Gadhafi Killed in Sirte ...

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WestCoastJoe
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http://www.cnn.com/

40 years of tyranny for Libya ends with his death. Continued change in the Arab Spring ...

In the West he was portrayed as crazy, but to survive for 40 years ... Hmmm ... crazy like a fox.

Good riddance. A bit surprised he did not run to a safe harbour country.
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Toppy Vann
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WestCoastJoe wrote:http://www.cnn.com/

40 years of tyranny for Libya ends with his death. Continued change in the Arab Spring ...

In the West he was portrayed as crazy, but to survive for 40 years ... Hmmm ... crazy like a fox.

Good riddance. A bit surprised he did not run to a safe harbour country.
I believe that Libya is a country of some 6 million people with large oil reserves that suggest they could pull it together and make something for their people unlike Egypt which has some 85 million and much less resources.

Now the issue will be to get some control as the streets have been full of armed guys with little direction and no real chain of command. Egypt is not looking pretty and will have massive problems getting their economy together at a time when it is now clear that this down cycle for some countries like the USA and to some extent Canada is not just a blip and predictable cycle

The US has some 29 million out of work today and many of those jobs aren't coming back. This is not cycle but a structural change in their economy that can be traced back to President Reagan and his policies not supporting manufacturing on the theory that was better to do it cheaper abroad. It is not pretty what his happening there.

Libya has a good size land mass and fewer people than in Hong Kong with 7 million here and a small land mass only 30% of which is occupied. Libya with oil has a chance to become a model state.
"Ability without character will lose." - Marv Levy
TheLionKing
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Let's hope the nutbar in North Korea is next but frankly don't see it happening anytime soon.
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WestCoastJoe
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http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/op ... 97144.html

I thought some might enjoy reading this Canadian military and economic writer, as he discusses the passing of Moammar Gadaffi.

I've heard Dyer speak twice. He is interesting, well informed, and thought provoking.

Dyer, born in Newfoundland, served in the Canadian Navy, the U.S. Navy, and the British Navy. He also lectured in the military schools of all three countries.
10-23-2011

Sic Transit Moammar Gadhafi

By Gwynne Dyer

When I was in school I used to wonder who Gloria Mundi was and how she had died, but it turned out to be my defective Latin. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi means “Thus passes the glory of this world.” But still, it kind of fits, doesn’t it? Sic Transit Moammar Gadhafi.

Being Moammar Gadhafi must have been a bit like being Mick Jagger. You’ve been playing the same role since you were very young, and everybody loves you for it, at least to your face. You have actually become the standard by which all others aspiring to the same role is judged. And after a while, you start to believe that you really are Jagger, and not just that guy from Dartford who can sing pretty well.

I’m not denying that there were differences between the two men. To the best of my knowledge, Jagger never ordered anybody to be killed. (Neither did Keith Richards, at least to the best of his recollection, and he swears that he remembers everything.) Jagger also has better taste in clothes than Gadhafi had, especially in his later years when he took to wearing his mother’s embroidered drapes.

Sorry, that was unkind. They were actually ceremonial robes befitting the King of Africa, which Gadhafi claimed on occasion that he was. It was just that his mother liked very heavy, gaudy drapes, suitable for an African king (or his vision of an African king), and his seamstress had a heavy-duty sewing machine, so why not?

Another difference between Jagger and Gadhafi is that Mick is unlikely to end his life being bombed by the French air force, dragged out of a storm drain, man-handled into the back of a pick-up truck, and showered with the curses of the men around him as he bleeds to death. It becomes clearer with every passing day that it is better to be a rock and roll hero than an Arab dictator, which doubtless explains Jagger’s career choice.

Am I being insufficiently serious here? Should I not be condemning Gadhafi’s crimes, and lamenting the fact that he will never stand trial for them, and speculating on Libya’s future after 42 years of one-man rule? Isn’t that what pundits are for?

Perhaps, but what would be the point? There are hundreds of other columnists who are writing exactly that stuff, and none of them knows any more about Libya’s future than I do. Gadhafi’s crimes have been detailed in your friendly neighborhood media at least once a week for the past six months. Nobody really thought he was going to live to stand trial. So let’s talk about something interesting instead.

