Last but not least, l’article de Stephen Walt qui s’interroge sur l’ampleur du nombre des victimes de Kadhafi. Morceaux choisis (désolé, pas le temps pour une traduction)
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Although everyone recognizes that Qaddafi is a brutal ruler, his forces did not conduct deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured, and his violent threats to wreak vengeance on Benghazi were directed at those who continued to resist his rule, not at innocent bystanders. There is no question that Qaddafi is a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive qualities, but the threat of a bloodbath that would "[stain] the conscience of the world" (as Obama put it) was slight.

Others scholars have questioned Obama’s propaganda. University of Texas associate professor Alan Kuperman notes that Gaddafi "did not massacre civilians in any of the other big cities he captured – Zawiya, Misrata, Ajdabiya – which together have a population equal to Benghazi." Human Rights Watch has recently released casualty figures on Misrata that bolster his point. Kuperman writes : Misurata’s population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people – including combatants – have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22 – less than 3 percent – are women. If Gadhafi were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties…

Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The « no mercy » warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those « who throw their weapons away. » Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight « to the bitter end. »

Paul Miller, who served on Bush and Obama’s National Security Councils, intones that far from a genocidal clash, we are looking at a "Libyan civil war. . . between a tyrant and his cronies on one side, and a collection of tribes, movements, and ideologists (including Islamists) on the other.

(Incidentally, these opponents of Gadhafi’s regime, like practically all other insurgent allies of the CIA, are far from the angelic freedom fighters that the U.S. implies. Their leader outright admits connections between his group and al-Qaeda, which has offered his rebels aid. The U.S. went to war with Iraq boasting of Saddam’s fictitious ties to al-Qaeda, a connection that was « proven » on the tortured testimony of Libyan al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. But unlike Saddam, America’s allies in the struggle against Gadhafi are probably tied to these Islamist killers.)