|
The Sorry Mess
In Libya the U.S., France and British air forces are running out of targets. The non-integrated 1960s era Libyan air defense, totally incapable against modern jets, was taken out by some 130 cruise missiles. There is no functioning radar system and no usable air strip left. The French bombed some sleeping Libyan soldiers in the desert some 10 miles from Benghazi. Last night Libyan harbors were bombed. Everything that might be left to bomb will be in build up areas and will likely kill civilians.
All the bombing has of course nothing to do with providing a no flight zone. That could have been achieved by only firing at those Libyan planes and helicopters that were actually flying. As Qaddafi followed the UN resolution there were none.
But even without reasonable targets, the bombing will not be allowed to stop now. That would expose that there is no plan on what to do next in supporting this tribal rebellion. Today some U.S. media are finally waking up to that.
The African Union is miffed as the U.S. did not allow their delegation to land in Tripoli to negotiate a ceasefire. The Arab League is retracting its support for the operation. Has anyone actually seen the planes from Qatar and Kuwait were said to join the campaign? After helping the "west" to fall into the intervention trap, China and Russia now demand an immediate halt of the bombing.
According to McClatchy, the praised Libyan National Council has somehow vanished:
Many members of the National Libyan Council had fled to nearby eastern cities and even to neighboring Egypt. The council leader, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, was in nearby Baida, his hometown. The council's Benghazi headquarters was closed.
Several NATO countries do not want to let NATO take over the undefined mission as the U.S. had planned. My guess is that the U.S. will be stuck with the tar-baby it created out of Libya.
The UK and France want Qaddafi killed and the country occupied. But after agreeing to follow the UN resolution they pressed for it will be difficult to argue for steps the resolution explicitly forbids.
I can not remember any foreign policy issue that was so badly thought out, unorganized and unplanned for like this one. Not even the aftermath of the war on Iraq comes near to this.
If there are still any grown ups in Washington, London and Paris they urgently need to take over and end this sorry mess.
This morning (here at the center of the universe) the media is full of how that now the no-fly zone has been successfully enforced, the air strikes are going to continue against ground targets of the Libyan military.
From my fishwrap”
Libyan state TV showed footage of a house that was demolished and burning. Weeping women slapped their faces and heads in grief while men carried a barefoot girl covered in blood on a stretcher to an ambulance. A man screamed “a whole family was killed.” The TV labeled the footage as “the crusader imperialism bombs civilians.”
Gaddafi’s regime has alleged that dozens of civilians have been killed in the international bombardment. The Pentagon said there was no evidence of that.
From the guardian (sorry I don’t link to the grauniad any more, google at al determine a sites listing according to published links elsewhere & I refuse to do anything that might increase that sleazy mob of give ups circulation – its only a piss in the wind but if all peeps, appalled at their railroading of Julian Assange did the same, it would knock them back) usual complete digression here is what the english press is saying:
Rear Admiral Gerard Hueber, chief of staff of operation Odyssey Dawn, said the coalition would continue its attacks on Gaddafi’s ground forces in both places as well as other cities under assault by the regime. Hueber said the air attacks were aimed at preventing the regime’s army from entering rebel-held cities as well as cutting supply and communication lines. But he admitted that Gaddafi’s forces were making incursions into some cities and targeting civilians.
y’can see why amerika wants to lose leadership of the next stage to england and france.
There will be many many civilians killed now that the coalition forces have joined in the actual civil war rather than just knock out the air force. The mixture of oil and dead civilians coats the empire in a muck it claimed to have cleaned off.
elsewhere in the pommie paper they drag out the old zionist excuse for killing civilians:
The air strikes in and around Misrata suggest that what appears to be a tactic of Gaddafi’s forces to shelter in residential areas, in response to the destruction of tanks and guns on the open desert road near Benghazi, has not provided protection.
The english attitude of fighting for regime change was set in concrete after their ‘secret’ envoys got arrested a couple of weeks back from the 6th of march guardian:
A British diplomatic effort to reach out to Libyan rebels has ended in humiliation as a team of British special forces and intelligence agents left Benghazi after being briefly detained.
The six SAS troops and two MI6 officers were seized by Libyan rebels in the eastern part of the country after arriving by helicopter four days ago. They left on HMS Cumberland, the frigate that had docked in Benghazi to evacuate British and other EU nationals as Libya lurched deeper into conflict. The diplomatic team’s departure marked a perfunctory end to a bizarre and botched venture.
“I can confirm that a small British diplomatic team has been in Benghazi,” said William Hague, the foreign secretary. “The team went to Libya to initiate contacts with the opposition. They experienced difficulties, which have now been satisfactorily resolved. They have now left Libya.”
