Some compare militia-dominated Tripoli with Al Capone’s Chicago, but the comparison is false, because Al Capone didn’t have artillery:
Seven years after Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and killed in the Arab spring revolution, Libya has gone full circle from dictatorship through revolution, democracy, chaos and back to a new kind of tyranny. Except this time there is not one dictator but dozens, in the form of the very militias who defeated him.
[...]
Driving through this city means navigating a political fog as you try to work out who among the rag-tag gunmen in assorted uniforms and battered pickup trucks are gangsters, and who constitute the official security forces of the United Nations-backed government. After a while you realise they are the same. One unit is freshly kitted out in smart blue uniforms of the interior ministry, but it remains a militia, as violent and threatening as before. Tensions are high after the body of one warlord was dumped by rivals outside a city hospital in the latest tit-for-tat killing.
[...]
Tripoli’s warlords are on the state payroll, through the simple expedient of gunmen threatening the bankers with kidnapping or worse. Similar pressure resulted in the government handing its all-important intelligence and surveillance portfolio to an Islamist militia. Even as militias fight each other in the capital, they also fight the army of the nationalist warlord Khalifa Haftar, a brooding presence far to the east.
Meanwhile, the citizens suffer: there are shortages of petrol, electricity, water and banknotes. Libya is rich, with £50bn of foreign reserves and booming oil production. But only a handful of banks — those controlled by militias — are permitted to dispense cash. Citizens form kilometre-long queues to collect it.
Libya — another great “victory” for American foreign policy. Serbia, Kosovo, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen… Is there nothing American foreign policy can’t make worse?
Let us be brutally honest: Libya was not the result of some fantasy “American foreign policy”, any more than giving Iran to the mullahs was. Both are prime examples of bespoke Democrat idiocy and were in no way part of any coherent long-term foreign policy followed by anyone beside the particular morons in charge at those moments.
Lack of policy can be policy, but incoherent breaches of policy are just that: breaches and aberrations.
Iraq was a great success. It made it so the war would be mostly in the Islamic world. The resources Al-Qaeda spent in Iraq could have been spent elsewhere.
By the way, Clinton did nothing and got a 1993 attack against the World Trade Center and a 2001 attack that destroyed it. (I know it was already under Bush.)
Given that fledgling democracy, or rather the attempts to impose it on others, doesn’t work, then one wonders why it is so popular among the elite. But every effort to promote it is still made irrespective of the all-too-familiar consequences.
Namely, gangsters and war lords take over in the quest to find a new dictator. Whoever wins that one can expect a lot of cash from the West for then saying they believe in democracy, even if they never quite get round to implementing it.
But the one concrete development from the death of Gadaffi and the collapse of his power is the endless stream of “refugees” now able to move north through Libya and on to Europe. Previously, Gadaffi’s army stopped that happening.
Why, it’s almost if the West’s purpose in removing Libya’s boss was to open an unrestricted supply route of non-Europeans…
Lucklucky,
There is something of fundamental importance about the conflict between the West and Islam that does not seem to be much understood. The West and Islam have been in conflict for over 1200 years. During nearly all this time the West enjoyed a large numerical supremacy. Thus despite the wealth of classic Arab civilization there was no way the Arabs could overrun the West. There weren’t any where near enough Arabs.
That numerical superiority of the West changed drastically in the 20th century. In 1900, for example, the population of Metropolitan France was about 39 million. The population of France’s colony Algeria was less than 5 million, which included a substantial number of French settlers. Today the population of Metropolitan France is about 65 million, and the population of Algeria is about 41 million. Now a substantial part of the 65 million population of Metropolitan France consists of Arabs not Frenchmen.
The West has never been in greater danger than it is today. The Islamic world now has a population about equal to all of Europe. This is completely different from the historical past. In addition while the indigenous population of Europe is declining, that of the Middle East, and even more that of Sub-Saharan Africa, is growing rapidly.
Deliberately destabilizing the Middle East is an insane policy. For example, Turkey has a population of about 85 million, while Greece has a population of about 11 million. If Turkey were to experience something like the Syrian civil war (and Turkey with it’s Kurdish population has enormous potential for internal conflict) then Greece could be overwhelmed with refugees and simply cease to exist.
The events of 1993 and 2001 would probably not have occurred if we had not allowed Moslem immigration into the US.
Jim: “…there was no way the Arabs could overrun the West.”
Most of the lands outside of the desert of Saudi Arabia were Christian prior to the spread of Islam. Missionaries of Islamic faith were not the ones responsible for the changes.
Jim,
The Mohammedans overran the Iberian peninsula and very nearly broke into France. They then occupied that territory for literally dozens of generations. “There was no way they could overrun the West.” Really?
Today, they’re harmless. America and protectorates have nukes. They don’t. QED.
If instead your question is, “why are the NGOs flying millions of Somalis into Minnesota?”, the answer is clearly not, “because they pose a threat to Clinton, Mueller, the CIA, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, or the BIS”.
1993 and 2001 would not have occurred had we not allowed Jewish/Catholic immigration into the US.
