Baxxter, are you sure you’re thirty years old?

[Daphne – I’m surprised he hasn’t received any proposals of marriage (or propositions) via this website, quite frankly.]

Cruise missiles are no good for taking out mobile anti aircraft missile launchers. You need planes with specialised equipment.

You would not want to use cruise missiles anyway in this particular situation – sophisticated as they are a few of them will still go off course and land on a school or something.

In Libya you would want to keep to an absolute minimum the attacks on ground targets and the only such targets that need to be destroyed are those which can endanger the aircarft enforcing the no fly zone. The only such targets are the missile batteries, of which all of Libya’s are mobile.

Most commonly these are taken out by missiles which are designed to home in on the illuminator or tracking radars. They will not necessarily destroy the missile launchers (which are on separate vehicles some distance away) but the missiles are rendered almost useless without their radars, at least against modern military aircraft.

kev, I agree with you that there is an element of corporate intrusion in government and vice versa that is clogging the state machinery. After all old western power families are still enamoured with the fascist experiment. Some overt, like Mdm L’Oreal, Bush family others less so. A compromise that lets them keep their fortunes without having to fight the people and their pesky revolutions. Adam Smith, Franklin, Paine and others expected progressive taxation, democracy and a representative government would have equalised the fortunes of citizens and spread the wealth around after some generations. Hasn’t happened.

I don’t agree with the libertarian view that when something fails you simply cut it off and throw it in the fire without any consideration as to how this action affects citizens. By extreme libertarian I am thinking of a very small toothless government that cannot control the large corporations. Weak governments are a problem. It’s not the size, but how much the citizens are involved in the governing process. I sort of like Ron Paul, even though he’s a young earther, especially since he wants to sanitise the deficit by reducing the pentagon’s budget. I much prefer democrats like Barney Frank though for a way forward.

Libertarians never tell us how their plan can control mischievous growth and power grabs by individuals outside government. They always use the excuse: the markets will decide. I’d hate us to become a feudal conglomeration with a figurehead elected by the people to keep the sham of a democracy. That’s Russia post Gorbachev thanks to libertarian policies instituted by American advisors or feudal japan with the emperor as figurehead.

I have similar inclinations to yours in fancying less intrusive government but lean towards anarchic principles: right to property is a sort-of necessary state fiction. You have to admit though that there’s a limit to what can be really achieved when a few are intent on gaming the system for their benefit – no matter what the negative effect may be on others.

Socialism at least has it’s values squarely where they count: it’s of the people and for the people. Not the local flavour though it has a totalitarian bent common with old ideologists that it hasn’t shed of yet.

When are sane labourites going to take their party back?

You’re getting confused Village….Ghaddafi’s forces are NOT the Libyan army.

@Joseph A Borg – The Koch brothers are just a blip in the GOP establishment. The wide-ranging Tea Party movement cannot be described as ‘extreme libertarian’ – whatever that may mean to you and others who usually have a rather distorted image of what libertarianism stands for, let alone how it works for the benefit of all.

I say this, because what today passes for a ‘free market’ is in fact a market managed by state-propped dinosaur corporations that continue to operate their monopolitstic cartels only because big government has had enough clout to legislate their budding competitors out of the way.

So what they call ‘capitalism’ is in fact State-sponsored corporatism a la Mussolini, which brings us to ‘corporate fascism’. This explains why today’s sandled revolutionaries are clamouring for (more) socialism, which is what the corporate elite want since socialism means bigger government by which to stave off more market competition and render what they call ‘the masses’ into highly dependent organisms at the mercy of the state and the global corporations.

Could they have been factoring in facories and service industries located here in Malta whose output (part or all) is targeted at the Libyan market?

I think there are more people working in Brussels/Strasbourg/Luxembourg.

I’m not averse to intervention, the problem is that ‘the west’ has a credibility problem with the Arab world and there could be a fundamentalist backlash.

A hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire was taking its last gasps and the European powers stood like vultures at its borders, trying to nab tasty morsels.

Lloyd George encouraged the Greeks to retake Anatolia and the backlash was immediate and catastrophic.

Even though the rebels have congealed into a machine with a single purpose, there are still the far right muslim fundies who are being silent. If we give them fuel for their (sometimes justified) hate towards the west, the mindless majority will follow them, not the more liberal factions.

Minor correction, the Tea Party has been taken over by Kock brothers, the GOP is the political appendage of their extreme libertarian policies.