A Place to Stand

      Whenever our rulers start talking about human rights they are trying to get us to support bombing somebody.

BRITISH forces are poised to storm Libya to prevent Colonel Gaddafi massacring more of his people with weapons of mass destruction...

Royal Navy destroyer HMS York, currently in the rebel-held port of Benghazi, will also be on hand to assist the relief operation...


Cameron confirmed he was still planning a no-fly zone over Libya despite a lukewarm response in other countries. ctd

        I regard the legal sovereignty of nations to be not only a necessary requirement for the existence of international law and respecting it to be the only alternative to every nation that can pointing nukes at every other one, but also the only barrier to a world state averaging a less competent and democratic version of the EU. And as the Green party, who support it for that reason alone, an EU style bureaucracy is the only thing that can prevent and reverse human progress.

    If the "International Criminal Court" is not wholly and completely corrupt they will reply to the western reference of Libya to them by pointing out that the deaths in the Libyan rising are of the order of 1,000th of those brought about in Croatia in Operation Storm, an operation de facto controlled by American and British staff officers and that on that basis no criticism of him by the pro-Nazi governments responsible for that genocide, can be valid until the war criminals behind that and other acts of genocide and worse have been given a fair trial. I do not expect the ICC to show such integrity. It is simply a propaganda organisation for its paymasters.

        For the same reason that we should oppose even people we don't like being beaten up by the police it is vital that we defend Gaddafi's Libya from casual invasion. The moreso because we only recently "legitimised" the regime when he gave up trying to produce nukes. If, yet again, we prove that promises of peace made by western countries are worthless, as we did over the occupation of Kosovo and the poisoning of Milosevic, then there cease to be any circumstances when other countries can "do business" with us. Jerry Pournelle puts it with biting satire:

Of course shooting down the aircraft of a formerly hostile which became neutral and was trying to be friendly foreign power has a rather murky status under international law. Only Great Powers can actually impose an aerial blockade. Do Great Powers have an implied right to make war on the nation which is this year the Chairman of the Human Rights commission of the United Nations? But the UN has suspended Libya's membership in that commission. So it's not too late for the US and Europe to get into the internal affairs of Libya. Who knows, there might be a bonanza in fishing in those troubled waters. Bring Gaddafi down, and there's all that lovely oil most of which is already in the hands of the rebels. We should get in there and choose sides, and support democracy and sow the Western dream.

But meanwhile the rebels are sort of in control in Tunisia, and someone is in control in Egypt, and we don't seem to know what to do about all that, either.

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     A curious side issue via Steve Sailer that Col Gadafi is a blogger:

"The best thing I ever read about Turkey & the EU was an article by none other than..... Mumar Qaddafi. Check his website out:

http://www.algathafi.org/turkey-eng.html

The links are broken, but all seem to be old enough that you can get at them via the Internet Archive, for example the first two are http://web.archive.org/web/20041204020447/http://www.algathafi.org/turkey-eng.html & http://web.archive.org/web/20041207005534/http://www.algathafi.org/kurea-issue.htm

Here's Kaddafi's root directory for all his musings. Did he write them himself? I dunno, but I sort of think he did. The notion that he's a bright guy with ADHD seems plausible."

------- The links keep being broken and yesterday the only one I could connect to was the Korea one. The english is fractured (but infinitely better than my arabic) but it is an intelligent analysis from which I learned something.

   Not as good a blogger as Vaclac Klaus, President of Czech republic or Sarah Palin but way smarter and more original than David Miliband's blog or anything I would expect from Cameron, Obama, Gordon Brown or most of the numpties  we elect.