“Two To Three Years” To Take Out Gaddhafi

August 2, 2011

President Obama told a bipartisan group of members of Congress today that he expects the U.S. would be actively involved in any military action against Libya for "days, not weeks," after which he said the U.S. would take more of a supporting role, sources tell ABC News.
[…]
"We are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal, specifically the protection of civilians in Libya," he said.
Obama: U.S. Involvement in Libya Action Would Last 'Days, Not Weeks'

That was on march 18. As usual, Obama lied. Here on both points, the timeframe of the role of the U.S. and the "well-defined goal".

If the current plans to overthrow Gaddhafi continue how long will the U.S. and the other attackers be involved in Libya? The imperial think tanks which are propagandizing and planing this affair believe it will be for a very looong time.

In what could hardly have been music to NATO’s ears, [a panel of experts assembled last week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington] concluded that while “change” will come to Libya in the form of Qaddafi’s departure from power, it could take as long as two to three years for that to happen.
[…]
[Robert Danin, a Middle East specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations] says the prospects for a drawn-out war to oust Qaddafi, coupled with the lack of standing institutions that a new government like the TNC will be able to count on, means the international community is engaged in Libya for some time to come.

“All the problems we’re seeing now are further reminder that even when Qaddafi goes, we won’t be able to just pick up and leave,” he says. “To some extent, the international community has committed to nation-building in Libya.”

And while the approach President Obama has taken means the US is less engaged than the British and French, Danin says the US will still be on the hook once Qaddafi goes.

“No one should have the illusion that we [the US] aren’t in this,” he say. “We are.”

That international community Danin dreams of are the three states that started this war. France, Great Britain and the U.S. No other country will be willing to foot the bills for nation-building in Libya. As the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan have shown nation-building, aka installing a puppy regime and stabilizing it by force, takes a decade.

I wonder how the electorates in France, Great Britain and in the U.S. feel about this.

Will they really allow a prolonged attack on Libya, two to three years?
Will they allow the de facto occupation that will have to follow if Gaddhafi falls?
Will they be willing to pay for a decade of nation-building in Libya?

But maybe the only relevant question is this one:

Will they be asked?

Posted by b on August 2, 2011 at 15:55 UTC | Permalink

Comments

The Great British Public really don’t care. Libya and Col Qaddhafi are quite peripheral to their vision. The death of a 27 year old pop singer is a far more significant happening in their universe than petty scuffles (irony alert) in the sand faraway. Posh and Beckaham named their new kid Harper Seven; a rugby international married into the Holy Family – sorry – Royal Family; there is deep concern about the possible anorexia of another in that family of parasites, the Duchess of Cambridge. Bread and circuses. With crises like these, why worry about an inglorious military exercise bombing sand dunes? The poisonous Murdoch press may have had a setback, but the rest of the venomous and mendacious British press surely the lowest in the world – continue to pump out their toxic opiates to a gullible public whose wits are dulled by this toxic diet. Only if there were a “real war” with “our boys” fighting gloriously on the ground against an evil enemy, the rattle of gunfire, the heroic charge across open ground bayonets fixed, the scream of shells, the steady eyed march of serried ranks of brave men against adversity, would the press in Britain start giving regular front page attention to Libya. Our Boys kicking shit out of the wogs (irony) would be provide the raw material for the press producing the consumables too readily devoured by the celebrity culture.

Posted by: hilerie | Aug 2 2011 16:46 utc | 1

If Fouad Ajami’s theory is right, as he presents it in the Wall Street Journal (see link below) that Obama has lost his faith in American exceptionalism, then he wouldn’t be conducting himself as an imperial president waging wars against relatively defenseless countries through the Muslim world, much less resorting to Orwellian doublespeak to describe his war against Libya as a “kinetic” military operation. If Obama really and truly believes that the American empire is on its way out, as Fouad Ajami has suggested he has, he wouldn’t be taking what’s left of America’s collective wealth and handing it over to the wealthy so that they can turn it into even more wealth for themselves. Instead, he would be doing what the British did when their empire was on its way out, which is to take what’s left our collective wealth and use it to build a stronger and more secure social safety net for all of our people, not just those of us who happen to be rich. This is why I’m having a very hard time buying into Fouad Ajami’s theory that Obama’s pessimism towards America’s future as a global superpower is what’s driving him to sell his soul to the rich and powerful on Wall Street.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576466411161774824.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Posted by: Cynthia | Aug 2 2011 17:18 utc | 2

fouad ajami is a quisling pompous piece of shit

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 2 2011 18:01 utc | 3

“To some extent, the international community has committed to nation-building in Libya.”
to some extent, the international community has committed to nation-destroying in Libya; of course it’s Gaddafi’s fault, because he stubbornly refuses to hand the western clowns the easy victory they counted on
nation-building: the perpetual western supervision of devastated countries, characterized by (1) humanitarian aid and military occupation, in a 1:10 costs ratio; (2) drug trafficking boost (3) looting of natural resources
Somalia seems to be next on the list; strategy: as usual: bring humanitarian aid at gun point (can you say at “bomb point”?)

Posted by: claudio | Aug 2 2011 21:28 utc | 4

overthrow Gadaffi? People seem to this he is in office: its not quite like that. Gadafi is certainly influential, the way Castro is: as a moral and spiritual leader…The western dictators keep trying to say gadafi is going, has gone fled(to venezuela etc), will go into exile etc etc. Gadafi is not going anywhere.To the Libyan people and now more than ever, Gadaffi IS Libya.
And yes, ‘International community’ is a code word for the interlinked dictatorships of the major and minor powers or political parties that rule.
And yes Fortress Europe like Dumb america have more important things on their ‘minds’ than the annihiation of 40 years of nation building by the sons of satan.

