Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

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."

His stance seems to be that a failed uprising without western help would have been fine but a successful one with western help is wrong. The idea that the rebels could have succeeded on their own is a fantasy.

I do see where you're coming from and on the whole I agree with you far more than I do with Simon Jenkins. Still, I don't feel comfortable being instructed to "just" think one thing. I supported the intervention within my understanding of its original parameters - that of preventing a massacre of civilians - and I think foreign states not only have a right but a responsibility to protect a people whose leaders have turned on it. Where I feel uncomfortable, from an international law perspective, is with the suggestion that that right extends to providing air support for a rebellion, even if that means the rebellion is caused to stall.

Sure, well I'm not saying you have to think one thing but I think without sustained assistance the massacre would only have been postponed. Once the rebellion was crushed, which it would have been, the rebels would have been in as perilous a position as the Benghazi residents back in March. Whether that assistance contravened international law I'm not expert enough to say.

I think experts on international law would probably agree on nothing except the fact that the politicians don't give a shit about international law and do what they like, when they can, anyway. In my view they went a lot further than the mandate said they could and, because it did, talk of assassinating Ghadaffi, supplying weapons and putting men on the ground to topple the regime made me feel very uneasy. None of that happened, of course, but it quite conceivably could have.

I think without sustained assistance the massacre would only have been postponed. Once the rebellion was crushed, which it would have been, the rebels would have been in as perilous a position as the Benghazi residents back in March.

Almost certainly. There aren't, obviously, any appetizing alternatives to the way things unfolded and as I'm as happy with the outcome as anyone there's not a whole lot quibbling about how it came about. Still, I'd hoped we'd gotten past the idea that it's okay for foreign states rather than local people to choose how and when and which governments (dictatorships or otherwise) should rise and fall. That is prob a bit naive of me tbh.

i think we might be at the "it's not okay, kinda grody, but we're gonna do it anyway" stage of that idea

xp I don't quite understand your last point. What about when local people specifically ask for help from foreign states? Misleading to say it's the west choosing the how and when in this case.

i read a piece in the economist the other day which said that rebels in east libya had threatened to destroy oil pipelines if the_west *didn't* intervene, which is a nice twist on the war-for-oil meme.

no one in the US government leadership gives a tinker's ass about who asks for what.

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime...."

What about when local people specifically ask for help from foreign states? Misleading to say it's the west choosing the how and when in this case.

Probably was a bit misleading there as my thoughts sort of drifted onto Syria and Iran &c which, while not irrelevant, is obv not quite what we're talking about. To the first bit of the question it is, to my mind, the distinction between when a people asks for protection from a brutal regime and when it asks for the regime to be overthrown. The former, not the latter, being okay to agree to. Obviously the distinction is not that clear cut which is why mission creep is even possible and it's also why I've gone back and forth on how I feel about this whole thing.

The legality of the war is arguable both ways. What seems fairly clear, however, is that the members of the Security Council that abstained could have nixed it if they wanted to and it's unlikely that they believed the intervention would be limited to a no-fly zone. Russia and China might have made a lot of noise about their misgivings after the fact but it looks like tacit approval in the absence of formal disapproval.

Ah OK, I see. It certainly is a case of mission creep, just one that seemed inevitable and, imo, right.

The basic reason Obama decided to aid this stems not from his desire to see the Arab spring more successful (though I think he'll be happy for Libyans and happy to see the last of Gadhafi) but to support NATO, led by France/Britain (and to a lesser extent, Italy) both of which have far more interest in the outcome than we do from regional, economic, and refugee/immigration aspects. I will not deny the populist and diversionary aspects of Cameron's and Sarkozy's decisions to display the remaining bits of power both countries still have but over all, I think they were right and while I deplore Obama's possibly illegal use of American weaponry, I, for one, refue to be one of those petulant, navel-gazing American narcissists who clamor for our allies to always help us but don't give a damn if they need help. This is more important than the Falklands and just as defensible as Suez (where we rightly messed with them).

Somewhat like our intervention in the Balkans was less about universals than the health of Europe and the future of NATO.

I find it hard to believe that anyone thought the 'mission' presented to the security council would be the end of it, including the UN. Is it a US thing? Certainly here the presentation was that the Libyan rebels had joined similar uprisings, they were stalling, losing, at risk of massacre, we help it succeed.

lol...just trust the generals, they know what's best

otm as long as we dont trust that rascal k3vin k