{"id":8611,"date":"2011-04-03T11:07:50","date_gmt":"2011-04-03T15:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=8611"},"modified":"2011-04-03T11:09:18","modified_gmt":"2011-04-03T15:09:18","slug":"picking-sides-in-libya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/04\/03\/picking-sides-in-libya\/","title":{"rendered":"Picking sides in Libya"},"content":{"rendered":"

I must have been following the wrong news stories, because I thought the UN resolution empowered the coalition to enforce a no-fly zone, not to attack both sides<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we\u2019re also happy to serve as the Qaddafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it\u2019s rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist he\u2019s willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn\u2019t exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we\u2019ve got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side. If a coalition plane bombing Qaddafi\u2019s forces runs into a coalition plane bombing the rebel forces, are they allowed to open fire on each other? Or would that exceed the U.N. resolution?<\/p>\n

Who are these rebels we\u2019re simultaneously arming and bombing? Don\u2019t worry, the CIA is \u201cgathering intelligence\u201d on them. They should have a clear of who our allies are round about the time Mohammed bin Jihad is firing his Kalashnikov and shouting \u201cDeath to the Great Satan!\u201d from the balcony of the presidential palace. But America\u2019s commander-in-chief thinks they\u2019re pretty sound chaps. \u201cThe people that we\u2019ve met with have been fully vetted,\u201d says President Obama. \u201cSo we have a clear sense of who they are. And so far they\u2019re saying the right things. And most of them are professionals, lawyers, doctors — people who appear to be credible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Credible people with credentials — just like the president! Lawyers, doctors, just like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda\u2019s No. 2. Maybe among their impeccably credentialed ranks is a credible professional eye doctor like Bashar Assad, the London ophthalmologist who made a successful mid-life career change to dictator of Syria. Hillary Rodham Clinton calls young Bashar a \u201creformer,\u201d by which she means presumably that he hasn\u2019t (yet) slaughtered as many civilians as his late dad. Assad Sr. killed some 20,000 Syrians at Hama and is said to have pumped hydrogen cyanide through the town: There wasn\u2019t a dry eye in the house, as the ophthalmologists say. Baby Assad hasn\u2019t done that (yet), so he\u2019s a reformer, and we\u2019re in favor of those, so we\u2019re not arming his rebels.<\/p>\n

According to the State Department, Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s 27-year-old son, Khamis, is also a \u201creformer.\u201d Or at least he was a few weeks ago, when U.S. officials welcomed him here for a month-long visit, including meetings at NASA and the Air Force Academy, and front-row seats for a lecture by Deepak Chopra entitled \u201cThe Soul of Leadership.\u201d Ten minutes of which would have me buckling up the Semtex belt and yelling \u201cAllahu Akbar!\u201d but each to his own. It would have been embarrassing had Khamis Qaddafi still been getting the red carpet treatment in the U.S. while his dad was getting the red carpet-bombing treatment over in Tripoli. But fortunately a scheduled trip to West Point on February 21st had to be canceled when young Khamis was obliged to cut short his visit and return to Libya to start shooting large numbers of people in his capacity as the commander of a crack special-forces unit. Maybe he\u2019ll be killed by a pilot who showed him round the Air Force Academy. Small world, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Gerard Vanderleun<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I must have been following the wrong news stories, because I thought the UN resolution empowered the coalition to enforce a no-fly zone, not to attack both sides: So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we\u2019re also happy to serve as the Qaddafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,5,13],"tags":[145,158,687,506,694,691],"class_list":["post-8611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-military","category-usa","tag-airforce","tag-barackobama","tag-libya","tag-revolution","tag-syria","tag-unitednations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2eT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8611"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8614,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8611\/revisions\/8614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}