Breaking: Revenge in Libya More Important than Change

    By Desider on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 8:33am |

    Well, our optimistic air campaign on Libya has produced less than we hoped, so we're busy sending military advisers in to teach the rebels to do more. (I remember how Putin helped us solve that problem with the Northern Alliance - briefcases full of bills and Swiss bank accounts). And now our compassionate strategic strategists are saying we should have skipped the no-fly zone and gone straight to taking out Gaddafi to help civilians.

    Funny how malleable international law is - just take out the leader you don't like, all will be forgiven. Like aspiring Playmates-of-the-month of years gone by, politicians do everything for "the children", to "save the world".

    And now when we have ourselves in a problematic pas-de-deux where neither side can get a lucky break, guess we're going to have to compromise, right? Well, not so fast. 

    Rebel spokesman Ghoga says he'd welcome more military advisors, weapons, steam baths and direct attacks on Qaddafi, but they don't want him to just leave - they want their trial.

    Well now that someone says they saw 3 cluster bombs, I guess we have to press on with more military intervention rather than watch Moammar walk off into the sunset. Those rebels are really great at out-of-the-box thinking - better another 6 months or a year or forever of desert fighting, rather than say turning to important issues like elections and running a new democracy. 

    Or let's call it: "counting your oil fields before they're hatched". Though Qatar has already helped east Libya sell $100 million of oil. And I'm starting to think the higher prices with the shut down Libyan oil fields makes good incentive for Western countries to keep this semi-war going for as long as they can.

    To guess a bit why my cynical tone, check this alarming report from UN High Commissioner on Human Rights:

    “Reportedly, one cluster bomb exploded just a few hundred meters from Misrata hospital, and other reports suggest at least two medical clinics have been hit by mortars or sniper fire,” Pillay said in a statement on the UN group’s website.

    Guess I'm showing my age, but I remember civilian atrocities being napalm-burned naked little girls running down the road, or a summary revolver execution of a capturee by a Colonel. Or miles of defoliated jungle. You know, the Pulitzer-Prize "got the picture". None of this "came a few hundred meters away from causing damage", or "suggests something bad happened".

    Hell, I remember the Israeli attack on Beirut suburbs. Here's a before and after picture:

    http://tyros.leb.net/massacres/beirut_southern_suburb.html

    If they're going to go after Qaddafi for an appearance in The Hague for attacking civilians, I hope they have something worthy, something that would befit the last big guy, Milosevic, for his direction in Bosnia including Srebrenica (the deliberate, methodical massacre of 8000 men and boys by Ratko Mladić), or those Rwanda trials.

    "Came within 200 meters of a hospital" is going to sound an awful lot like "littering....and disturbing the peace".

    Seems to me, the rebels are getting a bit uppity. We want Qaddafi gone, a Mubarak moment? Let him walk if he'll walk, save ourselves the embarrassment, hopefully we'll find a few democratically-inclined people to run the country in the next round. 

    Wait around for revenge? That's a losing proposition in the Mideast.

    Comments

    I'm glad Obama stopped Quadaffi from occupying Benghazi. That was good. I'm glad he then did what he said he was going to do and withdrew. I have no desire to assist the rebels in occupying Tripoli where they would be responsible for the same sort of atrocities from which we protected Benghazi.

    Not because it's the Middle East. It's because that's what occupying forces do when they fight their way into a city.The Greeks had a word for it. War.

    Life continually poses  problems for which there is a simple straightforward solution. Always wrong. I suspect we have a president who realizes that. Be nice if he had some opponents or supporters who did.


    by Flavius on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 10:05am

    I didn't pin this all on Obama - Cameron and Sarkozy seem to be leading the pack, including the new boots on the ground. But boots on the ground there are. 

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/19/libya-nato-civil-war-cameron

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/19/libya-mission-military-advisory-team

    But you act like Obama solved the problem by bombing. (The rebels are trying to hold onto Masrati and Benghazi now, not attack Tripoli, and they didn't even get close with US air cover)

    The article below notes the US is only supplying $25 million in non-military aid, while Qatar is providing light weapons, and UK, France, Italy are sending in "advisors". Yes, I'm glad it's not our people going in (though I think the CIA et al are already there heavily enough). But it's still part of our NATO baby whether we think we gave it up for adoption or not. And that baby's got boots

    http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-04-20/allies-send-military-advisers-equipment-to-toughen-libya-rebels.html

    And didn't I make obvious my objection was not what specifically they were doing, but "what's the plan, and what principle's at stake?" Because if it was just giving the civilians some breathing space, mostly accomplished. If it's supporting the new rebels for regime change, well, what happens when Al Qaeda tries that - will our foreign policy re: regime change quickly about face to declare there's never been support for regime change with Oceania?

     


    by Desider on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 11:02am

    I don't think boots on the ground means 50 or 100  soldiers. If that's the test we have boots on the ground everywhere. I take it to mean units fighting in uniform. We've avoided that ,fortunately..


    by Flavius on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 8:14pm

    Well yes, they're trying to stage manage it for people like you with low expectations, a simple proxy war, not a real war. A few cruise missiles then a few smart drones, a few advisors, let the locals do most of the work - if they can. By the time we have real units fighting in uniform, I'm sure you'll have come around.

    This is a pleasant little Pax Americana, we're above the fray. Mean guys like Qaddafi target civilians. We just kill them by benign negligence, when our smart weapons forget to be smart. Dirty people go to war, we sip our mint juleps and wave our Wii controllers to dash faraway tanks and headquarters to smithereens - the way God intended war to be fought.

