Here we go. It finally happened. It finally made the front page and people finally took notice something beyond Lohan in court. All it took was a no fly zone and the US bombing the shit out of the place to get people to notice what is happening in Libya.
In the event you don't know what's going on, Over the weekend Obama stamped away, with the help of the U.N. to create a no-fly zone for Libya. Then they started bombing the shit out of Libya's hot spots. Yup, this should lock up a 2nd Nobel Peace Prize easy.
It was only a matter of time before Obama jumped in and used one of the follow:
- Moammar Gaddafi has failed to disarm
- He represents an imminent danger to the region
- The cost of inaction is greater than any risk posed by going to war
- The world, and Libya in particular, will be a better place without Gaddafi's regime
Why yes, let's name our supposedly easy military operation after a hellish lengthy journey. Great job, Pentagon. You fucking idiots. My only hope now is that we have a lot of aircraft carriers sailing in circles around the Mediterranean for 10 years.
Oh yeah, in case you were wondering. 114 Tomahawk missiles x $500,000 = $57 million. Thank god that hundreds of Libyans will be granted glorious spiritual liberation by American bombs and then capitalism instead of having to languish in Gaddafi's dungeons.
I wonder if you remember when France penned a $400 million dollar arms deal with Libya in 2007? That's gotta be fun. Now they get to blow up all the stuff they sold them. Now that's a solid business model if I've ever heard of one.
So why hasn't this been getting more media attention? Maybe it was because no one could figure out what his god damn name was. The banner at the top of his official website spells it, "AL Gathafi." But if you go deeper into the site, you'll see it variously rendered as "Al Qaddafi," "Algathafi," and "Al-Gathafi." Adding to the multitude of his spellings is the increasingly ironically named "Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights."
And that's just the surname. Variations on his given name include Muammar, Moammar, Mu'ammar, and Moamar, and many others. Once you've settled on how to spell his first and last names, you then have to decide whether you want to add the Arabic prefix "al-" before his last name. Which can also be spelled "el-." And then you have to decide whether the prefix should be capitalized.
All this because his name has 3 different letters that have no english equivalent: ع, ذ, and غ. The first one (from the left) makes a sound kind of like the th in rather (as opposed to the th in with or thick, which is a different letter). it's often transliterated as just a dh, sometimes a dd. the second one was the hardest for me to learn as a native english speaker, it's kind of a vague U noise made at the back of the throat, close to the way you'd constrict your throat if you were doing a kermit the frog impression. transliteration is hard with that, but sometimes you'll see an apostrophe. the last one is made by trilling your tongue on the top of your throat, a lot like a parisian R. in the program I was in, we focused on standard arabic with a little egyptian, so I can't speak to how this might differ from the egyptian dialect, but that's how the letters were taught to me.
And all this so far is on how to deal with his name. So I guess it's no wonder that we haven't been hearing much about this on your local station, let alone on the cable news networks. After all that, most editors gave up and ran stories about Justin Bieber instead.
Maybe the reason Libya wasn't getting the same attention as Egypt because Gaddafi is one of those people that likes the attention. We never know what he's going to do next. He's a wildcard and if we gave him any ounce of attention, it's basically him saying "You thought that was bad, well look at this shit!". As he blows up an oil pipeline or something.
If you're not aware of this guy, here's a good article on why he's a pretty bad man.
Gaddafi has ruled the country with the delusion of grandeur of a man who rose to power in a 1969 coup with fairly acceptable political ideals that got corrupted and abandoned. Gaddafi’s much vaunted socialism turned into distribution in favour of the Colonel’s clansmen.So while I really wish we could stop this, the only thing we can really do as a nation is to raise awareness and I guess bomb the shit out of there. I mean, at least Obama is saying that there wouldn't be any troops on the ground...... yet.
I would like to toss this one out to you with any sort of logic. Think about this - Hillary Clinton traded with the Arab League, getting their support for this in exchange for letting them crush the shit out of the protests in Bahrain. Without the Arab League's declaration of support for a no fly zone, there would not have been a U.N. resolution. Which is what Obama's using as a political fig leaf here.
In short, this isn't about innocent civilians. It's about who can be sacrificed for our own benefit. But hey, I'm glad we're going through all of this effort to replace a stable, autocratic government with a Somalia-style environment.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was all some sort of pretense of an excuse to boost his re-election chances by genociding yet another hundred million brown people. I mean, it couldn't be, right? This is the same guy who inspired us to have HOPE.... fuck. Won't be fooled again.
It's as if Obama has just turned into Reagan. Oh wait.. didn't Reagan also bomb the shit out of places.. hell, he even killed one of Gaddafi's sons. The sad thing is that we all watched the metamorphosis happen right before our very own eyes.
He doesn't even have the excuse that he lost his mind. He's just literally a puppet to any and everyone. Fuck this administration. They're already starting to suggest that we should expect Libyan terrorist for our actions. Man, We deserve everything bad that happens to us. Fuck it.
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