RAF pilots who flew on a rescue mission to Libya used maps printed straight from Google. Why bother? When I need a map of Libya I use a sheet of sand paper. Apparently, we have been dropping in troops as ‘advisors’. It’s all perfectly fine under international law so long as when they shoot someone they say, ‘I advise you to die.’
The public doesn’t seem to be behind the war in Libya. To engage them, maybe we should tally up the number of civilian casualties and use them as the numbers for the EuroMillions. You’ll have Jenni Falconer in a morgue as Graham, the voice of the dead, reads the results. 6, 22, 11, 4, 9 and, because last night we hit a primary school, 40.
David Cameron said he undertook military action because it’s ‘not acceptable to have a situation where Colonel Gaddafi can be murdering his own people using planes and helicopter gunships’. It also invalidates the warranties the British arms manufacturers sold them with. Amusingly, David Cameron was roaming around the Middle East with arms dealers trying to flog weapons while calling for an end to violence. He’s right. What these places need to solve their differences is more guns. The Tories see Gaddafi as a ‘legitimate target’ for them – after all he is elderly, Muslim and has children.
Gaddafi’s also been accused of using human shields. He’s going to have to do better than that. Our bombs will simply rip through them. He should have opted for steel or concrete. And they say he’s a tactical genius! Yes, it’s horrible that protestors are being fired on by jets, but what a way to go! Fighting a plane! It must be like unlocking a secret level of Grand Theft Auto coded by Raoul Moat.
Both sides have been accused of using rape as a weapon. The hardest part of using rape as a weapon is training the troops. The assault course is a very different thing at rape camp. You rarely see rape squads as part of military marches. You can hear David Dimbleby doing the voiceover at Trooping the Colour. ‘Visiting from Scotland we have the 4th Rape Squad. They’ve been raping for their country since 1935. They’re taking the salute from the Queen. Some of them have broken ranks, and are racing straight towards Her Majesty’s box. And from here, I think I can see a flicker of a smile come across her face.’
NATO says Gaddafi’s reign of terror is near an end – because we will soon have bombed everybody he’s been trying to scare. It’s an interesting policy. We just keep bombing everything around him, but not actually him. I presume if he gets captured they’re going to execute him by knife thrower.
We were told that military action helped to prevent a bloodbath in Benghazi. Thankfully, with our help the bloodbath happened five miles outside Benghazi. Libyans are gathering around military instillations, not to act as human shields but in the knowledge that it’s probably the last place that NATO bombs are going to land. Surprisingly, some people in Tripoli still support NATO. The undertakers. To most Scots, NATO’s just a description of their feet after suffering a decade of Type 2 diabetes.
Is it wise to fill Libya with melting corpses while we look for Gaddafi? He’s increasingly blending in. Gaddafi has a lot of money at his disposal – it can’t have been cheap buying Michael Jackson’s face after he died. He looks like the last surviving balloon from a children’s party. If only he hadn’t hoarded £60 billion abroad. He could have kept say £10 billion, and used the rest to create an unbreachable defence. Right now, a colossal golden robot bear could be lapping up the protestors like ants, its tortured attempts to sing ‘Bear Necessities’ in machine code sounding, to Libyans, like a series of garbled sex threats.
Our various wars are being fought purely to justify a £50 billion defence bill and maintain an army that is grossly oversized for the realistic needs of our country. Ours is the second largest military force in the EU. The last time Britain was successfully invaded was over a millennium ago in 1066. And our military is used to attack not to defend. Some critics of this will say that Britain has been attacked, by terrorists. But we didn’t need an army to prevent 7/7. We needed a bus conductor.
The bombs we’re dropping cost more than the buildings we’re dropping them on. In financial terms they’re winning. First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope says he’s sure if we’d had enough money to send another warship we’d have finished this conflict. Yes, Sir Mark, and if we had enough money for jobs people could feed their kids. Who’d have thought that a navy as powerful as ours would struggle to win a war in a desert? So we sold Gaddafi weapons and now he has more than we do. How do we get out of this sticky situation? Surely we could launch a product-recall notice?
‘An unfinished surface of the T-72 dashboard could cause a nasty cut. Please return, in person, to the nearest HM warship.’
Why should we believe the opinions of the First Sea Lord? I haven’t trusted him since he told his daughter she couldn’t marry a human and she ended up selling her voice for legs. Also, maybe saying we’re running out of money to carry on isn’t the best way of getting Gaddafi to surrender. Is this the Big Society? We all work for free to save lives while special funding is ring-fenced to kill people? We got stuck in Iraq for eight years, we’ve been stuck in Afghanistan for ten years and, for some reason, we set the timetable for a conflict in Libya at 90 days. You can’t even get a sofa delivered in 90 days.
Gaddafi shut down all internet communications in the country. Which is a pity, as there are always thousands of people trying to get on Freecycle to pick up a coffin. Libya operated tight state control over the media, that’s obvious. The rebels invited Britain to get involved in their war – they must have watched no television at all. Gaddafi banned the learning of the English language in Libyan schools, which is obviously why Libya did most of its diplomatic negotiations with the Scottish government. A succession of colourful noises was all the two parties needed to be understood.
Trumping even Libya, Tunisia had the harshest internet censorship outside of China. I wonder why so few of us knew that? The Tunisian revolution started when a street vendor set fire to himself. Ian Tomlinson’s inquest ended and the British people were watching TV’s Most Shocking Talent Show Moments, which was a revolution in a way, as you didn’t get to vote on what won.
Tunisia’s revolution inspired the uprisings across the Arab world, so maybe all the Arab refugees should go to Tunisia. Put all the exiled revolutionaries in one country and rename it ‘Spirited Arabia’. It will have a lovely climate and be very close by plane, but the customer service will consist of someone shouting, ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ and shooting into the ceiling.
These Arab states have had to fight with their lives to install a hastily-decided-upon, cobbled-together, temporary government. We did it simply by not bothering to vote last year. The Arab League. It’s not a patch on the Premiership. You just can’t get the ball control with sandals.
It was reported that Leila Trabelsi, the wife of Tunisia’s ousted ruler, left the country with 1.5 tonnes of gold, worth more than £35 million. The joke’s on her, though, as she fled the country on easyJet. Her baggage allowance came to just over £40 million.
Israel killed a bunch of civilians in international waters for trying to bring aid to the Palestinians. According to the Israelis, their troops started shooting because people on the boats threw stones. That sounds proportionate. It’s a bit like, well, someone throwing stones at you and you executing them in cold blood with a team of commandos. ‘20 soldiers airdropped onto the boat from a helicopter’ – what surprised me is, if you type that into Google, you get a Charlie Sheen sex tape.
Israel still claims land rights based on the Bible. That’s a bit like me pitching a tent beside your house and saying I want your garden because it belonged to King Arthur. I pity the Palestinians, who didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to them. Israel should have been given some of Germany to start a country in. Anyway, I’d better leave it there. I get a lot of complaints when I write jokes about Israel, mainly from the Mossad agent who has to update my file.
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