How the West can end Gaddafi's slaughter Geoffrey Robertson

[.Morticia.]

It's a long article and good in some ways. I think he doesn't want to state what will be the most likely outcome.

10s of thousands of activists, rebels, town leaders, bloggers, organisers, protesters, et al will be killed over the coming weeks and the west will do nothing. Only after the place has been cleaned of any kind of threat to the status quo will the west come in and take over the running of the country and secure the oil fields.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politi ... 1bjgs.html

How the West can end Gaddafi's slaughter Geoffrey Robertson
March 7, 2011

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Libyan forces battle Tripoli-bound rebels
Libyan helicopter gunships fire on a rebel force advancing west toward the capital Tripoli along the country's Mediterranean coastline.

The civilised world has the right, and duty, to intervene. Failure may mean the mass murder of innocents.

As Colonel Gaddafi, with his army and air force, his tribal supporters and his propaganda machine, begins to counter-attack, only one thing is certain. He is a man utterly without mercy. The history of his regime demonstrates how he deals with opponents: hanging them from lamp-posts, sending death squads to assassinate them as ''stray dogs'', killing them in their jail cells. His offer of amnesty is not believable and will not, in any event, be believed by the insurgents. Will the world stand idly by once he starts to deliver on his threat to ''fight to the last man and woman''?

The shadow of Iraq invasion illegality has tainted talk of ''liberal interventionism'' - unfairly, since George Bush was no liberal and Tony Blair has wrongly used it as a retrospective excuse. There was no looming humanitarian crisis in Iraq in March 2003, and the coalition of the over-willing (the US, with Britain, Spain and Australia) explicitly ruled out this justification: they claimed an entitlement to circumvent the United Nations Security Council because of a convoluted reading of an earlier resolution and a bizarre ''Bush lawyer'' claim to the right of self-defence against Saddam's imaginary weapons for mass destruction (to be fair, Saddam imagined them too.

( you can read the rest at the link )

[JimC]

Unfortunately, whatever legal argument is used, intervention by western military forces would be considered by much of the world (especially the muslim world) as simply more imperialist adventurism.

Perhaps a UN force, with mainly Chinese troops...