The Sticky Wicket in Benghazi and Seal Team Imperialism

By John Grant

In the parlance of the classic British colonial era, President Obama is faced with a bit of a sticky wicket in Benghazi, Libya. That metaphor, of course, refers to a patch of rough grass making it hard to hit the ball through the wicket in the British sport of cricket. British colonials liked to bring a little of England to the warm climes they colonized and played cricket on native-tendered grass between dealing with unruly wogs and quaffing gin and tonics to fight boredom and malaria.

Obama’s little sticky wicket in Benghazi (four dead Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens) comes from the decision to pump in weaponry to support an assortment of militias to “take out” Muammar Ghaddafi, the mentally ill leader of Libya protected by a female militia who the US opposed after they supported him after they had opposed him. (I think that's the correct order.) Ghaddafi was, of course, the inspiration for Admiral General Aladeen, Sacha Baron Cohen’s satiric leader in The Dictator.

Ghaddafi was finally ignominiously taken out in the desert by men who naturally humiliated him for a while and made him grovel before they put two into his brainpan. Praise Allah! God is great!

Typically for American preemptive nation-state hits, at this point things got a little murky. As in: Who the heck are these militias we're supporting? The media blitz until this point had the US as the good guysand the Ghaddafi troops as the bad guys. All was well. American leaders had convinced the American media who had convinced the American people that it was good-guys-versus-bad-guys and we Americans were thegood guys working with Libyan good guys.

But, then, that pesky problem of Islam crept into the affair, and things quickly got confusing. Some of the militias we presumed were good guyswere actually bad guys with strong feelings about Islam. The troublesome fact we suddenly became aware of was that these Muslim bad guys hated Ghaddafi just as much as we did. People started scratching their heads.

At this point, in the midst of a particularly stupid and insidious election season in America, well-meaning and upstanding Americans began to ask: “Why is it these desert barbarians just can’t do what is in their obvious best interests and do what we want them to do? Do they have something against democracy? Gee! All they have to do is just look at America and our democracy and follow instructions."

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to:  HYPERLINK "http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1393" www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1393