Doctor Cleveland's picture

    Libya: That Was Quick

    The Libyan revolution is coming to a rapid end, although there is fighting left to do. Twenty-seven weeks ago, Muammar Qadhafi's armed forces fired on peaceful protestors across Libya. Today, he's in hiding, and a rebel army that didn't exist six months ago, combined with NATO's air power, has managed to take control of most of the country.

    Let me point out a basic truth: that was really fast.

    It doesn't seem particularly fast to Westerners, because the rapid developments in other places and the Ritalin-addict speed of our news cycle makes a six-month war seem long. We're used to having the conventional phase of a war over within weeks. It took much longer than the Egyptian Revolution (or the part of the ongoing Egyptian Revolution that was covered on American cable), because the regime decided to fight. It took much too long for Obama to justify his actions under the War Powers Act. But it was still very fast. In fact, one of the problems that NATO policymakers face is that the rebels are winning faster than expected, and the Western policymakers haven't put any transition plans together. (This, of course, presumes that the Libyans need and will gladly accept a Western transition plan.)

    A lot of complaints you hear from Westerners are, in one way or another, grounded in impatience. There was the now-discredited argument that the rebels could not win without Western ground troops, an argument that implies that it is unreasonable to wait 180 days for an army of irregulars to defeat well-equipped professional troops. There is the surreal and scurrilous complaint by Senators McCain and Graham this morning, who insist that President Obama should have taken a larger role in backing the rebels (because apparently success is not enough, and success without American casualties is, from McCain and Graham's pathological perspective, somehow unpatriotic). And of course, there are the realistic worries about the future of Libya which are expressed as an unrealistic concern that the Transitional Council doesn't have a plan yet.

    The future of Libya really is worrying. But if they had a plan already, that would be even more worrying. The transition Libya is about to begin may succeed or fail, but it certainly won't succeed with a plan put together hastily.

    This morning I came across a complaint that the rebels don't have any clear leader. That's true. But having a clear individual leader, before they've put together any kind of governance or power-sharing plan, is not at all a good thing. What was the Qadhafi regime but an individual leader who took precedence over any other governmental principle? The quickest transition is always a coup by a strong man, who doesn't worry about process but simply grabs operational control and keeps it. That's also the most inefficient and undemocratic transition; strong men don't deal with the country's real problems and needs. They don't fix underlying tensions or nagging dysfunctions. They just grab a country with all its flaws and hold on as long as they can.

    Working out a sane political future for Libya is only possible if it happens slowly and peaceably, with the Libyans themselves working out an arrangement that includes all of the necessary political constituencies and ensures a functional administration. You can't achieve that in a minute. It requires a set of complicated negotiations and compromises. And you can't plan it from London or Paris or DC, because the people who need to compromise and negotiate and share power are not in those places. In fact, the nature of Qadhafi's regime, which suppressed most public political expression, ensures that Western policymakers don't have any idea who the real constituencies are or what concerns they have.

    Actual nation-building, working out a viable set of political arrangements and building a functioning national administration, takes time. It took the United States something like a decade and a half, if you include the Revolutionary War years, to work out a practical and effective set of basic governing institutions, and the work continued well after that. The Transitional National Council hasn't even been on the job for six months.

    The Libyans, acting on their own and dealing with their own internal political realities, could still make a mess of their country. That would be all too easy. And taking more time won't ensure success. But haste, in this case, ensures failure.

    What the Libyans need, when the last shooting is over, is time to work out a plan that they can live with for the next 20 to 200 years. During that time, they need to keep domestic peace and to keep basic government services like water, energy and transportation working uninterrupted. They may not get that time. They may not manage to use it. But if they don't, they will have a new set of problems that will haunt them for decades.

    Comments

    Just to be clear, doc, I was not lamenting the failure of the transitional council to produce a strongman a la Qadhafi. It's just that the council has seemed somewhat rudderless at times, and now (to mangle metaphors) they need to hit the ground running. Strong leadership needs to emerge, and fast.

    I understand why: Qadhafi planned it that way, limiting real decision-making to a tight inner circle of family and tribe. But it's a potential problem. The French, Italians, bankers and oil companies could well eat the Libyans' lunch before they even wake up to breakfast (I like that metaphor better).

    Yes, they need to take the time to get things right. Thankfully, there's no occupation force to install a Bremer-like viceroy and set the country on the "right" course. If I recall correctly, Bremer once said that his proudest achievement in Iraq had been instituting a flat tax. No one bothered to pay it.

    You might remember that, in contrast to Libya, I was cool with Tahrir Square's diffuse leadership. That's because Egypt has a real civil society from which to draw leaders -- an educated class, diplomats like Amr Mousa and ElBaradei, scholarly experts, people with business and government experience. Libya was intentionally kept backward for decades. I worry.


    I wasn't thinking of your specific concerns, ac. But thanks for the clarification.


    Aw.


    One good thing about the predominance of ex-regime types on the council is that they are less likely to institute a policy of de-Qadhafization like the one that fueled the insurgency in Iraq. They've asked cops and government officials to stay at their posts, another positive sign. But the Islamists, who suffered big-time under the old regime, are going to want heads to roll. It's going to be a tough balancing act, and it might turn nasty.


    I think that the uneasiness some of us feel is not really impatience but anxiety. Far too often, these things just don't work out well--with or without Western involvement. And the hardest part is that I don't think we have much sense of the conditions that make success more likely, so we whimper for tangible elements like plans and leaders and constitutions and election dates. Such auspicious ingredients give us reassurance, even if they guarantee little.


    Sure. There's lots to feel anxious about.

    But when we translate our anxiety into backing someone, anyone, because we just want to get this finished, we do much more harm than good.


