Operation Oil Theft: Month 2, Week 3, Day 1.

While we've all been distracted by other things there have been dramatic developments in Libya although the conflict generally is still in something of a stalemate.

On Friday (29/4/11) - the day of the British royal wedding Muammar Qaddafi decided to make an hour long speech, live on Libyan state television. This allowed NATO to pinpoint his exact location and halfway through the speech NATO aircraft, believed to be British, attacked the building in a completely illegal attempt to assassinate him. Although Muammar Qaddafi survived the attack and even managed to finish his speech his youngest son Saif al-Arab Qaddafi (not Saif al-Islam Qaddafi) was killed along with his wife and three of their children. The blatant and cynical nature of the attack prompted supporters of the Libyan government to storm the long deserted British Embassy in Tripoli and more or less destroy it. This prompted the British government to expel the Libyan Ambassador to London on Sunday (1/5/11) and Britain is now talking about further escalating the conflict by using HMS Liverpool to bombard Libyan coastal towns from the sea. Of course the naval bombardment of Libyan coastal towns was one of the reasons Britain used for intervening in the first place.

Unlike America's (recently successful) attempts to kill Osama bin Laden the situation in Libya means that the assassination of Muammar Qaddafi can never be legally sanctioned by any resolution by the United Nations or any other international body. Since the end of the second world war and the formation of the UN the world has experienced an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity based on the principle that no nation can launch a war of aggression against another nation. Of course if one nation is attacked it can launch a defensive war against the aggressor or even possibly launch a pre-emptive war against a nation that poses a clear and present threat to it or another nation although that's rarely a good idea. However you simply cannot attack another country just because they've got something you want or you don't like the way they organise their government otherwise everyone would be doing it and there would be no peace.

Certainly for the last decade Qaddafi's Libya has not posed a clear threat to any other nation on earth and all that is happening in the country now is that the government is trying to put down an armed insurgency within it's own borders that may well have been started by another nation. By contrast bin Laden's Al Qaeda repeatedly attacked America and continued to attack them on many fronts so America's killing of bin Laden was not only justified but arguably necessary to underpin that principle which maintains world peace. Plus now that America has finally got him they should now have the intelligence resources available to at least know when they're making a huge mistake.