Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

max i hadn't heard that. it sounds sufficiently crazy. if gaddafi's troops had taken benghazi it's hard to see why they'd need to bomb anything from the air. anyway this is all maybe a small point, but i get irritated when pieces of the casus belli end up kind of... not actually having happened and everyone just forgetting about it

it seemed your sort of thing rly.

cheap

cheap

also, very much in character

iirc the issue was never whether or not qaddafi had bombed civilians, it was whether not he was going to. which--again iirc--he made explicitly clear that he would, once he took benghazi.

― ban drake (the rapper) (max), Sunday, April 17, 2011 5:52 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'm not sure this is correct. gaddafi's benghazi rant, prior to the 1973 resolution, was about going "house to house" to find and kill armed rebels. he didn't say he would take benghazi and then bomb civilians.

dowd i do remember that, but the no-fly zone was intended to protect civilians, i thought? gaddafi didn't bomb any civilians with planes iirc

OK: civilians rebel, are opposed with force. Rebels defend themselves. Gaddafi bombs civilians (albeit armed), the UN stops Gaddafi from bombing these people.

I don't know - when does an uprising cease to be civilian? These were not military forces, after all. In my (admittedly ideosyncratic) opinion Gaddafi is fighting the people - the people he is attacking are the people we are meant to protect.

And as for the idea that several of the NATO countries are calling for 'regime change' - that was always the damn point. Otherwise what was the point? OK, there may have been reasons not to state it, but the intervention was always meant to prevent the rebels from losing (and I really don't think it's a stretch to say that it was to help them win). Which would mean the removal of Gaddafi, by some means. Claiming the mission was a lie only means you weren't paying attention.

To clarify my meaning: the State was bombing the people's attempt at self-defence.

Claiming the mission was a lie only means you weren't paying attention.

Not so. The publically stated, official reason was "humanitarian", so as to prevent a "massacre of civilians". The fact that it was a transparent, self-serving lie doesn't mean it wasn't a lie, but only a poorly formed lie.

what's transparent is that the aim of the intervention included gadaffi going. but yes, they also said we're not going to do regime change. this was, i guess, a forlorn attempt to not make this seem like iraq II, ie, it was a probably unwise promise not to put in ground troops. the current position is contradictory-ish; it's difficult to see how the stalemate can be broken without increased involvement, but they're promising not to go much further than they have. they're still saying they won't put boots on the ground.

it wasn't a lie to say the aim was to stop a massacre; gadaffi going was the only way of making that (not) happen. it's a lie if you think that all along obama wanted gadaffi out and was looking for an excuse, i guess. that seems unlikely to me, and as for 'self-serving'? i don't think he wanted this really.

gadaffi going was the only way of making that (not) happen

o rly

lotta fortune tellers itt!

yes, anticipating future events is 'fortune telling'

this is hair-splitting though: you're against the intervention, so it doesn't really make any difference whether the killing could have been stopped without gadaffi's departure. i don't know why you're pressing the point -- it's irrelevant to your argument. the intervention is wrong whether or not it was aimed at getting rid of gadaffi or... some alternative where gadaffi stays.

i don't really have an argument. i think the case for war was built on a flimsy foundation. i think a lot of assertions about gaddafi's actions and intentions have been thrown around, some of which have turned out not to be true (that his air force bombed civilians, for instance). so i'm suspicious of anyone who claims to know what he would have done in an alternate universe, or what would have happened to extremely ill-defined "civilians" in an alternate universe, either over time or in the space of a weekend.

please understand that i'm not interpreting any of this as a consequence of the_west wanting "an excuse" to go to war (as was so transparently clear in the case of iraq). it's probably true that obama didn't really want this. but strangely, as in iraq, "truthiness" appears to have prevailed here in the run-up to war. where in iraq you had vastly different genres of unconventional weapons all lumped together as "WMD" (and thereby upgraded to be par with a nuclear bomb), in libya you have vastly different types of violence by the gaddafi regime lumped together, and thereby all upgraded to "attacks on innocent civilians". it's worth trying to parse the different level of threat and attack - and against whom - not only to understand the US and NATO response (and possibly critique it, or identify it as wrong-headed or misguided or perfectly pitched or what have you) but just to understand what the hell is going on in the first place.

Even as journalists and historians preoccupy themselves with trying to explain why something happened, they are playing a mug's game: however creative or well-sourced, their answers will be speculative, partial, and ambiguous. It can't be otherwise.

Rather than 'why', what deserves far more attention is the question of 'how'. Here is where we find Barack Obama and George W Bush (not to mention Bill Clinton, George HW Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter) joined at the hip.

