To the Shores of Tripoli

Sometime in the next month or so, Little Stevie Wonder, the preemeer of Canada will be asking his parliamentary cronies to 'have patience' while he extends Canada's role in leading the forces of freedom against the world's current tyrant in Libya. I imagine the patience part will have more to do with those cronies who think the his government is still spending like a drunk on a payday spree, for it couldn't have much to do with the transmogrification of the 'time to fall' period, vis a vis Mr. Ghaddafi,  from a matter of  days to months. If nothing else, 'Stay the Course' is a mantra Steve apparently learned in utero.

And how are things in sunny Libya these days? Well it depends on who you're reading,  but none of it is that 'light at the end of the chunnel'  horsewallop.  Positively speaking, the rebels (now that couldn't be the best word for legitimate forces of freedom) keep on keeping on, lately toward Tripoli, or holding-off the onslaught of Ghaddafi's minions elsewhere. The first desert boots are on the ground - on the feet of some private 'security' personnel, there to offer 'training' to the ragtag rebel forces. "Leadership" would definitely be faster, but, perhaps, too expensive and might not sit well with the Libyans. The French and Brits have decided that deploying attack helicopters is warranted, to do a 'blue knight' and winkle the evildoing armour out of city allies and bazaars. Lately, the rebels are complaining that Ghaddafi is hiding all his 'good stuff' in or near mosques and hospitals and, only to-day, in the ruins of some of those reminders of Roman glory that dot the Mediterranean seashore. If grandpas 'had to' bomb Pompeii to winkle out the panzers, great-grandkids Bubba and Harold wouldn't think more than once about 'restructuring' Leptis Magna or Sabratha. NATO "isn't ruling anything out", even some world  heritage destruction would be Ghaddafi's fault.

On the negative side, things don't seem to be changing fast enough to have Ghaddafi get the 'willies' and go away. A bombing 'uptick' last week seemed aimed at removing more sand from bunker sites, or blasting Muammar's tent to shreds than it did actually 'awing' anybody. The NATO 'campaign' seems to be on summer holiday. It appears that the bombing might be more of a joke than anything else, if what the Toronto Star's Rosie 'the Riveter' DiManno is reporting from behind the lines, the Gahaddafites seem to be laughing it up! So it's either they're not taking NATO all that seriously, or they're doing the 'Berlin bunker thing' on a demi-national scale in a sort of latter-day gotterdammerung party - without the artillery.

Our dear friends in America seem to be willing, if not actually encouraging, NATO to take over the whole thing and leave them out of it.  If it's to be believed, the US has a very light footprint in Libya, some CIA spooks and US-based patriots trying to set up a cogent 'government' and find out who the 'bad guys' from AQ might be to head off any applecart-upsetting when mission becomes successful. That should have been easy, for Ghaddafi had most of them in jail, but the rebels released them.



So, right now, the Libyan thing is a 'non-war', in many places it's not even a media event - like in Canada or the US. It soon won't be an African event either, if NATO succeeds in getting satellite access blocked for Libya's government TV stations. One would have thunk that would have been right up there on the first day target list. Apparently not. They let Ghaddafi go on "lying" and "using propaganda against them", to show how 'free' everything is?

And that's a good thing for Stevie Harper's Government are getting ready for their hard-earned summer break which will see him ruling as the national autocrat until they reconvene around Thanksgiving Day (in Canada that's at the beginning of October) to extend our Libyan 'mission' to Christmas.

The House of Commons , yesterday, "unanimously"  (but with "vigorous" debate and a threat that such wouldn't happen in future) approved the extension of Canada's 'mission civilatrice' to the poor benighted Lbyan people. It also took the rather unique step of recognizing a non-group of 'rebels' as the legitimate national government. I don't even think the Commies recognized the Viet Cong as the legitimate government of anything before they won. But Canada points to a proud tradition of support for 'governments-in-exile' during WW2 ( what would they have been otherwise?),  Jean Bertrand Aristide in exile 1 (before the USA convinced us that he was really just an asshole-in-disguise and we joined in the UN-sponsored 'regime change' in that benighted nation.). I believe we even 'recognized' Pol Pot at one time.

That bit of hypocrisy is further diminished by the pusillanimous thumbsucking and political pettifoggery that holds up what we are doing trying to kill Ghaddafi  as some sort of moral exercise the Libyans really need. If we are so noble, why the restrictions? Why only $60 million and why only three months? Why aren't we  loading the invasion barges with unemployed lumberjacks and making plans for Syria, Yemen, Darfur or Bahrain, too? There are a ton of  places the UN has a responsibility for us to protect.