change. As the mass media popularized new ideas, new perceptions and practices appeared. Foreign settlers and foreign workers frequently embodied ideas and values distinctively different from those traditional in the country. In particular, the perceptions of Libyans in everyday contact with Europeans were affected.

The continued and accelerating process of urbanization had broken old kinship ties and association with ancestral rural communities. At the same time, opportunities for upward social movement have increased, and petroleum wealth and the development plans of the revolutionary government have made many new kinds of employment available thus opening up more well paid jobs for women especially among the educated young. Many of these educated and increasingly independent young women preferred to set up their own households at marriage, rather than live with their in-laws. In addition social security, free medical care, education, and other appurtenances of the welfare state had lessened the dependence of the aged on their children in village communities and had almost eliminated it in the cities.

[edit] MilitaryAs of the late 20th century the regime had sought to introduce women into the armed forces. In the 1978 Libya’s new military academy began training women, training thousands since.[12] In the early 1980s where the ‘Nuns of the Revolution’ were created as a specialist police force attached to revolutionary committees.[1] Then in 1984, a law mandating female conscription that required all students in secondary schools and above to participate in military training was passed.[1] In addition, young women were encouraged to attend female military academies, the first of which was established in 1979. These proposals originated with Colonel Gaddafi, who hoped that they would help create a new image and role for Libyan women everywhere. Nonetheless, the concept of female training in the martial arts encountered such widespread opposition that meaningful compliance seemed unlikely.

[edit] MarriageChild brides were banned, and the minimum legal age to marry placed at 18.[12] Since 1973 Libyan women have had equal rights in obtaining a divorce.[2]

btw - the woman behind your source link is one scary egomaniac

umm...he was an islamic socialist islamist terrorist.

You can post all the nice stuff about him that you want, but you’re just not gonna convince me that I should like him. Sorry.

I’m real happy he’s dead.

Egomaniac or not, female or not, the facts on the ground point to deliberate demonization of a man the Saudi cabal wanted removed, his liason with Mubarak of Egypt was a threat to Sunni-wahabbi dominance in the region. I knew something serious was up many months before this fiasco started...

There was an long article in an Australian newspaper entitled ‘Getting to know the Colonel’ written some thirty years ago, outlining his plans for Libyan infrastructure. I searched for the article source on the web, and found the title, the article had been replaced by a lengthy diatribe against Ghaddafi.

He also made a speech just a few years ago, in which he said ‘what have the arabs ever done for us’ and that article has also disappeared from the web.

One does need to look a little deeper than the self-serving mush being served up by the media, he certainly was no saint, but he was more of a threat to fanatical islam, than he was to the West.

Watch the video. Assad appears to be cheering him on, and if looks could kill, the Saudi perfumed ‘princes’ would have annihilated him right then and there.

Be happy by all means, but be informed.

“but he was more of a threat to fanatical islam, than he was to the West.”

He was a threat to anyone that he viewed as a threat to him. The man murdered Americans. Al Qaida was a force and a threat to him, not because of their religious fanaticism, but because they threatened to take over Libya and thereby destroy him. Gaddafi sent death squads overseas to assassinate anyone he saw as a threat to Libya, which of course was a personal threat to him.

I understand that you dislike the Saudis. But Please stop trying to find the good in this terrorist madman. It’s like people who try to say that Hitler wasn’t so bad because he was nice to his dogs and liked to paint.

Good Lord...I’m NOT trying to tell anyone he was ‘nice’ - I am trying to show the many facets involved in his over-throw, and the primary reason was the fear Ghadaffi was becoming too powerful in the region. His liason with Mubarak and their plans for agriculture on a grand scale had to be stopped.
Now the egyptian population of 70 million or so, who can not afford to feed themselves without government subsidies - and whose grain supplies have to be imported, will probably need to be fed by the UN (ain’t that nice!) and the Libyans whose irrigation infrastucture has been destroyed, can suffer thirst and famine.
And no one has asked what happened to the thousands of foreign workers in Libya.
But I’m wasting my time. All anyone wants to hear is ‘Ghaddafi was a bad man’

Well, it’s all going to be better when the entire region is under sharia law...and the door to the remainder of Africa is wide open, and there won’t be a Christian, black or white, or an animist left on the entire continent.