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On 2/25/2011 8:50 AM, Marv Gandall wrote:
They have no need to kick in an open door. The Americans,
British, and Europeans have happily supported Ghaddafi and
supplied him with weaponry to facilitate the orderly
exploitation of the country's oil reserves by their
multinationals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/opinion/25krugman.html
Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy
and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war,
those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative
ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the
streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a
Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to
“corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s
words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the
state supports everything.”
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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/08/060508fa_fact_solomon
[Prime Minister Ghanem] Dr. Shukri, as he is called by those close
to him and by those who pretend to be close to him–he has a Ph.D.
in international relations from the Fletcher School, at Tufts–has
a certain portly grandeur. With a neat mustache and a
well-tailored suit, he exuded an effortless cosmopolitanism that
seemed more conducive to facilitating Libya’s reentry into the
world than to winning over the hard-line elements at home. When I
arrived, he was sitting on a gilded sofa in a room furnished with
Arabic reimaginings of Louis XVI furniture, before many trays of
pastries and glasses of the inevitable mint tea. In the Libyan
empire of obliquity, his clarity was refreshing, and his teasing
irony seemed to acknowledge the absurdity of Libyan doubletalk.
I mentioned that many of his colleagues saw no need to hasten the
pace of reform. This was clearly not his view. “Sometimes you have
to be hard on those you love,” he said. “You wake your sleeping
child so that he can get to school. Being a little harsh, not
seeking too much popularity, is a better way.” He spoke of the
need for pro-business measures that would reduce bureaucratic
impediments and rampant corruption. “The corruption is tied to
shortages, inefficiency, and unemployment,” the Prime Minister
said. “Cutting red tape–there is resistance to it. There is some
resistance in good faith and some in bad faith.”
Nor was he inclined to defer to the regime’s egalitarian rhetoric.
“Those who can excel should get more–having a few rich people can
build a whole country,” he said. Qaddafi’s “Green Book” decreed
that people should be “partners, not wage workers,” but it is not
easy to make everyone a partner, the Prime Minister observed.
“People don’t want to find jobs. They want the government to find
them jobs. It’s not viable.”
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