ARAB LEAGUE CALLS FOR A NO-FLY ZONE IN LYBIA

Not all of it. The UK Tornado strikes from the UK surprised me a bit, but perhaps it is simpler to tank them over France while supporting them from their home bases. It's a long flight in a fairly cramped cockpit.

Though we did some strikes on Libya in the 1980s using F-111s based in the UK, and they had to fly around Spain because the French then wouldn't let us overfly their territory ... a very long trip.

The BBC interviewed one gentleman in Misratah, east of Tripoli. He stated that there were at least 14 dead men and women and dozens of wounded brought to the hospital where he works, who were shot by army snipers operating from the rooves of apartment buildings. He said that most of the wounds were to the head or upper torso.

He further stated that the army was collecing corpses off the street, to place them in military installations, so that when coalition air forces bombed those installations, the corpses could be brought out as "proof" that the coalition attacks are killing innocent civilians. I heard audio of that interview last nigh, and this morning, i've seen another interview of this gentleman from a cell phone video feed.

I was being disingenuous George in case our enemies are watching.

Gaddafi is going to try every trick in his book that he can dream up to blame the coalition forces for killing innocent people in his attempts to get the people of the Middle East to turn against them; all this while he already declared he was going to wipe them out.

He's a mad man.

Crazy like a fox . . . he's attempting to reach past the member nations of the Arab League to appeal to their people with his propaganda. He's highly unpopular among the leaders of other Arab states, he knows it, so he isn't going to even attempt to appeal to them. He's trying to make his case directly to the people of those nations.

I think that's accurate. His appeals don't have their old effect in Libya and we can hope they won't rersonate elsewhare in an Arab world that appears to be listening more to other voices. However Ghadaffi does have friends in other governments whom he has paid off in past ventures. The demand by the African Union that the intervention stop and the UN withdraw its authorization is an example.

Portraying Gaddafi as some sort of insane madman run amok is sheer idiocy.

Yeah, I'm afraid many are going to buy into his propaganda, because their thinking is already pre-programmed for it.

If you've listened to any of his drivel, you'll note that he constantly referred to colonialism and crusades. He's using language calculated to stir up the people of the middle east--those are catch-phrases in use by every rabble rouser in the region, especially the talk about crusades.

Well- the latest is that the Arab League have got cold feet. And I can understand why.

It certainly is. Hypocritical as well. Aggravated idiocy. Fantastic intellectual contortions required to get into the position.

Any specifics? I'm aware that the major Arab powers don't propose to do anything, and that some elements of the new political forces in Egypt have already been critical of Western efforts, however, nothing else yet. None of it is surprising.

Plenty of specifics south of the Sahara desert (also east and west) but these reactions are from pitch-black Africans so as usual nobody's paying attention to them - except for the Chinese, who've been hard at work cornering the uranium ore supplies. Read up on Gadaffi's mercenaries (except for Kosovar and other Albanians, maybe also Chechens), mostly black with some being actually Libyan citizens descended from previously enslaved parents, and also look up Addis Abeba African Union criticism of Western intervention in what they consider their lands, plus recall that there's very deep-seated resentment in all areas of Africa (not the Arabian peninsula) against colonial interventions. Libya was Italian - before. Gadaffi has paid off every tinpot dictator between Tripoli and Johannesburg - and his mercenaries know they can never go back so they might as well fight. These "humanitarian" interventions into fires that should burn out by themselves are so much fantasy - exactly like our current sec state visiting Kosovo to shake hands with the same murderers of Serbs, Croats, and Turks, for the sake of selling these pitiful peoples' kidneys and other organs. This is surrealistic foreign policy - or maybe kitsch foreign policy.

Yeah--he's been Big Cheese for 42 years in a country you wouldn't have known where to start with any confidence and he had recently, until this lot blew up after some deranged kid set himself on fire in Tunisia, been accepted in Western governments and the boardrooms of large business corporations. Has he suddenly become an "insane madman running amok"?

I never refered to him as insane or as a madman - only as a tyrant.

More influence in some Western Governments than others. But then we have already addressed that.

spendi, The insane can sometimes hide their insanity when the environment is relatively calm for them. He's been a tyrant, but the west just ignored it until this incident became world-wide knowledge about his killing of his own people in great numbers. Wasn't it the same with Saddam to some degree?

I presumed that "Any specifics?" related to my response to dys.

I'm sorry if that was mistaken. If it related to my saying I can understand why the AL were backtracking then I had in mind what the Iranian propaganda machine will be blasting over the airwaves. Radio is not as easy to control as TV.

It is interesting to note British punctilliousness with respect to the Blair government's participation in the Iraqi intervention and their current participation in the Libyan one.

Is there a moral distinction to be made between the murderousness of the two tyrants? On both a relative and absolute scale Saddam appears to haver been a bit worse than Ghadaffi.

In both cases there were UN resolutions that, arguably at least, authorized some intervention, though the present one for Libya is less ambiguous - though by all appearances, probably not a lot less contentious among those in the world who interpret it after the fact.

What then motivates the government that investigates the one and willingly pursues the other?

What does all this tell us about "legitimacy" as conferred by the UN?

The same as with any legitimacy conferred with novel institutions in the early stages of their growth. When there is a "World President" it will be pretty solid.

How legitimate was George Washington when he opened the door on the confusion? You expect the UN to solve intractable problems and when it stumbles you want to abolish it. As if the intractable problems will be abolished as well.

Do you believe it has progressed to the stage in which we should rely on it to the degree you suggest? What are the appropriate limits for a "novel organization in the early stages of growth" - and most of whose members are still authoritarian tyrannies?

When do you believe that will occur? At what point should the democracies surrender sovereignty to the least common denominator of the world? I note that many Brits are even skeptical of an EU all of whose members are several cuts above the world average, and which has much higher political & economic standards for membership, as well as fairly clearly defined limits on interfertence with national sovereignty.