American Flip Flopping in Libya

Just two years ago in August of 2009, Libyan thug, Muammar Gaddafi – the same  unrepentant Muammar Gaddafi who sponsored the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988, killing more than 250 people, mostly Americans – U.S. Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, among other high profile American politicians, were the best of buddies, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released recently by WikiLeaks. Now they’re all screaming for the Libyan leader’s hide.  

McCain was actually characterizing Libya's relationship with the U.S. then as "excellent," and promising to help Gaddafi obtain $billions in U.S. military hardware to ensure the security of Tripoli as our partner in the war on terror, while Lieberman was praising the dictator as an important ally, insisting that it was in the interest of both countries to make the relationship stronger.

What could we dopey Americans expect to get from this cozy arrangement? As usual in stupid deals like this, not much. Gaddafi simply promised to let us foot the bill to ship his supplies of highly enriched uranium to Russia where it might be disposed – that’s it. He didn’t even promise to be a good boy in the future.

McCain later called it an "interesting meeting with an interesting man." Now, of course, the political winds have changed causing McCain and the other American political dupes to do a complete hypocritical flip flop on the relative merits of Muammar Gaddafi as our vital ally in the War on Terror. Now they’re all lined up with the Libyan rebels seeking justice for the vicious slaughtering his own people.

Our man Trump, of The Donald fame, that is, almost got the deal unwittingly scrapped when he humiliated Gaddafi by reneging on a contract to let him set up an elaborate Bedouin tent on Trump real estate in New York City as part of a United Nations Summit. “I screwed Muammar Gaddafi,” Trump bragged triumphantly to Fox News, after taking the dictator’s money then booting him off the land.  

That minor fiasco caused an enraged Gaddafi to back out of his deal with the senators which, in turn, resulted in a rickety container of potent enriched uranium left untended next to an airport runway for several weeks, which might easily have caused a nuclear radiation disaster.

But then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came riding to the rescue, finally talking the recalcitrant Gaddafi into letting us ship the stuff to Russia to the tune of $800,000 in transport costs. In short, we stupid Americans paid big time in both military hardware and cold hard cash for the privilege of taking out Gadaffi’s garbage.

Of course, today the dictator, in his last dying struggle, is using the military hardware we helped him get against his own people, and now that the tide has turned, Sen. McCain wants to arm Gaddafi’s enemies, the Libyan rebels. "I think we could do the same thing that we did in the Afghan struggle against the Russians. There are ways to get weapons in without direct U.S. supplying," he opines.

These politicians are dangerous. There really ought to be a law, perhaps a constitutional amendment, forbidding congressmen and senators from leaving the country while in office in order to prevent them from flip flopping around the globe, meeting with heads of state, making stupid and costly deals, sticking their long noses into, and meddling unabashedly with the political affairs of other nations.

I thought we had a President, a State Department and corps of diplomats to do the flip flopping.