Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

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

I realize the rebels are in Tripoli, whatever that means, but I could have sworn this thing has been close to over several times already. There are still loyalists shelling and shooting. Gaddafi and his sons are still at large. And regardless, there's a looming power vacuum ready to kick in, and as soon as NATO/US pulls support what's to stop civil war? Or will this be another permanent Western military engagement?

i don't know anything about the pre-g monarchy

I know Gaddafi overthrew King Idris, but no explanation of how a Welshman ended up being king of Libya in the first place.

It looks like the rebels might be trying to bring as much of the existing state infrastructure along with them as possible, rather than taking a new broom approach. The statement yesterday was that everyone in the police, civil service and security apparatus was being asked to turn up for work as usual. Might be one way of avoiding the kind of massive destabilisation we've seen in Iraq.

Yes, de-Ba'athication (or whatever the equivalent) is not the way to go.

I don't know why the default should be pessimism, Josh. To talk about a power vacuum and civil war as the only alternative to permanent western presence is to treat the Libyans as idiots. Of course it's hard to replace a dictator who has had the system in place for over 40 years - doesn't mean it's impossible.

how a Welshman ended up being king of Libya in the first place.

lol @ history

I could have sworn this thing has been close to over several times already

Only if you believe the Western news media, bowing before the holy monstrance of NATO air power.

tbh i haven't been reading pravda too closely of late, but i was not under the impression this was close to over. the media was telling me that it was in stalemate.

The Western news media taking the rebels at their word yesterday re the capture of Gadhafi's son are today asking more questions.

But yes various political figures and NATO people were saying the Gadhafi regime was nearly finished at various times over the past weeks.

i only watched on al-jazeera on sunday night -- don't know if that counts as "western news media" -- and they were pretty gung-ho about it all, even if they only showed the same three-minute clip of rebels stamping on a gadaffi-carpet in endless loop about a thousand times

also: it was pretty hard to listen to the translations and sound quality of muammar g's broadcasts and be feeling "this is a man with a clear grip on events"

no don't you see the western media is lying to you because they're always lying about everything and any second now Capital Q is going to surge back to power with a crack army of mercenaries and dedicated loyalists who will plunge the country back into a protracted civil war that is going to turn into a morass, dragging NATO and the US into an interminable war that will just prolong the suffering of the Libyan people and waste billions of dollars in resources on a horribly misguided colonialist adventure. or something.

I know a NATO-assisted rebel victory would be horribly inconvenient for you, Morbius. Let's hope Gaddafi fights back and wreaks a bloody revenge just to prove you right.

no don't you see the western media is lying to you because they're always lying about everything and any second now Capital Q is going to surge back to power with a crack army of mercenaries and dedicated loyalists who will plunge the country back into a protracted civil war that is going to turn into a morass, dragging NATO and the US into an interminable war that will just prolong the suffering of the Libyan people and waste billions of dollars in resources on a horribly misguided colonialist adventure. or something.

yeah well never say never

just being a "realist" dontchaknow

way to bet: horrible old murderous bastard is replaced by others.

love this btw:

With his 42-year rule appearing to crumble, to whom did Colonel Qaddafi turn for a sympathetic ear?

Apparently, to his old chess buddy.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the head of the World Chess Federation, claims to have spoken to the embattled -- and still unaccounted for -- Colonel Qaddafi by phone, according to Russia's Interfax news agency. Mr. Ilyumzhinov said the Libyan leader was still in Tripoli.

FIDE head Ilyumzhinov says he talked to Gaddafi on phone, he is in Tripoli with his eldest son Mohammed, no plans to leave Libya.

This account could not be verified, though it is not entirely from left field. Colonel Qaddafi and Mr. Ilyumzhinov met in Tripoli for a chess match staged for the Libyan state television cameras in June.

Of course, as The Lede pointed out then, Mr. Ilyumzhinov has a reputation for being something of an eccentric, believing, among other things, that chess is "a gift from extraterrestrial civilizations."

