Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

It's not picking winners, it's choosing sides - and there is a difference, even if not in outcome. Hell, even Gandhi stressed the importance of choosing sides in WWII. Failure to act is to support Gadaffi. Partitioning the country would take more force than removing him. The problem remains that the world has not acted enough, rather than acting too little.

i hear all that

I'm with Dowd on this. If you allow Gaddaffi's troops to retake towns hence life will be dangerous for civilians in those towns. Jeeez Tracer, you're still worried that these rebels might be worse than Gaddaffi.

what?? when did i ever say that?

really, i mean i DO understand that being opposed to western airstrikes is equal to supporting gaddafi's right to kill civilians in cold blood, but no one should have to bring up hitler to make their arguments

I probably wouldn't put it as strongly as saying that opposition is "equal to supporting gaddafi's right to kill civilians in cold blood" - it may enable his actions, but it doesn't condone them. I guess it gets a bit too act and omissions doctrine at this point.

JUST A LITTLE BIT

In the case of Ivory Coast, it's been an intervention months in the making, plus a much more clear cut idea of the opposition: the is, the guy that won the national election and the millions that support him, vs. the despot refusing to concede who has nationalized the banks, cocoa industry, etc., to consolidate power and fund his side. Libya just seems so much more ambiguous/amorphous, with "Qaddafi is a bad guy" the only thing obvious to everyone. Just about every other aspect of it is a degree of guesswork.

So, with regard to Ivory Coast, I'm fine with intervention. Though the French, obviously, owe a much greater debt to and have a much deeper relationship with Ivory Coast that we do with Libya.

^sorry for all the typos, packing a kid's lunch while I wrote this

Re Ivory Coast, here's an article from the Nation on how the exploitive role played by American agribusiness companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (in not paying farmers fairly for cocoa) will continue to be a problem there even if/when the guy who lost the election finally leaves

http://www.thenation.com/article/159707/roots-cote-divoire-crisis

NPR this morning covered Libya and Yemen from the perspective of those in the US government who are trying to stop Al Queda. Sadly it seems that civilians in both of those countries are irrelevent pawns. All of the military 'experts' just assume that changes in governments in those 2 countries will help Al Queda in Libya(alleged to exist based on prior reports) and Al Queda in the Arabian Peninsula(AQAP gave us the underwear bomber). There was no discussion of economic aid or anything else for the people in Yemen, just how the US has been unable to use Predator drones in recent months to target AQAP.

Josh in Chicago, do you have a child?

I've got two!

That's impressive. Congratulations.

Well, they're not that new! ;)

But thanks.

NATO bombing missions in Libya apparently up a bit today, but Gaddaffi is trying to use non-military vehicles and hiding troops in urban areas to make things more difficult.

good to know. any idea when it will end?

Ha. I liked the story that one of Gaddaffi's sons was suggesting that if his Dad be considered a British style king, he would go along with having a Parliament.

Gaddafi also wrote another letter to Obama:

from the NY Times

In a letter to President Barack Obama on Wednesday, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi called for an end to airstrikes on his forces and addressed the American leader as “our son,” apparently referring to Mr. Obama’s African heritage.

Colonel Qaddafi also assured Mr. Obama that he has not taken the American military action personally, and even endorsed his campaign for reelection in 2012.

As White House Press Secretary Jay Carney reminded reporters on Wednesday, the letter was “not the first,” from the Libyan leader to the American president.

omg

Man, Muammar really needs to go into exile on a talk show. If it weren't for the evil, he'd be a zany comic genius.

the letter was “not the first,” from the Libyan leader to the American president

Muammar el-Gaddfly

I'm sure the big thing Obama wants in his corner right now is the endorsement of a crazy black man dressed as a future pimp

just got nostalgic for Idi Amin for a moment there

Many of the fighters are brave, but by any measures by which a military might be assessed, they are hapless NY Times on Libyan rebels

So I guess these "hapless" rebels are not Al Queda?

