Some things still make me laugh. -rg

'Your turn is next,' Gadhafi warns Arab leaders after US toppling of
Saddam
The Associated Press
March 29, 2008

DAMASCUS, Syria: Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi poured contempt on
fellow Arab leaders at a summit Saturday and warned that they might be
overthrown like former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

Gadhafi's rambling, off-the-cuff speech to the opening of the Arab
summit both bewildered and brought reluctant smiles to the faces of the
other leaders.

The maverick Libyan's litany of insults at Arabs and his undiplomatic
railing at the disarray of Arab regimes have become almost a tradition
at the annual gathering.

Dressed in lush purple and pink robes with a traditional Libyan cloak
and cap, Gadhafi blasted Arab countries for doing nothing while the
United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew Saddam.

"How can we accept that a foreign power comes to topple an Arab leader
while we stand watching?" he said. He said Saddam had once been an ally
of Washington, "but they sold him out."

In recent years, Gadhafi has dramatically repaired ties with the United
States ' once his top enemy ' by giving up his country's weapons of
mass destruction programs and paying compensation for the 1988 Pan Am
bombing. Libya is hoping for a landmark visit by U.S. Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, though one is still not set, and has stepped up
economic ties to the West.

Still, that hasn't stopped Gadhafi from denouncing U.S. domination of
the world and criticizing other Arab countries for their closeness to
Washington.

In his speech, Gadhafi slammed Arab disunity and inaction on the
region's multiple crises.

"Where is the Arabs' dignity, their future, their very existence?
Everything has disappeared," he said. "Our blood and our language may
be one, but there is nothing that can unite us"

"If they (Arabs) will not reorganize themselves, they will turn into
protectorates. They will be marginalized and turn into garbage dumps,"
he said.

Gadhafi also mocked a plan by the Arab League to start Arab cooperation
on a joint nuclear program. "How can do we that? We hate each other, we
wish ill of each other and our intelligence services conspire against
each other. We are our own enemy."

Gadhafi repeated his frequently made proposal that the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict be settled by creating one democratic
state where the two peoples live together, to be called Isratine.

He threw a compliment-cum-backhanded insult at Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas, praising him as the "hero of Oslo," referring to the
1993 Oslo peace accords that created the Palestinian Authority, now
headed by Abbas, but are derided by many Arabs for failing to bring a
final peace.

Abbas scowled at the comment.