Gratuitous insults: The staying power of bad ideas

 people.”

Intemperate comments from the hothead Erdogan are nothing new, but surely even he would agree that anything done to remove Gaddafi from power would be in the interests of the Libyan people. It is allowing Gaddafi to stay in power which would be a punishment of the Libyan people.

We note that back on 1 December 2010, Erdogan received the Kadhafi International Prize for Human Rights – yes, there is such a prize and, yes, Erdogan was proud to accept it.

We also recall the May 2010 incident in which nine pro-Hamas Turkish Islamists were killed on a ship which tried to breach the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Erdogan called it a “massacre” and accused Israel of a “genocide” of the Palestinian people.

Israel has inflicted many injuries on the Palestinians since it was created in 1948, and the post-1967 Israeli policy of settling Jews in Palestinian lands in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank has been misguided in the extreme. Israel, though, has not engaged in a “genocide” of the Palestinian people.

In any event, we do not know how wise it is for a Turkish leader to use words like “massacre” or “genocide.”

Advise to Erdogan: Ask a friend to tell you about what people who live in glass houses should not do.

3. How do you say chutzpah in Arabic?

Reuters reports that Gaddafi’s government exerted heavy pressure on U.S. and other oil companies to reimburse Tripoli the $1.5 billion Libya had paid in 2008 into a fund to settle terrorism claims from the 1980s.

The amount was the initial payment in a planned $1.8 billion fund. The cable suggests Gaddafi intended foreign oil companies to provide full funding for the scheme, which at the time was a key factor in improving ties between Libya and the United States.

Even before Libya paid into the fund, Gaddafi, “who prides himself on being a shrewd bargainer, made it clear that he intended to extract contributions from foreign companies to cover the … initial outlay,” according to the April 2009 cable titled “GOL ratchets up pressure on oil companies to contribute to U.S.-Libya claims fund”.

Prime Minister-equivalent al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi is cited as telling oil firms that if they did not comply, there would be “serious consequences”.

When Challenger Drilling’s representative said it would have legal difficulties if it chose to contribute to the fund, the officials “were quick to offer possible mechanisms that would allow (the companies) to circumvent such problems,” the cable said, citing a representative from Hess who later complained that “pressure had turned into coercion” at the meeting.

No Arab regime has been as involved as Libya was in promoting terrorism, so coercing oil companies, in effect, to use their money to pay the victims of Libyan terrorism is a form of corruption unique to Libya.

For the ruling family of Libya brazenly to steal money to enrich itself is, alas, a common feature of all Arab regimes. Reuters reports that the instinct to ask oil companies for money was apparently not new. An earlier cable, sent in July 2008, relates how one of Gaddafi’s sons, National Security Adviser Muatassim al-Gaddafi, was demanding “$1.2 billion in cash or oil shipments” from the NOC[Libya’s National Oil Corporation] itself.

The reported attempts by Gaddafi’s sons “to use the NOC as a personal bank” alongside doubts about prospects for meaningful reform, suggest “the regime remains unchanged with respect to the way it conducts key elements of its business,” says the cable headlined “National Oil Corporation chairman Shukri Ghanem may seek to resign soon”.

Another advise to Erdogan: Re-think your definition of what constitutes a punishment of the Libyan people.

4. What gives?

Tom Friedman just came back from a few days in post-Mubarak Egypt. He writes that there are many reasons why we see such upheavals across the Arab world. One explanation with which Friedman agrees is offered by Edward Goldberg in the Globalist.

Both China and Egypt were great civilizations subjected to imperialism. Back in the 1950s both were dirt poor – in fact, China was poorer than Egypt. Goldberg notes that today China has built the world’s second-largest economy, while Egypt still lives on foreign aid. What do you think young Egyptians thought when they watched the dazzling opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics? Goldberg says that the Olympic Games were another wake-up call telling young Egyptians that something was very wrong with their country.

Advice to those autocratic Arab rulers who remain in power after the current wave of anti-government protests: Black out the opening ceremony of the next Olympic Games

Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire