Eight year ago the United States made peace with Kaddafi, and put paid to the history between our two countries, including the Lockerbie bombing. The best and the brightest hailed this peace as a wonderful vindication of Bush’s foreign policy. U.S. officials including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sen. John McCain, and President Obama had friendly meetings with Kaddafi over the years, speaking of their desire to advance the two countries’ bilateral relationship.
Kaddafi never violated his agreements with us and never became a threat to us or our allies. He spoke in the warmest terms of the United States and of Obama. Yet the instant that people whom we chose to call democrats rose up in rebellion against him, our ideology and what we perceived as our political self-interest required that we side against him. We attacked his country, bombed his military and his government, bombed his residence, drove him from power, and now we have killed him.
I will not become a moral relativist and make the despicable statement, which some on the anti-war right and the European New Right have made in the past, that the U.S. is as immoral as the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, there is now significant and terrible overlap between the behavior of the U.S.S.R and the behavior of the United States. We are not a moral state; we are not a state under the rule of law. We are, as Solzhenitsyn said of the Soviet Union, an ideological state, a state that will do anything, violate any agreement, betray any ally or friend, tell any lie, cover up any truth, in order to advance its ideology and its power that is associated with that ideology.
BTW the interim government has already told us to forget about them handing over al-Magrehi. So much for justice.
I can't read any further. I will surely puke. You ARE a moral relativist. The monster killed far more people than Charlie Manson ever did. If Manson started speaking in warm terms of the US and Obama, would you have us commute his sentence? All is forgiven? What about justice? What about the innocent people who died in the Lockerbie bombing?
I'm only sorry it took this long and Obama gets some of the credit.
No tears for Gaddafi. Live by the sword, die by it.
Excellent comment!
At the point of a gun -- by threatening to blow his terrorist ass to hell if he didn't abandon his WMD program. That's the only language he and his Arab brethren understand. A "friend" or "ally", he wasn't.
...and now we have killed him.
Too bad he wasn't killed back in '86 at the Bab al-Azizia compound during Operation El Dorado Canyon. ...which Reagan ordered.
Hear Hear!
That is a powerful, disturbing and true statement. We as Americans are much better than this. My hope is the man in the White House is the reason for these actions, it matches his ideological bent to me. It is not my philosophy, and I hope a lot of us disagree with the non diplomatic methods employed by the U.S. . The rule of law is all we really have.