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The protests were not large in the early phases, and there was violence in all of the video I've seen. Shots were fired at the protesters in Tripoli, but they also burned government buildings. The oft-touted footage of the horrible massacre in Zawiyah is of a crowd that's chanting and marching, accompanied by a few armed rebels in the front of the procession as they approached a military roadblock. Guns are seen in the crowd, and when they're fired upon, they run and we see automatic weapons fire coming from a truck in the crowd and a three-man team retreating with a tripod-mounted, belt-fed heavy machine gun that is set for action. The reporter is a Murdoch employee and goes on to tell of one of these innocent young civilian males getting instructions for an RPG and going off with it while yelling "God is Great".
The bloodshed is reported to be 24 in a Tripoli incident (where there was violence) 24 in a Benghazi incident and 10 in another Benghazi incident, where reports also show that it was started by the protester throwing rocks at police. The other incidents have less than 10 deaths. There were no incidents of attacking innocent, singing civilians. The 1200 people killed at Abu Salim in 1996 were largely Islamist Revolutionaries who had been on a months-long killing spree of police and soldiers, including an assassination of Qaddafi himself. By all accounts, they rioted, took at least 2 guards hostage--one of whom was killed or died--and the security forces over-reacted. This is not an example of innocent victims, yet their being murderous fundamentalist revolutionaries in a riot is never said; it's just an example of how he killed 1200 of his own people.
Qaddafi did NOT threaten to kill civilians, he threatened to hunt down armed revolutionaries door to door; most governments would do something similar in an analogous situation. This threat does not constitute guaranteed proof that he'd go bayoneting babies.
In 2009, he forced the French "Total" company to renegotiate their deal under threat of nationalization, reducing the amount of OIL they could take for their efforts from 50% to 27%. He did this to others, too, not making many friends. In October of 2010, Chevron decided to leave Libya due to its inability to find new fields where allowed to explore, and because of the onerous fees and restrictions to be allowed to do business. Somewhere around that time he put a freeze on new foreign deals, although I need to corroborate that story, so let's put that on ice 'til I do my homework.
The Provisional Government threatened Western Governments when beseeching them for recognition, saying that they would remember those who helped and those who DIDN'T in their future business dealings. When it looked like the rebellion was working, and the propagandists started to believe their own propaganda, the French formally recognized them as the legitimate government. Suddenly, Qaddafi struck back, doing very well. The French KNEW that they'd be cut out of ANY oil once they'd done that, and the die was cast.
All outcry that there was an oil component to the hunger for war was systematically shouted down by people saying that it had no basis in fact because Qaddafi had been no problem in providing access to the oil. Not only is this not true, it's REALLY not true.
The French and British made a military pact on November 2, 2010, with plans for a joint wargame called "Southern Mistral" to be played on March 21, 2011: the game had the two militaries staging in France to overfly a neutral country ("Navarre") in order to mount an offensive operation against a southern dictatorship that had interfered with their economic interests.
It looks very much as if a pretext was being awaited, and a handy revolution popped up to fit the bill.
The reason why Benghazi and Derna are such hotbeds for revolt is that they are the home areas for the Islamist Revolutionaries who went on a rampage in 1995-6, and many of the prisoners who died were their friends and family.
In short: there's a big oil component that is scrupulously ignored, no real threat of the guaranteed atrocities that are held as "PROOF" of the need to intervene and no acknowledgment of the ongoing civil strife and theocratic undercurrents.
Going to war on "proof" of something we presume is going to happen is ridiculously flimsy, but here it doesn't even bear scrutiny. Where are the mass executions in Ras Lanuf or Ajdabiya? Where WERE they at the time: he had already retaken these cities before the march on Benghazi?
We went to war for soothsayers claiming to know the future, and specifically ignoring any facts that didn't support their claim. Whether driven by sincere emotion or not, they were distorting the reality at hand and deliberately playing upon people's emotions.
Our President said that journalists were captured, sexually assaulted and killed. At the point when he said that, two journalists had been killed: one in an unmarked car that sped through a public street during fighting, and one who was shot videotaping another street fight; the former was not obviously a journalist, and the other was in a battle. The only journalist who had been sexually assaulted had been groped, had every inch of her body touched, had her hair stroked as someone said that she'd die in the morning, but she specifically says that no hands EVER went under her clothes. Not nice, certainly "sexual assault" to some degree, but these incidents do not fit what the President was trying to convey to the listeners. He makes it sounds like many journalists (it was one group of 5) had been captured, raped and killed afterward in captivity. The ones who died had nothing to do with this group; they were in incidents of literal gunfire. There was no systematic and repeated "sexual assault" of numerous people, and the level of assault here is not what one would expect from the emotionally charged condemnation of our President.
Personally, I feel it's an outrage to have our sympathies played upon with grotesque omissions, suppositions and exaggerations to justify a war that sets the precedent for violating national sovereignty whenever we damned well please. Many people have been killed since then. Children have been killed. Had we not intervened, chances are rather good it would be over by now, but now, the killing goes on. The innocent rebels are also conveniently holing up in areas with civilians, so the outrage of Qaddafi using human shields reeks of hypocrisy.
Those who declare themselves "right" and exempt themselves from fair depiction of the facts or reasonable civil comportment are assholes, both on the anti-interventionist and interventionist side.
I hope this answers the questions, and it is done in accord to someone having actually taken the time to compose a message to convey a point. You'll note that none of this is cut-and-paste; the time was taken specifically for you due to the overall conducive tone of your post.
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