    I think we made that mistake in both Iraq and Afghanistan -- we were desperate for a local leader to make everything all right.  But that's not what was needed.  Leaders will emerge, but only if there's a civil society for them to lead from.


    I think that's true in both cases, but to varying degrees.

    Karzai is a pretty reasonable choice as President of Afghanistan: he started with a genuine power base and real prestige. It's not clear to me that he's the wrong guy, or that there was a more plausible option at the time. But having the right leader at the top of the hierarchy isn't enough when you don't have a firm political structure in place. The upside with Karzai is that he's the leader of real and powerful Afghan constituencies. The downside is that those constituencies had lost out to the Taliban before, so there was no reason to think just handing the country back to them would guarantee stability. There needed to be more investment in old-fashioned nation-building.

    Ahmed Chalabi, on the other hand, was never a plausible option to anyone who wasn't drinking single-malt with him in Georgetown, and the Iraq war basically tore down the country's whole infrastructure (physical, political, and civil), with no plan for rebuilding it. That's just idiocy. It's no surprise that Iraq has gone even worse than Afghanistan in many ways. Afghanistan was a failed state when the Taliban got hold of it. Iraq was a bad place but still capable of grinding along on a daily basis: there were roads and electricity and civil servants doing their jobs. You could go out on the street without getting shot up. Installing a leader but not fixing the electricity grid was never going to work.

    Libya doesn't have much going for it, but there are a few things it doesn't have going against it. Whatever leadership emerges won't necessarily be seen as having been installed from outside. And they'll get at least some buy-in from the public for the short term, at least, because a big swath of the public wanted Qadhafi out, and pushed for it themselves. Some people will see the pains of transition, for a little while, as the price they pay for getting Qadhafi off their backs. It's easier to pay a price for something you actually bought on your own, rather than something a foreign military charged to your account.


    Really fast? The bombing campaign in Kosovo lasted 2 1/2 months. 

    The Iraq invasion lasted 2 weeks.

    Our overthrow of the Haitian government was overnight - rebel troops pouring out of the Dominican jungle, as was Venezuela's (okay, Chavez got it back, our bad)

    Just as we slowly discovered that Bin Laden wasn't outed by intelligence, but by someone coming forward for a $25 million reward, I expect we'll find out the less exciting truth somewhere in a few months when the cheering's subsided and people have forgotten.

    But there are enough western advisors to make sure Libya takes a pro-oil view.


    Really fast? The bombing campaign in Kosovo lasted 2 1/2 months. 

    The Iraq invasion lasted 2 weeks.

    And how did that Iraq thing work out?

    As I said, Western attention spans have gotten so short that 6 months seems like a long time. Your response is that you consider 6 months a long time.

    I encourage you to find both Kosovo and Libya on one map that includes them both (so that both countries are represented in the same scale). You might notice a difference between them.


    1) how that Iraq thing turned out has nothing to do with how fast the invasion happened

    [and did Afghanistan go any better?]

    2) we don't know how Libya will turn out 


    Actually, I have a blog post about this. You're responding to it. Try reading it.

    Two weeks of bombing and zero attention to post-war planning turned into a years-long quagmire.


    Yet you note that the US needed 1 1/2 decades to work its problems out.

    What my grandma said - 7 days if you don't, a week if you do.

    Seriously, I don't understand the point. Yes there were stupid things done in Iraq - dissolving the Guard immediately, prohibiting certain ethnic groups from holding power in effect, and simply not doing basic crowed control, etc.

    But many of those same stupid things will happen in Libya, except the ethnic enmity is much lower.

    The idea that insight can't come from the UK? Well, Libya's best and brightest were educated in the UK, France, Switzerland and Italy. Libya wasn't nearly as closed as Iraq.

    But we're making sure we line up oil contracts as we did in Iraq, though I think the conditions are less draconian as when we forced Iraq to sign everything under gunpoint and give away all its rights. They planned that part well I guess.


    A fundamental difference between Libya and Iraq/Afghanistan is that Libya is a Libyan war - not an American war. As far as the Libyan populace is concerned nobody externally imposed this on them ... no matter how much some Westerners assert America set the whole thing up ... that puts the psychology in an entirely different place. They aren't really looking for us to work our problems out in order to move forward.

    I don't get this whole hang up on oil though. Again, it's not like anyone is pressuring the Libyan people to go into the oil selling business. That's been their only significant export for decades. What the hell else would they do ... dismantle their oil infrastructure?

    One interesting thing is that the NTC has said that moving forward with exploration deals involving nations that were not supportive of the revolution may be politically difficult - naming China, Russia and Brazil in specific. But aside from that, it kind of looks like they intend to honor contracts already in place to a large extent.

    Interesting you bring up Chavez ... he has ended up as one of the biggest losers here. Between this and the fall from grace of Ahmadinejad he's down to like Robert Mugabe for his intercontinental sphere of influence. Looks like he's decided to write off Libya, cut his losses and play this entirely for a local crowd casting it as a clear sign we intend to stage an invasion of Venezuela next or something.


    The "whole hang up on oil" seems pretty simple, and important.

    The U.S. has a real and abiding interest in the stability and market accessibility of states that control significant oil reserves. That goes even for oil states from whom we do not directly purchase oil.

    We involve ourselves with such states, where and when we can, to help keep them stable and market accessible. As we did when we brought Moammar Qaddafi in from the cold a few years back. As we did again when we sided with the rebels to kick Qaddafi out.

    There was big trouble in Libya and we decided to join some of our NATO partners in backing one side over the other. Largely, not solely, to preserve and improve the market accessibility of their oil.


    First off. "we" never brought Qadaffi in from anywhere. That was Europe.