Morbz keepin hope alive

He's our very own little ray of sunshine

people in libya don't know wtf is going on so i'd take it all pretty circumspectly for another few months at least

I bet Bam can remake the world into paradise with lots more bombing. What a wonderful world it would be.

it's weird how everything is so black and white with you. like there's no "worse" or "better" there is only "BEST" and "WORST" and no in between

blame the nuns, I guess

I didn't even realise Morbius had a BEST

man if i was godawfly i'd have rigged that whole compound with bombs out the ass and would be sitting on a couch in algeria right now with my remote control blowing that whole place up the minute it got stormed

Tweet of the day, from Eli Lake of the Washington Times:

Worth noting. President Birth Certificate has done what Reagan and W could not: end Gadhafi’s reign and kill bin Laden.

to be fair reagan did manage to kill his adopted daughter

bam's bombs may have contributed but they didn't start it -- this was a genuine generational uprising also: as ditto across all arab world

you know your army is awesome when the uniform is "chicago bulls shorts"
http://media.timesleader.com/images/Mideast%20Libya_Acco(2).jpg

isn't that the Miami Heat?

yep

typical frontrunners, right?

:( - fine ruin my witty zinger you bastards

so where is Q'wdawfy? South Africa? Algeria? in a hole in the desert?

Le Figaro is saying that the rebels have taken his compound but there's no Gadhafi.

he is at a Miami Heat training mission

mccain stayed on MG's ranch -- and a ranch is not a compound -- so maybe he's there

per that above picture, you know it's a clusterfuck when the guy with the gun is leading off people dressed just as casually as he is.

dig those weird turquiose pants - mc hammer style?

He probably goes further than I would but, for the most part, I don't find myself disagreeing with Simon Jenkins here.

The UN basis for the intervention, supposedly to prevent "massacre in Benghazi", showed how tenuous was the case for British aggression to achieve regime change. Britons might fervently will freedom on Libyans, as on Egyptians and Syrians, but how these people achieve it is their business, not Britain's. The more we make it our business, the less robust their liberation will be.

SJ's not shown any sign of knowing what he's talking about so far:

The great lie has once again been rumbled, that air power can deliver any sort of victory... The resolution is rotten, based on the false premise that a no-fly zone can determine a civil war.

This is the oldest fallacy in the book, that you can "shock and awe" a population into rising up against a dictator and driving him from power...The no-fly zone saved Benghazi from what might have been extensive killings, but Britain then slid into every interventionist fallacy. It did not put in ground troops when they were the only way to render the intervention effective. It relied on air power to deliver a politico-military goal.

Britain's half-war against Libya is careering onward from reckless gesture to full-scale fiasco. As it reaches six months' duration, every sensibly pessimistic forecast has turned out true and every jingoistic boast false.

There remains no sign that the terror bombing of civilian areas now is contributing to military victory any more effectively than when Bomber Harris advocated it. The enterprise has been delegated to the navy and air force, each desperate to show its latest kit can be of use. They have duly deployed costly cruise missiles and Typhoon bombers, which have done no more than impose stalemate on a distant civil war at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds.

Had David Cameron the courage of his convictions at the start and declared proper war on Gaddafi, we might be contemplating a Libyan spring.

Sure, certainly not saying I agree with everything he's written on the subject. It just seems to me that those that were opposed to this intervention out of fear of mission creep, were at least partially justified in their concerns.

wasn't trying to have a go at you, i've just been nauseated by jenkins' reverse-triumphalism over the last few months, and am glad to see him wrong. long may it continue.

I hated the Simon Jenkins piece and I hate his smug isolationism. These comments captured my own feelings:

Can't you just be happy for the libyans and the arabs as a whole? Tunisia and Egypt both had armies that refused to turn their guns on their own people. That's the difference. The West had access to oil under Ghaddafi anyway so that's not even a valid argument. in fact it makes no sense what so ever. It's so much easier to sit in london and preach when it's not your family or people being massacred. Most arabs (i'm one) are so bored with anti western rhetoric from the older generation and the islamic lunatics that it is falling on deaf ears. It's not about the west anymore. that just suited every idiot dictator. Like the arabs ever had a say in anything before this January.

"Britons might fervently will freedom on Libyans, as on Egyptians and Syrians, but how these people achieve it is their business, not Britain's."

Noble sentiments about the right to self-determination? No, a cynical fig-leaf to hide the nasty truth - that "freedom for Libyans" is unimportant, and will even be bitterly opposed, if it entails western help. "How these people achieve it is their business..." That really makes me sick. You know, as do we all, that they had no chance of "achieving it" in the face of the dictator's tanks. "How these people achieve it is their business" translates to "These people can rot."