'No reward' for non-nuclear Libya

[Forkboy]

'No reward' for non-nuclear Libya

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has said his country has not been given adequate compensation for its decision to renounce nuclear weapons in 2003.

Speaking to the BBC, Colonel Gaddafi said the failure by the West to reward Libya meant Iran and North Korea were reluctant to follow Tripoli's lead.

He insisted there would be no return to the confrontation of the past, however.

Sanctions were lifted after Libya ended its nuclear weapons programme, and the US and UK have resumed diplomatic ties.

Libya was also removed from the US list of state sponsors of terror, a major step towards international rehabilitation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6414387.stm

Way to encourage others!!

[talkinghead]

1. They got their reward

We didn't try to invade them and set up a democracy.

[Forkboy]

2. How white of us!

[Solo_in_MD]

3. What additional reward was suitable

Libya when from pariah to notionally responsible member of the community...what else would he reasonably have expected?

[Forkboy]

4. Well,if conditions were made they should be kept.

"They said if you abolish your war programme we will help you to develop your nuclear abilities into peaceful ones. This has not happened."

The sad thing about this is that our adminstration is so full of liars and shitheads that even Muammar's words ring true.

[MrPrax]

5. Standard Operating Procedure...

We compel Arab nations meet our demands and when they do tear up their societies to meet our demands -- we renege in order to humiliate them. The whole reason for NOT negotiating with the enemy is to dehumanize them and de-legitimize them. They and their demands are not worthy of an audience. In fact, even when they comply to our demands -- we still kill them and humiliate them.

-We didn't wait for the Taliban to turn over AQ which Omar had tentatively agreed to do.

-Saddam HAD comply with everything we asked and demanded -- he got invaded. According to the UN inspectors, Saddam was STILL destroying his missiles two days before the invasion.

-PLO etc have long since sign agreements -- the last one being the Oslo Accords -- that has recognized Israel, but it doesn't really matter that they comply anyway because we want their land and they know it

-Iran has always had an open offer to talk and has always requested a role in helping stop the violence in Iraq...given the track record of the US in Iraq and public statements that American leaders actually want to stop the violence in Iraq, one would think that the US is genuine in their wishes -- their offers are not only rejected, but Iran is the latest country poised to be our latest war crime.

-Sudan enter peace talks at our request and it was 'our' proxy rebel groups from outside the country that rejected has rejected the offers -- Darfur and Juba are still suffering regardless of a ongoing peace process/AU - UN involvement, in which we have decided we aren't going to talk to the only player in the that dispute that is willing to negotiate.


We are butchers. We have no moral or rational justification for what we do anymore...unless you actually believe that killing people is better than sincerely talking to them.

[gratuitous]

6. I was going to comment

But that sums it up pretty well, particularly the parts about delegitimizing people by refusing the talk to them. And, like the terrorists the Bush administration is so fond of invoking, the Bush administration's demands never end. Meet their conditions, and they "refine" them further and further until you can't possibly keep up any longer (viz. the pathetic spectacle of the pre-invasion Saddam regime destroying its defenses as the American wehrmacht was massing on its border). And when the failure to meet increasingly unreasonaly and unrealistic demands inevitably comes, the military is right there to carry out its orders and punish you further.

[MrPrax]

7. If your interested...

or anyone else... I just found this by Robert Fisk.

He's is tackling this same thing but from another, and dare I say much more informed position than I...

Robert Fisk: How easy it is to put hatred on a map

Why are we trying to divide up the peoples of the Middle East? Why are we trying to chop them up, make them different, remind them - constantly, insidiously, viciously, cruelly - of their divisions, of their suspicions, of their capacity for mutual hatred? Is this just our casual racism? Or is there something darker in our Western souls?

Take the maps. Am I the only one sickened by our journalistic propensity to publish sectarian maps of the Middle East? You know what I mean. We are now all familiar with the colour-coded map of Iraq. Shias at the bottom (of course), Sunnis in their middle "triangle" - actually, it's more like an octagon (even a pentagon) - and the Kurds in the north.

...

Our guilt in this sectarian game is obvious. We want to divide the "other", "them", our potential enemies, from each other, while we - we civilised Westerners with our refined, unified, multicultural values - are unassailable. I could draw you a sectarian map of Birmingham, for example - marked "Muslim" and "non-Muslim" (there not being many Christians left in England - but no newspaper would print it. I could draw an extremely accurate ethnic map of Washington, complete with front-line streets between "black" and "white" communities but The Washington Post would never publish such a map.

Imagine the coloured fun The New York Times could have with Brooklyn, Harlem, the East River, black, white, brown, Italian, Catholic, Jew, Wasp. Or the Toronto Globe and Mail with French and non-French Canadian Montreal (the front line at one point follows the city Metro) or with Toronto (where "Little Italy" is now Ukrainian or Greek), and colour the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim, of course. But we don't draw these Hitlerian maps for our societies. It would be unforgivable, bad taste, something "we" don't do in our precious, carefully guarded civilisation.

Independent -- many more points in a short column

Not much to add...