Business in Libya is very much transacted at the personal rather than the corporate level. Directors of not-for-profit organizations have told me of their frustration – after many months of building up a good working relationship with the head of a government department or ministry, the guy gets fired or transferred and they have to start all over again with the new one, addio what had been signed and agreed with the predecessor.

It will be the same with whoever takes over from the Gaddafi regime; Maltese businessmen will have to put out new feelers, hand out new gifts … not something they’ll be relishing.

Each of those missiles took countless conferences to design, more conferences to market, and yet more conferences to deploy. It employed thousands of researchers, inginiera brillanti, studenti tal-MCAST and esperti fl-ICT.

What’s more, it wasn’t outsourced to some sweatshop in China, but made in hi-tech factories paying excellent wages back home.

Now you tell me: what does the European economy need? More handouts to PIGS and aid packages to the Third World, or a lovely war?

It’s Kevin and like-minded peacenik bourgeois-bohèmes who are responsible for the disastrous state of our economy and our dire job market.

My guess, and it is just a guess, is that the government is under heavy pressure from some of those Maltese who have considerable business interests in Libya. Many of them would have preferred to see no uprising at all, and to carry on with business as usual regardless of the misery of Libyans.

They probably think and hope still that Gaddafi will survive – and so they want to make sure that the Maltese government doesn’t do or even say anything that would put them in bad light with him or put their businesses at risk.

“and the cost of the exercise is counted in millions every day ”

Just to put it in perspective, at just under half a million euros each, the cost of the missiles alone in the opening salvo was around 50 million euros.

How many conferences is that?

It is true that Malta doesn’t need to scrap neutrality to abide by UN Security Council resolutions, but the quicker it’s scrapped, the better.

I totally agree with your comment about the poor judgement and very short-term, inward-looking mindset (to put it mildly) of Malta’s politicians. I was unable to listen to the statement concerning the ‘reality check’ – but it seems like Malta wants to be a Gaddafi ally for as long as possible.

I am not a gung-ho hawkish kind of person. I was 100% against the invasion of Iraq, as that was never about the people of Iraq.

I do not pretend to know the motives of people like Sarkozy and Cameron. I’m a cynic, so tend to look for ulterior motives. For once, I cannot see any.

Some people talk about oil. Sorry, but things were going just fine with Gaddafi in power. The status quo was pretty profitable for western countries.

I just hope Malta’s official position is to do with fear and not money. Fear I can forgive, greed I cannot.

Actually if it is money, those making the decisions are being very short-sighted. A free Libya on Malta’s doorstep would be a veritable gold mine for Maltese business.

I can’t actually see any downside to getting rid of Gaddafi. For Malta it’s win/win. If Libya is free, even the flow of refugees will die down. A free Libya will be a rich Libya.

I’m one of those who Daphne describes as always seeing Gaddafi as a murdering thug and bully. I cringed every time I saw our leaders (and I’m beginning to use that term loosely) hug and cosy up to the tyrant.

I’m one of the generation that was forced to learn Arabic at school (no harm in that; it’s just the way it was done, and the whole atmosphere of the time). I also have Libyan friends, and I consider them good friends. I know how much they yearn to get rid of Gaddafi, and I for one support them 100%.

The Libyans I know are decent people. I’m proud to call them friends. And though they are Muslim and we are not, I feel we as Maltese have more in common with them than most Europeans. The only reason I bring religion up is because others have and no doubt will. It’s not something I bother about.

If it was up to me, Malta would be doing more. The least we could do is allow coalition planes to use our airport. Sorry, but by denying them that, you are in effect saying you are against the strikes, and in turn you favour the status-quo.

There is no other conclusion you can come to. They are now flying French flags in Benghazi. It would make me proud to be Maltese if they could fly Maltese flags too. We haven’t given them any reason to yet.

Cat- Giletti should research more before going on screen.

Come 2011, Malta is (once again) choosing to stay in the backwaters, when it could have played a leading role in support of freedom.

Even if one were to take the self-centered ‘national interest’ perspective, neutrality has been and remains a veritable threat to Malta’s freedom: by using the neutrality argument to shirk off participation in international military coalitions, Malta is also opening the door to quid-pro-quo behavior by other states should the island ever need foreign assistance from a coalition of countries.

Furthermore, it pays to to take ‘risks’ (i.e.support the Libyan Opposition) as the bigger the risks, the bigger the gains. Just think who will be taking decisions when Gaddafi’s regime is gone.

In short, Malta… scrap neutrality and play your part in helping the Libyans achieve their dream. It’s to your benefit too!

[Daphne – The thing is that we don’t even need to ‘scrap neutrality’ to do it, because the Constitution specifies that a UN Security Council resolution overrides that clause, so it is literally sheer bloody-mindedness and poor judgement masquerading as the opposite. When I read yesterday that the prime minister said on radio that his “reality check” on Gaddafi came when he used the Japanese crisis as the opportunity to forge towards Benghazi, I thought: “What?” It sounded as though up until then he had been holding out hope that he would find reason to believe that his friend Gaddafi was not so bad after all.]

Daphne look at the amount of people from Britain and the other countries who were working there and you will realise where the interests lie.

America and Britain are grabbing the occasion to get rid of Gaddafi the Lockerbie Terrorist and the IRA sponsor.

Would they have done this for us? Are they going to do the same in Syria, Yemen or Saudi?

British, French and American companies have interests in Libya, they cannot just stand there watching ‘their’ assets disappear.

We just eat the breadcrumbs which fall from the table , like we always did.

[Daphne – You are absolutely contradicting yourself, John. Contradicting yourself and proving several of my points, including the one where I said that most of the opposition to Malta to offering help to the coalition comes from people with an innate anti-British ‘feeling’, because of the political history of their families, starting most conspicuously with our foreign minister, unfortunately. Remarks like your last line here are very revealing; they show what people truly think and why they think it.

As for Yehmen and Syria, that argument has been more than adequately addressed several times over in the international press, but let’s boil it down to its essence as David Cameron did: your reasoning belongs to the ‘why should I tidy my bedroom when the rest of the world is in such a mess’ school of thought. Also, there is no national interest involved in those two countries – not for Britain, and not for Malta. If you are going to justify use of millions of pounds of your taxpayers’ money every day in an exercise like this and in very troubled times at home, you must have a national interest argument, and a strong one at that. But of course, people like you – and I don’t mean that offensively, but as a description of a particular Maltese mindset, think that it is all right for those ‘who can afford’ to spend their money doing Malta’s work while ‘poor little Malta’ sits back and takes advantage of the situation and of the tax money earned by the British and the French.]