The interesting question is this: Would Gadhafi have ended up as a delusional egomaniac and a mass murderer if he had not had absolute power over an entire country for his whole adult life? The answer is almost certainly no. It was the power that made him that way.

He came from a Bedouin family who lived in a traditional herder’s tent, but he was sent away to boarding school. His family hired a tutor for him toward the end of high school, which may explain how he got into the Libyan military academy. His education was spotty and did not equip him for complicated intellectual endeavors, but he was not an ignorant man. Millions like him have led productive and blameless lives.

We do not know whether Gadhafi played well with others when he was a little boy, but he was certainly popular with his fellow junior officers when he overthrew King Idris at the age of 27. Contemporary reports portray him as an intensely serious young man, charming when he needed to be but dedicated full-time to the “Arab cause.” It’s a profile that he shared with millions of other young idealists in the Arab world.

So how did he end up as a dangerous but ridiculous monster? Those millions of others didn’t. If some other young officer had led the 1969 coup d’etat and made himself the sole ruler of Libya for the next 42 years, Gadhafi might well have ended up as a kindly retired army officer spending his time with his grandchildren. And quite possibly that other young officer would have become the monster.

Lord Acton said it 120 years ago: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." By implication, he is saying that Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, and the other mass murderers who have tormented the Arab world over the past decades were shaped more by circumstances than by some intrinsic evil in their character.

If Acton’s analysis is right, then countries where the rule of law is supreme and civil society is strong should not produce such monsters, because they do not allow any individual to have absolute power. If that were always true, then Hitler, for example, could not have achieved absolute power, but it is usually true.

So the remedy is obvious, in the newly free countries of the Arab world and elsewhere, too. Democracy is good, but you also have to build strong civil institutions and an independent judiciary. It’s just a lot easier said than done.
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Toppy Vann
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In all this what is escaping the main stream media it seems is how much the Europeans, UK and US sold to Libya in the way of weapons under this tyrant.

This is the same all across the Mid East where the friends of these gov't jail doctors (Bahrain) for treating protesters and on and on.

It is kind of like building an economy that lives off the avails of gambling and our BC govts have dabbled and toyed with this policy as it is a winner for gov'ts.

While US and Canada and Europe and UK are seriously losing manufacturing jobs as capital keeps moving to the lowest cost producers the US selling weapons used against citizens like in the Middle East should be a scandal. Even in China there are mfg job losses as they shift west to Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, etc.

While the world is in econ. crisis the bad news for western nations is that many of the jobs lost are not coming back. There has been a structural change and this bodes poorly for the future of our children and their families unless gov'ts in the US and Canada get back to funding education and R&D and not wasting money on foreign wars - but pursue humanitarian undertakings while not forgetting that charity begins at home. The crises in the UK - no jobs for youth. Here in Canada the opportunities for good jobs like before are slimmer. We fare better than others as we have resource industries still but we need gov't to help in sectors where we can get competitive advantage and stimulate jobs there.

MANUFACTURING JOBS
DEVELOPED CAPITALIST COUNTRIES
CHANGE (1980–2006)
CANADA ......................... 2%
GERMANY ..................... -11%
ITALY .............................. -11%
AUSTRALIA ................... -13%
JAPAN............................. -15%
US.................................... -25%
FRANCE ......................... -31%
SWEDEN ......................... -36%
UK ................................... -47%

And let's not leave out China. You can see factories shut down all over Guangdong Province near me in HK.

"China is the most stunning example of this effect of productivity and restructuring.
In spite of its remarkable rise as a global manufacturer, the number of
manufacturing jobs in China has actually fallen by some 15 million over the
past decade – more than the sum of manufacturing jobs lost by all the developed
capitalist countries combined! The explanation for this apparent paradox
lies in China’s shutting down of tens of thousands of small manufacturing
plants in rural areas (the legacy of Mao’s emphasis on local self-sufficiency)
and concentrating them in larger, more ‘efficient’ operations. As well, China
has privatized and ‘rationalized’ its former publicly-owned operations."



Libya has oil and 6 million people but it could be some time they get their people back on their feet as the NTC only agreed on ousting the tyrant. Egypt has 85 million and nothing to speak of in resources.
"Ability without character will lose." - Marv Levy
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