David Rothkopf: The End Cannot Come Too Soon for Qaddafi & Son
[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.]
I can't help but wonder if the British Government, which showed so much empathy for Libyans for whom the end was near in the past, will be willing to embrace the Qaddafi family much as they did their agent of murder in the Pan Am 103 bombing.
The departures of Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Mubarak as a result of the wave of unrest that has swept across the Middle East took away bad men who had at least one or two redeeming qualities. Despite a recent PR campaign by his son to attempt to make Libya look somewhat less barbarian than its leader and the humorous nature of some of the WikiLeaks revelations about Qaddafi's penchant for nurses who seem to be drawn from the cast of a Ukrainian road company of a Russ Meyer movie, the Libyan chieftan has been throughout his far too long career one of the world's real nut job leaders....
Qaddafi spent much of his career as one of the world's least discriminating sponsors of political unrest in Africa and worldwide. He is believed to have helped underwrite terrorists from the Black September group that conducted the 1972 attacks on the Munich Olympics to the IRA to Colombia's FARC to Carlos the Jackal. While he periodically seemed lucid and was charismatic enough to once inspire Nelson Mandela to name one of his off-spring after him, he has enough blood on his hands to earn him a place in the 20th Century madman hall of fame, admittedly not in the main wing with the really big time murderers like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but in the wannabe annex....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
I can't help but wonder if the British Government, which showed so much empathy for Libyans for whom the end was near in the past, will be willing to embrace the Qaddafi family much as they did their agent of murder in the Pan Am 103 bombing.
The departures of Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Mubarak as a result of the wave of unrest that has swept across the Middle East took away bad men who had at least one or two redeeming qualities. Despite a recent PR campaign by his son to attempt to make Libya look somewhat less barbarian than its leader and the humorous nature of some of the WikiLeaks revelations about Qaddafi's penchant for nurses who seem to be drawn from the cast of a Ukrainian road company of a Russ Meyer movie, the Libyan chieftan has been throughout his far too long career one of the world's real nut job leaders....
Qaddafi spent much of his career as one of the world's least discriminating sponsors of political unrest in Africa and worldwide. He is believed to have helped underwrite terrorists from the Black September group that conducted the 1972 attacks on the Munich Olympics to the IRA to Colombia's FARC to Carlos the Jackal. While he periodically seemed lucid and was charismatic enough to once inspire Nelson Mandela to name one of his off-spring after him, he has enough blood on his hands to earn him a place in the 20th Century madman hall of fame, admittedly not in the main wing with the really big time murderers like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but in the wannabe annex....