Obama’s silence on Libya is embarrassing and unsurprising.
Obama is history in the NOT making. What a fool...
Much concern by those who do care...price of oil shooting up with all this unrest...and fear Saudi Arabia uprising could really damage things worldwide. Not to mention the Muslim leaders now planning to merge their countries into one power block. This stuff is going to change many things and not for the good in the long run or short.
BTW Bengazi is now in the hands of the protesters and military...who joined them. Tripoli next.
Gadaffi was a horrible dictator internally, but we had more or less tamed him in terms of his foreign aspirations and in fact Bush had forced him to disarm to a great extent (or at least enough not to be a threat to us).
I did notice that a couple of voices here and there (from within Libya) have declared that the Islamists are involved and are pushing for sharia. Gadaffi was not a mullah but a bizarre, crazy Oriental potentate, with his snappy all-girl security force, mercenary armies, and costumes straight out of the wardrobe room of a really bad B movie. He did the usual amount of anti-Western raving, but he continued to sell oil.
There are certainly many of the protesters, particularly in one of the cities that has a fair amount of Western influence, who are not Islamists and genuinely want a modern secular state that is not a dictatorship. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Islamists end up with the power here because they are the ones who have the most unified agenda and also because they are probably receiving foreign support. There is so little reporting coming out of there that it is really hard to know what’s happening or who are the players.
I think Obama is on the fence. It is well known that the US (under Obama) knew all about and approved the release of the Lockerbie bomber, and in many ways, Gaddafi (a good friend of Hugo Chavez) was Obama’s buddy. But I think Obama would also like to see a solid radical Islamist bloc there and I think that because of his weird climate fantasies and hatred of oil and the modern societies it powers he actually wants to see the supply disrupted and reduced.
He’s not saying anything because he really doesn’t have to. It’s a win-win for him. If Gadaffi or his sons stay, they’re sufficiently anti-American and will probably become even more so, and even perhaps become more Islamist in orientation; and if the Islamists take over, that’s one more step towards the caliphate.