Different yet deeply flawed because collectively we are one fucked up species.

Posted by: par4 | Mar 21 2011 12:58 utc | 3

i have no idea

Posted by: annie | Mar 21 2011 13:51 utc | 5

I think MB @ 1 is very close, if not right on target. The end game being the West’s hegemony over the region, by ANY means.

Posted by: Ben | Mar 21 2011 14:15 utc | 7

Hannah’s link to the diplomatic outlines of UN Resolution 1973 are a place to start.
The prohibitions against ground invasion, no authorization of violent regime change, and no authorization for arming the rebels, are certainly interesting provisions. These are provisions which I predict were meant to be broken or bent from the beginning. Well, b has passed on reports that the Egyptian military is funneling arms from the east already. So that’s one provision down.
Amy Goodman is reporting today that the delegation from the African Union, has been denied entry into Libya, by the military authorities who are running this war.
As far as violent regime change, or regime change with no questions asked, I think Cameron is all in favor of that, and has said so. Admiral Mullen and US military officials deny Gadhaffi is being targeted in the missile strikes; and yet the Colonel’s compound in Tripoli is going up in smoke and the tent he once used for receptions and ceremonies has been bombed. If Gadhaffi gets blown to bits it will be an accident, or the result of his own carelessness or imprudence, according to the Top Brass.
Well, I say that between the fog of war, and the fog machine of war, we will be seeing more of the latter. And I would say that it’s not so much that the US will be handing the operation over to the poor European saps, as it will be that they are dropping the hot potato of this war into their hands.

Posted by: Copeland | Mar 21 2011 14:53 utc | 9

no prediction of the end results, but, among other things, expecting to see

invading military forces make efforts to shore up physical protection of oil infrastructure

an initial partitioning of libya, but efforts to preserve the borders rather than inflame irredentialism in & around the region

africom attempts to expand their footprint on the continent – though could backfire by reopening the issue throughout africa now that the imperial command has chosen a major oil producer for its first war action

a split in the AU along lines of support for & against neo-colonial initiatives and an increase of interest in pan-africanism and pan-arabism

Posted by: b real | Mar 21 2011 15:09 utc | 11

Adventures of this sort have a myriad consequences. And they have half lives measured in centuries. But some of these consequences are inevitable.
1/ Wrecking a country, smashing its infrastructure and impoverishing its people will lead quickly to massive migrations. If Europe was worried about refugees last week it should look out, there are many more coming. And not just from Libya.
2/Unless they are even more idiotic than they seem the Camerons and Sarkozys know this. They probably relish it. Both live off islamophobia and xenophobic reactions against “illegal” imnmigrants.
3/ Then there is terrorism. This is inevitable because it is written into the script. It really doesn’t signify whether any Libyans decide to take revenge on the imperialists, because the imperial authorities will be cooking up plots as fast as it can think of them. The remarkable appetite in the media for the work of agent provocateurs and frame-ups makes years of terror alerts, ever enhanced surveillance and all the other bells and whistles of corporate authoritarianism that would make Mussolini, Franco or Hitler green with envy.
4/ More neo-liberalism. Libya will be rebuilt on reformed modern lines, Ghadaffi’s relatively enlightened social programmes and patronage networks will be replaced by laissez faire income re-distribution to benefit rich foreigners and their collaborators. A real kleptocracy will be built, amid rapidly declining living standards, producing anger and protests, necessitating death squads and concentration camps.
5/ (and as the weary reader will be guessing we could go on and on)Enhanced political consciousness in both the African and Arab worlds. It is becoming increasingly clear that, for individuals in these lands to identify with the “west” and its values they must recognise that they have deserted their own communities, turned against their own people.
In the “west” too it is surely becoming impossible to sustain illusions about the nature of this Empire, its malignity and the inescapable fact that this is the Barbarism that Rosa warned us of. We are the enemy. The culture has slipped from being merely murderous into embracing suicide.

Posted by: bevin | Mar 21 2011 15:14 utc | 13

@annie – they had to put it on hold (damage control) indefinitely in order to try & gain control of the narrative, but i would suspect that, all public stmts to the contrary, there is still the very real desire to get a physical HQ on the ground somewhere to coordinate, control & command everything that is and will be taking place there.

Posted by: b real | Mar 21 2011 16:07 utc | 15

How will this end? Badly.
Generally, this strikes me as another example of the complete and utter strategic incoherence and disfunctionality of the US and its allies.

Posted by: dan | Mar 21 2011 16:32 utc | 17

Russia and China will have this to point to when they veto any other schemes. Putin is already using this ‘crusade,’ as he has put it, to gain support. China will find African doors easier to open for resources.
Military threats against Iran and Venezuela eased a bit in the short term.
Commodity prices increase. Oil and arms companies clean up.
American and EU citizens targets of retaliation.
If possible, UN, Arab league and Western leaders further discredited.