    And while your observations are true in the trivial sense, that still doesn't explain the relevance.

    Just so we're clear. The oil was totally flowing and available to western interests who were happily pumping the shit and buying it like crazy before the revolution came along. Supporting Qaddafi would have yielded a similar result (with a more assured outcome) as far as access to oil is concerned.

    So, sure. We like to buy oil and nations that have it like to sell it. That still seems almost wholly irrelevant in regards to this context. Just seems like we went through an awful lot of effort to "secure" access we already had in the first place. If it was only about that ... why didn't Europe (and we) support the stable dictator to keep the oil flowing? Isn't that the usual MO everyone complains about (myself included)?


    As the NY Times link I posted hinted, Qaddafi could be a whimsical prick about the oil. The oil companies figure to do better with a new government.


    I'm still pretty skeptical there is going to be that large of a difference. All nations who have the resource play with their oil policy for political leverage occasionally - us included.

    Interestingly, China's been doing some serious butt kissing. I don't see how the Western companies are going to undercut Libyans too badly with other willing interlocutors pressing in eagerly from the wings.

    I suppose simple contract stability could be a reason to support the revolution over Qaddafi. Fair enough. Can't say it bothers me too much to see financial pressures finally get western powers to support something decent for a change. It still doesn't seem to be enough of a gain to justify the expense and risk of the "Chavez scenario" idea which seems to be explicit or implicit in much of the criticism.


    To be clear, LazyKGB, I didn't allege this was a war for oil. I said the reason we cared enough to intervene is because there is oil.

    You can call that trivial, if you like. Most folks think oil is a vital national interest.

    Was oil flowing prior to the rebellion? Of course it was. Would oil keep flowing after the rebellion? Of course it would. Did we start a rebellion in order to control Libya's oil? I don't think so.

    The rebellion happened, turned bloody, and put us in a bind, coming as it did during the Arab Spring. Adopting a wait and see attitude would have been problematic.

    We like to think we want to support the people against the tyrants, or, at the very least, we'd like others to think that. And we did not trust Qaddafi to be a stabilizing influence in the region, for good historical reasons. And France & Britain wanted NATO to intervene. So I'd presume deciding to support NATO in its support of the rebels wasn't too difficult a choice for this administration.

    Now where did you get the idea that the USA had nothing to do with bringing Qaddafi in from the cold? 


    Peracles, really incisive of you to say the fast invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 'how that Iraq thing turned out', I also like your 'we don't know how Libya will turn out' for a very bold statement. However Libya 'turns out' it appears it won't cost us a decade of occupation (in fact we are not occupying Libya, and have no plans to) or $3 trillion and tens of thousands of dead and wounded troops.

    Peracles, I made up a list of what the 'Obamanot' crowd seems upset about, or are thinking on Libya, from reading comments at NYT, any of these strike a chord with you?

    1. Obama (and NATO) started the Libya revolt to take over the oil and, for Obama, to get re-elected. It's colonialism/imperialism, not a fight for freedom from an oppressive dictator.
    (2. In this respect, it seems the Libya revolt is different than the democracy movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, which Obama did not apparently start.)
    3. Hillary, Democrats and Wall Street will profit from Libya war contracts.
    4. The ill equipped ragtag  rebels are actually stooges/mercenaries under the control of big oil, which plans to take over Libya and its oil when Gadaffi is gone.
    5. Arabs aren't like us, they need dictators and if Gadaffi ran his own election he would have won it easily. Democracy will never work with them anyway.
    6. Gadaffi is just like other dictators, even though he was responsible for blowing up a US passenger airliner over Lockerbie, and blowing up a disco in Germany with US troops inside it.
    7. Libyans by large numbers support him. TV images of celebration and fighters risking their lives to kick him out of power, notwithstanding.  MSM lies.
    8. Gadaffi lured the rebels into Tripoli to destroy them, just like Russians lured the Germans Panzer Army into Stalingrad to destroy them.
    9. On the other hand, the US body count at zero is too low. Success looks too easy at this point. If Americans were killed, Obamanots could say Obama killed them, as he started the war (see #1). As such, Libya looks too easy, and makes the Bush war in Iraq (many Obamanots supported Bush) look like an even bigger fiasco than it already appeared to be prior to the Libya conflict.
     


    You forgot to mention the most insidious of all the points: by making oil more available, Obama and his imperialists will help lubricate (pun intended) the global economy through lower oil prices and thereby increasing employment.  The Obama imperialist machine will then use this increase employment to get the imperialist Obama re-elected so that he can work with NATO to overthrow other dictators of oil-rich countries, furthering the rebound of the global economy and ushering in forty years of Democratic rule of the White House.


    Yes, yes. That point in opposition is made far and wide. I see it all the time.

    You live in one hell of a feverish fantasy land ... both in imagining that's how economics works (hellloooooooo record tax-free oil company profits) as well as in imagining anyone who isn't warped as hell uses Obama's reelection as a waypoint for determining what is right and what is wrong.

    Keep this up and you'll complete the metamorphosis into a full-blown teabagger even more quickly than the Bushies did.

    Seriously. He spent the whole time saying he had nothing to do with it and American assets weren't engaged and we weren't even involved enough to make it a war that needed congressional oversight/approval. How much credit do you think the man actually deserves ... or will get?


    I assume that "you" wasn't directed at Another Trope per se as it seems pretty clear to me he was writing tongue-in-cheek…


    Well ... at AT in the role as author of said tounge-in-cheekness, yes, it was.

    AT in the larger sense, no ... at least not based on this particular comment. He has said equally wacky things in all seriousness, though.