Jim, the fight in Iraq made Islam fight Islam more clearly. It also made plain to the Middle East that what is born there goes back with vengeance.
Also we got rid of Saddam, who was an erratic, militarily gambling Dictator. Those are the worse kind.
Bob sykes, we can’t have the USA hogging all the credit here. It was a proper Obama-style international cooperation affair.
Probably his greatest foreign success story together with Ukraine.
“then one wonders why [democracy] is so popular among the elite”
It’s popular abroad because when any particular country’s system is honest, it’s easy to subvert, and when it isn’t honest, the democratically elected high officials have a striking tendency to be graduates of the Ivy-Stanford-Oxford-Cambridge apparatus.
Domestically, they paid lip service to it until Donald Trump became President-Elect Trump, at which point the phrase “dangerous to our democracy” rapidly lost its friendly veneer and became a nakedly Orwellian “dangerous to the continued existence of our national security state”, the Mainstream Media coming out of the closet as the Mockingbird Media.
No UN Peacekeeping mission of humanitarianism, brotherhood, and good-will serves just one objective, and the murders of Gaddafi and tens of thousands of his countrymen were probably not even mostly to facilitate the (further) mass-importation of semitic desert-cultists. Still, if we are looking for just one cause, it is much more likely, in my estimation, that the root of the Liberation of Libya can be found in the epic mammonic struggle.
Which is to say–: Gaddafi was probably whacked first and foremost because he was planning to chop off the omnipresent parasitic tentacle of fiat. “Here lies Muammar Gaddafi: basically a Nazi.”
Luckylucky: “Jim, the fight in Iraq made Islam fight Islam more clearly. It also made plain to the Middle East that what is born there goes back with vengeance. Also we got rid of Saddam, who was an erratic, militarily gambling Dictator. Those are the worse kind.”
Still drinking the Kool-Aid, I see.
Bob Sykes: “Libya — another great ‘victory’ for American foreign policy. Serbia, Kosovo, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen… Is there nothing American foreign policy can’t make worse?”
What makes you think that American foreign policy has failed?
Kirk: “Both are prime examples of bespoke Democrat idiocy and were in no way part of any coherent long-term foreign policy followed by anyone beside the particular morons in charge at those moments.”
One possibility is that foreign policy is set by well-meaning schlemiels who go into these things with high ideals and never seem to achieve what they want to achieve
Another is that the master shinniers of the greasiest of greasy poles know exactly what they’re doing and positively revel in the experience.
I know which I think is more plausible; do you?
CVLR – In considering the Arab conquests the amount of territory they overran seems quite impressive but much of it was peripheral with relatively little population. Looking at a map the Byzantine Empire is greatly reduced in extent but it retained the greater part of it’s wealth. By far the wealthiest and most densely populated part of the Byzantine Empire was Eastern Anatolia which the Byzantines held on to (until the coming of the Turks but that was long after the conquests of the Arabs). The Arabs took much of the Iberian peninsula (but not all), Malta, Sicily, Crete, part of Southern Italy etc. but they did not Islamize these conquests. They didn’t have the population numbers to do so. Malta for example was ruled for centuries by Arab rulers but is today 99% Catholic.
Even Damascus had a Christian majority for centuries after it’s conquest by Arabs. The Arabs began to steadily lose some of their conquests – Crete, Sicily, Southern Italy, Spain.
At no time before the present did the West face any
fundamental existential threat from the Arabs who simply didn’t at that time have the population numbers to more than nibble at the periphery of the West. The Turks were more threating but again their conquests were basically peripheral and after awhile they too were thrown on the defensive.
France has nuclear weapons but that doesn’t seem to be stopping the growing Islamization of France.
Correction – I meant to say Western Anatolia, the part on the Aegean. Anatolia means “land to the East” in Greek which is probably why I wrote “Eastern Anatolia” but what I said is not what I meant.
Lucklucky – “what is born there goes back with a vengeance” – You can look up the identities of the 9-11 hijackers on the Internet. 15 were Saudis, 2 were from the UAE, 1 from Egypt, 1 from Lebanon. Hussein and the Saudis were bitter enemies. If you think that 9-11 was a Saddam Hussein operation you are batshit crazy.
Of course it was always obvious that Osama bin Laden was being protected by the Pakistanis. I never thought for a second that he was hiding in a cave in Afghanistan. I was sure that he was living quite comfortably in Pakistan. If you think the Pakistanis were not in cahoots with Osama bin Laden you are an utter fool.
The Saudis have vastly more involvement in terrorism than Hussein ever did.
“Still drinking the Kool-Aid, I see.”
Facts? So it seems Jim you are incapable of reading.
How many Muslims were killed by Muslims in Iraq?
And what was the reaction to that?
We just have to compare the significant applause in Arab world when the Twin Towers were attacked with silence when Bin Laden was killed.
