That Could Have Done With More Detail.

In Britain there is a university called the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE). Although it has a slight liberal left wing bias in it's field the LSE is considered one of the best if not the best university in the world.

Yesterday (4/3/11) it's director was forced to resign after an independent investigation was launched into links between the university and the Libyan government. These links included accepting Saif Qaddafi as post-graduate student during which time he wrote a PHD thesis on bringing democracy to autocratic middle eastern regimes and a training program for Libyan civil servants. Obviously this should be viewed as an attempt to bring democracy to Libya by reforming it's government institutions and changing the culture of the Libyan civil service. The fact that Britain is now punishing people who were involved in this slow but stable approach to reforming Libya while simultaneously undertaking a course of action that leaves Libya's future looking uncertain at best should be very worrying to anyone who cares about bringing democracy to the middle east.

One of the key drivers in the middle eastern uprisings and the Libyan rebellion especially is the news channel Al Jazeera who are funded by and therefore, to some extent, answerable to the Qatari Royal Family. Also on March 4th the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) suddenly responded to a long standing BBC freedom of information request that revealed that during the 2018 World Cup bid process the British bid team got Prince Phillip to use his family links to the Qatari Royal Family to negotiate a vote swapping deal which would have seen Qatar support Britain's bid and Britain support Qatar's bid. Qatar did not honour their part of the deal so the FCO announcement seems to be an attempt to establish if Britain still has Qatar's support for it's operations in Libya and to exactly what extent the Qatari Royal Family has editorial influence over Al Jazeera because if Al Jazeera were to stop it's sometimes wildly optimistic spin on events in Libya the Libyan rebellion would collapse quite quickly.

So yeah what was I saying about being too tired to form coherent sentences?