Posted on 10/20/2011 4:55:08 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama hailed Muammar Gaddafi's death on Thursday as a warning to authoritarian leaders across the Middle East that iron-fisted rule "inevitably comes to an end," and as vindication for his cautious strategy toward Libya.
Obama joined U.S. politicians and ordinary Americans in welcoming the demise of Gaddafi, who was for decades regarded as a nemesis of American presidents, and also claimed some of the credit for the Libyan strongman's downfall.
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"This marks the end of a long and painful chapter for the people of Libya who now have the opportunity to determine their own destiny in a new and democratic Libya," Obama said in the White House Rose Garden.
Obama made clear he considered Gaddafi's death a validation of his "leading from behind" strategy that had drawn criticism at home for casting the United States in a support role in the NATO air assault in Libya. Some of his Republican foes see it as an "Obama doctrine" that abdicates U.S. global leadership.
He also issued a veiled warning to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and other long-entrenched Middle Eastern leaders resisting home-grown democracy movements to take heed of Gaddafi's fate.
"Our leadership at NATO has helped guide our coalition. Without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives, and our NATO mission will soon come to an end," Obama said in a televised statement ..
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STARK WARNING
Obama also touted Gaddafi's death as a stark message to other authoritarian rulers in the Middle East where revolts upended longtime leaders in Egypt and Tunisia this year.
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"For the region, today's events prove once more that the rule of an iron fist inevitably comes to an end," Obama said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
This communist son of a whore is responsible for thousands of shoulder fired AA missiles falling into the hands of his fellow muzzie subhuman animals.
Every commercial jet that is shot down by one of these is blood on his hands.
This nation also made a deal with Qaddafi that if he dropped his nuke program and paid reparations to the victims of the Pan Am 103, we would take him off the terrorist list and let him be.
This degenerate monster in the WH is out to put radical islamists in charge of every stable country in the Mideast, and let them take back all of the territory paid for with American blood in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And I bet not one of the GOP candidates will even bring this up.
Libya Is Off U.S. Terrorist List
By KIRIT RADIA (@KiritRadia_ABC)
May 15, 2006
After spending more than a quarter-century on the United States’ State Sponsor of Terrorism list, Libya has finally completed its journey back into the relative good graces of the U.S. government.
The State Department announced today that it would remove Libya from the list in 45 days as part of a three-pronged process of normalizing U.S.-Libyan relations, declaring that Libya was “out of the terrorism business.”
In a statement announcing the restoration of full diplomatic relations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Libya was being rewarded for its “renunciation of terrorism and the excellent cooperation Libya has provided to the United States” in the war on terror. Libya has, in recent years, shared intelligence with the U.S. government that has helped track terrorist networks, including al Qaeda.
The re-establishment of diplomatic relations and the removal of sanctions is also seen as a reward for Libya’s surprising dismantling of its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The announcement comes at a time when the United States is looking to convince two other countries on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list — Iran and North Korea — that cooperating with international demands will ultimately lead to greater gains for their countries.
“Today’s announcement demonstrates that, when countries make a decision to adhere to international norms of behavior, they will reap concrete benefits,” Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs C. David Welch said.
The United States will also reopen its embassy in Tripoli, Libya’s capital, for the first time since the building was set aflame by a mob and closed in 1979. The United States withdrew its last ambassador in 1972, but withdrew its remaining personnel from the embassy after the attack. Less than two years later, Libyan diplomats were expelled from Washington.
Libya will also be removed from another list: countries not cooperating with the U.S. war on terror. Venezuela was added to this list today, with the State Department citing the country’s ties to Cuba and Iran. The decision means that the United States will ban arms sales to Venezuela, whose leader, Hugo Chavez, has been an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy.
Removal from these two lists will mean that Libya will no longer be subject to restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance, a ban on arms sales, certain export controls, and other financial sanctions.
The State Department sought to reassure those who remained unsure about the decision to re-establish diplomatic ties with Libya. “This was not a decision that we arrived at without carefully monitoring and assessing Libya’s behavior,” Welch said.
