Our Friends In Tripoli?

With Sinn Féin on the Policing Board, why complain about the PSNI training the Police in Libya? Similarly with that Special Forces business. If the great enemy is now "al-Qaeda" or some such, then we and Gaddafi are now in the same boat, which is to say on the same side. Aren't we?

But isn't Libya very Westernised? Well, yes, Gaddafi or no Gaddafi, it is true that there remains a very strong Italian influence in at least urban or elite Libyan culture. But at least one third of the population nevertheless adheres to the Sanusi synthesis of Wahhabism and popular Sufism. Similar things could be said about every other such "almost Western" country around the south and east coasts of the Mediterranean, although Lebanon is the best and Syria is not half bad. Sarkozy wants them all in NATO and the EU. And he's not the only one.

As in 1980s Afghanistan, 1990s Bosnia, and today's Turkey, Kosovo, Pakistan, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Iraq, and putatively Syria (if they do an Iraq there) and Xinjiang; and as by means of the limitless immigration necessitated by the "free" market; so also by this means, the neocons continue their relentless pursuit for themselves of the privileged dhimmitude of Moorish Spain.

And to hell with the rest of us.