They were arrested by the peeps they were trying to talk to possibly a deliberate act by the rebel forces because it has meant that england has no show of shell keeping the oil contracts if the current Libyan regime stays in power.
Consequently NATO has been forced to take over leadership according to the english press ‘sarkozy backed down’ but they would say that. This will leave amerikan underwriting of small air attacks and english & french special forces operations against the Libyan government. Incidentally Colonel Ghadaffi retired from all his positions in the Libyan administration long ago.
The current head of state (president) is Mohamed Abu Al-Quasim al-Zwai and the chair of the National Transitional Council (prime minister) is Mustafa Abdul Jalil. A pity international media doesn’t bother to report any of this.
So we are in for a long and dirty war the rebels have grabbed a CIA agent of influence who surfaced from some technocratic role in the Libyan government a couple of weeks back and made him interim leader of their insurrection all set to sign up to alla the bad deals the world bank and IMF offers no doubt. One Mahmoud Jibril – treasonous little shit.
The rebel leadership will continue to maintain ‘the people’ are prepared to wear any amount of collateral damage but they would say that too, as even the french showed during the 1944 liberation from Hitler, after a certain point peeps get the shits about gettin blowed up in the name of everyone else’s freedom and the difference between the current administration and the rebels won’t seem as big as the difference between foreign occupation and de gaulle seemed to the frogs back then.
The real question will be how much negotiation between the warring clans the fukUS (thanks to the z-troll for the acronym with a little capitalisation change it fits the situation well) mob will allow.
Too much will mean that the war will end quickly and they may still be on the outer as the forces within government will contain cadres who resent their treachery, too little and the blood will flow causing resentments that even the most pragmatic of clan leaders would be loathe to ignore. That is the alliances shift and change regularly but if too many members of a big clan currently siding with the govt get killed, the odds of that clan shifting to the rebel forces will decrease.
London paris and more recently washington have become chocka with self styled ‘arabists’ but I reckon that even if there was one who was smart enough to see the tipping point, and who had sufficient up to date intelligence to judge it correctly; the odds of him her being heard over the cacophony of competing voices of the other arabists is not great. Then of course the much divided leadership of a divided military mission would have the attacks turn on a dime.
I don’t see it. Back in the 19th century when the great arabists of england and france wove their magic, they were dealing with a much less sophisticated group of tribal leaders, and were generally on the spot whispering straight into the ear of their anointed leader, plus they had final command over the english and french forces that were being used to ensure ‘their man’ won the argument.
I want to be wrong here and see this thing end quickly so the least possible number of Libyans die over long dead trees and animals, but I’m not optimistic that will happen.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Mar 23 2011 22:15 utc | 53
sorry no links to this subscription-only site, so I’ll directly post the text (allowed by their rules): I agree with its general point of view: the role of the ideological narrative over specific material interests in the decision to wage war at Lybia;
LIBYA, THE WEST AND THE NARRATIVE OF DEMOCRACY
By George Friedman
Forces from the United States and some European countries have intervened in Libya. Under U.N. authorization, they have imposed a no-fly zone in Libya, meaning they will shoot down any Libyan aircraft that attempts to fly within Libya. In addition, they have conducted attacks against aircraft on the ground, airfields, air defenses and the command, control and communication systems of the Libyan government, and French and U.S. aircraft have struck against Libyan armor and ground forces. There also are reports of European and Egyptian special operations forces deploying in eastern Libya, where the opposition to the government is centered, particularly around the city of Benghazi. In effect, the intervention of this alliance has been against the government of Moammar Gadhafi, and by extension, in favor of his opponents in the east.
The alliance’s full intention is not clear, nor is it clear that the allies are of one mind. The U.N. Security Council resolution clearly authorizes the imposition of a no-fly zone. By extension, this logically authorizes strikes against airfields and related targets. Very broadly, it also defines the mission of the intervention as protecting civilian lives. As such, it does not specifically prohibit the presence of ground forces, though it does clearly state that no “foreign occupation force” shall be permitted on Libyan soil. It can be assumed they intended that forces could intervene in Libya but could not remain in Libya after the intervention. What this means in practice is less than clear.
There is no question that the intervention is designed to protect Gadhafi’s enemies from his forces. Gadhafi had threatened to attack “without mercy” and had mounted a sustained eastward assault that the rebels proved incapable of slowing. Before the intervention, the vanguard of his forces was on the doorstep of Benghazi. The protection of the eastern rebels from Gadhafi’s vengeance coupled with attacks on facilities under Gadhafi’s control logically leads to the conclusion that the alliance wants regime change, that it wants to replace the Gadhafi government with one led by the rebels.