“The relevant U.S. government agencies conducted a thorough review of Libyan conduct since 2003,” he said, citing Libya’s having distanced itself from terrorist organizations with which it once had maintained relations.
Scars From Pan Am Flight 103 Linger
The State Department said today’s announcement did not indicate the United States had resolved its other concerns about Libya.
“Instead, these steps will enable us to engage with Libyans more effectively on all issues,” Welch said. “In particular, we continue to call upon Libya to improve its human rights record and to address in good faith cases pending in U.S. courts with regard to its terrorist activities of the 1980s.”
After the mob attack on the U.S. embassy in 1979, U.S.-Libyan relations deteriorated further as the United States accused Libya of supporting several terrorist bombings. Most notable among these were the 1986 bombing of a discotheque in West Berlin frequented by American soldiers that killed three people, including two American service officers, and an explosion aboard Pan Am Flight 103 that brought the plane down over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 — killing 270 people, most of whom were American.
The Libyan government reached a settlement with the crash victims’ families in 2002, to which the United States government was not a party, in which it agreed to pay $2.7 billion, or $10 million per family, in monetary compensation for the attack.
Of that settlement, $4 million was paid to each family after the United Nations removed sanctions on Libya, and an additional $4 million was paid to each after the United States removed additional sanctions. The remaining $2 million was to be paid when Washington removed Libya from its State Sponsor of Terrorism list. The timeline for this decision, however, expired in February 2005, and the money, which had been held in a Swiss escrow account, has since been removed.
The announcement on Libya was met with mixed emotions by the families of the crash victims.
Jim Kreindler, the attorney representing 130 of the 270 victims’ families during negotiations with the Libyan government, spoke with many of the families today. He told ABC News that some were pleased that Libya had taken steps to reform itself and ensure that no more lives would be lost as a result of its actions. Others, he said, still maintained bitter feelings toward Libya and especially its leader, Moammar Ghadafi, saying that he should be imprisoned.
Now that Libya has been removed from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, under the original agreement Libya is to pay the remaining $2 million to each family. It remains to be seen if this agreement will still be honored since the escrow account has expired.
“We have continually expressed to the Libyans that whenever the secretary of state offers findings that Libya will come off the list, that Libya should put the money back into the escrow account and then indicate that it’ll abide by the agreement,” Kreindler said.
As others are saying, when I heard ZerO on tv today I said ‘is he talking to the mirror again?’
GONE 2012
AMEN, BROTHER!!!
Should be a warning to some of the crooks in our government as well.
Record kill list for any Nobel Peace Prize winner!
Piece Prize.
What happened to his female bodyguards? Did they abandon him? Turn on him?
Gaddafi death is warning to iron-fist rulers................................. Does this mean that Chavez, the Castro brothers and little Kim could be next? Wow!
Especially the closer it gets to election time.
I agree, clever you are.
Who can make war against the anti-Christ?
Thanks NormsRevenge.
Yeesh... It always comes back around that current 'resident' at 1600 Penn Ave, Washington DC is old "Mr Triple Six" himself. Not hardly.
Do you really think that the Antichrist would be so politically inept that he would stake the prestige of his office on a decision whose outcome that he didn't fully control? Obama did exactly *that* right from jump, and got publicly smacked down by the IOC.
This Chicago street punk isn't Antichrist material, at all. What he is, is a hapless stand in (understudy) for 'the star' to ensure that the machinery that will propel the 'real deal' from obscurity to the height of power works. Well, as we've seen, it works well, so expect it to be used in earnest at earliest available moment.
But don't make the mistake of believing this mug, while a beneficiary of the machinery, is 'the real deal'. He will be replaced, in due course by the 'the star of the show', probably sooner, rather than later, as too many people have tumbled wise to him.
The *real* Antichrist is going to be so much more smoother than this jumped up Chicago carnival huckster that it isn't funny. The Scriptures say that the *real* Antichrist would have the ability to fool even the elect (if they weren't extremely careful). That's something that B. O. has never been able to do, and never will, given a million years...
the infowarrior
Chill-I was being factious.
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