“Ending the crisis entails the departure of Qaddafi from power,” Mr. Juppé told France Info radio. “This was absolutely not a given two or three months ago.” ~The New York Times

This is an odd thing to say. The joint op-ed by Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama that demanded Gaddafi’s removal as the condition for ending the war was published on April 15, which was almost exactly three months ago. I know Western publics have short attention spans, but does Juppé think that we can’t recall what his government was saying about this war as recently as April? If we believe Juppé’s latest statement, there would have been no reason to continue the war this long. What we are seeing here is a bit of sloppy revisionism that is trying to claim that it was not the NATO-supported maximalist demand that Gaddafi’s departure be a precondition of any cease-fire or talks that has prolonged the war. As Juppé tells it, there was no such precondition, and Gaddafi’s removal has only recently become unavoidable. I’m not sure what the point of making such an obviously untrue statement could be.

Micah Zenko recently commented on the bizarre habit of both sides in the conflict to make public statements that were easily shown to be false. He concluded:

But the doublespeak coming from both sides of the fight is Libya is remarkable in its divergence from publicly available information gleaned from less biased sources.