News and views from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada
Welcome To Alberta West Online News
Centered on the Caroline area of West Central Alberta, Canada, this news service is updated daily with reports of community events, area news and wider political issues.
In the past decade, Washington has killed, maimed, dislocated, and made widows and orphans of millions of Muslims in six countries, all in the name of the "war on terror." Washington's attacks on the countries constitute naked aggression and impact primarily civilian populations and infrastructure and, thereby, constitute war crimes under law. Nazis were executed precisely for what Washington is doing today.
Interview with Gilad Atzmon, Israeli-born musician, author and philosopher
by Silvia Cattori
In his book, "The Wandering Who?", Gilad Atzmon goes where no one else dares to tread. He challenges the myths and the tribal mindset underpinning the founding of the Zionist state and its racially-driven policies. Repudiating the concept of ’chosen-ness’ that separates the Jews from the others, he abandoned his to ’become an ordinary human being.’ Acclaimed by eminent Jewish intellectuals, his ideas don’t sit quite so well with the Jewish left and Jewish anti-Zionist circles. He responds to Silvia Cattori’s questions.
Wealth vs. Money: Why Main Street is Better Off without Wall Street ______________
By Ann Tulintseff Public Banking Institute Board Member
“The real measure of your wealth is what’s left after you’ve lost all your money.”
As we look at the devastation being wreaked across the United States as a result of the selfish recklessness of the titans of the financial services industry, it’s clear that Main Street doesn't need Wall Street. In fact, Main Street is better off without Wall Street.
It’s time to see the seduction of Wall Street’s promises for what they are—an illusion that confuses money with wealth. Money should not be confused with wealth, and the fundamental definitions of each will help understand this difference.
Wealth is a combination labor and/or natural resources.
Money, on the other hand, is simply a medium of exchange for goods and services—a means to facilitate transactions. Money has taken many forms, including shells, beaver pelts, coins, paper notes, and now accounting entries on a computer. In other words, money is an abstract social invention that can be viewed as a contract—a financial obligation. [1]
A community combines its labor and natural resources in order to meet the needs of its members. Money is simply the oil that helps the machine of society function.
Thus the fundamental difference between wealth and money is that money is itself only a claim to wealth, and not that wealth itself. [2]
What are the implications of this? Main Street produces wealth, Wall Street does not. In fact, Wall Street cons us into holding our money, and then siphons it off with interest, fees and market manipulations, resulting in an unnecessary transfer of wealth from people on Main Street to those on Wall Street.
As Glen Edens, a former Sun Microsystems executive, summarizes, "… How can we break the cycle of Wall Street, a strong financial services industry is simply not good for society.Wall Street does not improve productivity, the model is parasitic, transferring huge resources out of the system." [3]
Finally, as a means of facilitating transactions, money should be seen as a public, or community, creation and/or utility. A "free market" becomes a manipulated market when the ability to create money is held by private interests. It’s time that we, the public, reclaimed our sovereign right to issue money “and regulate the value thereof,” as our Constitution declares, by establishing publicly owned banks.
References: [1] Jere Hough at wealthmoney.wordpress.com. [2] "Fixing the System: A history of populism, ancient and modern," by Adrian Kuzminski. [3] http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Impact-of-the-Internet-on-Institutions-in-the-Future.aspx?r=1
Have you ever before heard of the Haqqanis? I didn't think so. Like Al Qaeda, about which no one had ever heard prior to 9/11, the "Haqqani Network" has popped up in time of need to justify America's next war -- Pakistan.
President Obama's claim that he had Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden exterminated deflated the threat from that long-serving bogyman. A terror organization that left its leader, unarmed and undefended, a sitting duck for assassination no longer seemed formidable. Time for a new, more threatening, bogyman, the pursuit of which will keep the "war on terror" going. Article continues here
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report September 24, 2011, 6:12 PM (GMT+02:00)
Muammar Qaddafi and his sons have raised a new army of 12,000 soldiers - all fighters of loyal Tuareg tribes of the Sahara, debkafile’s military sources report.