Posted by: Biklett | Mar 21 2011 17:41 utc | 19

Gadaffi and sons will be assassinated by one of his underlings. Peace will be made between the rebels and the government. US, UK and French troops will be invited to march through the streets of Tripoli to resounding cheers, stepping across the massed flowers cast before their marching feet by a grateful free people. A democratic constitution will be established, followed by elections, in which a free liberal secularist pro western government will be formed. Libya will become a shining beacon of freedom and prosperity – an inspiration to all the Arab and Muslim nations who, knowing that the West will support their aspirations and efforts for freedom and justice, will overthrow their tyrannical masters and follow the example of Libya to embrace true democratic ideals. The oppressed people of Iran and Syria in particular, heartened by the upsurge of the popular will of the Libyan people, will cast off the shackles and claim their rightful inheritance of freedom. Sarkozy and Obama and Cameron will be revered as the champions of human rights and the dignity of the Arab and Muslim peoples.
AND, as they do in all fairy tales, EVERYONE WILL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER…..

Posted by: hilerie | Mar 21 2011 18:12 utc | 21

I think there’s too many moving parts to predict.
If NATO forces *just* disable Q, and if rebels choose their leaders wisely and similarly identify worthwhile goals, I think there’s a good chance of better Libyan society for all.
Frankly, I’d just like to see Hillary/BO/Sark et’al just shut up/be quiet, and let this play out.
The rapidity w/which Egypt is moving to elections and re-writing constitution… & those on the ballot who have had a voice through this… this looks encouraging to me, perhaps even a model to follow.

Posted by: jdmckay | Mar 21 2011 18:38 utc | 23

& john negroponte has got another job until he finds his home in hell

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 21 2011 18:49 utc | 25

Biklett @ 19

Putin is already using this ‘crusade,’ as he has put it, to gain support.

Medvedev has chastised Vlad on that one according to Bloomberg.

Posted by: jdmckay | Mar 21 2011 19:06 utc | 27

If NATO forces *just* disable Q, and if rebels choose their leaders wisely and similarly identify worthwhile goals, I think there’s a good chance of better Libyan society for all.

c’mon, jdmckay @23
on this line of thought, we might just bomb the capital city and the army of any country of the world, then sit by and watch if something better than before materializes (hey, now that I think of it…)

Posted by: claudio | Mar 21 2011 19:20 utc | 29

Saudi Arabia is the one pulling the strings and paying for this attack on Libya. Look at Arab League chief Amr Moussa how he changed his tune today, somebody gave him the orders. Why is Syria mum on criticism, because the Wahhabi’s can cause immense damage for Syria. China, Russia it’s the crazy Wahhabi’s. The bottom line if Saudi’s stop even a bit of production none of the NATO countries will survive. So I say first Yemen, then Bahrain and finally KSA. Where is AQ when you need them!

Posted by: hans | Mar 21 2011 19:34 utc | 31

The U.S. will try to push the hot potato to someone else but does not want to give it to France.
Yeah, yeah. Poor France. I can imagine the scene, in one of those opulently gilded french drawing rooms, in which sarko is lightly beaten by Hilary’s warm leather whip until he submits his country to the authority of Empire.
Sounds like bs to me, b. Got some good links?

Posted by: slothrop | Mar 21 2011 19:54 utc | 33

Personally, I think they’re stuck, unless they’ve got a way of getting rid of Gaddafi.
Gaddafi is wily, and not easy to get rid of.
It sounds to me like war by committee. Three leaders who have little experience of war, Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron. They were offered a spectacular opening by the military, and accepted. That part is easy. The other part, disabling the Gaddafi regime, is more difficult, if it is going to be done without offending every Arab in sight, and staying within the UNSC rules.
The rebels don’t seem to have the organisation to recover the towns lost, even if Gaddafi loses his heavy weapons to air-strikes. So it would be a question of training up the rebel army, feeding in weapons from covert sources. A long job.
By the way, b, you said somewhere that the rebels had lost the oil apart from Tobruk. It is the oil ports that have been lost, Brega and Ras Lanouf, and they are interdicted by the Western forces. Gaddafi is running on the money that he has – which may last quite a while. But nevertheless finite. Mercenaries have to be paid. Gaddafi’s success depends on him regaining the political upper hand.
I thought last night’s raid on the “command centre” may have been intended to take out some of the Gaddafi family. We’ve heard that Khamis, he of the brigade, may be wounded or dead. But it is difficult to finish off the lot.

