With Libya we have a country ruled by a brutal dictator who is "widely regarded in the West as the principal financier of international terrorism" and who has an "appalling" human rights record...
"Over the past three decades, Libya’s human rights record has been appalling. It has included the abduction, forced disappearance or assassination of political opponents; torture and mistreatment of detainees; and long-term detention without charge or trial or after grossly unfair trials. Today hundreds of people remain arbitrarily detained, some for over a decade, and there are serious concerns about treatment in detention and the fairness of procedures in several on-going high profile trials before the Peoples’ Courts. Libya has been a closed country for United Nations and non-governmental human rights investigators."
And yet we now have word from Bush and Blair that because Col. Moammar Gadhafi has agreed to
dismantle its WMD programs they are ready to welcome Libya back into the international community.
Why are they so willing to negotiate with Libya when they insisted that military force was the only way to deal with Iraq? Saddam Hussein had already made the same agreements that Gadhafi is proposing. He said they had no more WMDs and he allowed U.N. inspectors in to check it out. None were found. Why couldn't we have handled Iraq the same way we are doing in Libya? Why was regime change necessary in Iraq but it is not in Libya? Is the freedom of the Iraqi people more important than the freedom of the Libyan people?
The difference is simply that Bush's foreign policy is not based on principles - it is determined by political opportunism. We needed a war to distract the country from the poor economy and to make it look like we were doing something about the 9-11 attacks.
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