It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Parts of the British media have already mischaracterised my visit to Libya as a "peace mission to Gaddafi". This is untrue. It has now been two months, and 6,000 Nato air attacks, since UN security council resolution 1973. I visited western Libya to see what was happening on the ground and I intend to visit eastern Libya in due course.
While one could understand the push for a security council "no-fly" resolution, to term the way in which the resolution has been stretched "mission creep" understates the pace at which Britain is racing to full-scale war. "Mission creep" is shorthand for an escalation in the number of dead civilians. For all the haste we have seen on Libya, we see no such urgency, for example, in the case of Syria, Yemen or Bahrain. It appears to many observers that Libya is being singled out for political rather than human rights reasons.
We are now being told by General Sir David Richards, the head of the armed forces, that the UK must further "up the ante" by systematically destroying more civilian infrastructure in Libya in support of the rebels about which we know little.
As for the alleged surgical precision of Nato bombing, a Nato bomb exploded 400 metres away from me during my visit. It was dropped on a parliamentary complex I had visited four hours earlier. Other Nato bombs had destroyed a lamppost on a pavement adjacent to the parliamentary office. They were hardly "command and control" centres.
What also concerns me is the message that the Libyan – and also the Egyptian – situation has sent out about western foreign policy. Several years of painstaking diplomacy brought Libya back into the community of nations: this effort was thrown away in 48 hours. What conclusions are to be drawn about British and western foreign policy by developing and emergent countries?
For all the haste we have seen on Libya, we see no such urgency, for example, in the case of Syria, Yemen or Bahrain. It appears to many observers that Libya is being singled out for political rather than human rights reasons.
Originally posted by TDawgRex
The UN screwed up big time with this one. By all accounts, Syria is a larger humanitarian crisis, but yet the UN does nothing, as usual. They have such a glorious record concerning human rights don't they? Remember all the good they did in Rwanda and Darfur? You don't? Neither do I.
Originally posted by kro32
I have no problem being there for economic reasons as that's something we should do but yes I agree that they should at least be honest about it and not say it's for humanitarian reasons.
Originally posted by Illusionsaregrander
reply to post by PrinceDreamer
I didnt need him to tell me that Libya was being singled out for economic and political reasons. Its been obvious to me from the start that this whole thing has been a fraud on the people of the "Allied" nations perpetrated by politically well connected economic interests.
I have never for a moment believed that this was "humanitarian" in nature, and I have been incredibly frustrated with how easily people accepted that it was.