But that would be too much like the invasion of Iraq against Saddam Hussein, and the United Nations and the alliance haven’t gone that far in their rhetoric, regardless of the logic of their actions. Rather, the goal of the intervention is explicitly to stop Gadhafi’s threat to slaughter his enemies, support his enemies but leave the responsibility for the outcome in the hands of the eastern coalition. In other words — and this requires a lot of words to explain — they want to intervene to protect Gadhafi’s enemies, they are prepared to support those enemies (though it is not clear how far they are willing to go in providing that support), but they will not be responsible for the outcome of the civil war.
The Regional Context
To understand this logic, it is essential to begin by considering recent events in North Africa and the Arab world and the manner in which Western governments interpreted them. Beginning with Tunisia, spreading to Egypt and then to the Arabian Peninsula, the last two months have seen widespread unrest in the Arab world. Three assumptions have been made about this unrest. The first was that it represented broad-based popular opposition to existing governments, rather than representing the discontent of fragmented minorities — in other words, that they were popular revolutions. Second, it assumed that these revolutions had as a common goal the creation of a democratic society. Third, it assumed that the kind of democratic society they wanted was similar to European-American democracy, in other words, a constitutional system supporting Western democratic values.
Each of the countries experiencing unrest was very different. For example, in Egypt, while the cameras focused on demonstrators, they spent little time filming the vast majority of the country that did not rise up. Unlike 1979 in Iran, the shopkeepers and workers did not protest en masse. Whether they supported the demonstrators in Tahrir Square is a matter of conjecture. They might have, but the demonstrators were a tiny fraction of Egyptian society, and while they clearly wanted a democracy, it is less than clear that they wanted a liberal democracy. Recall that the Iranian Revolution created an Islamic Republic more democratic than its critics would like to admit, but radically illiberal and oppressive. In Egypt, it is clear that Mubarak was generally loathed but not clear that the regime in general was being rejected. It is not clear from the outcome what will happen now. Egypt may stay as it is, it may become an illiberal democracy or it may become a liberal democracy.
Consider also Bahrain. Clearly, the majority of the population is Shiite, and resentment toward the Sunni government is apparent. It should be assumed that the protesters want to dramatically increase Shiite power, and elections should do the trick. Whether they want to create a liberal democracy fully aligned with the U.N. doctrines on human rights is somewhat more problematic.
Egypt is a complicated country, and any simple statement about what is going on is going to be wrong. Bahrain is somewhat less complex, but the same holds there. The idea that opposition to the government means support for liberal democracy is a tremendous stretch in all cases — and the idea that what the demonstrators say they want on camera is what they actually want is problematic. Even more problematic in many cases is the idea that the demonstrators in the streets simply represent a universal popular will.
Nevertheless, a narrative on what has happened in the Arab world has emerged and has become the framework for thinking about the region. The narrative says that the region is being swept by democratic revolutions (in the Western sense) rising up against oppressive regimes. The West must support these uprisings gently. That means that they must not sponsor them but at the same time act to prevent the repressive regimes from crushing them.
This is a complex maneuver. The West supporting the rebels will turn it into another phase of Western imperialism, under this theory. But the failure to support the rising will be a betrayal of fundamental moral principles. Leaving aside whether the narrative is accurate, reconciling these two principles is not easy — but it particularly appeals to Europeans with their ideological preference for “soft power.”
The West has been walking a tightrope of these contradictory principles; Libya became the place where they fell off. According to the narrative, what happened in Libya was another in a series of democratic uprisings, but in this case suppressed with a brutality outside the bounds of what could be tolerated. Bahrain apparently was inside the bounds, and Egypt was a success, but Libya was a case in which the world could not stand aside while Gadhafi destroyed a democratic uprising. Now, the fact that the world had stood aside for more than 40 years while Gadhafi brutalized his own and other people was not the issue. In the narrative being told, Libya was no longer an isolated tyranny but part of a widespread rising — and the one in which the West’s moral integrity was being tested in the extreme. Now was different from before.
Of course, as with other countries, there was a massive divergence between the narrative and what actually happened. Certainly, that there was unrest in Tunisia and Egypt caused opponents of Gadhafi to think about opportunities, and the apparent ease of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings gave them some degree of confidence. But it would be an enormous mistake to see what has happened in Libya as a mass, liberal democratic uprising. The narrative has to be strained to work in most countries, but in Libya, it breaks down completely.
The Libyan Uprising
As we have pointed out, the Libyan uprising consisted of a cluster of tribes and personalities, some within the Libyan government, some within the army and many others longtime opponents of the regime, all of whom saw an opportunity at this particular moment. Though many in western portions of Libya, notably in the cities of Zawiya and Misurata, identify themselves with the opposition, they do not represent the heart of the historic opposition to Tripoli found in the east. It is this region, known in the pre-independence era as Cyrenaica, that is the core of the opposition movement. United perhaps only by their opposition to Gadhafi, these people hold no common ideology and certainly do not all advocate Western-style democracy. Rather, they saw an opportunity to take greater power, and they tried to seize it.