    It wasn't enough for Obama to want to kill Palin's baby, and mandate death panels, now as KGB says, he has hidden our massive involvement, whose aim is the stealing the oil from Libya! Bush just wanted to spread God's Gifts of Freedom in Iraq, and Obama just wants to drone on to a second term!

    BTW KGB, do you still stick to your previous feeble assertion that Pakistan knew and/or handed over bin Laden to the US in Abbottabad, as there is 'no way' a US helicopter could penetrate Pak airspace without detection?


    Did something discredit KGB's assertion? We now know that it was a bounty-hunter who took the $25m reward for turning in OBL, not crack intelligence work.

    So which other lies are we supposed to live with?


    Huh? Is this another attempt at humor? I can't fucking tell anymore.

    But yeah ... I think it has actually been reported that we presented Pak with proof, told them we were coming in and that we'd blow their asses to kingdom come if they fucked with us (loosely paraphrased, of course) - or they could do the "whhhhaaaa???" dance that had been long planned (now well documented) for the occasion to avoid outright war. And it has also been reported that we were handed Bin Laden by a member of Pakistani's intelligence for the reward. Right?


    So now we were 'handed bin Laden' by 'a member of Pakistani's intelligence'. Previously you claimed it was official Pak policy to hand the guy over, and I said, if so, why not pick him up in a van in daylight? Reality check: Nobody in Pak 'handed' over BL, Obama sent in the SEALS who took him out.


    Nobody has disputed the SEALS killed him. Or that Obama ordered it to happen.

    The question was if we could fly in to a military garrison with quite sophisticated air defenses, crash a helicopter, have a minor gun battle, spend about 40 minutes on the ground after, wrap up business and fly a couple hundred miles back out of Pakistani airspace all without Pakistan's knowledge and without anyone from their security forces thinking to send over a squad car or recon plane or something to check out what was happening (Yeah. That sounds totally plausible) ... or if the operation was carried out with Pakistani knowledge/cooperation. The answer increasingly appears to be yes, yes they did know we were coming and yes, yes they did indeed stand down and let the operation happen..

    But there is this niggling little question if nobody in Pakistan 'handed over' OBL ... how did we find out where he was? Oooooh, in your mind someone from Pakistan who tells us where he is doesn't count as handing him over.

    (Damn. Times must be rough for a die-hard supporter of such a crappy president, eh? You're waaaaaay OT trying to milk a little glory here. OK. Yes, yes ... your brave little solider went and found OBL single handed and commanded the kill mission himself ... aaaannnnd then promptly forgot what happened when it came time to explain stuff for the teevees and spent a week or so untangling a narrative clusterfuck.)


    This isn't about Obama - it's about US foreign policy and precedent and what that means for world order and peace.

    You ignore the caveats I actually stated, such as:

    - what happens when China wants Taiwan back and uses this excuse (hey, an oppressed minority rebelling somewhere)

    - similar with Russia using Ossetia to break away from Georgia

    - we trained rebels who popped out of the Dominican jungles to take over Haiti - yes, it matters who the rebels are, doesn't it? And some of those leaders were ex-Qaddafi bigwigs. How far will the apple fall from the tree?

    - I don't think Arabs need dictatorships, thank you, but the way things go, the biggest chance is they'll end up with another one. (which could be installed by oil companies who prefer stability over democracy - see Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran in the 1950's when we overthrew Mossadegh for the Shah Jr., etc.)

    - bringing up Qaddafi's actions from the 90's, when he's been an American ally for the last decade just sucks, the height of hypocrisy. We ask leaders to change, he changed, and now we're going to pull out an old traffic ticket as evidence? Can't do better than that? Aside from hysterical post-rebellion charges of atrocities, isn't there one thing you can point to in the last decade to say he was a worse dictator than others?

    (hint: I also noted that Qaddafi had supported Charles Taylor and others in committing atrocities in Africa of awful proportions, includig hacked off limbs by the thousands. Believe it or not, an act of international terrorism doesn't have to involve an American to leave us appalled, but somehow we always need an act against America to make it to the front page).

    - oh yeah, drones running surveillance, intercepting communications, firing missiles - sounds like war, but somehow we've made the position that this is above the fray, not an act of war.

    So go ahead and pretend that I'm only doing this out of some need to bash Obama.

    Actually 1 slight optimism I have is that since UK, France and Italy led the regime change (sorry, "popular rebellion"), there's a better chance they'll have an EU-like standard forced on them to ensure democratic values take root. Perverse, no?

     


    And one of the issues that set off the rebellion is that Libyans discovered Qaddafi had mowed down 1200 inmates during the 90's, and many families only discovered the deaths recently. The result was something like the mothers in Argentina's Desaparacido period, finally leading the overthrow.

    But here in the west, we know nothing about this - we just run everything through 1) what happened to an American, and 2) American domestic politics.

    So we can cheer because American media has said this is a great day for Mideast peace.


    Scusi, forgot to answer your first issue - no, the fast invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the resulting trillions spent. The fast invasion could have just as easily been used to advantage, to get in and out quickly, leave institutions in place, install a caretaker government, ensure WMDs were non-existent, and hasta-la-bye-bye.

    The poor (or intentional) long-term planning that went along with the fast invasion was the issue.

    We invaded Afghanistan rather quickly too (supposedly with some wise help from Putin). Should we have taken a long time to occupy? Would things have gone any better? Does a day differ from a decade in the Hindukush?


    That makes no sense.  Leave what institutions in place?

    With hindsight we can say there was no wau to get in and get out quickly. Period.


    Uh, like leave police in place, as 1 obvious institution?


    So, Peracles, you supported the Bush invasion of Iraq, yet in retrospect, you feel we should have left after 2 weeks?


