Okay, maybe there is another Libyan opposition. But this is the one I see, and this one makes me sick in my gut. Take a look at them, and judge for yourself:
Judging from the two characters representing the "opposition" on this show it is quite clear that these folks have no problems with the idea of turning Libya into another Kosovo or Bosnia. It really does not matter to me why/how these people came to their current stance, whether they were always sold out to the CIA or whether they suffered too much from the atrocities of the Gaddafi regime - what counts here is the bottom line and their bottom line is this: if we have to choose between Gaddafi and NATO, we choose the latter.
Of course, fundamentally that is a choice for the Libyan people to make, not for outsiders like myself. I did not live under the Gaddafi regime and I cannot really understand where these people are coming from. But being the outsider that I am I also clearly see two dominant "strains" in the so-called "opposition":
a) first, judging from the videos coming of Benghazi, there is a strong Islamists element in the opposition to Gaddafi. The regime speaks of "al-Qaeda". Well, I don't know whether there are Saudi inspired Islamists in Libya, but there is no doubt in my mind that Sunni Islamists constitute a big proportion of the anti-Gaddafi forces.
b) the second group, which one would typically see on TV, are the strongly pro-NATO pro-US intellectuals which appear on various talk-shows.
Combine Sunni Islamists and pro-Western Arabs and you truly get the "witches brew" which turned Bosnia and Kosovo into a US/NATO colony. These are the folks which attempted to turn Chechnia into a wilayah of a (US-controlled) "Islamic Caucasian Emirate".
And make no mistake: for every Sunni extremist cutting off fingers, crucifying kuffars, selling slaves or cutting the throats of those who dare to oppose his idea of Islam there is an articulate and college-educated intellectual who is fluent in English and who will explain to the corporate media that these bloodthirsty thugs are really oppressed mujahideen who embody a legitimate national liberation movement.
If there ever was a real, national, patriotic, anti-Gaddafi resistance, it now has no other option than to denounce this ugly alliance of former regime bonzes, crazed Islamists, and pro-Western intellectuals which aim at turning Libya into a US colony.
I don't know whether such a national, patriotic, anti-Gaddafi resistance ever existed or not. One one hand, if it does exist, it does not surprise me that it would never make it to the Western TV channels. On the other hand, if it did exist would it not have manifested itself somewhere, in some way?
The Saker