Hundreds of kilometers to the north, Libyan rebel troops clashed with Qaddafi loyalists in his home town of Sirte after reportedly entering the town from the west. Although rebel ranks are seriously divided, they derived encouragement from NATO's decision to extend its naval and air campaign in Libya by another 90 days to help them dislodge Qaddafi's troops from the cities they are still holding. Saturday, Sept. 24, his daughter Aisha said in an audio recording that her father was in high spirits and fighting alongside his supporters. Last week, our sources report, a Tuareg tribal council convened in Niger extended full protection to Qaddafi, his sons, his military chiefs and the still-loyal members of the ousted regime. Members of the rebel National Transitional Council were proclaimed enemies of the tribes.
Three days earlier, the NTC claimed the capture of the southern desert town of Sabha, even though they only reached its outskirts. Article continues here
Markit's iTraxx Crossover index – or 'fear gauge' – of corporate bonds surged 56 basis points to 857 on Thursday
Europe's debt crisis risks escalating out of control as the world economy slides towards a double-dip slump with few shock absorbers left to limit the damage.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
9:25PM BST 22 Sep 2011
Key indicators of credit stress have reached the danger levels seen before the Lehman Brothers failure three years ago, with Markit's iTraxx Crossover index – or "fear gauge" – of corporate bonds surging 56 basis points to 857 on Thursday.
Societe Generale led a further rout of bank shares, crashing 9pc in Paris on concern that it might need recapitalisation to cope with losses on Italian and Spanish debt.
The yield spread between Italian 10-year bonds and Bunds reached a fresh record of 408 basis points before the European Central Bank (ECB) intervened in late trading. It is near the level at which LCH.Clearnet raises margin requirements, the trigger that forced Greece, Portugal and Ireland to request bail-outs.
Global investors appear shaken by the refusal of the US Federal Reserve to come to the rescue yet again with quantitative easing (QE3) even though it was never likely the bank would launch fresh stimulus with core inflation running near 2pc or in the face of protests from Capitol Hill.
The global flight from risk has hit Europe hardest. Peter Possing Andersen from Danske Bank said Europe’s authorities are running out of time. “The financial markets have lost faith in the current policies and the economy is on the verge of a recession. Radical action is needed to short-circuit the negative spiral,” he said. Article continues here
Sir John Rose, the former chief executive of Rolls-Royce, who built a reputation as one of the UK’s top industrialists, is to join the Rothschild family owned banking group as deputy chairman.
He said on Wednesday he hoped to use his “skills and experience” to help guide Rothschild’s “long-term business strategy”.
“I wanted to join a group which thought long term and where I enjoy working with the people there, and this new challenge will fit this job description extremely well,” said Sir John, who has a degree in psychology and worked in the banking industry before joining the treasury department at Rolls-Royce in 1984.
The new non-executive role for Sir John, who is 58, is his first large corporate job since he left Rolls-Royce in March after 15 years as chief executive. He is also on the board advising John Kay, the economist and Financial Times columnist, on his review of short-termism in the UK equity markets. Story continues here
China's consumption rate has fallen to 36pc of GDP from 48pc in the late 1990s. Academic libraries are bursting with PhD papers trying to explain why. Photo: Getty Images
When America became the first casualty of the global credit bubble in 2007, Europe's political elites thought it had nothing to do with them.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Beijing
6:30PM BST 18 Sep 2011
Even after Lehman and AIG collapsed a year later -- and Europe's economy crashed into slump -- it remained an article of faith in Berlin, Paris, and Rome that this was just fall-out from the Anglo-Saxon casino.
Few understood that the `China Effect' had engendered credit bubbles everywhere, and that Europe's variant was even more pernicious because euro-banks were more leveraged, with much greater liabilities, and the structure of EMU concentrated the damage on weaker states with no policy defence against sovereign collapse.
US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner must have felt a twinge of Schadenfreude as he exhorted EU finance ministers in Poland to rescue their banks or face "catastrophe". The Germans and Austrians barked back at him, of course, but at least debate is joined.
Europe cannot blame America any longer, and if the US really were to slash spending right now -- as Germany's finance minister seems to want, like the disastrous Bruning, circa 1931 -- EMU would be in even deeper trouble. In-depth article continues here
At a food pantry in a Chicago suburb, a 38-year-old mother of two breaks into tears.
She and her husband have been out of work for nearly two years. Their house and car are gone. So is their foothold in the middle class and, at times, their self-esteem.
"It's like there is no way out," says Kris Fallon.
