Somali pirates can seize oil tankers but Libya's navy can't

This story tells you everything you need to know about the sad-sack stooges NATO left in charge after the glorious campaign to bring freedom and democracy to Libya three years ago.

They don't control the oil terminals. They don't control the militias. They don't control their own parliament.

They don't govern.

What are they doing other than organizing the next "donor conference?"

Celebrating the basic human decency of a lying stooge

Must admit we made something of a faux pas with this post from a couple weeks ago, praising the integrity of former Liberal leader Bob Rae.

Bob has betrayed the trust we had in him with his unfortunate comments about Libya that appeared in the Globe and Mail today.

Bob did get one thing right; it's rare for an establishment commentator, especially one who was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the war, to admit that two years after the demise of Gaddafi the country is a shambles.

But here's the whopper that floored me; "Gaddafi did not invest in people, institutions, or infrastructure."

Gaddafi's people enjoyed free housing, health care, and education. Before we liberated them they enjoyed the highest standard of living on the African continent.

Under Gaddafi, tens of thousands of Libyans studied abroad at the expense of the state.

Gaddafi built one of the greatest infrastructure projects of all time, the Great Man-made river.

And notice how Bullshit Bob bemoans the fact that "aid money is drying up."

How is it possible that Gaddafi was able to do all the above without aid money, but now that we've liberated them the Libyans have become aid dependent?

Perhaps the key to this mystery is revealed by the note at the end of the article. Bob is working with the "National Democratic Institute." That is one of a multiplicity of US funded "democracy promoters" busy on the ground to help guide nascent democracies towards the "right" sort of democracy.

And only a Washington approved democracy will ever be the right sort.

Libyans dying for a drink

And who can blame them?

That "freedom" thing NATO gifted them doesn't seem to be working out so well. Prices for everyday goods through the roof, jobs non-existent, security but a tattered memory...

Even the hard-core Gaddafi haters want to reach for a drink... at least the ones who have to live in the country.

Turkish news sources report that 38 Libyans have died in the past couple of days as the result of consuming sub-par home-made hooch, with almost 400 others seriously ill.

This is of course Gaddafi's fault. Instead of donating billions to pie-in-the-sky African infrastructure projects just to antagonize the IMF and the US, he should have been nurturing a proper distillery industry in his Islamic country.

No wonder we had to get rid of him.

Libya two years on; the most prosperous African state now a basket case

Latest news out of Libya as we celebrate the second anniversary of the outbreak of the NATO "revolution" is that the Libyan government has suspended parliament because they have no safe place to meet.

If Libya's parliamentarians have no place in their country where they can safely meet, what does that say for security for the common citizens?

The few remaining cheerleaders for the NATO intervention like to point out that oil production has returned to pre-revolutionary levels. What they don't like to acknowledge is that the funds from those oil sales seem to end up somewhere other than Libya. Libya's economy has gone from enjoying annual surpluses to running huge deficits.

Already the IMF is lecturing Libya that the social welfare state they enjoyed under Gaddafi is no longer affordable. Welcome to "free" Libya; just another African basket case.

Maximilian Forte has written an excellent summary of NATO's achievement in the Libyan Spring.

Libya a basket case but it's still Gaddafi's fault

A few days ago the New York Times had an op-ed that shows that the editorial writers have moved from their initial cheerleading for the NATO war on Libya, through a period of cautious optimism to their current position, which might be called hedging their bets.

We are told that the NATO-decimated water supply doesn't yet work properly, huge heaps of garbage line the streets, and thousands of heavily-armed young men lounge around with no meaningful work.

All of this, a year after the demise of the dictator, remains his fault, because he never allowed the country to build "strong state institutions or a civil society."

How hard can it be to organize those thousands of unemployed young men to do something about those mountains of rubbish? Does it really take "strong state institutions?"

In a remarkably even-handed report the African Development Bank last June summarized the living standards that had been achieved under Gaddafi's rule. These folks were no friends of the dictator, but nevertheless point out that progress made during the Gaddafi rule was unprecedented on the continent.

Universal health care, universal education for both boys and girls, generous social welfare benefits, subsidized housing. In many respects Libya more closely resembled a European welfare state than anything in Africa.

Today Al Jazeera brings us this story. Seems like we've heard it before; rival militias having it out in Tripoli's city center with small arms and RPGs. And we have heard it before! It's a story available on a weekly or even daily basis for anyone who wants to look for it.

The story quotes locals who claim they called the police but the police never show up. That's because the militias are better armed than they are! As a result, whether law and order are present on any given street on any particular day depends on the whims of the local militia commanders.

A year on it's time to stop making excuses. NATO transformed a stable and prosperous country into a  rudderless shambles. Talking patronizing twaddle about Libya's  "nascent democracy" doesn't excuse NATO's responsibility.

The Times notes that "chaos and corruption will breed widespread cynicism" or worse.

Worse?

The day may yet come when even America's newspaper of record is forced to acknowledge that Libyans were better off under Gaddafi.

Post-Gaddafi Libya run by "stooges of the West"

How gratifying to hear the hardened Islamist fighters of eastern Libya say exactly what this blog has maintained all along; that the bumboys that NATO put in place after ousting Gaddafi are there to loot the oil wealth and do the bidding of the West.

Reuters had a stringer in the city of Derna for a few days recently, and his report is far removed from the inane happy talk we are accustomed to hearing from the State Department and their cheerleaders in the media. Any attempt to rebuild Libya along the lines of a Western-style democracy is doomed to fail.

Aside from show projects like the supposed elections this spring, it is highly debatable to what extent those efforts are at all genuine. What the Nations of Virtue seem to have settled for is a kleptocracy with a bit of pro-Western democratic window dressing.

Big Oil has the run of the oil fields. A small clique of Libyans, mostly expats based in London, control the oil wealth while the country goes cap in hand to the World Bank for reconstruction financing.

The Islamic fighters have other ideas. The oil wealth belongs to all Libyans, not to those few favored by the West. Democracy must be subservient to Sharia rule. The countries who destroyed Libya's infrastructure in their nine month bombing campaign should pay for the reconstruction.

And above all, Libyans must be masters in their own house.

Libyan militias swept out of Benghazi

That's the headline on the Reuters news site at the moment.

At first blush you want to think, finally! The people are putting a stop to the rule of misrule by the militias that have run amok in the last year.

Or maybe the non-existent central government has finally got its ducks in enough of a row to establish a bit of law and order. So far they've not shown any interest in governing anything other than the oil exports.

But when you read the article you realize it's nothing of the sort. One Islamist militia has been swept out of town by other Islamist militias.

That's what Western media consider a good-news story out of Libya a year after we dispatched the Colonel.