Middle East Focus: Liberating Arabs: A Different Libya Teetering on a Different Brink………….

Arabia Deserta

Liberating Arabs: A Different Libya Teetering on a Different Brink………….

Rattlesnake Ridge

BFF

“A gun fight erupted in central Tripoli on Tuesday, killing two, as a group of former rebels from the western city of Misrata clashed with a unit of ex-fighters from the Libyan capital, witnesses said. The two groups of former rebels who helped topple the regime of slain leader Moamer Gathafi traded anti-aircraft and heavy machinegun fire as they fought in broad daylight in a Tripoli neighbourhood. The fighting broke out between Al-Zawiyah and Al-Saidi streets near a building used as intelligence headquarters by the former regime. Reporters saw the building and the entire neighbourhood surrounded by hundreds of rebels who ousted Gathafi, several of them armed with Kalashnikovs, amid steady gunfire. Massud al-Khadar, a member of a militia from the neighbourhood, said: "Two of our (fighters) were killed in the clashes which began this morning." He said the violence started when a rival militia from Misrata attacked his group based near the former intelligence building. Ex-rebels, who remain organised in militia brigades, are visible in many parts of the capital, and some have taken control of former government buildings to use as headquarters…………”

These guys are not the Minutemen or the Continental Army or the Civil War volunteers. Libya, its cities and the country, are gradually turning into a land of militias and warlords, fighting over turf and money. Soon Libya may become a country with various militias financed by petro-money (Arab and possibly Iranian as well). As usual, the only ideology these days is with the Islamists, the Muslim Brothers and the Salafi Wahhabis. Their ideology unites them and makes them a formidable force (or rather formidable forces if they owe allegiance to different foreign masters). There is an economics professor at the University of Washington near where I live who left for Libya some weeks ago. The local media said he was going back to help rebuild a new Libya. Last month the local media reported that he was back in Seattle. Apparently he didn’t last long in the new Libya: that tells me a lot.

The West managed to liberate Libya from the Qaddafis, just as the West liberated Iraq from the Ba’ath Party before that. Now the West is being urged by some of the Syrian “opposition” and by outside Arabs, oddly including the Salafis, to intervene and liberate Syria. They don’t mention the “West” of course: the favorite kosher term is the “international community”. But we all know that the “international community” starts in Paris and extends through London to Washington (or better yet: it starts in Washington and extends to London and Paris). As time gos by and the West hesitates the same parties, including the Salafis, may shorten their horizons and urge the Turks or Israelis to liberate them.
Cheers
mhg

m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com