When it comes to the Islamic world, for more than three decades, Washington's answer to 'how' has been remarkably consistent: through the determined application of hard power wielded by the United States.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011413113026323290.html

Even as journalists and historians preoccupy themselves with trying to explain why something happened, they are playing a mug's game: however creative or well-sourced, their answers will be speculative, partial, and ambiguous. It can't be otherwise.

i reeeally have to dispute this, completely divorcing this from anything to do with libya. of course i don't believe there's a absolute, final answer to any question of history. but calling the whole thing a mug's game? that's irrational, and anyway impossible.

of course the US has used hard power against some parts of 'the islamic world' in the last three decades. but they have also had other kinds of relations with 'the islamic world', which isn't a unified thing by any stretch of the imagination. i don't know where libya fits within it. gadaffi doesn't have many friends among other (predominantly) muslim states.

it's a bit over the top but pretty accurate i think. it's good to be reminded that the "why" of any intervention is a pick n mix bag of consensus.

one thing about gaddafi is that he has been a master at exploiting power vaccums in the region, and indeed all over africa. i have to wonder - it's hard to shake this "why" instinct! - if the US and NATO saw a great danger in an unfettered gaddafi moving to fill the void in egypt and tunisia. so that the broader "humanitarian" aim of this intervention was to stop that from happening - to protect the green shoots put down in egypt and tunisia.

i think william hague has said straight up that two major concerns were oil and refugees. sounds to me that you get refugees whatever happens. but i saw that in the sunday times iirc.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/04/14/false_pretense_for_war_in_libya/?camp=misc:on:share:article

The actual prospect in Benghazi was the final defeat of the rebels. To avoid this fate, they desperately concocted an impending genocide to rally international support for “humanitarian’’ intervention that would save their rebellion.

It is poignant to recall that if not for intervention, the war almost surely would have ended last month.

poignant? well, fuck that guy. sorry, i mean: however creative or well-sourced, his answers will be speculative, partial, and ambiguous.

really, though poignant? the prospect of gadaffi's prisons and torture chambers (and mass graves) filling up with new inmates is poignant? because it would be better than trying to stop him and aiding the rebels?

(to pre-empt, yes, there are big questions about the rebels, but the rebels are only a part of the very large number of libyans against gadaffi, who would also have faced repercussions)

i think i probably would not have used that word myself

alan kuperman is just mad that nato is bombing libya and not iran

i just saw him on the youtube. he has a ridiculous beard, i mean really egregious. also he's an associate prof or was then, but they billed him as prof. also he's too young to be prof, and the whole american thing of calling any bastard with a degree a prof makes me crazy.

i just remember him writing a really long op ed a year or so ago about why the US should bomb iran

weird.

from the comments page here - http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/alan-j-kuperman-useful-idiot/

I’d be very surprised if HRW monitors captured all of the killing. On the other hand, if Kuperman’s piece is intended to suggest that the narrative of genocide is wrong, and that the main thrust of Qadhafi’s assault is aimed at people presumed to be enemies of the state, then I think it’s basically right. The real controversy here is not at the level of stats, or even morals, but politics. In this respect, Kuperman’s very interesting – he’s a right-wing thinker, basically, but someone whose commitment to ‘Realism’ in international relations gives him a critical perspective on the claims of humanitarian intervention which results in useful work. His work on Rwanda, which I’ve cited, is an example of just this kind of thing.

Another problem here is that there’s an exile leadership allied to the transitional council that has been pushing the narrative of genocide from very early on – I recall this argument from a spokesperson on Al Jazeera right at the beginning of Qadhafi’s crackdown. These are the same people who have pushed the incorrect and unhelpful argument that Qadhafi carried out the Lockerbie bombing, and that if he wins he will carry out a wave of terrorist attacks in the European continent. It’s understandable why they would resort to such tactics – they think this is what will win them wider political support and put pressure on European political leaders to throw money and arms at the rebels. Alas, it’s only created a fug, which the Qadhafi apologists can all too easily exploit.

that commenters blog: http://leninology.blogspot.com/

according to wikipedia it is the 21st-most-popular blog in the uk!

with 730 daily visits!

thanks for that link max. i've read that blog before (one of the daily 730!) but didn't connect the two.

this post is very much worth reading imo (and takes kuperman apart, a bit) -

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/04/creep.html

And uh

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-is-the-fed-bailing-out-qaddafi-20110401

x-post
So does Kuperman think the Gaddaffi forces cluster bomb attacks going on now in Misrata are just aimed at the rebels and somehow not making life difficult for the civilians?

Does something depend on the answer to that question?

no

:D

I mean, I think bombing in general is making life "difficult" for civilians. Every time a town gets retaken, lost, re-retaken, etc, the whole place gets fucking shelled. Mortars aren't cluster bombs but they're not exactly pinpoint accurate.

from leninology again:

