Libya's Weapons of Mass Destruction: Reinventing Gaddafi

[durutti]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=4743


The problem I have with the whole Gaddafi saga is that the Libya I know can scarcely repair a drain or install a working lavatory in a hotel.

Yet this same Libya, after years of sanctions, was apparently making a nuclear bomb. Libyan nuclear scientists. Say those three words over and over again. Really? And what was that odd word in the Downing Street announcement? "Programmes'? Wasn't that exactly what Mr Blair accused Iraq of developing after the weapons of mass destruction he had told us all about turned out to be non-existent? According to the usual anonymous "US officials' who daily grace the front pages of American newspapers, Libya had not actually acquired a nuclear bomb but was "close to developing one'. But what does that mean? How close is close? A year? Ten years? Some time?

Of course, Gaddafi used to be fascinated by weapons. Like the dictator in Auden's wonderful poem, "The poetry he invented was easy to understand... he was greatly interested in armies and fleets".

I remember the crazed, sticky evenings in Tripoli when the wretched man would celebrate his own revolution with a seven-hour military parade, tank after tank, missile after missile, not one of which was ever used. There was even a 300-strong squad of black-suited frogmen who would march panting past us in the stifling midnight heat in snorkels, their giant flippers sticking to the hot Tarmac.

[kalian]

1. Well...Gaddafi got smart....

he realized that he could become member of the Bush co. for real
cheap. All he has to do is bend over and let them take the oil.
That's it...pure and simple.

Just remember: where there is oil...there are terrorists... :eyes: