Now, pricked by some primordial decency, it can't seem to toe the line so consistently.
Somewhere around a hundred people had died in riots in Libya before the shrieking and hand-wringing moral goody two-shoes moralists guilted and hammered us into bloody and illegal intervention. None that I can see were killed in any incident that didn't involve arson against the government or had armed protesters among the "innocent"
Contrast that to Syria, where more than 50 TIMES THE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN KILLED, yet the butter-won't-melt-in-my-mouth moral narcissism garners nary a whisper. Oh, there's that Israel issue, too. There's also Russia. There's also the fact that Syria has a real military; we don't tend to attack the strong.
Contrast that against Bahrain and Yemen.
I give Human Rights Watch some credit for trying to actually live up to their mission statements, but they have irrevocably thrown away much of their credibility. The sheer racism and lack of true support of the Benghazi Islamists proves the point.
Human Rights Watch hasn't prostituted itself to the degree that Al Jazeera has, but that's to be damned by faint praise: Al Jazeera and its Qatari overlords were deeply, deeply ugly in the Libyan mess: they lied, violated the UN arms embargo, deliberately distorted their news reporting to vilify the Qaddafi regime while whitewashing the French and British efforts. The Qaddafi regime was not a "nice" or "fair" operation, but it had its points.
It's not over. Our media may do its best to quash any reality from seeping out, since both parties crave the oil and know they've cynically taken advantage of the weak to reap a tidy windfall, but chances are rather slim that the lid can be totally kept on this mess.
It's VERY simple: Qaddafi was not a compliant leader willing to simply give away his country's resources at our behest. When he rewrote the French contracts in 2009 so that they'd only get 27% of the oil produced instead of 50% and did so with the threat of nationalization, he was a dead man. The American companies left very quickly after that and this was also due to hefty signing bonuses and byzantine regulations.
Asshole selfish blinkered little-bo-peep supporters of our and Europe's energy policy cling vehemently to the concept that there was no oil component; they are wrong in the clear light of day: it was ALL ABOUT OIL. (Okay, to be fair, his monetary policy and the telecom satellite were problems, too; how DARE a local fuck with so many money-making enterprises.)
Even our compliant media can't hide all of this. It's disgusting.
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