    I did not support the Bush invasion of Iraq, though I did support the return of UN inspectors. Where did you get the opposite idea?

    And I would have supported a real post-occupation plan rather than divvying up the oil spoils and assuming they could strike a controlling bargain with some remaining tyrant to keep the peace.

    And I think with a bit of trying, we could have figured out how to get in and out in short order, leaving only a skeleton presence, as our main goal was to make sure they didn't have WMDs, and secondary there was no infrastructure support for Al Qaeda in place.

    2 weeks is a bit short, but 2 months troop pulldown, yes.


    But....if we left after 2 months we wouldn't have gotten Saddam, and George W. wouldn't be the world saving Saddam Getter. Bush may not have even gotten Saddam's gun for his presidential library. You may need to rethink that scenario!


    Maybe Putin could have coughed up Stalin's field revolver as consolation prize.

    Or Qadaffi could have donated one of his sequined Colonel uniforms.


    And sorry, but I missed where or how we learned that there's no way to get out quickly.

    I don't recall anyone trying to get out quickly.

    I think the main idea was to stay forever and ever and ever, as the girls said in The Shining.


    I don't think Arabs need dictatorships, thank you, but the way things go, the biggest chance is they'll end up with another one. (which could be installed by oil companies who prefer stability over democracy - see Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran in the 1950's when we overthrew Mossadegh for the Shah Jr., etc.)

    Therefore the US should never ever assist those in the ME attempting to overthrow dictatorships because there is no guarantee that things will turn out exactly as we hoped.

    - bringing up Qaddafi's actions from the 90's, when he's been an American ally for the last decade just sucks, the height of hypocrisy. We ask leaders to change, he changed, and now we're going to pull out an old traffic ticket as evidence? Can't do better than that? Aside from hysterical post-rebellion charges of atrocities, isn't there one thing you can point to in the last decade to say he was a worse dictator than others?

    Aside from the fact he was a.....Dictator...i don't know, the fact he was sending the military to wipe out those pesky outspoken folks in Benghazi. Oh and he has destroyed or not allowed the development of civil government structure so with his removal folks like you (your ilk) can now wring your hands about what might happen next.

    - oh yeah, drones running surveillance, intercepting communications, firing missiles - sounds like war, but somehow we've made the position that this is above the fray, not an act of war.

    in your world war is war is war.  American involvement  Vietname = American involvement in Irar = Afghanistan = Libya.  If you hate that then you hate this. 

    Actually 1 slight optimism I have is that since UK, France and Italy led the regime change (sorry, "popular rebellion"), there's a better chance they'll have an EU-like standard forced on them to ensure democratic values take root. Perverse, no?

    You know who led the regime change? This is obviously going to surprise you. LIBYANS.  Yes. That's right.  The People. Are oil companies going to benefit? yes.  but so freaking what.  You would rather see a nation live under Q's sons dictatorship for another 40 years than give a chance, no matter how small, that from this chaos something better can arise.

    So, in the end, all i can say is....and pardon the french...screw you.  Give the People a chance to freakin' fail. 


    Cute. Would reply, but too much hyperbole and misdirection.

    Please re-read what I wrote without extending to absurd things I didn't say (like Iraq=Vietnam?)

    Most important point is that dictatorships do recur, and Libya will be in danger of another, whatever freedom fighters led the day.

    Even the leaders of Glasnost became a bit anti-democratic with their success.


    Why does everyone imagine anything other than full-blown American-style democracy is failure?

    This was never a fight undertaken from the context of our aspirations. Maybe even if they end up with more or less the same system, slightly stronger central institutions and a properly empowered council to diffuse executive authority ... led by folks who aren't slaughtering thousands of people when they dare complain and don't censor the internet and stuff ... that might be a pretty cool outcome from a Libyan's perspective.

    I say the results should be judged based on the satisfaction Libyans themselves view it with, not some arbitrary metric we're imposing from an outside perspective.


    Marginal improvements are fine by me. Don't need US control, don't require a mini-EU.

    However I was optimistic after the Shah fell. I was optimistic with the Iranian reforms in the late 1990's. Neither turned out very well, though the former much worse than the latter.

    It's over when it's over, don't count your chickens and all. That's not wishing for failure - that's hoping someone, somewhere takes over with a plan that brings at least marginal improvement.

    Revolutions have always been easy. Post-revolutions have always been tough. This hasn't changed.


    Let's just not lose track of the comparative baseline they are dealing with in terms of governance over the last 4 decades. Living under Qaddaf *had* to have sucked pretty bad for most folks.


    I don't know how bad it sucked for the majority - as a quick search shows, wealth was better than in Egypt and basics like health care and sanitation were taken care of.

    http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Africa/Libya-POVERTY-AND-WEALTH.html

    Material necessities of course don't substitute absolutely for freedoms, but there are countries who've done a lot worse at sharing the oil wealth.


    And the American revolutionaries led to what we have.  Which brings us to your underlying point - unless we can guarantee perfection, we shouldn't be involved.  There is a logic to not getting involved because of this reason, but you need to own up to it.  You can't pretend you're a realistic pragmatic when you are really a starry-eyed idealist.


    Christ, I said something like "unless we have a plan, we shouldn't be involved".

    Not perfection - a plan, some idea of how this relates to our future, world diplomacy, precedence in dealing with future conflicts, what comes after Qaddafi. How does it improve their situation, and hopefully ours as well, and set the stage for more world improvements.

    Why do people keep labeling a desire for a plan or improvement as "purity" or "perfection"?

     


    Related: ends do not justify means, and they don't make a foreign policy strategy.

    We had enough military adventurism and coups in the 60's and 70's, that didn't improve much. What is the plan?


