I'm not interpreting anything according to my own world-view.
Uh, apart from the knee-jerk assumption that the opposition in any Arab/Muslim state ruled by a regime unfriendly to 'the West'* must necessarily be sponsored by the CIA...perhaps you also consider Ahmedinejad the legitimate and justified defender of Iran against Mousavi's counterrevolutionary tendency... :slanted:
*and as martin points out, Gaddafi apparently has no problem selling his country's oil to Western countries, so why would the CIA want to stir up trouble and provoke violence that's going to make it *more* difficult and expensive to buy Libyan oil?
Oh, and while it's at it, why doesn't the Coalition of the Willing intervene in Côte d'Ivoire? The conflict between president Gbagbo and the supposedly rightful winner of the last election Ouattara is turning into a veritable civil war. A major humanitarian crisis is expected as a consequence. Who will stop it? Or should cacao be of less interest than oil?
Hang on, are you arguing
for intervention, or against it? The fact that violent oppression is happening in one country is not, in itself, an argument against trying to prevent violent oppression in another.
When setting up a straw man you should be careful to make it resemble at least roughly your opponent's opinion. Your drivel would be an utter non-sequitur if one couldn't tell that, in fact, you've given vent there to your own petty resentment.
Straw man, my arse. I've seen this so many times: the solipsistic worldview of people for whom everything happening anywhere in the world is about 'the West', which is to say, about
us. The idea that a country, especially a Muslim country, might have internal politics and divisions, and that a large part of the populace might spontaneously revolt against a corrupt and violent despot, just throws up a 'does not compute'.
"It is reasonable to fear that the accused has, in fact, decided to murder, wherever he still can, innocent members of the public... and furthermore, to systematically and indiscriminately break the law..."
Only in a legal system were accusations counted as hard evidence a defendant could be sentenced on the basis of such a reasoning as above. Such a legal system wouldn't be a legal system at all and the fact that, to push the analogy further, Ghaddafi has been sentenced without conclusive evidence of his alleged crimes only proves that international law is nothing but a charade in service of the fancy-worded legitimation of arbitrary power interests.
A moment's googling turned this up: "
Gaddafi bombs protesters near Tripoli" - that's Iran's state-controlled Press TV corporation - and this, from left-wing anti-war/anti-imperialism news blog Another World Is Possible: "
Forces loyal to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi have heavily bombarded pro-democracy protesters...[t]wo thousand people have been reported killed in the weeks-long violence." Unless they, too, are pawns of Thee Powers That Be...
Whereas you've already decided that the protesters are
definitely guilty of killing black immigrants who are
definitely not mercenaries. I've seen this contrariness-for-contrariness's-sake from you so many times before. It's not big and it's not clever.
Even if it's a bit boring at times, it must feel really cozy in your tiny little world of clichés, doesn't it?
One could almost feel sorry for you because of your ignorance but denouncing me as "smug" for actually being interested in the truth is so incredibly low and so irredeemably perverse that all pity turns into disdain.
Whereas you, alone, have access to the unalloyed, objective TRUTH.
Oh, and speaking of straw men, who are "the people here on Dissensus who deem the Western intervention in Libya to be justified"? Crackerjack says it might be, albeit with heavy reservations. No-one else here has said they support it. I'm not sure where I stand, and can see it doing more harm than good if for no other reason than that it risks de-legitimising the opposition.