The humanitarian argument presupposes the foreclosure of options that was built-in to the intervention in the first place. It's quite right that opponents of the war have pointed out that there were a number of alternatives to a bombing campaign from the start, if the motive was to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. Those being, as I review the antiwar blogs, columns and newspapers: the handing over Libya's frozen funds to the Transitional Council to enable them to arm themselves; a regional intervention building on extant support provided by Egypt; a diplomatic settlement, in the event that outright military victory on the part of the rebels was out of the question. But when people ask what your alternative to bombing is - "what would YOU do?" - they are asking us to hypothesize, to speculate, and to do so in a terrain in which most people, including the advocates of humanitarian intervention themselves, have no experience whatever. That is, they're asking for a speculation concerning military logic, in which most are not trained, as it might play out in a situation where do not have intelligence, or networks of associates or informers. And such hypotheses are necessarily less immediately compelling than the seeming obviousness and corporeal bluntness of imperialist solutions. The question, once addressed, should be reversed: the burden of justification is on those who are doing the bombing or supporting it. The option that needs to be interrogated is the one being pursued: bombing. And it won't do to justify it on the basis of abstract humanitarianism. Humanitarianism is a contested, political term, and arguments predicated on it can only be assessed and settled in the political sphere.

And the fact is that the political bases for such a war are hopelessly confused. It can't be justified on the ground of liberal internationalism, since we're not talking about spreading democracy or promoting a liberal world order - that idea has taken a serious knock in the last decade. But the Realist grounds for the war seem even more incoherent. This is hardly a power-balancing operation, and any 'security threat' that can be conjured up is both less than convincing and potentially liable to fly back in any scaremonger's face if the same 'threat' is imputed to the rebels themselves. As for any attempt to justify the bombing on leftist internationalist grounds, of supporting the revolution, that is perhaps the least convincing of all. The logic of this, if taken to its conclusion, is that should air strikes fail to result in Qadhafi's overthrow, then the US and its allies should invade and finish the job. Any ideas where that might lead to? The US has a long history of intervening in revolutionary situations: the Spanish-American War, the Mexican revolution, the Russian civil war, the Greek civil war, the Vietnamese revolution, indeed a whole series of anti-colonial and leftist revolutions in Latin America, Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East. In not one of them has the United States military been a pro-revolutionary force. In this case, the US and its European allies have been consistently intervening in the region on the side of the counter-revolution. Expecting such forces to be part of any revolutionary transformation of the Middle East is frankly unworldly. In the last analysis, there seems to be no coherent, intelligent way to defend this war.

These are the same people who have pushed the incorrect and unhelpful argument that Qadhafi carried out the Lockerbie bombing

whoa hold the phone

As for any attempt to justify the bombing on leftist internationalist grounds, of supporting the revolution, that is perhaps the least convincing of all. The logic of this, if taken to its conclusion, is that should air strikes fail to result in Qadhafi's overthrow, then the US and its allies should invade and finish the job.

I don't see how this follows.

revolution - regime change

well, if you want "the revolution" to succeed then you want to overthrow gaddafi, ergo if airstrikes don't work you need to ratchet things up to the next level.

You can be willing to go so far in aiding revolution, and then be willing to admit that it's failed. Being willing to do something leading to an end does not necessitate doing anything to achieve this end. I'm a socialist internationalist who supports this intervention but there is nothing about that stance that requires me to support a ground invasion of Libya.

there are some "boots on the ground" btw

well, you know what i mean.

dowd interesting! are you saying you thought airstrikes might have been enough to lead to an outright rebel victory? (and hence your support for the airstrikes?) what do you think the endgame is, or ought to be?

i sort of wonder what it would be like to live in a non-NATO country and "support the revolution".

I think the revolution would have failed without intervention - I think arming Libyans directly would be a great help; I don't think having the change carried out by foreign militaries in it's entirety would lead to anything good. Ultimately I can't see the rebels succeeding unless the stress-lines within the Gaddafi camp fracture. I suspect the most likely (rebel friendly) outcome would be palace coup/increased defections leading to a somewhat liberal democracy.
The endgame will be a bourgeois revolution at best - I have no illusions about a socialist Libya (in the sense I would define it). At the moment the progressive forces in the middle east/north Africa are capitalist/democratic in nature, and I'm (somewhat) marxist enough to believe that this is a desirable stage of development. (It is, of course, complicated to tell how progressive these elements can be within a world of global capitalist exploitation rather than 18th century western Europe)

But basically, if the attempts to destroy Gaddafi's military advantages over the rebels fail, then I think that's a tragedy, but I wouldn't just keep ramping up force.

i just can't help thinking this intervention has guaranteed failure of the revolution, at least in the sense that the non-defector, non-CIA revolutionary wing wanted.

If you mean that with Gaddafi refusing to give in to protestors who became rebels, feet on the ground are probably needed and that Gaddaffi's well-paid inner circle and troops are not turning on him, well yes.

Here's a problem with this intervention courtesy of the Washington Post:

"Less than a month into the Libyan conflict, NATO is running short of precision bombs, highlighting the limitations of Britain, France and other European countries in sustaining even a relatively small military action over an extended period of time."

A spokesman for the Misurata City Council appealed for NATO to send ground troops to secure the port that is the besieged city’s only remaining humanitarian lifeline.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nato-runs-short-on-some-munitions-in-libya/2011/04/15/AF3O7ElD_story.html?hpid=z1