Some on the right believe NATO and the US are wrong to have supported Libyan rebels

Besides all of the rhetoric that we have heard from the right over past several months below are two articles that point this out.

Monday, Aug 22, 2011 11:50 ET

War Room

Whoops, no one told the right that their Libya talking point doesn't work anymore

By Alex Pareene

AP/Harry Hamburg/Paolo Duarte/Carolyn Kaster

It's obviously premature to celebrate "victory" in Libya when no one knows what will happen next, or how difficult and bloody the process of state-building will be. (And Gadhafi is not yet actually gone.) But the news is good, and Obama's strategic approach to the conflict -- allowing France and NATO to take the lead to minimize the chance that America was seen as leading another Iraq-style war of aggression -- seems to have been the right one. (Strategically. Not necessarily legally.) As Steve Kornacki wrote this morning, this should be the end of the "Obama is too weak to lead" talking point from the right. It should be, but ... it isn't.

Today's Wall Street Journal editorial page takes a break from excusing the criminality of the executives in charge of its parent company to deliver an official house reaction to the developments in Tripoli that starts off cautious and then just descends right back into the exact same lame arguments it's been using for the last six months:

Having helped to midwife the rebel advances with air power, intelligence and weapons, NATO will have some influence with the rebels in the days ahead. The shame is how much faster Gadhafi might have been defeated, how many fewer people might have been killed, and how much more influence the U.S. might now have, if America had led more forcefully from the beginning.

Planning for this moment is precisely why we and many others had urged the State Department to engage with the rebels from the earliest days of the revolt, but the U.S. was slow to do so and only formally recognized the opposition Transitional National Council in mid-July. The hesitation gave Gadhafi hope that he could hold out and force a stalemate.

Libyans will determine their own future, but the U.S. has a stake in showing the world that NATO's intervention, however belated and ill-executed, succeeded in its goals of removing a dictator, saving lives, and promoting a new Libyan government that respects its people and doesn't sponsor global terrorism.

I'm not sure how long the editors of the Wall Street Journal think your average revolution lasts, but assuming Gadhafi's hold on power is as weak as it appears today, I would argue -- as a layman, of course -- that NATO's intervention seems neither "belated" nor "ill-executed." (I mean, it seems well-executed, in the sense that it seems to have accomplished its goal?)

But it's the line about America leading "more forcefully from the beginning" that the neocons and GOP hawks will continue to cling to no matter what actually happens in Libya. It's the same argument BFF Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham used in their joint response to this weekend's developments: "Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Qaddafi, but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower."

All-out war! From day one! With the full force of American airpower! One definite way to make a civil war faster and less bloody is for a foreign country to enter it fully, right? (It tends to unite the populace, for one thing!) And conflicts are always less bloody when America drops more American bombs. That's how we won Vietnam!

There's no point in countering McCain and the Journal's arguments with reason, of course, because these are not actually fact-based responses to news, they're just rote recitations of Republican dogma: Obama weak! (Except domestically, where he is an autocrat.)

And this is the "respectable" Republican talking point. The line from the real nuts -- I'm guessing something along the lines of "radical Obama allows Muslim Brotherhood to seize control in Libya" -- will begin bubbling up from the sewers to talk radio and Fox News and Michele Bachmann's campaign soon enough.

• Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon.

http://www.salon.com/news/libya/?story=/politics/war_room/2011/08/22/libya_talking_point

NATO Hands Terrorists Who Killed U.S. Troops Control of Libya

Al-Qaeda gets new home as rebels seize Tripoli

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Monday, August 22, 2011

While U.S. troops are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq in the supposed fight against terrorists, those same terrorists are now being handed control of an entire country, along with its lucrative resources, as a massive NATO bombardment of Tripoli aids the Al-Qaeda backed rebels in their overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

Al-Qaeda-backed rebels have now seized most of Tripoli, with pockets of forces loyal to Gaddafi still offering resistance as the Libyan leader vows he will be “with you until the end”. Gaddafi’s sons were seized by rebels while Gaddafi himself has gone into hiding outside the city.

