Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

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

a stock line from the antis is that the_west does nothing about protesters getting killed elsewhere: and with yemen and saudi and bahrain they can say, these are key US allies, so it's obvious what's going on there. when the same thing happened in iran, milne was all: these are just student rich kids, 'tehran's gilded youth' getting beaten, raped, killed, etc. he honestly did! that's an actual quote. not sure if he's weighed in on syria, but that's the measure of the guy.

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?

― BIG GERTRUDE aka the steindriver (history mayne), Thursday, March 24, 2011 8:56 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

point 1 yes well put.
point 2 yes, but i mistrust the staging of the foreboding

Nature of Moe's heavy weapons as contrasted with rebel armament. Some comment on token militaries in the 'coalition.'

http://sitrep.globalsecurity.org/articles/110324735-bombing-moe-heavy-arty-versus.htm

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.

hmm, but what does it taste like?

'Civil war' first got mentioned when the spread of revolt met Gaddafi's forces. It wasn't a change of participants ("who are these guys with guns?"), but a change of means. I'm hard-left, and I'm surprised by how many leftists oppose this intervention. The revolution in North Africa/Middle East shouldn't be allowed to die with a massacre in Benghazi. This is probably the most important geo-political change since the fall of the Soviet Union. And while it's not a leftist revolution, a bourgeois revolution is what is both necessary, and worth fighting for here. It's possible that the West can act in it's self interest whilst still driving progress (in fact, it's maybe necessary that these things go together).

I know I'm good at killing threads, but I would have thought this thread would be immune!

A NATO decision to take charge of a no-fly zone over Libya does not include conducting air strikes against Muammar Gaddafi's ground forces, a mission that will remain in U.S. hands until a new command deal is reached, Vice Admiral Bill Gortney said on Friday.

Gortney, chief of the U.S. military's Joint Staff, said the U.N.-backed operation against Gaddafi's forces involved three different missions -- an arms embargo, a no-fly zone and protecting Libyan civilians.

He said the U.S. military initially assumed command of all three missions in order to quickly implement the U.N. resolution authorizing the action. But President Barack Obama and other U.S. officials made it clear the United States would hand off control of the operation as soon as feasible.

From MSNBC.

Also, I was reading rightwinger Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post badmouthing the "Professor Obama" decisions to get approval from others and to hand off to others (whom he also mocked). Charles says the folks rebelling want the US to lead. There are certainly flaws in the approach but I'm not ready to agree with Charles' proposed method. He apparently likes the good ol Bush ways where you make up stuff about weapons of mass destruction and go in unilaterally.

A Canadian's been put in charge: http://www.globaltvedmonton.com/Canadian+head+NATO+mission+Libya/4505412/story.html. "Odyssey Dawn," out; hello "Operation Roll Up the Rim to Win."

Krauthammer isn't looking for a solution, he's looking for cudgel to bash Obama.

xp the left has really disgraced itself in foreign policy over the last decade imo and I'm still not sure why that came to be so. There seems to have been a reluctance to view any issue other than on whether it is palatable to Bush (basically, still) and therefore evil, with its counterpart being a refusal to engage with non-westerners as independent actors. I can just about see the sense if the cold war were ongoing (historically it seems to have been ever thus which you could understand if one were picking sides and one chose international socialism; not so much if one's choosing Hizbollah or Gaddafi), but it's a fundamentally childish way of looking at the world as it is now. I don't see why leaning left on economics should require leaning like this on foreign policy.

(Obviously I'm speaking in generalities here, generally I'm with Blair on the broad approach to foreign policy etc and I still consider him to be of the left - but it isn't half hard sometimes.)

the left has really disgraced itself in foreign policy over the last decade imo

Are you talking about UK leftwing bloggers or academics or ? because the left has not had a prominent political role or a strong media role in most nations over the last decade unless you're consider the Blair govt. to be Left

I'm talking about those with the loudest voices really, which yeah you could say is mostly unrepresentative types like Galloway and Stop The War, but they did capture the media and polite opinion on those issues for a long time and gave islamists an unwelcome leg-up into the bargain (specifically Ken Livingstone, who was in a position to do more than just posture)

But yeah, where the left has been in real power it has mostly been relatively pragmatic - though as you hint this seems to disqualify them from being considered as such.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2011/03/201132681812362552.html

Looks like the rebels have regained momentum, retaking Ajdabiya.

