Libya, or Operation Blind-Eye

Libya, oh Libya, that encyclopaedia, oh Libya the tattooed lady. (Almost © Groucho Marx ‘At The Circus 1939)

So the UN had got it’s panties in a bunch over another oil-rich nation. Funny that. The axis of evil, or the axis of ‘people the American government can’t do business with because they want to do what they wont rather than what we tell them to do’ has fallen foul of the international community once more. And suddenly fighter jets are covering a no-fly zone, hurried meetings and proclamations from the mouths of politicians fill the airwaves. Words like democracy and despot and nutter are flung about as the western media moguls line their ducks up alongside those they put into power, here and in the U.S.

Is Gadaffi any more power-crazed than George Bush Jnr with his direct link to God, or Tony Blair who was on Libyan soil pretty recently (2004) where he declared we must ‘move on’ from the pain of the past (PC. Yvonne Fletcher, Lockerbie etc), could that have had anything to do with the other thing that was happening there at the time (As Mr Blair met Mr Gaddafi, it was announced Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell had signed a deal worth up to £550m for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast (BBC News)) surely not, and you would be a ‘nutter’ to suggest it.

The attitude of the west to these dictators is so mind-numbingly hypocritical as to leave one breathless.

The arrogance and sheer barefacedness should be shocking but cause nothing more than another world-weary shrug around the world.

Iraq – here have some weapons. Oh look he’s got weapons, destroy him!
Burma – Burma, erm, Myanmar, erm, where? democracy, dictatorship, civil liberty, erm, do they have anything apart from suffering people, like oil and stuff? No? right, moving on.

Iran – nuclear power? Right, let’s get into there. But you’ve got nuclear power, yes, but we are non-violent and serene and worldly. You are just the cradle of civilisation.
Zimbabwe – oh, yes, tricky one, come back to us when everyone’s starving to death.
Niger – never heard of it, next.
Rwanda – no words to describe that vile colonial-ethnic abortion.
Fiji – oh yes, nice water, erm, beaches? Next.

Obviously solutions to these horrific humanitarian catastrophes are well beyond the mind of most of us, there are no neat and tidy answers to any of them, but stopping a military junta from controlling its people by policing with the military of a few select OTHER countries through the UN (the picture of Colin Powell holding up a vial of clear liquid in the UN before invading Iraq still haunts) is ludicrous.

Put it this way, if you’re a poor, average, working citizen and the skies above your country buzz with bombers and the ground rumbles with approaching tanks I would be wondering a) whose side are they on? b) whose side shall I say I’m on? And c) I wish we weren’t the 9th largest oil producer in the world? Or maybe we could see some benefit from OUR country’s riches.

My heart goes out to them one and all, normal people ripped off, downtrodden and coerced by their own people, and the people coming as their ‘saviours’.
From some nightmares there is no escape.

Reading – Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks
Listening to – Creedance Clearwater Revival – At The Movies