I find Mr president Mbeki's remarks a joke.The AU has never once intervened militarily as a collective, in this case to help oppressed people dump their dictator.

A huge benefactor to the AU.This will lead to a democratic Libya, to the detriment of the western alliance. 

The wave of democratic revolutions we see are similar to the collapse of the USSR, if you old enough to remember it.

In the Arab world,might lead to the nightmare of democratically empowered Islamic fundementalist governments.

Mbeki is shouting at the clouds if he thinks the AU will do anything.

The AU failed in Zimabwbe

Thabo Mbeki’s recent assertion at a University of the Free State meeting that “The Libya conflict could have been stopped much sooner if the western world listened to African leaders” speaks volumes about this South African diplomat.

"The peace makers could not go in, to make peace," Mbeki told students and guests at the Africa Arise Summit in Bloemfontein. 

Mbeki said the African Union (AU) had a peace plan, which the Libyan government accepted, but the continent's leaders were overruled by major powers, who decided on a no-fly zone over the country.

It is fortunate indeed for the Libyan people that the western powers simply ignored the AU and entered the Libyan fray to support liberty for the Libyan people.

In this regard, the western powers were not left guessing as to how the AU would have brokered peace in Libya, because they had a fully documented chapter from the Thabo Mbeki playbook called Zimbabwe 2008 -- when this same diplomatic pimpernel was sent to broker a deal between the MDC and ZANU-PF.

The outcome was to place the people of Zimbabwe in bondage under a ZANU-PF despot who had stolen the election, yet in apparent peace. 

Had the AU brokered “peace” in Libya one could expect the same outcome there, with Gaddafi still in charge and the Libyan people in bondage under that despot or his sons for at least the next half century.

The western powers know that liberty, rather than mere peace, is essential in Libya if Europe is to survive the next century. 

Every month, thousands of Africans living in bondage to African despots walk across the continent, including across Libya, and take flimsy boats to the islands off Europe to seek a new life on that continent. 

What they flee is peace -- peace under the bondage of despots.  Of course, a similar event takes place at the southern end of the African continent, where Africans living in bondage to despots in Zimbabwe and elsewhere walk across the continent to find a new life here in South Africa.

It is self evident that South Africa cannot provide a home for all these people, yet our leaders are satisfied with the conditions in Africa that compel these millions to migrate here.

Thabo Mbeki and the African Union have not understood that the future of South Africa itself requires an outcome on the African continent that is far more difficult to attain than mere peace.  It requires liberty. - Isaac Newton, Johannesburg