Inspired by “Today On Holden’s Obsession With the Gaggle”:
Q But before the war, the President said that taking out Saddam Hussein would help stabilize the Middle East. Do you think that’s turned out to be true?
MR. SNOW: Hard to say. I mean, what you saw, for instance, was very swift change of behavior on the part of Libya. Certainly we continue to work closely with our other allies in the region.
Someone needs to get the White House some maps. Libya may be a neighbor of Egypt, it may be a country with an Arab population, but one thing it’s not is the “Middle East”. It’s in North Africa.
In fact, a few minutes with a copy of Google Earth or a quick trip to timeanddate.com’s distance calculator would show that Tripoli — the capital of Libya — is more than 1800 miles from Baghdad. Here are some other calculations:
| Baghdad, IRAQ to | miles |
| Athens, GREECE | 1205 |
| Kiev, UKRAINE | 1383 |
| Moscow, RUSSIA | 1588 |
| Warsaw, POLAND | 1755 |
| Tripoli, LIBYA | 1801 |
| Rome, ITALY | 1830 |
| New Delhi, INDIA | 1968 |
| Berlin GERMANY | 2035 |
| Helsinki, FINLAND | 2060 |
| Copenhagen, DENMARK | 2174 |
Taking Out Saddam: Bringing Change to Libya, Finland, and India aka “The Middle East”.