    And the American revolutionaries led to what we have.

    How's that workin' out for you...?  (nb-rejoinder assumes premise in post accepting overall historical impact=positive...I know Trope will correct me if I have assumed to much)


    .screw you. 

    Uncharacteristically without nuance, brimming with style.  The Sultan approves...


    What are you talking about?  The invasion of Iraq lasted six years.


    The time from first bomb to US-arranged toppling of Saddam statue was several weeks.

    Roughly the same as a "mission accomplished" rebels rushing through Tripoli (though Qaddafi not found yet, and son captured-then-not-captured)

    Now, I imagine Libya will be much easier to subdue than Iraq, thanks to no Iran next door, and internal ethnic tension much less.


    Reading the NY Times description makes me queasy - could be a band of 6-year-olds, trained & supplied, accompanied by drones, air raids, sea embargo & intercept, and a last ditch NATO strike to hold onto Zawiyah.

    But will hear about how rugged and independent the rebels are. 600 rebels in a city of 1 million.... plus a little fire power behind.

     



    Libya isn't Iraq. There is nothing similar between the two situations. It's like apples and bowling balls. For the Libya conflict to have progressed from apparent stalemate to the occupation of Qaddafi's military and political headquarters this quickly is truly stunning. People were debating if the revolutionaries could even hold taken ground two weeks ago. The last real stronghold looks to be Sirte.

    Do you honestly envision Qaddafi being able to wage a six-year resistance? I really don't see a plausible way that could happen. Qaddafi made himself the heart, soul and body of the movement he leads ... without him, there is not much to fight over.


    I don't think Libya is Iraq.

    I think what happened will look less stunning as we realize the details.

    Yes, Qaddafi built his empire on himself. I'm not sure how Hussein's and Qaddafi's approaches differed, how devotion differed. Frankly I think Qaddafi was less of a tyrant, so there was less fear to protect him.

    And it can all still turn out badly with no post-fall plan. Doubtfully an insurrection. More likely corruption and a return to pseudo-dictatorship.

     


    Libyan military certainly not the powerhouse of the Iraq military- limited funding & capability, almost no experience in actual combat.


    Oddly enough, there is one striking similarity (not accidental...).  There is oil, hence, there will be blood. (Ed, note:too-cute-by-half reference alert)


    Than I'm confused. You seem to be agreeing that as far as the Libyan civil war being an active conflict is concerned ... it's pretty much over.

    That was fast.

    Saddam relied on a highly empowered Baath party and a formal top-down bureaucracy .. hence the de-baathification program we so brilliantly undertook to purge all technocrats from their government. There were institutions to which loyalty could be felt beyond the personality of Saddam. There are no analogous organizations in Libyan society. Qaddafi intentionally prevented any formalized political structures from forming and ruled in a much more retrograde and tribal fashion with family (children) used to control government institutions.

    Most importantly in this context though ... huge swaths of Iraq never had a revolution and asked for help (Kurdistan not withstanding). In Iraq, we invaded. We intentionally destroyed and purged an entire system that was quite committed to continuing. Then we had to invent something a foreign nation would accept and impose it on them ... with the arbitrary restriction that anyone who had ever worked for Saddam's party couldn't participate or make any money in the new system. By metrics used in Iraq, the head of the NTC (and most of it's members) would have been summarily disqualified and arrested. Again. There is damn near nothing about the Iraq situation that is particularly instructive for Libya.

    I'm curious, what metrics are you using to determine "less of a tyrant". I wouldn't hazard a guess either way.


    Well, it wasn't much of a civil war, was it? Max 2000 rebels held together by massive foreign intervention against a modestly equipped government, and no government-supporting supply routes.

    When we overthrew Aristide that way in 2004 it only took a couple of days. Perhaps my expectations are too high? Certainly the internationally sponsored civil war in Congo lasted much longer. None of the superpowers really helped out.

    Hussein threw away a million or so lives in his war against Iran. His invasion of Kuwait while having some historical pseudo-justifications was a pure oil grab, and he was a thug both around the neighborhood and towards his own people. The gassing of the Kurds certainly qualifies as a pretty heinous act, though since we kinda forgave him for that by-gone, shouldn't really use that as justification to invade in 2003. 

    AFAIK, the number of disappeareds in Libya was much less, and the state of big brother much less, but I really don't know. How does Abu Ghraiv under Hussein compare to Qaddafi's worst? And while people talk about Qaddafi and WMD's, it's pretty obvious Qaddafi didn't have his heart into traditional or mass-destruction buildup, despite his love of uniforms.

    There's nothing Qaddafi ever did that put the spook in neighboring countries like Hussein's continuous threats. Wow, an airline shot down. Compare that to Scuds that reach Israel or the invasion of Kuwait.

    And in the end, Qaddafi was much more cooperative with international arms inspectors.

    No, I don't think Qaddafi's Libya was near as bad as North Korea. That's a shithole. And Iraq was better than North Korea. And I think Libya was better than Iraq. So I rank their tyrant leaders in opposite order.

    I don't think anything we did in Iraq will be instructive except to be more careful in arbitrary changes, and this time get a receipt for the palettes full of dollars brought in to maintain the peace.

     


    Where are you getting your figures for "2000 max" rebels? And what are you counting as a rebel? Is the person who cooks bread for the revolutionary army a rebel? Is the guy loading a ship headed to Misrata? The wife and kids praying for his success and safe return (or their own safe return home)?

    And do you consider the citizens of Bengazi and other places seemingly spontaneously taking over military installations and compounds in their cities to have been somehow orchestrated by the US? If so, how did we do it? If not ... the conflict doesn't seem to fit in the box you are trying to put it in.

