Libyan and Egyptian Updates from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

LIBYA UPDATE: FDD’s Claudia Rosett reports:

Since lifting sanctions on Libya in 2003, the U.N. has honored Gadhafi’s envoys with seats on the Security Council and Human Rights Council, plus the 2009-10 presidency of the entire U.N. General Assembly. Now the U.N. is professing itself shocked — shocked! — that Gadhafi is displaying brutality consistent with his previous four decades of terror, repression and slaughter. …

In the coming days, we are likely to see Gadhafi become the sole sacrificial goat at a U.N. that loves to dignify dictators, while the organization quite likely launches emergency appeals for loads of money to bankroll its aid to the same Libyan people whom, until just last week, it so blithely betrayed. That’s nice business for the U.N., where agencies routinely take a cut for their services. But what’s most desperately needed from the U.N. right now — not only by the people of Libya but by the captive populations of such repressive states as Syria, Cuba, China, Iran and North Korea — is an about-face that fully recognizes that they, the people, are more deserving of a seat at the table than many of the eminences now motoring in their limousines, in New York and Geneva, to and from the U.N.’s emergency sessions on Libya.

More here.

The Wall Street Journal opines

It isn't often that an Administration has an opportunity to take decisive steps against a longstanding American enemy in ways that are moral, internationally popular and in the national interest. Nor is it often that the U.S. and its European allies have such a common and compelling interest in stopping a bloodbath, preventing a refugee crisis, improving energy security and putting an end to a long-time threat to international law and order.

Mr. Obama flubbed his first opportunity to stand up to tyranny after Iran's fraudulent elections in 2009. Let's hope the Libyan people don't pay a terrible price while the U.S. and its "partners" at the U.N. dither over the text of a toothless resolution.

More here.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson notes:

Given all the complexities, consistency is as necessary as it is difficult. At some point, the president is going to have to realize that the brutal totalitarian regimes of the Middle East — an Iran or a Libya — deserve the same degree of censure, if not more, than less savage dictatorships of the Mubarak stripe. There is a reason, after all, why BBC and CNN reporters are not in the streets of Tripoli and Tehran as they were in Tahrir Square. If the president’s baffling silence continues, observers will conclude that, to the degree a regime uses greater force and kills more of its own, or to the degree that it has a more atrocious record on human rights, or to the degree that it is more anti-American, it enjoys greater immunity from serial American criticism. The only mystery is, why?

FDD’s Tom Joscelyn on Kaddafi here.

Richard Chesnoff remembers Khadafy as he used to be here.

EGYPT UPDATE: Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim tells the Wall Street Journal:

“Dislikable as [President Bush] may have been to many liberals, including my own wife, we have to give him credit ...He started a process of some conditionality with American aid and American foreign policy which opened some doors and ultimately was one of the building blocks for what's happening now."

That conditionality extended to Mr. Ibrahim: In 2002, the Bush administration successfully threatened to withhold $130 million in aid from Egypt if Mr. Mubarak didn't release him.

So what should the White House do? "Publicly endorse every democratic movement in the Middle East and offer help," he says. The least the administration can do is withhold "aid and trade and diplomatic endorsement. Because now the people can do the job. America doesn't have to send armies and navies to change the regimes. Let the people do their change."

More here.