Reply #84: Who's talking about THEIR motivations? I'm talking about ours.

[PurityOfEssence]

They certainly know how to use it: their threat of dealing harshly with those who didn't support them suckered France to recognize them when it looked like they might win. That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, which should be damned obvious after all this

I'm not talking at all about the various reasons for the various rebels to go into revolt; I'm talking about the U.S., France and Britain. My quarrel is with those who dismissed OUR motivations as having nothing to do with oil.

How more obvious do I need to be?

Here's the real problem with the revolt from my perspective: it simply didn't have enough support. There are dedicated democratic types and a very serious component of Islamists, many of whom are bent on vengeance for having their 1995-6 insurgency crushed and many of their kith killed. There are also out-and-out opportunists, many of whom are defectors who lived just fine when cozying up to Qaddafi for years. The problem is that there is not enough of them. They couldn't make it work. They were on the verge of being taken down.

There's a certain justice to revolutions: if there's enough of a collective gripe and enough of a collective will, they often succeed. Look at Egypt.

There wasn't that much death, there wasn't that much oppression and there are many people who like or have no ire at the Qaddafi regime. It's far worse in Syria, it's far worse in Yemen, and we shall see how all that sorts out.

We have been sold this thieving opportunism as pure altruism, and that's deeply, deeply ugly. It's also transparent as hell, and the rest of the world knows it. The fact that some of he rebels clearly yearn for a more open government is, for many of us, thoroughly offset by the dangerous and ugly Islamist contingent and the opportunism of the cynical turncoats. History also shows what nasty turns revolutions can have, as well as the sustained human cost of long struggles like this one is becoming.

My gripe is with US and the enablers of our naked imperialist war of intervention. We had no right to do this, and the motives were scandalously propagandized. I also hold the rebels accountable for persisting in something where they really didn't have adequate support, and I find their methods--especially the oil shakedown--as rather unflattering indications of character.