"Jihadists gain hold after death of Khadafy" by Robert F. Worth | New York Times, January 20, 2013
WASHINGTON — As the uprising closed in around him, Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy warned that if he fell, chaos and holy war would overtake North Africa. ‘‘Bin Laden’s people would come to impose ransoms by land and sea,’’ he told reporters. ‘‘We will go back to the time of Redbeard, of pirates, of Ottomans imposing ransoms on boats.’’
Recently that unhinged prophecy has acquired a grim new currency.
In Mali, French paratroopers arrived this month to battle an advancing force of jihadi fighters who already control an area twice the size of Germany.
Related: French Fail in Libya
In Algeria, a one-eyed Islamist bandit organized the brazen takeover of an international gas facility, taking hostages that included more than 40 Americans and Europeans.
See: Algerian Aberration
And down the memory hole it goes.
Coming just four months after a US ambassador was killed by jihadists in Libya, those assaults have contributed to a sense that North Africa — long a dormant backwater for Al Qaeda — is turning into another zone of dangerous instability, much like Syria....
I will be getting to Benghazi later today, and there is a reason Syria went to hell in a hand-basket until Assad beat them back.
Another prophet:
"General Wesley
Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing
campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars
being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the
list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul
Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia [and Lebanon]."
I'd laugh except it reads like a protocol.
The mayhem in this vast desert region has many roots, but it is also a sobering reminder that the euphoric toppling of dictators in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt has come at a price.
Also see: Sunday Globe Special: Tunisia Taken Over by "Al-CIA-Duh"
They are taking over everywhere!
‘‘It’s one of the darker sides of the Arab uprisings,’’ said Robert Malley, the Middle East and North Africa director at the International Crisis Group. ‘‘Their peaceful nature may have damaged Al Qaeda and its allies ideologically, but logistically, in terms of the new porousness of borders, the expansion of ungoverned areas, the proliferation of weapons, the disorganization of police . . . it has been a real boon to jihadists.’’
Wait a minute. I have BEEN TOLD by MY GOVERNMENT and MEDIA that these wars were NECESSARY to make us SAFER!
The crisis in Mali could test the fragile new governments of Libya and its neighbors, in a region where any Western military intervention provides a rallying cry for Islamists.
I think the Arab Spring has been an engineered event so that it could be proved that "Islamists" can't govern.
And cui bono?
--more--"