When your opponents have just had the shit pounded out of them for a week, at a cost of a couple of billion dollars, regaining momentum is made rather simpler.

There seems to have been a reluctance to view any issue other than on whether it is palatable to Bush (basically, still)

i know bringing michael moore up is basically strawmanning, but i somehow managed to be surprised that all his tweets were like "JUSTIFICATION FOR GOING INTO LIBYA: THEM GOT WMDS!" and "JUSTIFICATION FOR GOING INTO LIBYA: THEY TRIED TO KILL MY PAW!" and apparently 2003-2008's flood of self-righteous snot just choked off michael moore's brain forever.

"michael moore's brain"

ha

Still want to know how much the rebels have to "win" before the_west stops bombing.

I am guessing that, for now, NATO military operations will continue until Qwodaiffffi (sp?) resigns or is killed, or until everything is so bogged down and hopeless that no one knows what should be done next.

We need to poll all the permutations of this man's name.

poll only has 50 choices?

I've been waiting to use this quote from the West Wing pilot...

LEO: Margaret. Please call the editor of the New York Times crossword and tell him that Khaddafi is spelled with an h, and two d’s, and isn’t a seven letter word for anything.
MARGARET: Is this for real? Or is this just funny?
LEO: Apparently, it’s neither.

[Later, on the phone to the New York Times]

LEO: [on phone] Seventeen across. Yes. Seventeen across is wrong. You're spelling his name wrong. What's my name? My name doesn't matter. I'm just an ordinary citizen who relies on the Times crossword for stimulation. And I'm telling you, that I've met the man twice, and I've recommended a preemptive Exocet Missile strike against his airforce. So, I think I know how to...
C.J.: [in shock] Leo!
LEO: [looking at the phone, then hanging up] They hang up on me. Every time.
C.J.: That's almost hard to believe.

sorry, I'll go away now :D

When your opponents have just had the shit pounded out of them for a week, at a cost of a couple of billion dollars, regaining momentum is made rather simpler.

Yes, that's the point.

So, when the rebels reach the Team Qaddafi towns and begin their inevitable massacre in that direction, backed by allied warplanes, we all cool with those innocent men, women and children amongst the supporters getting slaughtered?

A literal reading of the UN resolution would suggest the "allies" then start bombing the rebels, right?

So, when the rebels reach the Team Qaddafi towns and begin their inevitable massacre in that direction, backed by allied warplanes, we all cool with those innocent men, women and children amongst the supporters getting slaughtered?

What makes you think the rebels will massacre people?

The rebels will strike with surgical precision, using laser-guided weapons, to eliminate only the 52 villains soon to be depicted on a pack of custom-printed playing cards.

And anything else would be a massacre.

Casualties inflicted during battle, even upon innocent civilians, would not qualify as a massacre. However, if deadly force is deliberately used against civilians in a situation where no military resistance is expected, then "massacre" would fit. I have no idea if the rebels in Libya will do this or not. Retribution is a common sequel to successful armed uprisings.

The rebels are going to need the continuing support of the UN, which might keep them from getting over-zealous. I suspect that most of the violence will be in the character of the other revolts, or the early anti-soviet protests - the people will turn on groups like the secret police. We also don't know if the army will defend Tripoli - they're on the backfoot at the moment, presumable to try to ringfence Tripoli, but things might look hopeless by then, with defections within the army, and internal revolt within the city.

"How long must the footsteps of freedom be gravestones" is a legitimate question, but people forget that the alternative situation was that freedom took a couple of steps, faltered and stumbled, falling into a mass-grave in Benghazi. I'd take the risk of possible retaliatory violence (which I think is unlikely) over the near certain slaughter that would have followed Gaddafi's victory.

What makes a revolt worthwhile is not the success or failure of the struggle for freedom - this is no difference from the other revolutions recently except this has been met with force - what matters is that people were willing to commit to that struggle, and we should stand by them.