She is trapped like so many others, destitute in the midst of America's abundance. Last week, the Census Bureau released new figures showing that nearly one in six Americans lives in poverty – a record 46.2 million people. The poverty rate, pegged at 15.1 percent, is the highest of any major industrialized nation, and many experts believe it could get worse before it abates.
The numbers are daunting – but they also can seem abstract and numbing without names and faces.
Associated Press reporters around the country went looking for the people behind the numbers. They were not hard to find. Article continues here
Al Gore treated the globe to “24 Hours of Reality” Wednesday and Thursday, but before the finale, Mother Nature stepped in with a show of her own.
As Hour Six opened from the Hilo, Hawaii offices of the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory, Hawaii Lieutenant Governor Brian Schatz warned ominously that Hawaii is “particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.”
Schatz mentioned, “rising sea levels, impacts to marine and costal eco-systems, and impacts to our fresh water supply from encroachment of sea water into our aquifers.”
The Lieutenant Governor didn’t mention “summer snow”, but that is exactly what Hawaii received. By sunrise, the crown of Mauna Kea--clearly visible across the saddle from the CO2 observatory on Mauna Loa--was dusted with about an inch of the white stuff.
When Lois Griffin gets elected mayor of Quahog by pandering to the stupidest and most meaningless references to 9/11, audiences roar. But when that same scenario is replayed over and over again in a largely successful attempt to separate people from their intellect, their conscience and their instinct for self-preservation, no one apparently even knows what's happening. Never Forget! Shriek the flag-wavers and cheerleaders of empire, as if such a thing were even possible.
For the past ten years, every march to war, every Free Speech Zone, every step in the criminalization of dissent--the whole ball of wax has been accompanied at every turn by the mindless repetition, the fear-and-fascism-drenched threat not to question or even think too deeply, because "9/11 changed *everything.*" There is a blunt and chilling meme floating around facebook and other internet fora, subscribed either to the Palestinians or some other victims of empire's vented rage to avenge the events of that day: "Your 9/11 is our 24/7."
Yet Americans so lack the capacity for self-reflection that we apparently prefer to continue to see ourselves as eternal victims instead of the initiators of one insane war after another.
In all of the parades, all of the cheers, the self-congratulatory pomp and circumstance with which Americans greeted the supposed murder of Osama Bin Laden (seen instead with horror by much of the world), there was nary a glimmer of the careful introspection one might expect from mature adults. Instead, there seems to be this constant recapitulation of the above scene from Family Guy. No questions asked, no effective movement against the wars, no real interest at all in grasping the long range consequences of the actions of our government. Nothing, really, beyond the throwaway line, "How much will it cost so we can feel safe again..?"
It is a truly frightening and depressing time to be alive. The political system is so warped that the two monopoly political "parties" in the US, who pretend to represent different interests, are in collusion on all the most basic questions of the day in service to the corporate interests who pay for their elections. Worse, the electorate has still not caught on, rendering ever more prescient Jay Gould's famous boast that he "could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." Indeed, people are so bamboozled that our political circus continues unmolested, focusing on non-issue distractions like the debt ceiling and cutting the deficit (while still spending more on war than all the other countries in the world combined....!). Even worse, the so-called "left" allows itself to be lulled to sleep by the charm of a Democrat president, a black man no less, whose actions would have been vigorously and rightly opposed were there an R after his name instead of a D. What a farce.
Gordon Brown says the eurozone crisis will not begin to be resolved until government realise is "a banking problem and a growth problem". Photo: AP
Gordon Brown has warned that Europe's fast-escalating crisis is now more dangerous than the Lehman Brothers disaster three years ago, threatening to tip the West into a 1930s-style slump unless global leaders work together to take dramatic action.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Dalian, China
2:18PM BST 16 Sep 2011
"The euro can't survive in its present form and will have to be reformed drastically," he told a mostly-Chinese audience at the World Economic Forum in Dalian.
The former Prime Minister said EMU's malaise is at root a banking crisis, not a debt crisis. "The European banks as a whole are grossly under-capitalised: they have liabilities far in excess of American banks. We have now got the inter-play with sovereign debt because we socialised the liabilities," he said.
"It has morphed into a sovereign debt crisis, and is more serious than 2008 because governments then could intervene to sort of out banks. Now both banks and governments have problems," he said.