The United States formally recognized the rebel council as the country’s legitimate government last month, despite the fact that the rebel army was admittedly spearheaded by Al-Qaeda terrorists who are supposedly the target of a multi-decade “war on terror” that is now in its tenth year and has cost the U.S. a staggering $5.4 trillion since 9/11.

Shortly after the start of the conflict in March, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the leader of the anti-Gaddafi rebel army,admitted that the rebel ranks include Al-Qaeda terrorists who have killed U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Al-Hasidi described the fighters as “patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists,” adding that “members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader”.

The Telegraph confirmed that Al-Qaeda fighters had joined with anti-Gaddafi rebels in a story entitled, Libya: the West and al-Qaeda on the same side, in which Richard Spencer wrote how, “WikiLeaks cables, independent analysts and reporters have all identified supporters of Islamist causes among the opposition to Col Gaddafi’s regime, particularly in the towns of Benghazi and Dernah.”

Although NATO and the U.S. admitted that “flickers” of Al-Qaeda members had infiltrated rebel ranks, in reality, they were leading the anti-Gaddafi forces in several areas of the country. As the Wall Street Journal reported in a piece entitled, Ex-Mujahedeen Help Lead Libyan Rebels, Al-Qaeda terrorists who worked directly for Bin Laden were tasked with recruiting, training and acting as front line field commanders for the rebel army.

Abdel Hakim al-Hasady, an influential Islamic preacher and high-school teacher who spent five years at a training camp in eastern Afghanistan, oversees the recruitment, training and deployment of about 300 rebel fighters from Darna.

Mr. Hasady’s field commander on the front lines is Salah al-Barrani, a former fighter from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which was formed in the 1990s by Libyan mujahedeen returning home after helping to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan and dedicated to ousting Mr. Gadhafi from power.

Sufyan Ben Qumu, a Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden’s holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in Afghanistan, is training many of the city’s rebel recruits.

Referring to the fighters as “freelance jihadists”, Benotman said that the men were part of a North African terror cell known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM), and have completely infiltrated the rebel army.

A 2007 West Point report indicated that the Benghazi-Darnah-Tobruk area of Libya is a world capital for Al-Qaeda or mujahideen suicide bomber recruitment. Author Webster Tarpley details this intelligence in his excellent analysis piece, The CIA’s Libya Rebels: The Same Terrorists who Killed US, NATO Troops in Iraq.

Western intelligence agencies have also utilized their links with Libyan Al-Qaeda cells to target Gaddafi in recent history.

In 2002, French intelligence experts revealed how western intelligence agencies bankrolled a Libyan Al-Qaeda cellcontrolled directly by Osama Bin Laden to hatch a plot to kill Gaddafi that was foiled in March 1996. The cell was led by Anas al-Liby, who was with Bin Laden in Sudan before Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan.

Indeed, it was Gaddafi’s Libya who put out the first Interpol warrant for Bin Laden’s arrest in 1998. Western intelligence agencies blocked the warrant from being pursued, allowing Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda to go on and kill more than 200 people in the truck bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Some of the very rebels now being funded, trained, and given embassies by Britain and the U.S. were part of the Al-Qaeda cell that tried to kill Gaddafi on behalf of the United States and Britain 15 years ago.

As a result of the United States’ and NATO’s alliance with Al-Qaeda terrorists, Muslim extremists will now be given a free hand to take control of Libya and handed a sizeable portion of the country’s oil and gold wealth to entrench their dominance and ensure all remnants of the Gaddafi regime are swept away.

Even the establishment media has now been forced to acknowledge that Gaddafi’s absence will create a vacuum in Libya ready and waiting for Al-Qaeda militants to fill the void. ABC’s Good Morning America quizzed Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman on whether developments would allow Al-Qaeda to gain a foothold in the country, a question he was unable to answer.

What is almost certain is that the relatively high living standards of Libyans living in cities like Tripoli will now be eviscerated as NATO powers allow the country to be subsumed by radical extremists as the region itself becomes little more than an outpost for the next geopolitical conquest by globalist forces.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/nato-hands-terrorists-who-killed-u-s-troops-control-of-libya.html