The News From Libya

We haven’t heard much out of Libya lately. In itself, that is significant.

The mainstream media is hard at work supporting the Obama re-election campaign. Thus it has focused public attention on issues that can redound to the electoral benefit of its favorite candidate.

The media has happily provoked a grand national conversation about the cost of Sandra Fluke’s contraceptives because it helps to induce women to vote for Obama.

Similarly, with the sad case of Trayvon Martin. No one really knows what happened when Martin encountered George Zimmerman but presenting the issue as a racist act stokes minority voters and liberal guilt, so, better to run with it than to investigate the facts.

It’s a way to avoid looking at minority youth unemployment.

If things were going well in Libya you would be hearing about it. Reporters would be camped out in Tripoli and Benghazi trumpeting the arrival of a new democratic Libya. They would be running story after story about the greatness of the Obama foreign policy.

After all, Obama’s Libya incursion was supposed to be Iraq done right.

Those who had expended every ounce of their moral outrage railing against the way the Bush administration conducted the Iraq War and its aftermath have, unsurprisingly, grown silent when it comes to the aftermath of the Obama-Clinton foray into Libya.

I have often noted that foreign policy conducted by amateurs like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was more likely to involve grand dramatic gestures and less likely to involve the long-term implementation of real policies.

So, we assembled something of an international coalition, intervened militarily in Libya, helped to overthrow and execute the bad dictator Qaddhafi, and then we left, washed out hands of the whole thing.

Once the administration had its film clip it did not much care about what happened in Libya. In that the media has been complicit in the cover-up.

When the operation was going down I took the time to read through the analysis on offer from seasoned foreign policy hands. Link to my posts here.

Most of them knew that Libya was not going to become a liberal democracy. They all predicted that the new Libya would be ruled by armed militias, among which would be many militias loyal to al Qaeda.

Now it has come to pass, and naturally, no one is reporting on it.

No one except for Omri Ceren, writing yesterday on the Commentary Contentions site.

One Libyan militia has taken to mounting raids against hotels over unpaid bills. Another militia recently captured and held two British PressTV journalists because militia members mistakenly believed Welsh materials in the journalists’ possession were written in Hebrew, and that the Iranian-employed Brits were Israeli agents.

Meanwhile, official Libyan police have finally gotten around to rounding up the vandals responsible for the disgraceful desecration of Christian and Jewish tombstones in a WWII-era cemetery. The problem is they’re too scared to do anything about it:

“Police in Libya captured three members of an armed mob that desecrated British war graves in Benghazi – but released them after a few hours because they were ‘too dangerous.’ The extremists, who admitted smashing the gravestones with sledgehammers, belong to an Islamist militia with links to al-Qaeda. During questioning, police were so nervous they made the men wear blindfolds so they would not be able to identify their interrogators.”

In the aftermath of the Iraq War, Ceren remarks, the media was filled with stories about all the bad things that were happening in Iraq.

Anything that would delegitimize the war and the Bush administration was reported… over and over and over again.

The media assault on the Iraq War began slowly, but eventually you were reading about it day after day after day.

In the name of journalistic integrity the mainstream media felt that it had a duty to undermine the efforts of the Bush administration.

Everyone knew, or should have known, that it was all political expediency. The media’s real enemy was the Republican Party. Making the Bush administration look bad would give more power to Democrats. Truth be told, it worked.

Now, we have a new administration, one that the media wanted, and that means that the media can see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil about the ungodly horrors that the Obama administration has helped visit on Libya.

Obama has succeeded in giving Egypt to radical Islamists. He has given al Qaeda a new stronghold in Libya. As long as there is an election to be won, American journalism will have nothing to say about.