You'd have to check their driver's licenses to be sure

@bencnn benwedeman
Fighters, civilians fleeing ajdabiya after apparent NATO airstrikes kills at least three (including doctor), wound more than 10 opposition
1 minute ago via Twitter for iPhone

"We Support the Libyan Democratic Revolution and Oppose Western Military Intervention and Domination "

http://www.cpdweb.org/

And elsewhere in the region:

After Bahrain’s Sunni rulers crushed protests last month, the Shiite opposition is trying to regain momentum

Phyllis Bennis responds to Juan Cole:

http://www.zcommunications.org/on-libya-a-response-to-juan-cole-by-phyllis-bennis

She's just rehashing old arguments. Her argument about the military strength of the rebels might have seemed logical when the rebellion began, but I don't see many people voicing that view now about the "hapless" rebels.

Nothing surprising in that CPD statement - just wishful thinking and a pretty casual approach to massacres.

I guess you must be referring to those predicted massacres that did not happen, but are now happening in an alternate reality.

They did not happen because of the bombings, yes.

Easy to infer, much harder to establish.

I have learned through bitter experience that governments are quite good at inventing reasons to bomb. The Vietnam War was begun after an "incident" in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happeded. The first Gulf War peddled atrocity stories from Kuwait that were pure fiction, but widely advertised. The Iraq War was sold on the imminent threat of WMD's that didn't exist. A presumably "imminent massacre", even if it were valid in this case, should not be referred to as a massacre.

My point was that DL's dismissal of the linked article as "casual" was itself exceedingly casual, and tbf, was a lot less well thought out.

In a letter to President Barack Obama on Wednesday, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi called for an end to airstrikes on his forces and addressed the American leader as “our son,” apparently referring to Mr. Obama’s African heritage.

Colonel Qaddafi also assured Mr. Obama that he has not taken the American military action personally, and even endorsed his campaign for reelection in 2012.

Obama sonned in a Libyan beef

Aimless, I don't just mean the averted massacre in Libya (which even the CPD piece acknowledges) but the imo dishonest description of Kosovo: "Besieged Muslim Bosnians and Kosovar Albanians called for help from NATO; the results were permanent ethnic partition in Bosnia and the creation of a gangster state in Kosovo." Well, the results were also the removal of a tyrant and an end to a campaign of ethnic cleansing. I lost faith in the argument when they started making bogus comparisons (neither Libya nor Kosovo are at all the same as Iraq) in order to argue that all interventions are doomed to failure. And to go back to Libya, pretending that because a massacre didn't happen that it was never going to happen doesn't wash with me. (Reading it again, the paragraph about Qaddafi is all bet-hedging and guesswork while the paragraph about how anyone in the left who doesn't oppose all intervention is just a sucker for the imperialists is so fucking arrogant and condescending. It's a really badly argued statement.)

Why do you think govts have "invented" a reason to bomb Libya? What's in it for them? It's expensive, unpopular in polls, and may drag on for months. Qaddafi had already been brought in from the cold, had given up his WMDs, and was selling oil to the west - as, again, CPD acknowledges. The best they can come up with "However, once the situation became unstable they sought to assert more reliable control over Libya and its resources." Sorry, too vague, too groundless.

It's not as if Libya can forego getting oil revenue. They import more than 75% of their food! It's not a one-way street. Yeah, Italians (and the West) may be casually treated as imperialists (they acknowledged Libyan independence in '48 and left in '51) but Libya has set itself up as a resource extraction based society run by a thoughtless, corrupt elite and they need markets to friggin' even live.

My complaint, really, is that the better options; leave Libya to its own devices (and witness a long, brutal civil war and suffer the ignominy of knowing that we could have helped ppl undoubtedly better than Qaddafy) or stomp the regime hard and quickly (and further rend international security arrangements as embodied by the UN, cause outcry at home and abroad, and cost us blood and money) were avoided and instead, with a half-assed exertion we'll end up with all of the negatives anyway.

