Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Muammar Gaddafi, who saw what happened to Saddam, warns Iran
Those stubborn few of you who believe that Operation Iraqi Freedom had nothing to do with Muammar Gaddafi's decision to cough up his WMD program and come in from the cold may want to reconsider your position:
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Tuesday warned "arrogant" Iran that it faces military humiliation on the scale of Iraq for its refusal to respond to Western powers over a nuclear impasse.
"What Iran is doing stems simply from arrogance," Gaddafi said during a visit to Tunisia after Tehran ignored another western deadline to accept an incentives package in exchange for full transparency on its nuclear drive.
Negotiators from Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States - who suspect Iran is seeking to build nuclear weapons capability - have scheduled a conference call for Wednesday as the crisis deepens.
"In the event of a decision against Iran, this country will suffer the same outcome as Iraq... Iran is not any stronger than Iraq and won't have the means to resist (a military attack) on its own," Gaddafi said.
"The challenges are greater and exceed Iran's ability to reply," he added, speaking on the third day of his visit.
How many times does Gaddafi have to admit that he flipped his atomic weapons program (and thereby ratted out the A.Q. Khan nuclear black market) because of the object lesson in Iraq before critics of the war will admit that Libya might not have turned without the invasion of Iraq? There is no convincing evidence against the point other than that negotiations with Libya had been progressing for some years, yet there is virtually no acknowledgment of this geopolitical victory in the weighing of the gains and losses from OIF. It is almost as if opponents of the war are afraid to admit that any advantage may have come from it.
4 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Aug 07, 01:40:00 AM:
Once a party allows simple slogans like "War is bad" to take over their thought processes, it becomes more difficult for them to come to terms with difficult, complicated systems of national interaction. Iran, of course, is very difficult for them to deal with because our problems with the mad mullahs predate the last three Republican Presidents.
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Thu Aug 07, 07:09:00 AM:
The Libyans gave up so much stuff, one has to wonder if they were in possession of some of Saddam's original goodies.
By Jamie Irons, at
Thu Aug 07, 04:17:00 PM:
"It is almost as if opponents of the war are afraid to admit that any advantage may have come from it..."
Of course you are saying this ironically.
The fact is, as you know, the "anti-war" or "peace" position is a deeply religious one, though many who espouse it are atheists.
Were they forced to admit that some good, any good, could issue from a war, that would open the Pandora's box of the possibility that there might be, on balance and after careful consideration, a preponderance of good on the "pro-war" side.
I want to hasten to add that I regard war as a terrible and last resort option, which always and inevitably leads to sorrow and horror on a massive scale.
Jamie Irons
By , at
Thu Aug 07, 05:14:00 PM:
that's a shame, because it's (one of) our core competencies.
