2016 April 2^nd

George Will laments the “slaughter” of poor Muammar Ghadafi which he manages to tie to Hillary Clinton. What a surprise! He then gleefully tells us that although this was a NATO operation “only eight of NATO’s 23 nations participated.” He fails to mention that several non-NATO nations also participated, e.g. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, among others.  He also doesn’t mention that many of these 23 NATO members didn’t have the military assets that would have been helpful in this action against Libya anyway. How would NATO have been helped by the participation of Iceland, Croatia, Albania, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to name just some of the NATO countries that did not participate in the airstrikes against Libya? George Will does not tell lies in his column but the “truth” he presents is often badly strangled.

Will claims that “this military adventure was after all, the worlds most protracted and least surreptitious assassination.” One can assume that George Will was not at all in favor of Muammar Ghadafi’s removal…or perhaps he simply objected to the means by which it was accomplished…or perhaps he needed a column with which to smack down Hillary Clinton…or perhaps all of the above!

Let’s look at some of this Libyan leader’s accomplishments: Consider the La Belle nightclub in West Germany. This was a watering hole frequented by foreigners and in particular by United States troops. In 1986 Gadhafi arranged to have a bomb placed by the music area and about 2 AM it went off. Two of the dead and 79 of the 230 injured were American service men. Many of the wounded required amputation of limbs. President Reagan struck back with air attacks against Libya. George Will makes no mention of this event in his column, perhaps just an oversight.

Then there is the Pan Am 103 bombing; yes that was also Gadhafi. A bomb was planted on this transatlantic flight and the plane blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing altogether about 270 people. At the trial, a Libyan, Abdelbesset Al Megrahi. was convicted of planting the bomb that murdered those people. He was sentenced to life in a Scottish prison and then, after serving 8.5 years, he was released because of terminal prostate cancer. He was welcomed back to Libya by a jubilant Gadhafi. Although Gadhafi continued to deny responsibility for these murders he agreed to pay 10 million dollars to each of the victim’s families as well as compensation to the families of the La Belle bombing; this made a total of over 1.5 billion dollars committed to pay off victims of actions of which Ghadafi claimed he was innocent. What an amazingly generous fellow. Keep in mind here that George Will’s column has written not one word about any of Gadhafi’s brutal activities; he seems only concerned about NATO’s attacks on Libya and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in them. Political blinders?