    Our fundamental disagreement here is that this is somehow something *WE* did. We didn't do anything but make a choice of supporting one side or the other. Sitting quiet would have been choosing to support Qaddafi - the outcome for however many of the 600,000 citizens of Bengazi who had not managed to escape was sealed after this, their second uprising. The troops and tanks had arrived. The orders were to rape the women and kill them along with the children in front of the men before they too would be killed. Mercenaries and soldiers were given Viagra to help with the mission for fucksake. Many captured/escaped loyalist soldiers have given some variation of this assertion ... it was actually carried out in some places, BTW. Like the Rush song says: if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.

    I agree situations where dynamics allow such assistance to be viable are rare (as with Syria's dynamic for example), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't act when they are just because past American military adventurism has tended to the assholeish on occasion.


    Being kind. Find any video of rebels, and there are fewer than 50 vehicles with average less than 50/vehicle, which would be 250. For a major assault.

    No, the wife left behind baking bread is not a "rebel". Don't mean that popular support is only 2000, just that rebel fighting force is puny.

    How do they do it? 

    Eh, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/23/sas-troopers-help-coordinate-rebels

    So, reports at end of March had rebels at only 1000. Okay, maybe trained rebels are up to 4000. Just funny, not a single article estimates troop strength, kind of a basic for civil war. 

    Though I'm sure as of 2 days ago suddenly the number of official rebels jumped sky high.

     


    By that token, I've seen video of funerals with what appeared to be well over 5000 armed men in a procession that was occurring at the exact same time there were reports of fighting going on elsewhere.

    Still not seeing what you are basing the assertion that there were 1000 fighters at the end of March. That article simply says the Brits gave the Rebels some training. That's not exactly proof of Western powers winning a war for them.


    Here's a better rundown than I could give:

    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MH24Ak01.html

    The numbers don't stack up - and people barely talk about them - except as this article notes, even 2 months ago the numbers were less than 1000. Were they supplemented with African merecenaries? Qataris? Who knows.

    Typically war reporting includes troop strength, but this basic statistic seems to go lacking. All we hear is how fast rebels take stuff, and how many NATO sorties flown. Putting 2 and 2 together....


    Well, "WE" are doing it by lending quite a bit of firepower and surveillance behind the scenes.

    And it might be a good thing. 

    But let's say Argentina decides to support Teabagger Secessionists in Texas with Drones and Predators, and embargoes Galveston to keep the US from repressing the movement - well, after all, the Teabaggers are a majority in Texas, so we should give in to popular sentiment.

     


    If the response of the Federal Government to succession were to send a bunch of tanks and heavy rockets with orders to kill everyone in Dallas as brutal retribution for expressing their popular will ... wouldn't it actually be better to consider giving in to popular sentiment? I can see Argentina having a reasonable case for intervention in such an instance - provided they had the capacity of course.

    Would you seriously support the death of tens of thousands of otherwise innocent Texans for the crime of democratically deciding to be their own country?


    Yeah yeah yeah, Qaddafi really sent a civilian genocide patrol into Benghazi, right? Hundreds of thousands killed?

    Quite a lot of international hype. What was his actual civilian toll, and what was the civilian toll from NATO bombing.


    As a general rule I oppose intervention, Peracles, so I have laid low in my well-stocked bunker. But I think you're fighting the good fight. People can argue whether intervention was right or wrong, but no one should even dare to argue that "we" had nothing to do with the imminent regime change. Without NATO bombing, the rebels were toast.

    I think your point about troop levels is very telling. The vast majority of Libyans did everything they could to sit this fight out. After 42 years of Qadhafi rule, people obviously had little love for their "brother leader." Even in the military, few were ready to die to preserve his tired dynasty.

    But few flocked to the rebel cause either. Generals defected, but their units mostly went home to wait for a winner to be announced. This didn't feel much like a popular revolution; more like a somewhat botched palace coup.

    Early reports were surreal. A small town would change hands, and the rebel spokesman would say, "Yeah, it was a pitched battle. We lost six men." Or 13. The point is, before NATO stepped in, neither side could mass a sizeable enough force to win and hold territory. In a country with the population of Israel. And it was clear from the battlefield videos the rebels were not turning any volunteers away. 

    Now that they appear to control Tripoli, and western banks have unfrozen a few billion dollars, it's likely the NTC can attract the loyalty of many of Libya's dispersed military professionals -- at least those the Qadhafis haven't concentrated in and around Sirte. It's hard to see how such a last-ditch stand could succeed, with NATO controlling the Mediterranean and the rebels controlling all of the country's oil, but it could prove the bloodiest test yet for Libya's fledgling government.

    This may be far from over.


    You make an interesting point.

    I bet in Egypt there would have been no problem gathering 50,000 rebel fighters, based on their peaceful occupation of the center square over weeks and their passive resistance across the country.


    For the record. Of course without NATO bombing at the very least removing Qaddafi's heavy armor advantage, the revolutionaries would have been toast. If this were not the case, the need for intervention would not have existed ... obviously.

    However, that does change the fact that the revolutionary uprising was a truly homegrown populist movement and the resulting civil war is, at it's heart, a Lybian conflict to be resolved among internal parties, not a Western war of aggression requiring us to build a national infrastructure for a people under military occupation.

    We didn't start this one, and this one is not even primarily about us.

    As for the other stuff. IMO, your assertions either defy basic logic or don't really match the reporting from the ground I've seen on AJE, The Guardian, etc. Are you seriously arguing that Qaddafi didn't have the resources to win and control territory at the time NATO intervention started? How can that even be true at the same time you assert that without NATO assistance the revolutionaries would have been toast? Is this some brand of toast I have been hitherto unaware of?