Posted by: alexno | Mar 21 2011 20:25 utc | 35

@alexno – By the way, b, you said somewhere that the rebels had lost the oil apart from Tobruk. It is the oil ports that have been lost, Brega and Ras Lanouf, and they are interdicted by the Western forces. Gaddafi is running on the money that he has – which may last quite a while. But nevertheless finite. Mercenaries have to be paid.
First: I never said what you attribute to me.
Second: Those “mercenaries” are totally unconfirmed and likely just propaganda from the U.S. side.
Black folks must be mercenaries? Ever saw some folks from south Libya?

Posted by: b | Mar 21 2011 21:04 utc | 37

Now that the coalition of the damned are going through the un resolution with a fine toothcomb..trying to figure out if they can directly target Gaddafi-that is rather than accidentaly doing so…I see no end in sight..the revolt has been poisoned and that poison will spread.

Posted by: noiseannoys | Mar 21 2011 21:22 utc | 39

b,
Sorry if you didn’t say that, my mistake.
The question of mercenaries. It’s a question that should be discussed. I doubt that it’s a US invention. They wouldn’t think of that.
The Serb pilots in the airforce. Well we haven’t seen much of the airforce. Could be that they don’t want to get themselves killed, or the pilots are Libyans and not very enthusiastic.
Blacks in the ground forces. Obviously they could be southern Libyans, I’ve said it before. The rebels speak of people who can’t speak Arabic, not a proof.
The photos of the dead in the French air-strikes suggest they are Libyans.
In the end, it’s a question of whether you think that Gaddafi has a sufficient population base to furnish his army. That’s the question I was posing.

Posted by: alexno | Mar 21 2011 22:15 utc | 41

After what happened to Saddam, Qadhafi will go down fighting and perhaps take as much of the oil infrastructure with him as possible.
Once Qadhafi is gone, a civil war will begin, most probably against the Western anointed leadership, which will be seen as representing a single tribe but not the whole country.
Since Qadhafi didn’t like government institutions and didn’t form much of a government structure, the “international community” will be forced into nation building a la Afghanistan.
Or maybe Libya will descend into a Somali or Afghanistan with oil. As in the worst days of Iraq, the various tribes will live off of their ability to tap oil pipelines and smuggle crude. And they’ll probably blow them up regularly, something still happening in Iraq, to show their displeasure with whatever central authority there is.
Maybe Obama (nowhere man) should have taken some of this into consideration…

Posted by: JohnH | Mar 22 2011 0:01 utc | 43

“The rapidity w/which Egypt is moving to elections and re-writing constitution… & those on the ballot who have had a voice through this… this looks encouraging to me, perhaps even a model to follow.”
Anyone who could write that utter claptrap must be either the most deliberately ignorant contributor to this thread thus far or perhaps one of the 500 sock puppets the latest US defense budget has just approved funding to “explain our programs” .
Not that it really matters – ignorant or deliberate, I’m sure most will pay no heed to the bland anodynes in support of a dying empire.
One of the bigger elephants currently sequestered under yonder coffee table is that the same egyptian protesters who everyone was cheering for while the entire world looked on, have been demonstrating again, during this time when the world’s attention has been shifted to Libya.
They have been demonstrating against approving the constitutional changes. They see these changes which set many of the ’emergency measures’ Mubarak used for 30 years in stone, meaning they can never be repealed, as being a step backwards that will destroy any chance of democracy.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which is increasingly being seen as the new vehicle for foreign control of egypt is the only entity which participated in the original protests (altho belatedly) to which recommends approval of the changes to its members.
The constitutional amendments passed probably due mostly to the difficulty of explaining the complex issues in such a short time compounded by the mis-information supporters put out that “this was what we had all been demonstrating for”, but there also seems little doubt that the yes faction was aided by what some politely refer to as ‘electoral irregularities’. evidence of ballot stuffing preparations surfaced as soon as the election began.
The slaughter which pro ghaddafi forces were accused of loosing upon Benghazi last Sunday just prior to the start of fraUSuk carpet bombing, caused 7 deaths. Those were figures out of the anti Ghadaffi side I came across somewhere or other last night. Almost certainly most would have been fighting for the other side, since such a relatively low figure when shelling a city full of humanity tends to suggest the artillery was targeting installations rather than people. But even if they weren’t does anyone seriously imagine the 100 cruise missiles in a night killed less than 7 innocents? I haven’t seen the figures for the 2nd night of fraUSuk attacks but one would assume a similar number of missiles were launched since oblamblam needs to get this over quickly. They will be blowing the shit out of everything they can, before footage of maimed children surfaces.
This is looking more and more like the bombing of Gaza. Two thousand people are murdered by zionist mass killers dropping high explosive on them under the excuse that ‘they’ (meaning the other side the Palestinians) had been firing rockets into israel. The facts were that 8 israelis had been killed or injured by those rockets in the previous three years, 7 that those 8 casualties could not justify the deaths of thousands, was ignored by mass media, just as the reality of ghadaffi’s ‘atrocities’ will be ignored.
The mess is going to be when the no fly zone doesn’t result in Gaddafi’s abdication.
No fly zones failed in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and everywhere else they have been used, so why would they succeed in Libya?
Still it has been a great distraction away from amerika’s friends slaughter of civilian protesters in Bahrain, Qatar and Yemen. Ghadaffi is undoubtedly corrupted by having had too much power for too long, but the military were called out after the protesters had armed themselves and burned down police stations. In those other countries the demonstrators have been sticking to non-violence protocols but that didn’t stop the friends of amerika from machine-gunning them.
I believe we have allowed ourselves to be hoist by our own petard. When we justifiably (especially in light of the revelations that the demonstrators had been captured by a cadre of power hungry neo-liberals, uninterested in participative government) pointed out that the Iranian post election protests were middle class urban kids being sore losers, unable to accept that ‘the peasants’ votes were worth as much as theirs, most of us copped a lot of flak here, in the media, and undoubtedly in our real lives.
That meant we didn’t look closely enough at the reactionary and elitist nature of many of those in control of the Libyan uprising, soon enough, because we wanted to believe that this dissent was what it appeared to be.
I doubt anyone who posts here supports a political system that keeps the same clique in power for 30 years, so we naturally wanted to back the ousting of the colonel, despite his old reputation for not only speaking the truth to power, but also backing the same causes many of us had supported over the years.
But we mustn’t let that switch have us blind ourselves to mass media distortion. The colonel doesn’t practise the principles he once preached, but he has never been motivated by material self interest, his flaw is in operating out of political self interest and while the time has come for him to go, that should not fool us into suubscribing to an ‘anyone but ghadaffi’ ploy. Nor does it mean that the colonel can be automatically judged sufficiently criminal to be executed.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Mar 22 2011 0:36 utc | 45

