They Just Don't Think Like Us

Ignorant and backsliding persons with no knowledge or understanding of Libya have been playing politics with the Imperial Haystack's latest bit of robust British humour. The Haystack blathered at the Conservative Party's Manchester club-and-blub that the beach-front at Sirte would be a jolly place to invest once the bodies had been cleared away: a comment so Churchillian in its quintessential Britishness that not even the Libyans are laughing. The Libyan government, which is backed by those other humourless foreigners at the UN, summoned the British ambassador, and the Libyan parliament's foreign affairs committee called for, of all things, an explanation and apology; which shows just how little knowledge or understanding of Libya is common among mere Libyans. For his own part, the Imperial Haystack has undertaken a couple of taxpayer-funded trips to the country this year alone, in order to observe just how rah-rah the results of a good old wog-bombing can be. Since no reasonable analysis could entertain the possibility that the Imperial Haystack was there for anything so tediously mundane as doing his job, the investment potential of Sirte may well be a fact.