Lavrov

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Define irony? Here is one, or rather two, tries.

Back in the 1970s, it was none other than the US that armed the Taliban “freedom fighters” fighting against the USSR in the Soviet-Afghanistan war, only to see these same freedom fighters eventually and furiously turn against the same US that provided them with arms and money, with what ended up being very catastrophic consequences, culminating with September 11.

Fast forward some 30 or more years and it is again the US which, under the guise of dreams and hopes of democracy and the end of a “dictatorial reign of terror”, armed local insurgents in the Libyan war of “liberation” to overthrow the existing regime (and in the process liberate just a bit of Libya’s oil) – the same Libya where shortly thereafter these same insurgents rose against their former sponsor, and killed the US ambassador in what has now become an epic foreign policy Snafu.

But it doesn’t end there as according to Russia, it is the same US weapons that were provided to these Libyan “freedom fighters” that are now being used in what is rapidly becoming a war in Mali, involving not only assorted French regiments, but extensive US flip flops and boots on the ground.

Via Al Jazeera,

Russia said on Wednesday the rebels fighting French and African troops in Mali are the same fighters the West armed in the revolt that ousted Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

“Those whom the French and Africans are fighting now in Mali are the [same] people who overthrew the Gaddafi regime, those that our Western partners armed so that they would overthrow the Gaddafi regime,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference.

“It’s important to lift one’s head a bit and look over the horizon, look at all those processes more widely, they are interconnected and carry very many threats,” Lavrov said, speaking of unrest across the Middle East that could play into the hands of militants.

“This will be a time bomb for decades ahead,” he said.

That is our definition of irony.