I don’t know why people pretend that “we” run the US or that any sort of elites run the US that are in any way American. The Jews run the US. They own all the major media. They own almost all the large business from bank bail outs that were most probably set up by them. They own even most all the primary creators of capital on the planet(Central Banks)and charge us stupid peons interest on what they create for nothing. It’s obscene. They blew up our buildings on 9-11 so we would go fight wars for them. Which we have done to our disservice.
How can people pretend that the lying media messages we are drenched with are even remotely the truth?
If you recognize, and you should if you have any sense at all, that building 7 on 9-11 fell the same speed as if the only thing that held it up was AIR for a few seconds. Even NIST in it’s report, finally, with much teeth gnashing, had to admit that the building fell in free fall, because…it did.
https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/free-fall-acceleration
Then you know what you’re told is all lies.
It’s pointless to say “we” made a mistake. We did not. The people who run things got exactly what they wanted. The destruction of Libya, Iraq and Syria. Hell they even wrote a long position paper about doing it before they did. The only thing we got was the shaft.
CVLR,”…1993 and 2001 would not have occurred had we not allowed Jewish/Catholic immigration into the US.”
I would change that to just Jews. Notice the 1993 attack. The FBI has video of them mixing the bomb. They were watching them and supposedly,”lost track of the van”. Well they could have easily called the WTC and told them they were coming but they didn’t. They tried to frame the whole thing on the inside informant they had but he was too smart for them too and record every single conversation. They had to let him go.
I despise Bill Clinton but one thing I’ll give him credit for is he refused to allow the Jews to drag us into any big war. He was too smart for that. He’s a psychopath and pure evil but he’s not stupid like Bush Jr.
Will anything change with Trump? I don’t know. He could just be another mask to set us up and give us hope, while things get worse and worse.
Jim,
>The Saudis have vastly more involvement in terrorism than Hussein ever did.
Tsk tsk. The Saudis have long been engaged in charitable humanitarianism at the behest of International Finance. Terrorism is when one tortures one single Bezos-employed professional informant and “American resident” to death.
>Moslem Spain
As a rule, empires fail to repopulate their territorial conquests intact. America, Canada, Australia/New Zealand, and South Africa/Rhodesia are huge, huge exceptions, and none of them were ever sanctioned projects, except, briefly, as ill-advised dumping grounds for the ridding of troublesome persons. The Founding Americans broke away, forcefully; Australia was a penal colony; the Afrikaner people was an accidental, undesired byproduct of the activities of the Dutch East India Company; nor did the Eternal Anglo ever recognize the Rhodesian nation, choosing to genocide them as expediently as possible; and I have no idea what happened with Canada, except that they burned down the White House once.
As for the rest, I don’t know enough to comment. I should probably read a book on the subject, but haven’t found the time.
Regarding modern so-called “Islamization”… seriously, you have to be kidding. I called it “mass-importation” for a reason: these losers-of-the-Ayyrab-world are scientifically deluged with promise of food, water, clothing, shelter, cash, transportation, leisure, and women. By whom? I ask you, I ask you, by whom?
And this is a question easily answered: by unscrupulous NGO skanks working for Non-Governmental Organizations, of course! funded from Non-Governmental coffers via Non-Governmental tax breaks, the whole Non-Governmental operation orchestrated by other Non-Governmental entities such as the Ford Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Vatican, B’nai B’rith, and TED; i.e., by the innumerable grasping appendages of the International Community, which itself is both everywhere and nowhere equally and simultaneously.
It’s practically a meme at this point, but nevertheless we can quote Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Father of the EU”, chooser of its anthem, and first recipient of arguably its highest honor, the Charlemagne Prize, who said:
Thus, for example, the imminent UN Refugee Pact.
Lucklucky,
>Facts?
There were no weapons of mass destruction, the babies weren’t taken out of incubators, there were no mobile production facilities, several of CNN’s 9-11 hijackers publicly protested their supposed deaths, the Bushes smuggled visiting Saudis out of the country, the Taliban were not producing opium, Assad didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people ( or, almost certainly, on anyone else), ISIS is not Islamic, the free and independent contemporary Ukrainian government was principally established by a Ukrainian Jewess raised and educated in the American Midwest, and the end result (and, some would argue, a purpose) of the Libyan Liberation was to make the richest nation in Africa into a safe haven for the training of ISIS mercenaries.
>How many Muslims were killed by Muslims in Iraq?
Who cares?
Sam,
>[Jews] own all the major media.
>[Jews] own almost all the large business from bank bail outs…
>[Jews own the central banks and make the fiat currency]
>[Jews did 9-11]
¡Oy gevalt!
>I would change that to just Jews.
Nowadays it looks like Jews, but without the Catholics, LBJ would never have gotten into office. And the non-Jewish half of the Supreme Court is Catholic, suggesting an important, if junior, role. Killing a President, it seems, can reap a windfall.
>I despise Bill Clinton but one thing I’ll give him credit for is he refused to allow the Jews to drag us into any big war.
I respect Barack Obama for that same reason, although he wasn’t nearly as smart as Bill. Imagine if Obama hadn’t beaten out the Abramovic Acolytess in 2008. We might not even be able to have this conversation.