According to the narrative, Gadhafi should quickly have been overwhelmed — but he wasn’t. He actually had substantial support among some tribes and within the army. All of these supporters had a great deal to lose if he was overthrown. Therefore, they proved far stronger collectively than the opposition, even if they were taken aback by the initial opposition successes. To everyone’s surprise, Gadhafi not only didn’t flee, he counterattacked and repulsed his enemies.
This should not have surprised the world as much as it did. Gadhafi did not run Libya for the past 42 years because he was a fool, nor because he didn’t have support. He was very careful to reward his friends and hurt and weaken his enemies, and his supporters were substantial and motivated. One of the parts of the narrative is that the tyrant is surviving only by force and that the democratic rising readily routs him. The fact is that the tyrant had a lot of support in this case, the opposition wasn’t particularly democratic, much less organized or cohesive, and it was Gadhafi who routed them.
As Gadhafi closed in on Benghazi, the narrative shifted from the triumph of the democratic masses to the need to protect them from Gadhafi — hence the urgent calls for airstrikes. But this was tempered by reluctance to act decisively by landing troops, engaging the Libyan army and handing power to the rebels: Imperialism had to be avoided by doing the least possible to protect the rebels while arming them to defeat Gadhafi. Armed and trained by the West, provided with command of the air by the foreign air forces — this was the arbitrary line over which the new government keeps from being a Western puppet. It still seems a bit over the line, but that’s how the story goes.
In fact, the West is now supporting a very diverse and sometimes mutually hostile group of tribes and individuals, bound together by hostility to Gadhafi and not much else. It is possible that over time they could coalesce into a fighting force, but it is far more difficult imagining them defeating Gadhafi’s forces anytime soon, much less governing Libya together. There are simply too many issues between them. It is, in part, these divisions that allowed Gadhafi to stay in power as long as he did. The West’s ability to impose order on them without governing them, particularly in a short amount of time, is difficult to imagine. They remind me of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, anointed by the Americans, distrusted by much of the country and supported by a fractious coalition.
Other Factors
There are other factors involved, of course. Italy has an interest in Libyan oil, and the United Kingdom was looking for access to the same. But just as Gadhafi was happy to sell the oil, so would any successor regime be; this war was not necessary to guarantee access to oil. NATO politics also played a role. The Germans refused to go with this operation, and that drove the French closer to the Americans and British. There is the Arab League, which supported a no-fly zone (though it did an about-face when it found out that a no-fly zone included bombing things) and offered the opportunity to work with the Arab world.
But it would be a mistake to assume that these passing interests took precedence over the ideological narrative, the genuine belief that it was possible to thread the needle between humanitarianism and imperialism — that it was possible to intervene in Libya on humanitarian grounds without thereby interfering in the internal affairs of the country. The belief that one can take recourse to war to save the lives of the innocent without, in the course of that war, taking even more lives of innocents, also was in play.
The comparison to Iraq is obvious. Both countries had a monstrous dictator. Both were subjected to no-fly zones. The no-fly zones don’t deter the dictator. In due course, this evolves into a massive intervention in which the government is overthrown and the opposition goes into an internal civil war while simultaneously attacking the invaders. Of course, alternatively, this might play out like the Kosovo war, where a few months of bombing saw the government surrender the province. But in that case, only a province was in play. In this case, although focused ostensibly on the east, Gadhafi in effect is being asked to give up everything, and the same with his supporters — a harder business.
In my view, waging war to pursue the national interest is on rare occasion necessary. Waging war for ideological reasons requires a clear understanding of the ideology and an even clearer understanding of the reality on the ground. In this intervention, the ideology is not crystal clear, torn as it is between the concept of self-determination and the obligation to intervene to protect the favored faction. The reality on the ground is even less clear. The reality of democratic uprisings in the Arab world is much more complicated than the narrative makes it out to be, and the application of the narrative to Libya simply breaks down. There is unrest, but unrest comes in many sizes, democratic being only one.
Whenever you intervene in a country, whatever your intentions, you are intervening on someone’s side. In this case, the United States, France and Britain are intervening in favor of a poorly defined group of mutually hostile and suspicious tribes and factions that have failed to coalesce, at least so far, into a meaningful military force. The intervention may well succeed. The question is whether the outcome will create a morally superior nation. It is said that there can’t be anything worse than Gadhafi. But Gadhafi did not rule for 42 years because he was simply a dictator using force against innocents, but rather because he speaks to a real and powerful dimension of Libya.
This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to
http://www.stratfor.com.
Copyright 2011 STRATFOR.
Posted by: claudio | Mar 24 2011 0:33 utc | 56
|
