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Steven Den Beste has a thoughtful take on the Bush/Blair team and how they took down Qaddafi. He says that Bush and Blair have fine tuned the good cop/bad cop to a fine art.
The British position with Qaddafi, on the other hand, was that they had considerable influence with Washington but no veto over American actions. If you Libyans give us a deal with thus-and-so concessions, we think we can sell it to Bush and we promise to try really hard. We want to work with you here and to help you on this. But if you don't offer us enough there won't be anything we can do to keep the Americans from coming to visit you with extreme prejudice, like they just visited your buddy Saddam.
He also makes the point that Gaddafi's surrender was the product of diplomacy backed up with a credible threat of force. Without that threat, all the words in the world would not have moved Gaddafi.
The Weasels are trying to use a triumph of the threat of force as a demonstration of why you don't need threats of force. But it won't work, because they can't explain why they themselves could not do what Blair's government actually did, and why this agreement happened when it did. They can ignore the "coincidence" of events in Iraq, but no one else will.
Posted by Ted at December 22, 2003 7:51 AM