    Seriously. PP's troop level assessment is entirely based on counting the largest number of rebel vehicles he's ever seen on TV at one time and multiplying by four or some shit. Does that really count as making a point about troop levels? How many American soldiers are generally killed in a skirmish while taking or defending an area? Seems if the number goes above four there is a media freak-out (as there should be). Could it be that you are getting real war confused with what you see in the movies?

    And shouldn't we at least figure out the real answer of how many revolutionary forces were active across Libya before proceeding as if a blog assertion based on nonsense becomes somehow factual?  The idea that 2000 people could take and hold as much territory as has changed hands in the face of an unwilling populace while also proceeding to take more ground can not be explained by NATO bombing alone. A simple logistics analysis renders that idea laughable.

    Qaddafi has maintained power by filling his army with mercenaries ... specifically because he has been paranoid an army led by his own people might turn on him. Hence Qaddafi's heavy reliance on the brigade under the iron-control of his elder son. Again, that's been pretty widely documented and analyzed by now. For the most part, I think it would be pretty unrealistic to expect a bunch of mercenaries to join up with the revolution. There have been reports that in the instances where unit leadership disintegrated, mercenary troops were not only sitting out the conflict ... if they could escape, many were trying to get the hell out of Libya and go back home.

    I don't think Sirte is going to go the way you envision. IMO, that will be siege and attrition as the loyalist team negotiates for participation in the new order. The Sirte elders have already been negotiating with the NTC over it if AJE reports are accurate (and Sirte has also been sending reps to the contact group meetings and such throughout the revolution).


    Numbers from major media in April were about 1000 rebels. A recent article said 1000 as of 2 months ago, and noted African mercenaries and Qatari troops plus various foreign advisors.

    "The idea that 2000 people could take and hold as much territory as has changed hands in the face of an unwilling populace while also proceeding to take more ground can not be explained by NATO bombing alone.

    Of course not - no one said that.

    There was quite a bit of willing populace to protest, but that doesn't mean they were willing to get up off their asses and fight.

    Standard of living in Libya was much more comfortable than in Egypt or Iraq. (though no girls' volleyball team in short-shorts - a plus for Hussein I presume).

    Libya's army was about 50-75,000 troops - good enough with control of airspace to handle an easily visible Sahara desert, but without control of airspace, very difficult. And when NATO airstrikes knock out half of them or more, well, forget it.

    Qaddafi's army wasn't designed to invade neighbors. Hussein's army in Gulf I was a million men. In Gulf II, it was still 375,000. And Iraq's terrain is difficult, as rebels/terrorists have proven.

    As for reconstruction, we'll see how much airstrikes knocked out. But really, re-building wasn't the problem in Iraq - it was re-building, having it re-blown up, re-building and so on.


    So, wait. Are you disputing that columns of armor, missiles and grad rockets had been sent to Bengazi and were starting operations on the outskirts? Or are you denying the population of Bengazi is around 600,000 people? Or are you disputing the orders it has been widely reported were given to the Qaddafi troops (reported by the troops themselves)? Or are you denying that Qaddafi troops were given Viagra to help facilitate the rape aspect of their orders? Or are you denying that this combination of circumstances would reasonably be expected to result in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of civilian deaths?

    See, there is an interesting thing about intervention. Typically one wouldn't wait until after the city of Bengazi had been decimated before acting. Usually interventions work better when you do it that way ... waiting until after everyone is already dead kind of makes intervention sort of pointless. A lower civilian death toll from murder at the hands of Qadaffi would actually be a sign of success in this case. But I don't see how we're going to get an accurate death toll until all of the mass graves Qaddaffi has been dumping his victims into have been found. The videos I have seen of two that had been discovered were pretty gruesome - and pretty extensive.

    If you want to go out arguing that Qaddafi was a benevolent leader who took care of his people and was wrongly victimized by less than 2000 Libyan citizens somehow brought under the mesmerizing thrall of Western imperialism ... go for it. Kind of makes you look like an idiot though.


    The Viagra bit was definitely nonsense.

    The real threat of genocide to a population were overhyped.

    Qaddafi like most asshole leaders gave enough to the people to keep them complacent and  himself safe and in luxury, with force and torture/incarceration as the 2nd ingredient. Though compared to Mubarak, the average Libyan seems to have been better off, except more freedom of speech in Libya, and I can't compare the 2 prison systems precisely.

    "Mass graves Qaddafi has been dumping his victims into" Oh God help me - haven't we been down this road before? Viagra-equipped rape soldiers, babies pulled off incubators, mass graves....

    Supposedly when we fought in Kosovo, there were 100,000 or more Albanians spirited into mass graves.

    Numbers actually found were one 250 person cache, and perhaps 3000 total over 6 sites, not necessarily civilian. Not to make fun of their plight, but the hysterical exaggeration of numbers and atrocities is a hallmark of every conflict. 100,000+ predicted vs. 3000 actual. In the case of Sierra Leone they actually hacked off limbs by the thousands, and we all know about Rwanda.

    Was this really a Rwanda, or a serious threat of one?

    Look, the West wanted to get rid of Qaddafi and is happy to have his oil (Brazil, China and Russia lost out). The rebels set up their own bank in the middle of their rebellion, clever lads that they are. We hyped our way into regime change, and we didn't even have to supply troops or planes this time - just drones and communications interception - we're getting more clever. But then I say this is more of UK & French initiative, not the US, but we certainly participated. (After all, who drives NATO?)

     

     


    Don't they have Tuaregs?  My family history with Tuaregs is problematic...although I think they are on the rebel side, which may cut the other way...


    Latest Comments