Re: Meanwhile, in Libya ...

Libya is one big clusterfark.

Mike F.  




________________________________
From: Peter Chattaway <petert-LOVM4QxV+tDq6eQxt3vRmLDks+cytr/[email protected]>
To: Daniel Amos off-topic listserver <[email protected]>
Sent: Fri, April 8, 2011 12:01:54 PM
Subject: [DADL-OT] Meanwhile, in Libya ...

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/meanwhile-in-libya/

by Ross Douthat
April 8, 2011, 11:46 am

I haven’t written about our Libyan intervention for a week or so, but with the 
media focused on the budget battles in Washington, it seemed worth rounding up 
some of the latest news and analysis from the West’s ongoing non-war with 
Muammar el-Qaddhafi’s regime. First, from today’s Times:

    NATO said on Friday that it would not apologize for the killing of at least 
four people in what Libyan rebels said was “likely” a mistaken attack on them by 
allied warplanes in the east of the country — the second case of friendly-fire 
deaths in a week …  at a news conference in Naples, where the alliance has its 
operational headquarters, Rear Adm. Russell Harding, the British deputy 
commander of the NATO operation, said the alliance had not been informed that 
the rebels were using tanks at the time the attack took place. The military 
movements in the area where the attack took place were “very fluid” at the time, 
he said, according to news reports, with vehicles going backward and forward.

    “I am not apologizing,” he said. “The situation on the ground was extremely 
fluid and remains extremely fluid, and until yesterday we did not have 
information” that the rebels planned to deploy tanks.

Why didn’t they have that information? Well, possibly because the rebels still 
don’t really have an command structure, as The Times’s C.J. Chivers noted in his 
dispatch yesterday:

    … by almost all measures by which a military might be assessed, they are a 
hapless bunch. They have almost no communication equipment. There is no visible 
officer or noncommissioned officer corps. Their weapons are a mishmash of 
hastily acquired arms, which few of them know how to use.

    With only weeks of fighting experience, they lack an understanding of the 
fundamentals of offensive and defensive combat, or how to organize fire support. 
They fire recklessly and sometimes accidentally. Most of them have yet to learn 
how to hold seized ground, or to protect themselves from their battlefield’s 
persistent rocket and mortar fire, which might be done by simply digging in.

    Prone to panic, they often answer to little more than their mood, which 
changes in a flash … And their numbers are small. Officials in the rebels’ 
transitional government have provided many different figures, sometimes saying 
10,000 or men are under arms in their ranks … But a small fraction actually 
appear at the front each day — often only a few hundred. And some of the men 
appear without guns, or with aged guns that have no magazines or ammunition.

So where is this heading? Here’s Der Spiegel’s analysis:

    … the situation which critics had feared from the start has now seemingly 
occurred: a stalemate. The rebels are strong enough, with the support of NATO, 
to maintain their control of Benghazi, but are too weak to drive on in the 
direction of Tripoli. The front is moving a few miles back and forth, but the 
split between the Gadhafi-controlled west of the country and the rebel zone in 
the east seems to be solidifying.

Which is presumably why we’re hearing things like this:

    The United States may consider sending troops into Libya with a possible 
international ground force that could aid the rebels, according to the general 
who led the military mission until NATO took over.

    Army Gen. Carter Ham also told lawmakers Thursday that added American 
participation would not be ideal, and ground troops could erode the 
international coalition and make it more difficult to get Arab support for 
operations in Libya.

    Ham said the operation was largely stalemated now and was more likely to 
remain that way since America has transferred control to NATO.

For all of my doubts about the White House’s transparency in this non-war war 
effort, I find it extraordinarily unlikely that American ground troops will ever 
enter Libya. But unless France and Britain rush in where President Obama 
obviously fears to tread, we seem to be headed for exactly the situation I 
feared at the beginning — in which Qaddafi is bloodied but still dangerous, and 
NATO is stuck safeguarding an East Libyan protectorate more or less 
indefinitely.

Compared to that endgame, even the Saif el-Qaddafi peace plan doesn’t sound that 
bad.


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