    We've got these antiseptic wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen and now Libya. They may please some who think democracy can be dolloped out by control of air space and dedicated non-commitment, with a few "advisors" on the ground to coordinate. (Though probably most Americans don't realize we had a hired murderer in Pakistan for whom we paid off his victims' families using Sharia law and whisked him out of the country, as Pakistan expelled dozens more of our marauding spooks - eventually War by PacMan gets too much)

    Much of the media plays willingly along by never showing any mistakes (took a Wikileaks to do that - should start a new cable show, "When Smart Wars Go Bad":

    5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

    Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

    The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

    After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

    Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

    Yes, instead of a Constitution, we're going to run the world by classified rolling "Rules of Engagement", which if you're a civilian on the ground can be best described as "Alien Space Gods Appear Overhead and Open Fire".

    War sucks. Thinking it sucks any less because we're not planning it and doing it by remote control is just delusional and immoral. Obama can pretend it's someone else's war, but we're the ones who own all the fancy equipment. A "blame the guys over there" response when we're the powerhouse behind NATO just doesn't work.

    A plan, a real plan, not just "drop a few bombs and hope democracy sprouts". Aside from perhaps Kosovo (where there was quite a bit of planning), this recipe hasn't worked very well anywhere. Even our supposedly more clever Petraeus 2.0 "winning hearts of minds" is a resounding clusterfuck, except for his career.


    by Desider on Fri, 04/22/2011 - 1:20am

    Did I mention that virtual wars are expensive? $550 million for our part in Libya as of 3 weeks ago:

    http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/03/29/we-could-have-bought-a-lot-of-nice-things-with-that-550-million-we-spent-on-libya/

    How much have we given to peaceful protesters to speed them on the way to democracy? How much help to Sierra Leone to get its government back? That $550 million is greater than economic aid given to all but 2 countries in 2007 (Colombia at $561 mill and Pakistan at $734 mill, and you can guess these were related more to drug interdiction and anti-terrorism than real development money)

    Our "humanitarian" act is entirely muddled. We need a real humanitarian foreign policy with real humanitarian goals and principles. Giving a pass to the Administration with "sometimes you just gotta do something" doesn't cut it. 


    by Desider on Fri, 04/22/2011 - 1:39am

    1.8 million kids were drafted by our government during the Vietnam war. people showed up by the millions to protest the war that never ended.

    today the wars go on and on and on and on because we have not had two million kids drafted; because there is no war surtax, because our citizens for the most part have nothing to do with us.

    There will always be reasons for the US troops to be bogged down in wars. good reasons, less good reasons, bad reasons...


    by Richard Day on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 12:14pm

    No boots, but drones.  Predators.

    http://twitter.com/#!/DeptofDefense/status/61143545196707840

     


    by we are stardust on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 6:20pm

    Dammit, I was going to write that, and there this thievin' no good varmint crawled through the fence and posted it before me. Sufffrin' succotash.....thhppppttttt!~!


    by Desider on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 7:23pm

    It was m-m-m-my turn, dude! 


    by we are stardust on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 7:46pm

    Look! A couple hundred thousand advisors and a couple hundred 'privatised' advisors and that whole mess will be cleaned up by 2200!


    by Richard Day on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 7:29pm

    I see you've already referenced Gareth Porter's diary at FDL, (for those who might want to read it)but Obama's military budget being at least 14% higher than Bush's is even more creepy in that it doesn't include the cost of the wars!

    And the Gates/Obama phony duel over the budget is not all that clever:

    "Central to last week’s chapter in the larger game was Obama’s assertion that Gates had already saved $400 billion in his administration. “Over the last two years,” he said, “Secretary Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again.”

    The $400 billion figure is based primarily on the $330 billion Gates claimed he had saved by stopping, reducing or otherwise changing plans for 31 weapons programs. But contrary to the impression left by Obama, that figure does not reflect any cut in projected DOD spending. All of it was used to increase spending on operations and investment in the military budget.

    The figure was concocted, moreover, by using tricky accounting methods verging on chicanery. It was based on arbitrary assumptions about how much all 31 programs would have cost over their entire lifetimes stretching decades into the future, assuming they would all reach completion. That methodology offered endless possibilities for inflated claims of savings.

    The PDA points out that yet another $100 billion that Gates announced in January as cost-cutting by the military services was also used to increase spending on operations and new weapons program that the services wanted. That leaves another $78 billion in cuts over five years also announced by Gates in January, but most of that may have been added to the military budget for “overseas contingency operations” rather than contributed to deficit reduction, according to the PDA."

    Shoot; I can't find Nick Turse's investigative reporting that the DOD bidget is actually over a trillion bucks when scouring all the rather hidden budget programs that are directly related to the military.


    by we are stardust on Fri, 04/22/2011 - 9:48am

    John McCain says (from Libya)  Libyan rebels are his heroes.  "Today we are all Libyan Rebels" next?


    by we are stardust on Fri, 04/22/2011 - 1:08pm

    Yes, and he got to recreate his manly walking-through-the-market-wearing-Kevlar scene.

    So does this count as boots on the ground? Or just another asshole Senator?


    by Desider on Fri, 04/22/2011 - 1:46pm

    Mmmm...I gotta go with the JAAS designation; but do soldiers in tanks count?  Or do contract mercenaries count?  Staaaaaay tuuuuuned!


    by we are stardust on Fri, 04/22/2011 - 1:56pm

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