Operation Soaring Donkey Punch has reached it's bloody end.
Libyans rejoiced and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief Thursday at news of the death of ousted leader Muammar Qaddafi, but details of his capture and killing remained in dispute.
His convoy was hit by NATO airstrikes but not destroyed. And he later was captured alive in his hometown of Sirte. However, numerous reports -- often contradictory -- continue to surface about how he was captured and how he ended up dead, apparently from a bullet.
A U.S. Predator drone was involved in the airstrike on Muammar Qaddafi's convoy Thursday in the moments before his death, as he tried to escape Sirte, a U.S. defense official told Fox News.
The official said the drone, along with a French fighter jet, fired on the "large convoy." A French defense official earlier said about 80 vehicles were in the convoy -- the official said the strike did not destroy the convoy but that fighters on the ground afterward intercepted the vehicle carrying Qaddafi. He was later killed, reportedly in the crossfire between Qaddafi supporters and opponents as he was being transferred.
Arab broadcasters showed graphic images of the balding, goateed Gadhafi -- wounded, with a bloodied face and shirt -- but alive, as he was pushed around by a crowd of revolutionaries. Later video showed fighters rolling Qaddafi's lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head.
Much as I'd like to think this is an unalloyed good, the horrifying undignified death (Warning-It's graphic gory video of a dead dictator) of Khadafi probably generates more questions than it answers.
First, Barack Obama brought us to this war against the Libyan psycho-regime. What exactly did our President's Maghreb adventurism get us? The Coalition of the Swilling's Tree Hugging Sister makes a disturbing point.
What I am appalled by is an American President who can tout “American Leadership” in a statement patting himself on the back for what was basically the assassination cream-on-top of a patently illegal operation to begin with. Leadership would have BEEN calling out to Iranians on rooftops desperate for encouragement.
Obama couldn’t lead himself to the men’s room.
So, is that what our proud military’s for? To flush out the easy-target dirtbag of choice, who can then (eventually) can be pulled out of a pipe by a random hodgepodge of “Freedom Fighters”, beaten to a pulp and summarily executed there on the shoulder of the highway, all the while we can claim no boots on the ground and no blood on lily white hands?
Read the rest.
Remember how President Nobel Laureate painstakingly worked to get Congressional approval for the Libyan War? How about all those trips to the United Nations to discuss why Khadafi had to be removed from power? Do recall how many agonizing months we delayed our military operations in North Africa just to make sure we had all of our legal and Constitutional ducks in a row?
Yeah, me neither.
But you gotta give it up to the Obama Administration--at least they're not spiking the football.
"We came, we saw, he died."
Hey American progressives, I give you your glorious avatar: A corpulent hack lawyer/former junior US Senator/former First Lady waddling her overfed frame into a fawning media appearance so she can giggle about killing the leader of another country.
Speaking of idiots, The Daily Kos is in full-on hopeful puppy dog mode.
The world will soon move on to other matters, forgetting Libya ever existed. But as trite an observation as it might be, getting rid of Gaddafi is likely to be the easy part in Libya's hopeful transition to a better, more democratic future.
Amazing. This is the same guy who spent most of the Dubya years in high dudgeon over 'illegal wars' and the 'imperial presidency'. How Kos--and the rest of the progressive movement--used to righteously thunder on and on and on about the alleged abuses of power from the evil American Warlord Premier Bush. Naturally, when Barack Obama refuses to get Congressional authorization to use force and then subsequently pushes through some half-assed quickie UN Security Council resolution against Khadafi, it's all good in the hood.
Granted, Kos is a little concerned over how the post-Khadafi transition will look. He frets about the hard part still to come. But basically, summarizing his and the broader left-wing's position on Libya is simple: "Mission Accomplished".
The dissonance between liberalism's anti-war rhetoric during the Bush Administration and the left's more recent fawning accolades for their Glorious Warrior President should put a massive dent in their neo-pacifist credibility for a generation. No more can progressives claim the moral high ground. By hitching their wagon to the newly butched-up Democrat Party, they have demolished the notion of a viable American anti-war movement. It should now be clear that the Dubya era crying over Iraq was not done out of principle, but instead out of a vulgar partisan hate for Bush.
But perhaps I'm being too harsh on our progressive colleagues. On second thought, lets let bygones be bygones and give the Left a warm welcome to the Paul Wolfowitz/Donald Rumsfeld/Darth Cheney Axis of Neoconservatism. You libs are a little late to the shin-dig, but whatevs. Be sure to give William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer a shout-out at the beer pong tournament.
(BTW--I'm not linking to Kos' site. You can find it for yourself.)
Swinging back over into the real world, there are going to be actual-factual consequences that America will have to deal with in the wake of Khadafi's death.
Qaddafi was not America’s friend, but the vision of U.S. troops pulling Saddam Hussein from a spider hole in Iraq did persuade him that having America as an enemy was not smart. So he gave up his drive to develop nuclear weapons and coughed up useful intelligence on how that project had been organized. He stopped financing terrorism — as far as we’re aware. He did continue oppressing his own people. Both the Bush and the Obama administrations pretty much gave him a pass on that.
If the Great Arab Revolt — “Arab Spring” is a hopeful, not descriptive term — ends up only removing Qaddafi and, from neighboring Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, a despot who was, nonetheless, a reasonably pliant client of the U.S., and if Iran’s theocrats remain in power and manage to save the Assad dynasty in Syria while continuing to use Hezbollah to control Lebanon and sponsoring Hamas in Gaza, the lesson will be clear: It is more dangerous to be America’s ally than its enemy.
Such a lesson will carry long-term strategic consequences. If there are strategic planners in the current administration, now would be a good time for them to start worrying.
Egypt has been allowed to drift into a Muslim Brotherhood/military coalition government. Turkey has become more and more Islamist over the last decade. Now Libya will get the chance to replace their brutal dictator with...what, exactly? The chances of finding Jeffersonian democrats, Madisonian constitutionalists or even FDR-ite liberals amongst the Libyan freedom fighters are negligible.
Instead, it is very likely that Libya will be allowed to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda sympathizers and other hardline Sunni Muslim theocrats. That's great if you're a Islamist radical; not so great if you're an Egyptian Copt, a Libyan Jew, an American anything...or pretty much anybody else.
But according to President Obama's logic, America simply had to help throw out Khadafi, even though our short and long term interests would've been better served by keeping him around. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad still hasn't taken a laser-guided thermobaric curbstomp. The Iranian mullahs, who somehow managed to keep power even after the 2009 Persian uprising should've shown America just how brittle the Tehran theocracy really is, have yet to be shown the business end of a J-Dam.
It would be a far better and much more stable world if our real enemies were punished for their actions. But then again, is stability really what Obama is seeking to create in the world? His actions in Libya suggest he has some other goal in mind.
In any case, Moamar Khadafi has been put to death at the hands of the people he brutally oppressed for decades. There is a certain ironic justice to the mad Colonel's inglorious termination. Even though there are many troubling ambiguities, his execution rids the world of a mass murderer and large-scale terrorist sponsor. He has the blood of countless people on his hands, both in Libya and across the globe. Pan Am Flight 103 was simply the most direct assault on US citizens that Khadafi ordered against America.
The planet is a far better place with Khadafi roasting on a spit in Satan's special nuclear fire dictator barbeque pit. Regardless of America's domestic political situation, the death of the crazy Colonel is still a day to be celebrated. What happens next is a mystery, what happened this week should at least give some relief to the people who were impacted by Khadafi's evil.
