Reply #14: The problem is making the leap of logic to say that it's planned and encouraged by leadership

[PurityOfEssence]

Qaddafi has a MUCH better record on women's rights than the Islamists of Cyrenaica.

One of the unspoken realities of this war is that the Eastern revolt is partially fueled by vengeance from Islamists of the LIFG for having their kin killed at Abu Salim: a prison riot of captured Islamists who took hostages. They were in an overcrowded prison because they'd been on a rampage killing Police, Uniformed Soldiers and had botched an assassination attempt of Qaddafi. These people don't like Qaddafi's liberal policies toward women.

There has been plenty of rape from rebel troops, too, and some of it has been racially oriented: Arab on Sub-Saharan.

You obviously get the reality of what horrors are unleashed in war, and I don't think I'm at odds with you at all. The really ugly aspect of crying "rape" is the unsubstantiated leap of logic that it was sanctioned by Qaddafi as policy. This is an ongoing problem as the interventionists scrabble to justify the unjustifiable: they demand the moral high ground, even as they call for brutal military intervention into a situation that simply didn't warrant it, and ignore the greedy underpinnings of the operation.