I have a feeling they have waited a long time for this opportunity...

Can you imagine what the left here would do to us?

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Guy, personally I'm happy to see the revolts and don't think that the US has any place to intercede. Let the chips fall where they may.
If Egypt decides that they want some of the Muslim Brotherhood in power, so be it. My personal take is that the Muslim Brotherhood has been very much maligned in western press. We supported a dictator who brutally used secret police on the population of Egypt - we've forfeited any involvement in the formation of their new government.

Almost exactly my sentiments. How about that?

Expy - If they want Muslim brotherhood, that's THEIR business. Its your job to keep it OUT of the US which we are failing to do (certainly not due to my efforts I might add). You do that by protesting these titanic immigration quotas that we have of 1 million a year.

Guy & Ifly

Expy, over 90% of women & girls in Egypt have undergone genital mutilation. Many of those women are Coptic Christian. Despite a ban from Mubarak, people continue to do this to their girls. They've been doing it there since time of the Pharaohs. I'm a bit more leery of the Muslim Brotherhood than Ifly is, but I doubt they will be able to influence that practice one way or the other. They'll only stop when they decide to. As an American, what I can do is oppose foreign aid to those countries, be vocal & obnoxious about not allowing that in this country, push for the prosecution of Americans & foreign residents who do this to their daughters or send them to another country for that purpose, prosecute medical professionals who do it here, and support the granting of asylum for people who make it to the US to escape having it done to them or their daughters.

At the end of the day, we're going to suffer from these overthrows only because we never pursued a sane national energy policy that would have eliminated our dependence on these insane countries. Really, that's our own damn fault.

Grain of salt folks.

Just sayin'.

That's horrible.

If Genital Mutilation is going to be the standard topic destroyer in all these "Revolution" threads may we just get it off to its own topic somewhere?

THANK YOU VIDEOPRO for not posting those pics, like some others have done in different threads. I catch a glimpse of something like that, and I literally can't get it out of my head, and it horrifies me for days.

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THANK YOU VIDEOPRO for not posting those pics, like some others have done in different threads. I catch a glimpse of something like that, and I literally can't get it out of my head, and it horrifies me for days.

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. "
John Stuart Mill
English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873)


Violent death is not pretty. Never has been, never will be.

I was in Riyadh with my aircrew in 1995 after Ramadan. The Saudis don't carry out punishment during Ramadan; they save it for after Ramadan ends. Several of us went to chop chop square for an event we thereafter referred to as "Post Ramadan Triple Header '95".
At least one of the guys admitted that he had nightmares for a week and kept waking up, looking for one of the executed next to his bed. I had no problems afterward, but I'm not saying that's a good thing ... I came very close to pushing up daisies during Desert Shield/Storm so I was (to quote Pink Floyd) 'comfortably numb'.
My stories are 'G' rated compared to ground combat ops soldiers. I can understand how so many have PTSD.

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Violent death is not pretty. Never has been, never will be.

Whatever. Doesn't mean I can't have a choice of not seeing gore when I read a forum.

......

You crack me up Dakine...

Fidgit, you completely misinterpreted my post. I can see how; it wasn't written well.
And as for posting that picture on TF, IIRC, that would be a TOS violation if it was posted for everyone to view.

I'm glad that images such as that get posted on the internet. Too many have cognitive dissonance when it comes to death in warfare. It's a good reminder that armed conflict should be the very last solution to resolve disagreements.

Ifly

CNN just had a brief statement by Gaddafi stating that he is still in Libya.

Futures are blood red- esp ftse mib-italia

makes me wonder.

tomorrow's going to be a long one

Libyan Air Force Mirage F-1 Defected to Malta

Gaddafi's rule appears in jeopardy

Gaddafi makes a brief speech from inside a car holding a white umbrella out the door when it's not raining? Is he totally nuts or is there a deeper meaning?

Ah, so that's why they were saying Gaddafi Poppins on Twitter.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

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In sum, Gaddafi seems to have managed to destroy almost everything he touched: infrastructure, normal human interaction, the energy industry, the media — every aspect of life bore his destructive handprint.