remembereringgiap @ 38:

china people’s daily editorial

Good read, thanks.

Posted by: jdmckay | Mar 22 2011 4:09 utc | 47

re: #42, r’giap’s link to Museveni…
It is refreshing to read such nuance. Makes me feel like a pathetic Irish mongrel dog! Museveni seems a different kind of giant, and I hope there are more out there like him.

Posted by: Dr. Wellington Yueh | Mar 22 2011 7:03 utc | 49

See the no-fly-zone in action. The rebels can only ‘advance’ through the burned remains a western build ‘Death Road’.

9.42am: More on those Ajdabiya air strikes – Chris McGreal has been on the phone from the outskirts of the city, where he has seen four large plumes of smoke after hearing aircraft overhead.
The presumed air strikes occurred around 9.15 GMT after what had been a quiet morning. Chris says the rebels appear to have learned their lesson after the debacle yesterday when they rushed into the town after some air strikes only to flee in chaos when they came under fire from Gaddafi’s tanks. He added that the rebels will be more careful now to make sure that Gaddafi’s armour and heavy weapons in and around Ajdabiya are destroyed before they try to enter the city.
Chris reports that the fight for Ajdabiya has been going on for 10 days now but that the rebels remain disorganised militarily and that the air strikes have proved utterly decisive; on Saturday Gaddafi’s forces were fighting inside Benghazi, now they are defending Ajdabiya, 100 miles from the rebel stronghold. That is very much due to air power.

Posted by: ThePaper | Mar 22 2011 10:38 utc | 51

Some informative reading on Q, his siphoning of state assets/oil $$ and such into family bank accounts world wide, culled from US State Dept cables. (via Marcy Wheeler)
I would point out this is precisely what Mubarak did… both of ’em for 30+ yrs, which largely (finally) resulted in these events.
Just trying to add a little useful context to the discussion.

Posted by: jdmckay | Mar 22 2011 12:39 utc | 53

Q was murdering his own, on large scale. Q did this to maintain leadership role vast majority of his people were voting w/their feet and voices to end. And Q is/was using riches form his country’s resources to fund this. Q’s efforts were becoming a slaughter.
While in the beginning there were some demonstration for a system change, these quickly developed into a tribal revolt with parts of the army mutinying. The last two, three weeks I haven’t seen any pictures of demonstrations, but heavily armed rebels with their own tanks and planes.
Any state will fight such a rebellion. As for Qaddahfi stealing the peoples money. Have you ever seen any elite in any country that doesn’t enrich itself? Qaddahfi did much more for the development of Libya than dozens of “western” protected dictators ever thought of.

Posted by: b | Mar 22 2011 13:09 utc | 55