"You cannot begin to solve this unless you realise that it is a banking problem and a growth problem, as well as being a fiscal problem. You have to take co-ordinated action in all three areas," Mr Brown said, echoing the views of the International Monetary Fund.
He added that the €440bn (£385bn) European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) bail-out fund will need "substantially more resources" to cope, with an expanded role for the IMF to shore up the whole EMU system. "People do not believe that Greece can pull through without a default," he said.
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report September 15, 2011, 10:51 AM (GMT+02:00)
Israel and Greece have invoked the mutual defense pact they signed secretly only 12 days ago in the light of heavy Turkish sea and air movements in the eastern Mediterranean. debkafile's sources report that this was decided in a long nocturnal phone conversation Wednesday night Sept. 14 between the Israeli and Greek prime ministers, Binyamin Netanyahu and George Papandreou, and at Israel's expanded cabinet of eight, which was called into session over the Turkish threat to its off-shore oil and gas rigs. The Greek Prime Minister added to the information recorded so far on Turkish fleet movements in the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. He was particularly concerned by the observation flights suddenly increased in the past 48 hours over the Greek island of Kastelorizo in the southeast Mediterranean just two kilometers from the Turkish coast. Those flights are escorted by Turkish combat jets. Article continues here
This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. The two orbiting stars regularly eclipse each other, as seen from our point of view on Earth. The planet also eclipses, or transits, each star, and Kepler data from these planetary transits allowed the size, density and mass of the planet to be extremely well determined. The fact that the orbits of the stars and the planet align within a degree of each other indicate that the planet formed within the same circumbinary disk that the stars formed within, rather than being captured later by the two stars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against 'the foreign invasion' in Afghanistan Photo: AFP
Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi's regime.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admitted that he had recruited "around 25" men from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are "today are on the front lines in Adjabiya".
Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".
His revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad's president, said al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, "including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries".
Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against "the foreign invasion" in Afghanistan, before being "captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan". He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008.
US and British government sources said Mr al-Hasidi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which killed dozens of Libyan troops in guerrilla attacks around Derna and Benghazi in 1995 and 1996. Related Articles
Even though the LIFG is not part of the al-Qaeda organisation, the United States military's West Point academy has said the two share an "increasingly co-operative relationship". In 2007, documents captured by allied forces from the town of Sinjar, showed LIFG emmbers made up the second-largest cohort of foreign fighters in Iraq, after Saudi Arabia.
Earlier this month, al-Qaeda issued a call for supporters to back the Libyan rebellion, which it said would lead to the imposition of "the stage of Islam" in the country.
British Islamists have also backed the rebellion, with the former head of the banned al-Muhajiroun proclaiming that the call for "Islam, the Shariah and jihad from Libya" had "shaken the enemies of Islam and the Muslims more than the tsunami that Allah sent against their friends, the Japanese".
The IMF has ruffled feathers in Europe by calling on the region's banks to raise €200bn (£174bn) in fresh capital Photo: EPA
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has issued its starkest warning to date that Europe's banking debacle is turning into a systemic threat to global finance and can no longer be allowed to fester.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Dalian
5:12PM BST 14 Sep 2011
"This is the most urgent crisis facing the world today," said Zhu Min, the IMF's deputy managing director and China's voice at the institution.
"There is no room for politicians to muddle through: they have to take decisive action today. Banks must be recapitalised and made solvent," he said at the World Economic Forum in Dalian.
The IMF has ruffled feathers in Europe by calling on the region's banks to raise €200bn (£174bn) in fresh capital, with partial nationalisation and by compulsion if necessary, but events are fast vindicating the Fund.
William Rhodes, the former head of the Citigroup and a veteran of debt restructuring in Latin America and East Asia, said Europe had wasted its chance to stop the downward spiral.
"You only have so much time in a crisis before the losses become uncontrollable, as Latin America learned the hard way. But the Europeans thought they were different and refused to recognise the losses. Now they are facing contagion," he said.
"You can't just rely on austerity, you also have to show citizens that there is light at the end of the tunnel," he said, alluding to the Brady plan for Latin America that gave countries enough debt relief and oxygen to recover.
"What's spooking markets is that Europe's leaders say they will do this and that but fail to give a date, and that kills credibility," he said.
