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The bit from Franklin Lamb is pretty funny. Lamb was in Tripoli for months, and his reporting on Qaddafi was utterly uncritical -- large chunks of it consisted of government propaganda, edited lightly or not at all. He managed to live there all through the war without ever, as far as I can tell, doing any actual investigative reporting or talking to anyone who wasn't on the government's payroll. Now it's suddenly all come crashing down! I don't think it's the hotel staff who are "crestfallen".
Counterpunch can produce interesting stuff, but on Libya it's been pretty worthless. Cockburn and the rest kept recycling a few obvious points (NATO really wanted regime change YES WE KNOW) without ever trying to engage with the underlying issues. Inconvenient facts like the growing strength and competence of the rebels, or the steady flow of recruits out of Tripoli, or the underlying social and economic incentives for rebellion, were simply ignored. I don't mind advocacy, but this was badly written, badly reasoned advocacy that was obviously ignoring the realities on the ground.
Anyway. Your point about Abdel Fatah Younis is extremely interesting. At the time, his assassination -- and the NTC's seemingly feeble and clumsy attempts to explain it -- seemed like a major disaster. Under your interpretation, the feeble explanations and clumsy excuses would have been a feature, not a bug: we're strong enough to take him out, and confident enough not to bother with a good cover story. Maybe!
Putting the tribal issue aside, the east-west divide in Libya goes back a long time. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves.
Doug M. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