/drunk/flowery/sorry

also otm

a few questions

- what does this have to do with us

- isn't it extremely likely that becoming the air force of the libyan rebels will have the opposite of the declared effect, i.e. instead of buttressing the most exciting, broad-based arab uprising in literally centuries we have stomped in like a bull in a china shop and guaranteed that whoever succeeds gaddafi will be seen as an illegitimate western puppet

- most people on this thread seem to be hanging their support of this strange coalition on "civilian deaths" - that gaddafi has been egregious in this respect and must be stopped at all costs. so - if this ragtag libyan oppositon were holed up in benghazi with their backs to the wall, gaddafi's tanks and planes advancing inexorably toward them, you would NOT support airstrikes by the global north in the absence of earlier instances of civilians being killed?

- what does this have to do with us

- if a 16-year-old deathmetal fan picks up an AK and jumps in a jeep and is then killed by mortar fire, is that a "civilian death"?

- who are we fighting for? do we stand foursquare with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group LIFG, formerly backed by bin laden, then qatar, who have assassinated dozens of libyan policemen, who tried several times to assassinate gaddafi, who in 2009 supposedly renounced violence, and who sparked the initial libyan protests in mid-february (allegedly shooting and killing more than 100 libyan soldiers)? we're probably more sympatico with the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), given that they were created by israel and the CIA and subsequently backed by britain, morocca, saudi arabia, france and iraq. what do we think of the Libyan League for Human Rights, a geneva-based organization that gets heavily quoted in the media, predicting "a massacre like rwanda" in the absence of air support? how far we will go with the Libyan Constitutional Union, which wants a return to the monarchy?

- what does this have to do with us

- what does this have to do with us

some of the points are worth addressing, but posing this question three times, as if particularly perceptive and overlooked, strikes me as beyond retarded, unless you're into abandoning the UN, joining #team_pat_buchanan, etc

hackney tourist board gonna give himself an aneurysm here

isn't it extremely likely that becoming the air force of the libyan rebels will have the opposite of the declared effect, i.e. instead of buttressing the most exciting, broad-based arab uprising in literally centuries we have stomped in like a bull in a china shop and guaranteed that whoever succeeds gaddafi will be seen as an illegitimate western puppet

is it 'extremely likely'? what makes the likelihood so extreme? all of this is so crudely put -- won't it GUARANTEE THE EXACT OPPOSITE EFFECT? isn't the rebellion EXCITING whereas arab league, UN, and western intervention will make the winners PUPPETS even if they asked for help!? anyway anyway: it isn't out business to buttress or not-buttress anything because what the fuck does it have to do with us, right? why should we buttress these dudes who, you then say, are probably either islamists or agents of mossad anyway? what's so exciting, by the way, about the rebellion if it's being pushed by the islamists? what's your line here?

: it isn't out business to buttress or not-buttress anything because what the fuck does it have to do with us, right?

well, in a nutshell.

what's exciting about all this rebellions to me is that they're broad-based and largely positive; intolerance and fear are not the main weapons involved, which marks a big difference from most revolutionary and civil wars of the last couple of decades, from the balkans to rwanda to afghanistan. it makes me think that the 90s may finally be over, and that arabs are leading the way. or at least they were.

unless you're into abandoning the UN

haha yes, the united states just takes its marching orders from the UN. right.

by your own account, the revolutionaries don't all sound that positive and tolerant:

do we stand foursquare with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group LIFG, formerly backed by bin laden, then qatar, who have assassinated dozens of libyan policemen, who tried several times to assassinate gaddafi, who in 2009 supposedly renounced violence, and who sparked the initial libyan protests in mid-february (allegedly shooting and killing more than 100 libyan soldiers)? we're probably more sympatico with the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), given that they were created by israel and the CIA and subsequently backed by britain, morocca, saudi arabia, france and iraq.

and this rebellion was going to be smashed, so how the west has destroyed the momentum of the arab spring by stopping that happening is unclear to me.

xpost

the UN is such a US puppet: that's why it okayed the iraq war. i kid: obviously it is. but idk, anti-war kids used to say things like 'the iraq war lacked a UN resolution'; now they say 'the UN is a bunch of bullshit' i suppose.

not really sure you could have a UN-type outfit that wasn't dominated by the great powers. would be really interested to hear how that could work.