Libya Quotes

“Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa.

I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“The cost of war is like an immeasurable tremor that knows no borders, its shockwaves reverberating across the world resulting in universal suffering.”
― Aysha Taryam

“One common criticism emerged from Congress and the media: Obama had not formally addressed the nation since authorizing military action. So, on March 28, two weeks after the Situation Room meeting that had set everything in motion, he gave a speech at the National Defense University in Washington. The television networks said they wouldn’t carry it in prime time, so it was scheduled for the second-tier window of 7:30 P.M., an apt metaphor for the Libyan operation—cable, not network; evening, not prime time; kinetic military operation, not war. The speech was on a Monday, and I spent a weekend writing it. Obama was defensive. Everything had gone as planned, and yet the public and political response kept shifting—from demanding action to second-guessing it, from saying he was dithering to saying he wasn’t doing enough. Even while he outlined the reasons for action in Libya, he stepped back to discuss the question that would continue to define his foreign policy: the choice of when to use military force. Unlike other wartime addresses, he went out of his way to stress the limits of what we were trying to achieve in Libya “—saving lives and giving Libyans a chance to determine their future, not installing a new regime or building a democracy. He said that we would use force “swiftly, decisively, and unilaterally” to defend the United States, but he emphasized that when confronted with other international crises, we should proceed with caution and not act alone.”
― Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House

“At long last we have arrived... In the land of the lost, where we all belong.”
― Mladen Đorđević, Miraž

“To shine, we must push others forward and stand together when needed. The failure of others will never mean your success.
Our world needs a lot of solidarity, and this is the time to push the big ideas.”
― Mohammed Zaid

“I was against the Iraq war I was against the Afghan war I was against bombing Libya and Syria but to be quite honest and with a heavy heart because more innocent people are gonna be killed....We have to step in and help wipeout ISIS!”
― Cal Sarwar

“Thus all civilian officials and military officers in the United States government who either knew or should have known that the Reagan administration intended to assassinate Qaddafi and participated in the bombing operation are “war criminals” according to the U.S. government’s own official definition of that term. The American people should not have permitted any aspect of their foreign affairs and defense policies to be conducted by acknowledged “war criminals.” They should have insisted upon the impeachment, dismissal, resignation, and prosecution of all U.S. government officials guilty of such war crimes. Nevertheless, U.S. public opinion had been so effectively brutalized by five years of Reaganism that over three-quarters of the American people rallied to the support of their demented leadership over the destruction, injuries, and death it had inflicted upon hundreds of innocent civilians in Tripoli and Benghazi.”
― Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution

“Clearly, the humanitarian relation is not a relation between equals. We are not our "brother's keepers" then, but rather we are more like animal keepers. Bombing for us is really just an animal management technology, and our relationship to the world remains a zoological one.”
― Maximilian Forte

“One of my biggest worries is that youth grow in discomfort and insecurity, which stops them from truly dreaming freely. society, religion, and family should be the source of support, not the horror.”
― Mohammed Zaid

“Collective strength is the force to make the impossible happen. Sacrifices contributed to the creation of our current world and it is the mission of some of us to take leadership and work for others.”
― Mohammed Zaid

“Colonel Gaddafi was sitting under a tree that I had planted, we had planted several thousand hectares of forest there in Mauritania. He was sitting there under that tree and he was drinking the salted coffee that the Bedouins drink. And he was impressed. He asked me to work out a project with him in Libya as well.”
― Prince Laurent of Belgium

“Before I got the Royal endowment, I was not allowed to work. I always wanted to. And I have always been contradicted on that front. I have never asked to depend on others, I have always wanted to be independent. That's why I want to do these projects.”
― Prince Laurent of Belgium

“I may not always be taken seriously. I often come off as rather humorous: not serious, not academic enough. But that is simply not my style. I regret that I often get comments about that. That people think I have no sense of reality. But people don't know me. Sometimes I find it really disturbing, the criticism I've been getting since I was young. I'm 55 now: if I had really done something wrong, it would have been known by now.”
― Prince Laurent of Belgium

“I've experienced things I didn't want to know and I'm not happy at all with what's happening now. Those bad people will one day have to answer for their actions. I tell you again: in Libya there are people who have been murdered, because of the money that has been released here. And exactly no one has done it.”
― Prince Laurent of Belgium

“There's extreme violence, but there's a will to find who these people really are. And I think that's what's really inspiring about it.”
― James Foley