To follow Pepe's article on the Libyans and Bahrainis sheikh, rattle and roll , please click here.
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC17Ak01.html
The outlook is grim. There won't be regime change. Instead, there will be a tsunami of blood. The US cavalry won't come to the rescue. And we will all duly watch it on al-Jazeera like silent sheep.
The "enlightened" West has just sent a message to the rebelling Libyan people; Muammar Gaddafi's forces will have to dissolve you into a sea of blood before we decide to do anything. And even if we do, it may be too late. Sorry.
As for the African king of kings, he just had to slightly step on the gas to overtake those stone pillars of bureaucratic inertia - the United Nations, the European Union, the Arab League; now he's on a roll, after Ajdabiya has practically fallen, only 150 kilometers away from Benghazi along a virtually empty desert road. Liberated eastern Libya is sheikh, rattled and rolled.
Gaddafi called the West's bluff - and he's winning. He laughed on the abject Anglo-French failure to impose a no-fly zone (not that he cared; he prefers to use heavy artillery and tanks). He saw the White House's inertia as the House of Saud savagely preempted last Friday's "Day of Rage." He registered the White House silence as Saudi Arabia invaded Bahrain on Monday.
He noticed how, for Washington, regime change is unthinkable in both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. And as much as the West wants regime change in Libya, he concluded, they won't risk anything to accomplish it. He might have glanced at the Economist Intelligence Unit democracy index and noticed that Libya ranks 158th, and Saudi Arabia 160th. We're equals - he must have thought; we both have oil; and we won't go down.
In both Libya and Bahrain the great 2011 Arab revolt seems to have reached the red line. Regime change stops here - with the House of Saud ranked at the top of the Arab dictatorial pyramid, followed by its minions, the Gulf kingdoms and sheikhdoms.
The cherry in the hypocrisy cake is that last week Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) foreign ministers declared that Gaddafi's regime had become "illegitimate". They called on the Arab League to "shoulder its responsibilities in taking necessary measures to stop the bloodshed" - even as Bahrain's repression machine had already shot unarmed civilians and Saudi Arabia's had threatened to do the same.
And don't expect Qatar's al-Jazeera to the rescue; it is favorably covering the Saudi invasion of Bahrain, after largely ignoring weeks of protests. Call it the GCC's esprit de corps. Bahrain's King Hamad al-Khalifa has declared a three-month state of emergency - which apologists insist is not martial law - and authorized the head of his armed forces to do whatever it takes to quell the protests, as in killing his own people.
Watch the red lines
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