The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #136495   Message #3154404
Posted By: bobad
15-May-11 - 08:15 AM
Thread Name: BS: Bombing of Tripoli March-April, 2011
Subject: RE: BS: Bombing of Tripoli March-April, 2011
Good article in The Telegraph    Handwringers take note.

Highlights:

"Even for an Arab dictator, it is an unusually cynical variant of the "human shield" gambit. On the roof of his Tripoli command bunker, Colonel Gaddafi has installed a children's fairground.

Forty feet away from the crater made on Thursday by a NATO bomb, young boys and girls played happily on a roundabout shaped like a giant tea set."

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The reporter speaking to random citizens in Tripoli:

"Within thirty seconds, I had turned a corner and was out of sight in the narrow covered passages of the souk. And within ten minutes, I had spoken to three people who told me, quite bluntly, that they despised Gaddafi and wanted him gone.

"He is mad," said the man in the striped shirt, having first taken the precaution of checking my passport to make sure that I was indeed British."I want to be able to criticise him – why shouldn't I? He has ruined this country."

Another trader told me about the year he had spent in southern England. "Sarkozy, Cameron, they are doing what we all want," he said. "Tell everyone that we don't mind the bombing at all. We want the government to change." A third person said that the shopkeepers in the souk had been ordered to stay open, even though there was very little business, to preserve an appearance of normality."

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"Even at the bomb sites themselves - visited on official trips in the middle of the night, just after they happen, or the next day - almost no-one is hostile. It must have something to do with the fact that, in two months of attacks, almost none of Tripoli's civilians have been harmed. "We know that the regime's claims about civilian casualties are b----," said one customer who approached me in a shop as I was buying a soft drink. "There is a lot of opposition to Gaddafi in Tripoli.""