Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

Reuters are reporting unverified information that the Presidential Guard has surrendered to rebels in Tripoli.

Everything seems to be happening all at once now...

This war is finally starting to look like the rebels are forcing Qwudophy into his endgame, for which I am happy. Really, I am. The sooner hostilities can be over, the better off Libyans will be.

However, I do notice that NATO has given up any pretense whatsoever that it is only using force "to protect civilian lives", or whatever the formula was that Obama used to justify making war directly on Q's forces. They've been pretty skillful at allowing the rebel force not to look like a minor military appendage to NATO's air offensive, which was a political necessity, for western leaders as well as for the Libyan ones.

It will be interesting to see if the numbers of sorties and tonnage of bombs dropped ever make it into the news. I have a feeling they would be large numbers.

Final tidbit will be to see if Q gets to skip out with an Idi Amin deal, or comes to a Mussolini finish.

Gaddaffi reported dead - https://twitter.com/#!/MalikAlAbdeh/status/105384291495723012

killed by a follow friday. how sad.

also he's on the radio right now. assuming it's not recorded.

CORRECTION: Source in #Tripoli who has been v. reliable got his wires crossed. A lot of confusion out there. #Gaddafi is ALIVE. Just about.

i mis-read the original tweet & thought it was 'and was shot by @FF', as if there's a guy out there with a twitter account being all, just shot gadaffi nbd.

meanwhile: Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim says 1,300 people have been killed in Tripoli since midday and 5,000 injured

i don't know whether in this regard 'government spokesman' totally disqualifies the subsequent text from being taken as fact but like i can't even imagine?

yeah the general opinion seems to be that ibrahim is full of shit and not to be taken seriously.

al jazeera has been showing the same short loop of excitable tripolites for 45 mins, which is now quite annoying -- except for the one guy in what looks like a deathmetal T-shirt, which i call on ILX to crowd-source identify

@Reuters: ICC PROSECUTOR'S SPOKESWOMAN HAS CONFIRMATION GADDAFI HAS BEEN DETAINED

they already corrected that ed: it's his son not him

curses, social media fails again.

the correction was also on social media

but not universally retweeted

all's well that ends well

The Libyan leader's son, Mohammed Gaddafi, spoke to Al Jazeera Arabic for a live interview a short while ago, in which he took a very apologetic tone and said it was a lack of wisdom that caused the revolution and crisis in Libya.

As he spoke though, his house was attacked and shot at and the interview ended with the sound of gunfire.

"I'm being attacked right now," he said. "This is gunfire inside my house, they're inside my house. There is no God but Allah - no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger."

from NY Times:

Through Saturday, NATO and its allies had flown 7,459 strike missions, or sorties, attacking thousands of targets, from individual rocket launchers to major military headquarters. The cumulative effect not only destroyed Libya’s military infrastructure but also greatly diminished the ability of Colonel Qaddafi’s commanders to control forces, leaving even committed fighting units unable to move, resupply or coordinate operations.

On Saturday, the last day NATO reported its strikes, the alliance flew only 39 sorties against 29 targets, 22 of them in Tripoli. In the weeks after the initial bombardments in March, by contrast, the allies routinely flew 60 or more sorties a day.

“NATO got smarter,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the RAND Corporation who follows Libya closely. “The strikes were better controlled. There was better coordination in avoiding collateral damage.” The rebels, while ill-trained and poorly organized even now, made the most of NATO’s direct and indirect support, becoming more effective in selecting targets and transmitting their location, using technology provided by individual NATO allies, to NATO’s targeting team in Italy.

“The rebels certainly have our phone number,” the diplomat said. “We have a much better picture of what’s happening on the ground.”

Rebel leaders in the west credited NATO with thwarting an attempt on Sunday by Qaddafi loyalists to reclaim Zawiyah with a flank assault on the city.

Administration officials greeted the developments with guarded elation that the overthrow of a reviled dictator would vindicate the demands for democracy that have swept the Arab world.

"I'm being attacked right now," he said. "This is gunfire inside my house, they're inside my house. There is no God but Allah - no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger."

― mr peabody (moonship journey to baja), Monday, August 22, 2011 2:37 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

wow

yeah hoos i thought for sure he'd give Ra some love but whatever

"there is no god but jah"

congrats on yr cynicism tho

dogg the "whatever" was a continuation of my ironic icredulity at Ra's snub

lol

would pay dollars to see gaddhafi big up jah, no lie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_QurLCMpzA&feature=player_embedded

mea culpa

ay

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/29/gaddafi-libya-nato

^^ good read

LOL

ha. but if you check lenin's tomb today, he says: "Qadhafi is finished, as I rashly predicted he would be." so he's covered all the bases.

"It wasn't very long ago that most news articles highlighted the fractious, poorly armed, badly trained, indisciplined character of the opposition, and the territorial gains made by Qadhafi."

Yes, including articles by, er, this guy.

"Reuters FLASH: Libyan state TV goes off air, rebel spokesman says state TV HQ is now under rebel control"

Actually only true when TV comes back on air again, but still. Interesting to see how quickly this is "professional" -- by local standards -- as that's a sign of how smoothly the state TV functionaries have switched sides.

From the Washington Post:

As rebels in Libya continued to establish their control of Tripoli on Monday, senior NATO officials they were startled by the speed with which Moammar Gaddafi’s defenses have collapsed.

Washington Post grammar typo

my -- utterly uninformed guess -- is that the apparent stalement in fact allowed time for a LOT of undecideds to conclude that, while they wouldn't head any charges against any gun emplacements any time soon, they would, if push came to shove, quietly open doors for the rebels and fail to return gaddafiist phonecalls. So that people who -- when caught by surprise four months ago -- would have reluctantly defended the pre-rebel status quo, had now had plenty of time to grasp that the pre-rebel status quo was not at all a given.

The BBC's Tripoli correspondent, Rana Jawad, who has been unable to report openly since March, says people in her neighbourhood in eastern Tripoli were woken by the imam at the local mosque singing the national anthem of the pre-Gaddafi monarchy.

http://www.juancole.com/2011/08/top-ten-myths-about-the-libya-war.html

i don't know anything about the pre-g monarchy but that is a kind of rad bit of reporting

report fails to mention that the pre-gaddafi anthem was sugar, sugar by the archies

Related and depressing

I think Cole's been OTM throughout this. I can forgive him a little smugness today.

"lead from behind" supporters also feeling smug:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_08/revisiting_leading_from_behind031709.php#

right now watching an AJA doc on metal in the islamic world -- still have hopes my tripoli fellow upthread will have his fandom identified

i was trying to spot him but didn't see which one you were talking about! i saw a dude with a red shirt that i thought might have been the guy you meant, but then i thought "red? death metal??"

on the back of his T he had a kind of gothy screamy face with dark hatched scribbles all round it like a cowl: he was walking away -- hence seeing his back -- alongside the car

and yes, it was white on black not red

all the saif body-doubles now playing silly buggers w/world's media: is it me or is it him? which one got the phd at the lse?

Gaddafi has an honorary degree from the State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics in Belarus:

http://www.bsuir.by/online/showpage.jsp?PageID=87178&resID=100229&lang=ru&menuItemID=115808

i totally want one of those guys to get my old video so the picture shows on my new TV