Something about it always struck me as a stretch, but the words of Muammar Gaddafi, repeated endlessly in the media and from the White House, seemed to portent doom in Benghazi.
Now Steve Chapman has put the lie to the Obama claim that military intervention was needed to prevent near-genocide in Benzhazi. As Chapman documents, the speech by Gaddafi on which Obama relied and relies not only did not state that there would be mass murder, but actually stated that there would not be mass murder (emphasis mine):
In his March 26 radio address, Obama said the United States acted because Gadhafi threatened “a bloodbath.” Two days later, he asserted, “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi — a city nearly the size of Charlotte — could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
Really? Obama implied that, absent our intervention, Gadhafi might have killed nearly 700,000 people, putting it in a class with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. White House adviser Dennis Ross was only slightly less alarmist when he reportedly cited “the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred.”
But these are outlandish scenarios that go beyond any reasonable interpretation of Gadhafi’s words. He said, “We will have no mercy on them” — but by “them,” he plainly was referring to armed rebels (“traitors”) who stand and fight, not all the city’s inhabitants.
“We have left the way open to them,” he said. “Escape. Let those who escape go forever.” He pledged that “whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected.”
“He lied us into war.” Could very well be, but you will never hear it in the mainstream media.
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