The spectacle of NATO's inability to bring down Khadafy's rump regime in Libya is perversely fascinating, like watching a ship sink in the ocean.
The combined might of Europe, nations whose immediate ancestors were once able to project decisive power all over the world--and conquer a good part of it, to boot--with a handful of men (as few as 100,000 British regulars sufficed to police the Empire at the close of the 19th century) cannot impose a military decision on half of a small, backward, North African sand pit.
Little did I suspect, when I was a boy and started to read avidly the history of ancient Rome, that I would one day be afforded a front row seat at the spectacle of a once-great and feared civilization being brought low by backward peoples on its periphery. Ah well, perhaps I should think of it as a "living history tableau," like reenactments of American Civil War battles.
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The spectacle of NATO's inability to bring down Khadafy's rump regime in Libya is perversely fascinating, like watching a ship sink in the ocean.
The combined might of Europe, nations whose immediate ancestors were once able to project decisive power all over the world--and conquer a good part of it, to boot--with a handful of men (as few as 100,000 British regulars sufficed to police the Empire at the close of the 19th century) cannot impose a military decision on half of a small, backward, North African sand pit.
Little did I suspect, when I was a boy and started to read avidly the history of ancient Rome, that I would one day be afforded a front row seat at the spectacle of a once-great and feared civilization being brought low by backward peoples on its periphery. Ah well, perhaps I should think of it as a "living history tableau," like reenactments of American Civil War battles.
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