Victor Chu, chair of Hong Kong's First Eastern Investment Group, said Europe's policy shuffle had reached the end of the road. "My hunch is that Greece won't deliver so we have to think the unthinkable, and prepare for the worst," he said.
Vincent Van Quickenborne, Belgium's economy minister, said the EU had reached a pivotal moment where it either goes the whole hog as a "United States of Europe" or lets the project fall apart. "It's either unity or divorce, but divorce for Europe would be opening Pandora's Box," he said in Dalian.
The IMF's Dr Min said China too has a serious problem, with credit running at 200pc of GDP. "There is a large potential risk," he said.
The world can still avoid a double-dip recession, but only if the whole world works "hand in hand" to head off an imminent crisis. Article source here
In a cabinet meeting on Sunday, the Israeli ministers approved a plan based on the ‘Prawer Report’, which involves the forced removal of 30,000 Arab Bedouin villagers in southern Israel from their homes.
The Bedouin people have lived in southern Israel for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but when Israel was created in 1948, the Israeli government chose not to recognize the Bedouin as residents, and have destroyed their homes over and over again in the decades since.
After Sunday’s decision was announced, around 150 Bedouins gathered outside the office of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to protest the plan. Some have termed it ‘ethnic cleansing’, and a Bedouin representative told Israeli reporters with Ha’aretz newspaper that the displacement plan represented a ‘declaration of war’ by the Israeli government against the Bedouin people.
Israel has created three ‘recognized’ areas for the Bedouins to settle in, near the municipal dump for the city of Jerusalem, and has repeatedly attempted to force the tens of thousands of ‘unrecognized’ Bedouins from their ancestral homes and into these areas, which many of the Bedouin view as ghettoes. The ‘recognized’ areas also do not include space for the animals of the Bedouin, many of whom are shepherds and require space for the sheep to graze.
When the ‘Prawer Report’, commissioned by the Israeli government to come up with a ‘solution’ to end the ‘Bedouin problem’, was released in June, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed numerous objections to the report.
The report says that the ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin villages must meet a number of criteria in order to be ‘recognized’, including economic sustainability and contiguity – criteria which many Bedouin people say involve the forced urbanization of their rural culture.
According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, "If the same criteria were applied to the Jewish population, whole settlements - including community settlements, observatories, kibbutzim and moshavim - would be doomed”. Article source here
History repeats itself. In this interview segment former Hitler Youth, Hilmar Von Campe, describes what life was like under Hitler and the National Socialists (Nazi's). Eerily similar to modern day America.
Ralph Nader being interviewed during his 2008 presidential campaign, 08/01/08. (photo: Scrape TV)
By Ralph Nader, CounterPunch
03 September 11
The commemorative ceremonies that are planned for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 massacre are those of pathos for the victims and their families, of praise for both the pursuit of the supporters of the attackers and the performance of first responders and our soldiers abroad.
Flags and martial music will punctuate the combined atmosphere of sorrow and aggressive defiance to those terrorists who would threaten us. These events will be moments of respectful silence and some expressions of rage and ferocity.
But many Americans might also want to pause to recognize - or unlearn - those reactions and overreactions to 9/11 that have harmed our country. How, in this forward-looking manner, can we respect the day of 9/11?
Here are some suggestions:
Do not exaggerate our adversaries' strength in order to produce a climate of hysteria that results in repression of civil liberties, embodied in the overwrought USA Patriot Act, and immense long-term damage to our economy. Consider the massive diversion of trillions of dollars from domestic civilian needs because of the huge expansion and misspending in military and security budgets.
Do not allow our leaders to lie and exaggerate as when they told us there were funded, suicidal and hateful al-Qaeda cells all over our country. They were never here. Actually, the wholesale invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan became recruiting grounds for more al-Qaeda branches there and in other countries - a fact acknowledged by both then-Army Chief of Staff George Casey and then-CIA Director Porter Goss.
Do not create a climate of fear or monopolize a partisan definition of patriotism in order to silence dissent from other political parties, the citizenry or the unfairly arrested or harassed.
Mahathir Mohamad says it is not unthinkable for former US President George W. Bush to lie about who was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks on the American soil. [Editor’s note: Then-Prime Minister Mohamad is shown in the photo (L) with William Rodriguez, 9/11 hero and the "last man out" of the Towers at a private 9/11 presentation.]