I think there are many sound objections to the current plan, but I'm still waiting for someone opposed to the intervention to honestly confront the likelihood that many people would have died and a dictator would have triumphed while we did nothing (because I don't think there would have been a "long, brutal civil war" given the military weakness of the rebels). That was an option, and I respect anyone who says, sure, they could live with that and it's the lesser of two evils, but instead I just see people saying there wouldn't really have been a massacre, or the rebels would have triumphed with just our good wishes. I don't believe that and I don't think all the people saying it believe that either.

And I'm saying this while feeling that the current path is messy and fraught and could be a disaster and I wish the whole crisis had never arisen in the first place.

honestly confront the likelihood that many people would have died and a dictator would have triumphed

I'm not saying that we are not each other's brothers and it sounds callous to say realpolitk must be considered along with every other prism but the stakes are more than just national and more than just oil and Tamoil, etc... Chad, Niger, Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, heck all of North Africa, and the legacy of the Arab Spring are in the balance.

i posted those links not because i agreed with everything in them but to expose them to the light of debate - to help people skeptical of the intervention (like me) to sharpen our own thinking about it. DL your issues with the CPD piece are pretty accurate i think. the reasoning is very wooly.

of course you're right that no one can know what would have happened had no one stepped in - it's certainly unlikely that the rebels would have held off gaddafi's army forever, even in the absence of his air force. many would probably have died in benghazi, both in the fighting and the retribution - rebel soldiers, civilians-turned-rebels, defected grunts, and all those who conspired to help them - shopkeepers, even children. that's what happens when you take up arms against a dictator. if he can exact his revenge he will. the rebels knew that. everyone who helped the rebels knew that. it's utterly horrible. but i think the word "massacre" is a kind of unearned trump card - it conjures images of british troops firing into protestors in amritsar. what was in store for benghazi was horrible, but it was not like this. it was almost an entire city that had decided to violently overthrow its ruler, with guns, mortars and defections. it was a pitched urban battle, with a hundred shades of gray between civilians and full-on soldiers.

i agree too that if no intervention had happened this particular conflict may have actually been quite short, and left gaddafi in power (for now). i also suspect it would have been less bloody than what is to follow - a kind of long, grinding drip drip of attrition, skirmishes, bombs and possibly growing "terrorist" tactics as an increasingly desperate public tries whatever it can to destabilize the country.

I think that's a smarter, more honest and more coherent response than most of what I've read elsewhere. Though I still reckon that if the_west had done nothing, allowing if not a massacre than bloody repression, and the collapse of the Arab spring, a lot of people would be talking about Obama's disgraceful weakness and abdication of responsibility - maybe not on the level of Srebrenica or Rwanda in terms of body count and one-sidedness but in the same vein. I don't know - we agree there were two shitty options, the issue is which was the shittiest.

yeah, and there's no guarantee that even with a swift defeat there wouldn't have been a kind of grinding, low-level insurgency against gaddafi stretching out over the years as well. though he seems to have been pretty effective at snuffing things like that out over the years.

Nato refuses to apologise for strike on Libya rebels

Look, pro or con intervention, I really don't think Qaddafi massacring, or killing, or putting down the rebellion would have been shamefully hung around Obama's neck, let alone the_west's. We're talking about a region literally composed of nothing but dictators and despots who got where they've been for decades by violently or otherwise suppressing their people. And that's where precedent comes in, because from now on, if Obama does nothing or says nothing in similar scenarios, he *does* deserve to be at least slightly ashamed. Hence, perhaps, his confused responses to Yemen, where, unlike Libya, US interests are being directly affected (New Yorker piece was good on the complexities of that country, btw, a country that seems held together - or held at bay - entirely by rampant bribery and a daily narcotic-fueled siesta haze).

Has anyone suggested that Gaddafi's massacre would be hung around Obama's neck?

Republicans in the US like to blame everything on him anyway

x-post dowd, look four posts above yours:

Though I still reckon that if the_west had done nothing, allowing if not a massacre than bloody repression, and the collapse of the Arab spring, a lot of people would be talking about Obama's disgraceful weakness and abdication of responsibility

Sure, but I'm just not sure that would have happened.

But it will now! Go, 'Bama!

Thanks for linking that article on Cote d'Ivoire, curmudgeon.