Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

this kids were studying abroad and writing very bad dissertations

Which proves they've been Westernized.

the threshhold that was crossed was that his people rebelled.

The opportunity for the Libyans to determine their own government for the first time in ages is worthy. The opportunity for the US to help its image by helping is good. A democratic Libya between a democratic Egypt and a democratic Tunisia is nothing to sniff at. I wish them luck. They'll need it.

LOLSOTO what about the Beyonce gigs? Proof that MTV Base is/was the international soundtrack of jet-trash assholes who live in opulent transient beigeness the world over.

for lots of rich folks it pays to have fluctuating levels of ignorance and awareness and a conveniently timed sense of moral outrage

would just like to say the (albeit limited and scattered) political blowback Obama is getting in the US is alternately disgustingly opportunistic and pathetically blinkered

So basically the usual, then.

mostly

A bit more about who the the rebels are, and the mushy area between nonviolent resistance and running gun battles:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/africa/22tripoli.html

And the story of the 4 journalists who were abducted:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/world/africa/23times.html

(Should I be tweeting this and then linking to the tweet?? so confusing)

hillary is saying that qaddafi is looking for an exit strategy, which would be so great but strikes me as wishful thinking most likely

sorry i mean what the hell do i know? i just feel like if i were qaddafi id be looking to make this as difficult as possible for the coalition forces

the question there is how much his military will take. well, *a* question. hard to read his mind. by clinging on, he would make life very hard for western leaders. and im sure that does matter to him, but he ends up that dead that way, when he could just be chilling poolside in caracas.

The smartest thing Qaddafi could do is nothing, which would indeed make this as difficult as possible for the coalition forces.

i don't know how that works. not sure where the revenue comes from. feel like although the rebels are disorganized, gaddaffi pulling back from attacking benghazi (which is what 'doing nothing' means surely?) presages his downfall.

By nothing, I assume you mean "park the tanks next to kindergartens, and start disappearing suspected opponents of the Gaddafi clan at night".

there's a lot of bullshit out there about this of course, but this might be the most annoying

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/85528/we-intervene

nb i'm only thru the first paragraph so far

oh god why are you doing that to yourself?

i dunno, it's like going to the gym or something

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Flagellants.png

That picture is how I feel for at least 50% of my time on the internet.

i need some shoes like that

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/22/what-is-the-us-plan-for-libya?hp

All kinds of different ideas from putting Un peacekeepers in to enforce a ceasefire to splitting the country in 2 with a rebel East and a Quadaffi West, to coming up with carrots to get Quadaffi to go to Venezuela or using military sticks to end things for him

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12837330

Col Muammar Gaddafi's air force "no longer exists as a fighting force", the commander of British aircraft operating over Libya has said.

But his ground forces are still operating

Oh sure. It just makes it weird when people keep referring to the broader UN resolution as just a no-fly
zone when there's no more planes to fly.

I think there are plenty of planes left to fly, and plenty of anti-aircraft weaponry still in Gaddafi's hands but he's chosen not to use or expose them, pretty sensibly

(Though I'm not suggesting for a minute they pose any kind of threat to the US)

I think there are plenty of planes left to fly

any source for this?

i haven't read or heard a single report of gaddafi's planes themselves being blown up. what i've been reading is that they are "grounded" as a result of command and control being degraded, and visible air defences being taken out. so they may as well not exist right now because they can't be protected and organized.

not for the first time, seumas milne marks himself as a right cunt:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/23/nothing-moral-nato-intervention-libya

"western forces are in action against yet another Muslim state"

for dudes like gerry healy, not a million miles from milne ideologicially, the beauty of gadaffi's libya was its lefist secularism... but anyway onwards

As in Iraq and Afghanistan, they insist humanitarian motives are crucial. And as in both previous interventions, the media are baying for the blood of a pantomime villain leader, while regime change is quickly starting to displace the stated mission.

what is the object of this rhetoric? gadaffi is a bit pantomimic, yes. so was idi amin. it's as if milne wants to say the villain talk is all hype.

On the ground, the western attacks have failed to halt the fighting and killing

they seem to have stopped the advance into benghazi. ah, but then perhaps civilians in the east were not at risk. or had it coming:

As its secretary general, Amr Moussa, argued, the bombardment clearly went well beyond a no-fly zone from the outset. By attacking regime troops fighting rebel forces on the ground, the Nato governments are unequivocally intervening in a civil war, tilting the balance of forces in favour of the Benghazi-based insurrection.

well, the resolution called for more than a NFZ, for better or worse. but well, "regime troops fighting rebel forces", yeah i guess that's it, isn't it? he'll mention civilians being killed by western bombs -- legitimately -- but not, you know, the killing of unarmed civilians by libyan forces.

but then the massacre, says milne, was never going to happen...

Oh, look, Syria is firing on its protestors, too.

I rushed out of the house while trying to frame a response to the Milne piece that hm linked to and went to a meeting with a reporter who had been in Benghazi for 10 days before the intervention. She didn't tell me anything brand new but it was good to hear from someone who had been there. Her thoughts:

1. It feels more like a rebellion than a civil war because the rebels' passion dwarfs their organisational skills. They're doing everything on the hoof. She met some guys who were in a death metal band and had taken up arms when they saw their friends being killed. These are not trained fighters.

2. When she got there the atmosphere was like a festival and she saw graffiti reading NO FOREIGN INTERVENTION because they wanted it to be a purely Libyan affair but by the time she left she was convinced there would be a massacre and the rebels told her they were now desperate for intervention.

3. She thinks that the current media coverage, by focussing overwhelmingly on strategy and hardware, undersells the reasons for the intervention, which is a bunch of ordinary citizens who were on the verge of being massacred.

