In These New Times

Cailean Bochanan

14th October, 2011

NATO cheerleaders at the Guardian have an update message in their “news updates” from Sirte:

“Welcome to Middle East Live. Could this be the day that Sirte finally falls?”

But there is no update in sight. Perhaps there’s a bit of a hangover after the excesses of Peter Beuamont’s report yesterday,“Libya war reaches endgame with 100 loyalists left fighting”.

Beaumont puts it straight to the Gaddafi men:

“The choices faced by Gaddafi’s loyalists are stark: to fight on and end up dead…or to come out, as one fighter in uniform did on Thursday morning” described by Beaumont as  “bruised from beating, crying with fear”.

“Why they fight on seems baffling to many of those facing them in these last days and hours of the battle for Sirte and indeed the war for Libya”.

Dutifully following NATO’s “all resistance is futile” line Beaumont fails to see that in his description of a man facing almost certain death he makes it quite clear why they will fight on: Patria o muerte.

Another reason is that they are having quite some success:

In a now widely reported Yamahiriya counter-attack, according to AFP,  TNC forces were pushed back up to 2 kilometres to where they were on Tuesday. Not bad for a “pocket” of 100 men as Beaumont has it.

Still, Beaumont would be unfazed by setbacks since he knows this is “a battle that the government fighters now cannot lose”. Incidently, his reference to the TNC fighters as government fighters is inaccurate since the TNC has been unable to form a government.

So a day of triumph for the Guardian yesterday followed today by the inevitable silence from their man on the ground in Sirte, Peter Beaumont.