So what does his apparent departure portend? Some random thoughts:

1) This is the first totalitarian, collectivist terror state to topple in this period of Middle Eastern unrest, which raises the question of whether others (e.g., Syria, Iran) might also face the same fate as Tunisia and Egypt, despite their willingness to shoot and kill indiscriminately and ban the international press.

2) Gaddafi hated the United States. Anti-American propaganda was spoon-fed to the population hourly (I remember watching the evenings newsreels’ ad nauseam depictions of U.S. “crimes” in Iraq). We are disliked by some countries’ protesters for cozying up to Saudi, Tunisian, Egyptian, and Pakistani authoritarians; does it necessarily follow that we will be liked by the opponents of anti-American authoritarians? Does anti-anti-Americanism translate into pro-Americanism?

I doubt it. In 2006, I heard constantly from my minders and others that Gaddafi was installed through some sort of U.S./Zionist plot to impoverish Libya. In general, if the Middle East becomes more ‘democratic’ (as in plebiscites without constitutions), we should brace, at least in the beginning, for a grassroots outpouring of anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Semitic venom, given what we have seen in various polls of popular opinion.

3) We were far less culpable than the Europeans in dealing with this monster — especially the British and Italians, who simply overlooked Libyans’ virtual imprisonment and looked for profits wherever possible.

4) The country has great natural beauty, a stunning coastline, a central location, untapped gas and oil reserves (Gaddafi’s incompetence often meant that oil was not so easy to extract and squander), incredible antiquities — and unlimited tourist and commercial potential should it ever embrace constitutional government.

5) Libyans seemed to me terrified of Egyptians, including the tens of thousands of illegal-alien Egyptians in their country. The oil fields in their lightly populated country are a little too near for their comfort to the border of the oil-needy, overpopulated Egyptian powerhouse. The oil-rich border regions between the two countries will be of interest in the days ahead.

6) What is the U.S. official policy in all this? Is there a consistent one? When it came to encouraging anti-theocratic protesters in Iran, our policy was not to meddle; then we meddled quite a lot in anti-authoritarian protests in Egypt. Cannot the administration at last state that it supports non-violent, gradual transitions to consensual government, institutionalized secular human rights, and an independent judiciary — regardless of whether the overthrown government was hard-right authoritarian or hard-left totalitarian or theocratic Islamist? Since all governments and figures in the Middle East seem transitory, it would be far better to establish a policy that is principled and constant, no matter the ideologies and authoritarians involved.

The whole article is at: http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/prin....

Thank you for not posting those pictures inline. I have a strong stomach, but I also have kids that come into my office all the time, and I would have hated to explain to them what "that" was.

Mubarak didn't attempt to crush the protesters, and he lost power. This lesson is not lost on the other tyrants in the region. I suspected that they would very quickly attempt to do so, and I feared that the first place to follow in Egypt's footsteps would be subjected to these kinds of horrors. I hope that despite what may be happening there now, that they will succeed. I hope that they will be able to also find and kill Gadaffi, so that when this moves on to the next regime, that that tyrant will consider whether he'd rather loose power or his life.

Yes, those pics are rugged. I have a strong stomach too, but like the others are glad they weren't inline so I could prepare myself a bit and not get shocked.
Oddly enough the ones with the faces intact bother me less.

We don't often realize that we are "meat" just like any other mammal, until something like that drives it home.
Unsettling.

According to this Libyan Youtube poster, Gaddafi has Tripoli on lockdown by mercenaries from other countries.

Tunisia: Ben Ali flees before anything happens
Egypt: Mubarak tries repression, but is inept
Libya: Gaddafi goes all out on his people

There is a clear pattern here towards escalation. Gaddafi probably cleared the streets like this for now, but he is in a hopeless position. The world holds it's breath again, but I doubt that the outcome will be different. Any regime that still controls it's population with fear and violence is doomed after this.

Who's next? All the good one's are burning fast... more like who's left? Burma, North Korea, who else?

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Who's next?

This is the page you want to follow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%.... Info on every country and every dictator that's been affected so far.

NINETEEN COUNTRIES -- and counting!

And that number doesn't include the "minor" unrest (so far) in places you might not expect, like Albania, Bolivia, Gabon, and Kazakhstan.

This is shaping up to be a hell of a month.