What angers me most about Milne's argument (apart from the fairly repellent suggestion that everything would have been fine) is the attempt to gloss over the major differences between the conflicts with phrases like "as in Iraq and Afghanistan" and "another muslim state". Even at the time it was obvious that, even when humanitarian factors were added to the mix, Afghanistan was about a response to 9/11 and Iraq was about removing a potential threat. There was no humanitarian emergency in either case - no sense that a week could make the difference between life and death for thousands of people. Whether you agree with the intervention or not, Libya is a different case.

Also, I don't know what he's trying to say by quoting this guy: "figures such as the Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah have denounced the intervention as a return to the "days of occupation, colonisation and partition"." Hezbollah leader opposes the west? Wow.

basically you can see milne as a realist-in-reverse. anything that he perceives as harming FSVO "the US national interest" is OK. i think i read another recent one where he was hoping tunisia got the islamist leaders it deserved. shares the realists' lack of interest in the lives of people who are not part of the political or military struggle, that is, most people.

Great post, thanks DL. I fucking hate Milne.

Truth be told, though, one reason there was no humanitarian disaster in Iraq is because we had a no-fly zone in place for a decade. And Afghanistan, to say what was going on there did not constitute a humanitarian disaster requires a pretty tight standard as to what constitutes a humanitarian disaster. The Taliban is/was as oppressive as any totalitarian government in history. But that Milne dude is wrong about lack of (or indifference to) moral obligation, even if he is right about hypocrisy.

I'm with you on the Taliban - utter bastards - but that was not the main casus belli as I understood it. They were no more shitty in the weeks before the invasion than they had been up to that point afaik so it couldn't hold up as a humanitarian intervention, even if it had a (not uncomplicated) humanitarian upside. I don't know enough to guess at what Saddam would have done to his own people without a no-fly zone but that's a counterfactual - the way it shook down in 2003 there was no ticking-clock emergency scenario, except the alleged WMD one.

slightly ot: Kosovo's the only time averting a humanitarian catastrophe has been used as a basis for military action, everything else has had UN cover. Meaning that it's still not clear whether the Kosovo intervention was legal or not (my view is that it was, for morality and because it would've been for the_west to deal with the consequences).

Sierra Leone is complicated though. From Wikipedia:

The situation in the country [after the UN action] deteriorated to such an extent that British troops were deployed in Operation Palliser, originally simply to evacuate foreign nationals. However, the British exceeded their original mandate, and took full military action to finally defeat the rebels and restore order. The British were the catalyst for the ceasefire that ended the civil war.

However, the British exceeded their original mandate, and took full military action to finally defeat the rebels and restore order.

British Army did it themselves, without asking the British government first? I think that's right. General David Richards.

More googling about Sierra Leone brings up this. Nice. Not that I want to make Gaddafi into a "pantomime villain", obvs.

Muammar al-Gaddafi both trained and supported Charles Taylor.[34] Gaddafi also helped Foday Sankoh, the founder of Revolutionary United Front.[35]

According to Douglas Farah:[35]

The amputation of the arms and legs of men, women, and children as part of a scorched-earth campaign was designed to take over the region’s rich diamond fields and was backed by Gaddafi, who routinely reviewed their progress and supplied weapons.

I think there are plenty of planes left to fly

any source for this?

― BIG GERTRUDE aka the steindriver (history mayne), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 11:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

The fact that they just "shot down" (it was actually down but the principle seems the same) another plane would seem to suggest earlier pronouncements were a tad premature.

there was a pretty good observer (uk) article on sierra leone just after the paper relaunched a while ago, in case anyone's interested. think the british are still considered liberators & blair is a hero, there.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/18/sierra-leone-international-aid-blair?INTCMP=SRCH

The Washington Post has an article on the billions of dollars Libya has in bank accounts. The NY Times tracks some of the interesting ways Libya acquired cash:

In 2009, top aides to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi called together 15 executives from global energy companies operating in Libya’s oil fields and issued an extraordinary demand: Shell out the money for his country’s $1.5 billion bill for its role in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 and other terrorist attacks

Libya became so flush with cash that Bernard L. Madoff, the New York financial manager who stole billions of dollars in a long-running Ponzi scheme, approached officials overseeing the country’s $70 billion sovereign fund a few years ago about an “investment opportunity,” according to a State Department summary of the episode in 2010. “We did not accept,” a Libyan official reported

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/world/africa/24qaddafi.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

NATO reached the agreement to take over full command of the military campaign in Libya as allied warplanes delivered a ferocious round of airstrikes on Libyan ground forces. NY Times

not sure i agree with history mayne and dl in their reading of milne's piece. does he really insinuate that if there were no intervention everything would be fine? sure, he suggests that gaddafi's forces were not capable of taking benghazi, but if that line is to be doubted then i'm equally doubtful of cameron's line of "phew thank god we got there JUST in time".

the elephant in the room is the reason for intervention. and nothing from the coalition of the willing suggests that they have a coherent agreed reason. on the contrary, countries are covering their tracks with different rhetorics (in particular the oft quoted 'preventing a massacre') while on the ground western planes and bombs continue to be deployed.

what are the rhetorics being quoted besides "preventing a massacre"?

stopping brutal dictator being a meanie

does he really insinuate that if there were no intervention everything would be fine? sure, he suggests that gaddafi's forces were not capable of taking benghazi

i think we may have just answered our own question -- that's exactly what he insinuates

but if that line is to be doubted then i'm equally doubtful of cameron's line of "phew thank god we got there JUST in time".

i just... do you know the meaning of foreboding?

meanwhile in Syria:

Andrew J. Tabler, who spent a decade living in Syria and is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said six days of protests of this size were unknown in Syria since at least 1982. In February of that year, Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, killed at least 10,000 people in an assault on the city of Hama to definitively end an Islamist uprising.

1982, the good ol' days