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Gaddafi's Oddest Idea: Abolish Switzerland

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I find the dismantling of a tiny country to be a less odd than suggesting Obama for permanent president. Heck, it's probably less odd than suggesting he get a permanent security council seat as Leader of the AU or that he is the 'King of Kings'. All that's just from his most recent speech/introduction.


ps. I, too, was making G-Q-addafi terrorist references 10 years ago (20 even, I'm old).

How could anyone have missed this?!

Throughout the 1970s, his regime was implicated in subversion and terrorist activities in both Arab and non-Arab countries. By the mid-1980s, he was widely regarded in the West as the principal financier of international terrorism. Reportedly, Gaddafi was a major financier of the "Black September Movement" which perpetrated the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, and was accused by the United States of being responsible for direct control of the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 200, of whom a substantial number were U.S. servicemen. He is also said to have paid "Carlos the Jackal" to kidnap and then release a number of Saudi Arabian and Iranian oil ministers. Tensions between Libya and the West reached a peak during the Ronald Reagan administration, which tried to overthrow Gaddafi. The Reagan administration viewed Libya as a belligerent rogue state because of its uncompromising stance on Palestinian independence, its support for revolutionary Iran in the 1980–1988 war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq (see Iran–Iraq War), and its backing of "liberation movements" in the developing world. Reagan himself dubbed Gaddafi the "mad dog of the Middle East". In December 1981, the US State Department invalidated US passports for travel to Libya, and in March 1982, the U.S. declared a ban on the import of Libyan oil [9] and the export to Libya of U.S. oil industry technology; European nations did not follow suit. Libya has also been a supporter of the Polisario Front in their fight against Spanish colonialism and Moroccan military occupation.

In 1984, British police constable Yvonne Fletcher was shot outside the Libyan Embassy in London while policing an anti-Gaddafi demonstration. A burst of machine-gun fire from within the building was suspected of killing her, but Libyan diplomats asserted their diplomatic immunity and were repatriated. The incident led to the breaking off of diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Libya for over a decade.[citation needed]

The U.S. attacked Libyan patrol boats from January to March 1986 during clashes over access to the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya claimed as territorial waters. On 15 April 1986, Ronald Reagan ordered major bombing raids, dubbed Operation El Dorado Canyon, against Tripoli and Benghazi killing 45 Libyan military and government personnel as well as 15 civilians.[1] This strike followed U.S. interception of telex messages from Libya's East Berlin embassy suggesting Libyan government involvement in a bomb explosion on 5 April in West Berlin's La Belle discothèque, a nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Among the fatalities of the 15 April retaliatory attack by the U.S. was Gaddafi's adopted daughter, Hannah. Libya responded by firing two Scud missiles at the U.S. Coast Guard navigation station on the Italian island of Lampedusa, in retaliation for the bombing. The missiles landed in the sea, and caused no damage.[citation needed]

In late 1987, a merchant vessel, the MV Eksund, was intercepted. Destined for the IRA, a large consignment of arms and explosives supplied by Libya was recovered from the Eksund. British intelligence believed this was not the first and that Libyan arms shipments had previously reached the IRA. (See Provisional IRA arms importation.)

For most of the 1990s, Libya endured economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation as a result of Gaddafi's refusal to allow the extradition to the United States or Britain of two Libyans accused of planting a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Through the intercession of South African President Nelson Mandela – who made a high-profile visit to Gaddafi in 1997 – and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Gaddafi agreed in 1999 to a compromise that involved handing over the defendants to the Netherlands for trial under Scottish law.:[10] U.N. sanctions were thereupon suspended, but U.S. sanctions against Libya remained in force.

An alleged plot by Britain's secret intelligence service to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi, when rebels attacked Gaddafi's motorcade near the city of Sirte in February 1996, was described as "pure fantasy" by former foreign secretary Robin Cook, although the FCO later admitted: "We have never denied that we knew of plots against Gaddafi."[11]

In August 2003, two years after Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi's conviction, Libya wrote to the United Nations formally accepting 'responsibility for the actions of its officials' in respect of the Lockerbie bombing and agreed to pay compensation of up to US$2.7 billion – or up to US$10 million each – to the families of the 270 victims.
Click to expand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_al-Gaddafi


I have no idea how someone could wonder who he was before last week.
 
Why am I reading Gaddafi's name as Gaffadi and can we call him that anyway?
 
One can spell it with a G or a Q, right? And he's stylish... G-Q-addafi.
 
Ecofarm said:
I find the dismantling of a tiny country to be a less odd than suggesting Obama for permanent president. Heck, it's probably less odd than suggesting he get a permanent security council seat as Leader of the AU or that he is the 'King of Kings'. All that's just from his most recent speech/introduction.
Click to expand...

Wait, so I get it right. You suggest that proposing the UN should disregard the sovereignty of one of its members and a state which is the core principal of the international system is less odd than making a suggestion regarding the inner politics of a state?

He shouldn't do either, but the first one attacks the core-principle of the UN namely that each state is the same.
 
The UN never said each state is the same. It's never been a practice nor implied.

The very idea that all states are the same or should be treated the same is ludacris on its face.
 
No, we go back to whoever observes human and civil rights. I'm glad they are the ones with power, and not the Irans and nKs; let's keep it that way.
 
I think being introduced as "King of Kings", and possibly the other things I noted, are more "odd".

Heck, Ahwackjob regularly calls for the dismantling of Israel and people hardly notice.
 
There's a fair degree of uncertainty in your wiki article Ecofarm:

Reportedly, Gaddafi was a major financier of the "Black September Movement" which perpetrated the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, and was accused by the United States of being responsible for direct control of the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 200, of whom a substantial number were U.S. servicemen. He is also said to have paid "Carlos the Jackal" to kidnap and then release a number of Saudi Arabian and Iranian oil ministers.
Click to expand...
 
Ecofarm said:
I think being introduced as "King of Kings", and possibly the other things I noted, are more "odd".

Heck, Ahwackjob regularly calls for the dismantling of Israel and people hardly notice.
Click to expand...

They did the first time, it was dismissed, we move on.

Why is giving yourself some title odd? Names are hollow and most often elaborate, it's a kind of style most "dictators" do. The list of titles for example the Khameini holds is really really long. The official name of what we usually refer to as England or GB is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, etc. etc. Of course it is royalistic to call yourself King of Kings. But odd?
 
Gaddafi could do with a necromancer himself.
 
Even more than in the West, he had a reputation in the Middle East for being a lunatic and making bizarre and provocative statements.
 
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