In a post published in his personal blog chedet on Friday, former Malaysian prime minister said that the attacks on the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, New York City, and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, could not have been carried out by Muslims. The acts of violence could have rather been the work of other groups. Article published here
by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky Global Research, September 7, 2011
This article below entitled Who is Osama bin Laden? was drafted on September 11, 2001. It was first published on the Global Research website on the evening of September 12, 2001.
Since 2001, it has appeared on numerous websites. The original September 12, 2001 posting is one of the most widely read articles on the internet, pertaining to Osama bin laden and Al Qaeda.
From the outset, the objective was to use 9/11 as a pretext for launching the first phase of the Middle East War, which consisted in the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan.
Within hours of the attacks, Osama bin Laden was identified as the architect of 9/11. On the following day, the "war on terrorism" had been launched. The media disinformation campaign went into full gear.
Afghanistan was identified as a "state sponsor of terror". The 9/11 attacks were categorized as an act of war, an attack on America by a foreign power.
The right to self-defense was put forth. On September 12, less than 24 hours after the attacks, NATO invoked for the first time in its history "Article 5 of the Washington Treaty - its collective defence clause" declaring the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon "to be an attack against all NATO members."
What happened subsequently, with the invasions of Afghanistan (October 2001) and Iraq (March 2003) is already part of history. In the wake of the NATO sponsored "Liberation" of Libya (August 20011), Syria and Iran constitute the next phase of the US-NATO military roadmap.
9/11 remains the pretext and justification for waging a war without borders. In a bitter irony, the global war on terrorism (GWOT) is waged not against the terrorists but with "with the terrorists" (WTT), with the full support, as in Libya, of Al Qaeda affiliated paramilitary brigades under US-NATO supervision.
Gaddafi (left) vs Abdel Hakim Belhadj (right). Gaddafi could become the new «Lion of the Desert»
by Pepe Escoba
Political, economic and social instability in Libya did not end with the fall of Tripoli and the alleged victory of NATO rebels. Gaddafi’s decision to go underground has caught everyone by surprise. The current scenario is reminiscent of the life of Omar Mukhtar, the Libyan leader who struggled against Italian colonialism for nearly twenty years, from 1912 to 1931. Everything can still change in a country where most of the population hasn’t said its final word yet and the neo-colonial powers in place are very fragile.
Enough about The Big G’s downfall. Now comes the real nitty-gritty; Afghanistan 2.0, Iraq 2.0, or a mix of both.
The "NATO rebels" have always made sure they don’t want foreign occupation. But the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - which made the victory possible - can’t control Libya without boots on the ground. So multiple scenarios are now being gamed in NATO’s headquarters in Mons, Belgium - under a United Nations velvet cushion.
According to already leaked plans, sooner or later there may be troops from Persian Gulf monarchies and friendly allies such as Jordan and especially NATO member Turkey, also very keen to bag large commercial contracts. Hardly any African nations will be part of it - Libya now having being "relocated" to Arabia.
The Transitional National Council (TNC) will go for it - or forced to go for it - if, or when, Libya spirals into chaos. Still it will be an extremely hard sell - as the wildly disparate factions of "NATO rebels" are frantically consolidating their fiefdoms, and getting ready to turn on each other.
"The Wandering Who?", by Gilad Atzom 
Markit's iTraxx Crossover index – or 'fear gauge' – of corporate bonds surged 56 basis points to 857 on Thursday
China's consumption rate has fallen to 36pc of GDP from 48pc in the late 1990s. Academic libraries are bursting with PhD papers trying to explain why. Photo: Getty Images
Gordon Brown says the eurozone crisis will not begin to be resolved until government realise is "a banking problem and a growth problem". Photo: AP
This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission.
Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against 'the foreign invasion' in Afghanistan Photo: AFP
The IMF has ruffled feathers in Europe by calling on the region's banks to raise €200bn (£174bn) in fresh capital Photo: EPA
Ralph Nader being interviewed during his 2008 presidential campaign, 08/01/08. (photo: Scrape TV) 
Gaddafi (left) vs Abdel Hakim Belhadj (right). Gaddafi could become the new «Lion of the Desert» 
