Posted on 02/24/2011 8:59:54 PM PST by robowombat
David Cameron and Nick Clegg are racing each other back to Britain after the shameful mishandling of the Libyan evacuation mission. A full seven days after Colonel Gaddafi’s bloody civil war broke out, scores of Britons were still stranded in the country.
the deputy prime minister, enjoying a skiing holiday in the exclusive Swiss resort of Davos, actually admitted he had ‘forgotten’ he was meant to be standing in for Mr Cameron while the PM was away. He was flying home last night.
Both the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary William Hague were forced to issue grovelling apologies over the fiasco which has seen Britain embarrassed by countries such as Turkey, France and Russia in the scramble to bring their citizens home.
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Saved by the ship about to be axed From Sam Greenhill on HMS Cumberland TWO days late, and long after foreign civilians of almost every other nationality had been evacuated, the Royal Navy finally sailed to the rescue in Libya yesterday. Royal Marine commandos secured the quayside at Benghazi and British expatriates desperate to flee the violence were taken to safety aboard HMS Cumberland – which had been due to be taken out of service within weeks in the defence cuts. But it emerged that the Type-22 frigate had been held offshore in an absurd diplomatic stand-off, waiting for permission to dock from a non-existent port authority that had crumbled as the civil war gripped Libya’s second city. Thankfully, Captain Steve Dainton finally ran out of patience and decided to enter Libyan territorial waters regardless of permission. At 1.30pm yesterday, the warship – flying the British ensign and the flag of St George – docked, to the joy of scores of grateful Britons.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
what a way to run an empire
Da man! And it will take men of conscience and action to get us past these foolish leaders.
In government service, competence is much more dangerous than incompetence to the bureaucratic mind.
I had a girl friend in high school whose parents were faculty in the American University system. As a little girl she was evacuated out of Esfahan in Iran during the revolution. Her dad was reassigned to Beirut where they left on an American landing craft. In high school they moved to Manila just in time for Marcos to fall. We used to joke that she was a one girl nation destabilization team.
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