RPI rose to 5.5% year-on-year in February – even higher than consensus economists expected – again. The FT reports this morning that Gaddafi is sitting on $6.5 billion of gold in his war chest. Gold of course is the great inflation hedge throughout history. Britain on the other hand sold off her gold reserves at the behest of Ed Balls when he was at the Treasury. Who is more mad?
Muammar Gaddafi says the UN resolution authorising international military intervention in Libya is “invalid”.
The Libyan leader says he sent a message to US President Barack Obama defending his decision to attack rebel cities: “If you found them taking over American cities by the force of arms, tell me what you would do.”
The statement came from the government spokesman at a news conference in Tripoli.
Mr Gaddafi also sent a letter to the French and British leaders, and the UN secretary general, saying the resolution violates the UN charter and saying they would “regret” any intervention.
“Libya is not for you, Libya is for the Libyans,” he said.
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Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the colorful and flamboyant leader of Russia's LDPR party.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the colorful and flamboyant leader of Russia’s LDPR party, on Saturday called on the Muslim world to unite and support Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi.
“LDPR turns to all the people of the Muslim countries and urges them to unite and show solidarity with Muammar Gaddafi. The leadership of these countries should make a joint stand against NATO’s military efforts in Libya,” a statement by Zhirinovsky said.
“Do not ditch Libya face to face with the juggernaut of the North Atlantic bloc. Do not allow NATO to crush the democracy in Libya, especially with regard to the fact, that this country does not threaten anybody. Do not do the short-sighted oversea politicians’ bidding,” the LDPR leader said.
The tumult in Libya should be brought to stop as any other Muslim country could face the same situation, Zhirinovsky said. “The West is aggressive and resolved. They have not drawn a lesson from the negative experience of military intervention to Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Leaders from the United States, Britain, France and Arab countries are meeting in Paris today to discuss ways to act on the resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.
U.S. President Barack Obama earlier said Gaddafi must stop the violence or face military action.
That our politicians are unbearable hypocrites without borders is no secret. After all, Gaddafi himself was among Europe's best arms clients for a long time having to recycle billions of petrodollars into something tangible. It is these very same politicians (wink wink Bunga Bunga) that are now blasting him, and offering their airbases to launch offensive campaigns from. One person who however never misses an opportunity to expose each and every form of hypocrisy is Nigel Farage who takes Gollum-lookalike and European Council president Herman van Rompuy to the toolshed and anihilates him for his sycophantic attempts to appear larger than life by pandering to none other than now uber-despised dictator Colonel Gaddafi. And naturally he does it in his own very inimitable and always highly entertaining and humiliating style. We can't wait to see what haiku the Gollumite will tweet out in response...
Your rating: None Average: 5 (27 votes)I've written a couple of pieces on the Libyan uprising. In the last one I said that Gaddafi would first have to secure his base in and around Tripoli, and then turn east. And this is pretty much what he's done.
In the meanwhile, the rest of the world has issued statements, made lots of telephone calls to each other, and performed a maypole dance around the idea of imposing a no-fly zone on Libya. Perhaps at the outset, they thought that the rag-tag army of Libyan rebels that had sprung up everywhere really could oust Gaddafi all on its own. It certainly looked that way for a few days. So they hung back from imposing a no-fly zone, because they hoped one wouldn't be needed.
Probably the Gaddafi regime was caught off balance at the outset, and didn't know what was happening, or what to do about it. During this period of paralysis, numerous soldiers deserted, and quite few high-ranking members from Gaddafi's inner circle.
But this didn't last long. Gaddafi never lost his nerve. And pretty soon the military machine he controlled started working properly. The demonstrations on the streets of Tripoli were stopped. And now Az Zawiyah (and maybe Misurata) have been recaptured from the rebels. They were always going to be defeated in pretty short order by a well-equipped, professional army.
And now the race is on for Gaddafi's superior forces to recapture the Libyan eastern seaboard from the disorganised rabble which currently hold it. He has to try to do this as rapidly as possible, by land and by sea and by air, before the lumbering UN and NATO and the terminally indecisive Obama finally get round to calling for a vote on a no-fly zone, and for China or Russia to veto it.
That's why Libyan delegations flew yesterday to Cairo and Lisbon and Brussels, to try and stall the momentum towards a no-fly zone in any way they can, and delay it as long as possible. It's not a diplomatic imperative: it's a military imperative.
With that, a flood of Libyan refugees will start pouring across the border into Egypt, and sailing across the Mediterranean to Italy and anywhere that will take them. By the time NATO finally imposes a no-fly zone, Gaddafi will have all the eastern towns surrounded and cut off from each other, and will be able to reduce them one by one without any need of air power, because his army will have the tanks and artillery and troops to accomplish this alone, one city at a time. And furthermore, he'll be gaining Libyan volunteers who want to be on the winning side.
Then the NATO planes will circle uselessly overhead, as one town after another is recaptured by Gaddafi's army, and the rebels captured inside them are butchered.
And then of course there will be calls to supply food and weapons to the remaining rebels besieged inside their various towns and cities. By the time this has been agreed by NATO and the UN and the WWF and World Bank and the American Mothers Union, only Benghazi will remain. The food and weapons will arrive too late to do much more than slow the retreat of the embattled defenders towards the port.
So then there'll be calls to land an expeditionary force to re-enforce the defenders, and this will be agreed after a week or two of tea and biscuits and banana trifles, and the expeditionary force will arrive inside Benghazi harbour just as the last rebels are sailing out of it, and Gaddafi's troops have seized control of the port.
And then all concerned will have to deal with a newly invigorated and extremely angry Gaddafi regime, with all internal dissent inside Libya brutally suppressed.
And the various other tottering regimes in the region will take a leaf out of Gaddafi's handbook on How To Suppress A Revolt, and demonstrators everywhere will be bombed and mortared back into terrified submission. And any prospect of democracy in the region will have been set back a decade or more.
All of which could have been avoided if just one Western power had decided to side immediately with the fledgling rebels, and had provided them with air support and food and ammunition as rapidly as possible. It'll be an object lesson on how a decisive military leader can seize the initiative and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by a far more powerful but terminally indecisive opponent.
Gaddafi is going to win because he can think more quickly, and act more decisively, than the whole of the rest of the world put together.
See also LFTC Will Gaddafi Win?
Libya is an important partner for the West in containing al Qaeda and illegal migrants trying to reach Europe, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Monday, in an apparent warning to governments planning sanctions.
“Libya plays a vital role in regional peace and world peace,” he said in an interview with the France 24 television station. “We are an important partner in fighting al Qaeda.”
“There are millions of blacks who could come to the Mediterranean to cross to France and Italy, and Libya plays a role in security in the Mediterranean,” he said, speaking through an interpreter.
Western governments have condemned Gaddafi for the killings of hundreds of people since protests against his rule broke out last month. Several foreign leaders have demanded sanctions and an end to his four decades in power.
But in the past few years foreign governments, especially in southern Europe, have relied on Libyan help to stem the flow of sub-Saharan Africans migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean, and there has also been some cooperation in combating al Qaeda.
Gaddadi has denied his security forces shot innocenent people, and in the interview on Monday repeated his assertion that the violence was orchestrated by al Qaeda.
“The African Union has sent a commission of enquiry to show that what is published about Libya abroad is 100 percent lies,” Gaddafi said in the interview.
“The world has an image which is not based on anything and which is unreasonable,” he said. “A distorted image has been formed of peaceful demonstrations.”
An official at the African Union headquarters in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, said a fact-finding mission was being planned but had yet to set off for Tripoli.
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