"Change" - A View from Libya

It’s not just American election pundits who have been pondering the meaning of “change.” In case you missed it on the Fox News web site, Libyan tyrant Moammar Gadhafi has also glommed onto this buzzword of the Democratic campaigns, and in this video clip from MEMRI, with English subtitles, you can watch him airing his views (excerpts, transcribed by MEMRI, here) that Americans, with their interest in change, regard their system, their government, and their elections, as a failure. Says Gadhafi, “The whole world will return to the Libyan model.”

That, and some of Gadhafi’s other nonsense in this speech, might be easy to dismiss as simply the ravings of a crackpot dictator who after almost four decades of rule by terror can’t tell an election from a secret-police happy hour. Except for one thing — Libya under Gadhafi has in recent years been held up as a model of sorts, by none other than the Bush administration and its diplomacy-happy State Deaprtment under Secretary Condoleezza Rice. Since Gadhafi gave up his nuclear program in late 2003 — just after Saddam Hussein was pulled from his spider-hole — the Libyan regime has been ushered out from under U.S. sanctions, praised by leaders of the free world, and visited by a parade of western politicians and oil men. With no objection from the U.S., Libya last year got itself one of the ten rotating seats on the United Nations Security Council — where Gadhafi has now become one of the figures whose favors must be wooed in any U.S. attempt to cope, via the UN, with such nuclear-lovin’ rogues as North Korea and Iran.

And in the UN’s plans to hold a Durban II global mega-conference in 2009 — meaning a reprise of its anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-American conference held in 2001 in Durban, South Africa — it is Libya that now chairs the preparatory committee, with planners such as Iran, Cuba and Pakistan deciding how to spend funds provided in substantial part by U.S. taxpayers, via the UN core budget.

If all this gravy for Gadhafi is supposed to provide incentives, by example, for regimes such as those of North Korea and Iran to do business with the U.S. State Department, someone in Washington ought to at least be listening to what Gadhafi — with his newfound U.S.-legitimized platform — is telling the world, and his captive citizenry, about America.