Posted by: brian | Aug 2 2011 21:35 utc | 5

b poses 4 questions at the end of his post
my answers:
yes, they will allow …
yes …
yes …
no, they won’t be asked (this one is easy)
why will they (we) allow everything? because the west can’t back out of this adventure, not before having destroyed the country (see Vietnam and Iraq); it’s how our democracies work: no one can hand to the opposing party the rhetorical weapon of accusing a government of “backing out”, of course just when victory was “within reach”, rendering useless the sacrifices endured up to that point, etc etc etc
notice the false announcements by the western press of “progress” being made by the Libyan opposition every time that someone begins to question the rationality of the war
so the people will have the usual choice of mainstreams parties totally supine to Nato, international finance, etc or some nutty, racist opposition, and will choose the “lesser evil”
notice the resolve with which we rule out “boots on the ground”: deaths of “our boys” are the only events capable of snapping us out of hypnosis (once the rational of the war has collapsed)

Posted by: claudio | Aug 2 2011 21:53 utc | 6

“fouad ajami is a quisling pompous piece of shit”
Yep, no doubt r’giap. Just another lackey for the empire payed to tell people water isn’t wet’
hiliary @ 1: Your post fits not only the UK, but also the U.S.
The West will have its oil hegemony, no matter what.

Posted by: ben | Aug 3 2011 1:32 utc | 7

We’re only getting one side of the Libya story. US-NATO are pretending there are no diplomatic overtures from Russia and China on their Libya delusion. We can safely assume that none of these dialogues is ‘helpful’ to the West’s version of events. We do know that US-NATO’s ‘encirclement’ strategy has handed Russia and China an excellent reason to want to thwart any NATO plan and expose it as the disorganised rump of the Paper Tiger.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 3 2011 5:00 utc | 8

as this was basically a miscalculation by Sarkozy and Cameron (based on really bad intelligence from their intelligence services), done for their image and Obama was drawn into it by the choice of looking like Carter or like Bush to the electorate (in his mind probably looking like Reagan), and as this war is very hard to stop now because the image of all these leaders is involved, yes, the electorate of these countries was asked and their instincts are chauvinistic.
Gaddafi should invest his money into a quality English language competition to Al Jazeera, he seems to win the ground war, but lost badly the international propaganda war.
Though maybe just by winning he will even win the propaganda war.

Posted by: somebody | Aug 3 2011 5:41 utc | 9

… and yes, of course, it had been planned in a bipartisan way under the presidency of Bill Clinton.
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/26/post-qaddafi-libya-on-the-globalist-road/
this article quotes a conference of 1994
“Most participants argued for privatization and a strong private sector economy.” That is a statement culled from a report of a panel discussion entitled “Post-Qaddafi Libya: The Prospect and The Promise,” organized by Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1994.[1] Dr Ali Tarhouni stated at the conference, “with privatization, entrepreneurs will reach out and get involved in regional cooperation by searching for markets.”[2] Is that what the long-planned, well-funded “spontaneous revolts” now toppling regimes like a house of cards is actually about?
“Most participants argued for privatization and a strong private sector economy.” That is a statement culled from a report of a panel discussion entitled “Post-Qaddafi Libya: The Prospect and The Promise,” organized by Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1994.[1] Dr Ali Tarhouni stated at the conference, “with privatization, entrepreneurs will reach out and get involved in regional cooperation by searching for markets.”[2] Is that what the long-planned, well-funded “spontaneous revolts” now toppling regimes like a house of cards is actually about?”

Posted by: somebody | Aug 3 2011 6:17 utc | 10

Let us remember some of the thoughts that occurred in the early days of the Iraq war: That for the occupation to be successful, certain things would have to be done. Specifically, that top leadership would have to be removed (by force) and replaced by the occupier, and sufficient troops and staff would have to be allocated to accomplish this. That indigenous middle and bottom leadership would have to be kept in place to carry out the bidding of the new top leadership (by force, if necessary, and certainly by continuing to pay salaries). That laws and civic order be maintained as much as possible, and laws changed only to make them less onerous (Saddam Hussein was not really all that popular). This model for occupation had been tested before, with success, especially in modern countries. Iraq being the most modern of the Arab countries, it would also be the most easy to occupy.
In the event, none of these things were done, proving that the US was incompetent to carry out an occupation even in the most favorable circumstances. US failure in Iraq specifically implies that all US occupations will fail; nonetheless, actions in Yemen, Somalia, and Libya show that despite the increasingly dismal prospects for success, the US will try. The anticipated ultimate result will be military exhaustion and national failure.

Posted by: Gaianne | Aug 3 2011 6:55 utc | 11

@claudio

notice the false announcements by the western press of “progress” being made by the Libyan opposition every time that someone begins to question the rationality of the war

To this add PressTV propaganda against Ghaddifi and his Libyan support. At least the western press do not call the Salafists rebels revolutionaries.

Posted by: hans | Aug 3 2011 7:20 utc | 12

A tribal war in Benghazi: unintended consequences?

Posted by: ThePaper | Aug 3 2011 8:23 utc | 13

Maybe you are under rating Cameron. What does Cameron almost certainly not want to get involved in? A war against Iran. Perhaps British intelligence has established that Netanyahoo really does intend to bomb Iran this year. What better way to avoid British involvement in the follow-up than reduce the size of the army, remain in Afghanistan for the next four years and commit to what is little more than a “police action” to avoid being dragged into a real war.

Posted by: blowback | Aug 3 2011 13:10 utc | 14

No: the people are never asked: electoral ‘democracy’ only includes voting for this or that political party…after which the party in power behaves just like a very UNbenevolent dictator.

Posted by: brian | Aug 3 2011 22:11 utc | 15

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