As rebel forces backed by allied warplanes pushed toward one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s most crucial bastions of support, the American military warned on Monday that the insurgents’ rapid advances could quickly be reversed without continued coalition air support.
“The regime still vastly overmatches opposition forces militarily,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the ranking American in the coalition operation, warned in an email message on Monday. “The regime possesses the capability to roll them back very quickly. Coalition air power is the major reason that has not happened.”
Why make this point now? Because those outside Libya who believe that Western powers have stepped outside the terms of UN Res 1973 are eager to call for a timeout, insisting that the only legal conclusion to this war will come from a negotiated settlement.
The rebels’ own military capabilities, by measure of weaponry, training, organization and command remain distinctly limited. So, as NATO powers and others involved in the campaign convene in London on Tuesday to plot their next steps, they face the question of whether to use their military leverage to assault the regime on its “home” turf and effectively bomb it out of existence. There are good reasons to believe they’re unlikely to go that far.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Sunday that the alliance’s actions would be limited to implementing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, “nothing more, nothing less.”
And that resolution mandates foreign powers to protect Libya’s civilians through imposing no-fly zone and an arms embargo, and destroying armor and other heavy weaponry that menaces civilian population centers. But it says nothing about regime-change; on the contrary, it requires member states to work for an immediate cease-fire and a democratic political solution to Libya’s civil conflict.
If this is really a “civil conflict,” why hasn’t Gaddafi handed out weapons to all his loyal supporters? He said he’d arm a million civilians, but the fact that he hasn’t probably indicates that there are nowhere near that many Libyans he can trust.
If the Obama administration can be derided for using Orwellian language when calling this war a “time-limited, scope-limited military action,” the Gaddafi government’s own language should be viewed just as critically.
With good reason “civil conflict” is the exact term they have adopted in the hope that observers who find the intervention objectionable will help promote a narrative that legitimizes Gaddafi’s rule. The revolution is aimed at toppling a despotic regime, but if this is a civil war, who are we to take sides?
Amid repeated claims that Libya could turn into another Iraq or Afghanistan, there are growing calls for a negotiated solution. Such talk at the moment serves no purpose, apart from throwing a lifeline to the Gaddafi family and helping them maintain their grip on the country, or at least some of it.
Calls for negotiation are predicated on the idea that the situation in Libya will reach a political/military impasse. It might do, but it hasn’t yet – so there is no need to start behaving as if it had.
A more likely scenario, though, is that the Gaddafi regime will implode suddenly and fairly soon – in a matter of weeks rather than months or years. We should at least wait to see if that is what happens. Hardly anyone in Libya seriously believes in the leader’s eccentric Green Book ideology, and most of those who currently support him can be expected to abandon him once they perceive that he is on the way out.
So the effect of negotiations at this stage would be to help the Gaddafis salvage something. That certainly seems to be the aim of the leader’s son, Saif al-Islam, who has reportedly been trying to interest the US, Britain and Italy in a “transition plan”. Not surprisingly, Saif’s plan envisages Saif taking over from his father for a period of two to three years, while Libya is transformed from a revolutionary jamahiriyya into a liberal democracy. In the meantime, all the Gaddafis – despite their crimes over the years – would be granted immunity from prosecution.
Rebel Libyan forces were halted about 50 miles from Sirte on Monday as reinforcements loyal to Muammar Gaddafi were seen moving towards the strategically vital city.
Revolutionary forces had advanced more than 150 miles in two days, helped by coalition air strikes, breaking the stalemate at Ajdabiya and paving the way for hundreds of men to stream forward along Libya’s coastal road.
But despite a Libyan rebel claim that Sirte had been captured, there was no sign on Monday that the opposition was in control of the city, which marks the boundary between the east and west of Libya and has great symbolic importance as Gaddafi’s home city.
Instead, pro-Gaddafi troops in Sirte were being rallied by forces travelling east from Tripoli and other strongholds in 4×4 vehicles with light weaponry mounted on the rear, a break from the heavier artillery used so far by Gaddafi’s forces, which has been picked off with relative ease by coalition air strikes.
NATO will assume leadership from the United States of patrolling the skies over Libya but the military alliance remains divided over who will command aggressive coalition air strikes on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s ground troops, NATO and American officials said Thursday.
After a day of confusion and conflicting reports out of NATO headquarters in Brussels, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced late Thursday in Washington that NATO had agreed to lead the allies in maintaining the no-fly zone. Effectively, that means that planes from NATO countries will fly missions over Libya with little fear of being shot down since Tomahawk missiles, most of them American, largely destroyed Colonel Qaddafi’s air defenses and air force last weekend.
But NATO balked at assuming responsibility, at least for now, of what military officials call the “no-drive zone, which would entail bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s ground forces, tanks and artillery that massing outside crucial Libyan cities, and doing so without inflicting casualties on civilians.
Late Thursday night a senior Obama administration official insisted that NATO had agreed to assume responsibility for the no-fly and “no-drive” zones but said the details remained to be worked out. The official’s statements appeared to contradict those of the secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
A NATO official said that two member nations, Germany and Turkey, objected to NATO participating in strikes that they consider beyond the mandate of the United Nations security resolution that authorized the military action in Libya.
The international military operation against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s forces may last days or weeks — but not months, France’s foreign minister said Thursday, as allied countries tried to work out who will run the campaign.
Alain Juppe also said he hopes the airstrikes in Libya and the boisterous quest for freedom and democracy in the Arab world will serve as a warning to autocratic regimes elsewhere, including in Syria and Saudi Arabia.
“The job of dictator is now a high-risk job,” Juppe said, noting that some autocrats — including Gadhafi — have been targeted by the International Criminal Court.
With a new poll showing 60 percent of the American public approves of the allied air campaign to protect Libyan civilians, it seems that popular opinion is leaning toward cautious support for the limited U.S. military intervention that President Barack Obama is conducting. But the same poll shows that Americans are deeply averse to endorsing deeper U.S. involvement if the current effort fails to restrain Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi.
The new Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted on March 22, just four days into the air strikes, found that 40 percent of Americans oppose U.S. and allied military action in Libya, leaving no one in the undecided camp.
But while four in five Americans agree that the United States and allies should seek Gadhafi’s removal, they don’t support increasing U.S. military involvement to achieve that goal. If the current air strikes fail to curb Gadhafi’s crackdown on dissent in the country, almost one in three Americans say they don’t know what to do. One quarter say the U.N. should then send in peacekeeping troops. However, just 7 percent of those surveyed say that the United States and its allies should send in ground troops (“peacekeeping troops” seems merely a rhetorically less worrisome way to say “ground troops.”) A lukewarm 23 percent say the best path forward in that scenario would be to increase air strikes–essentially, more of the same.
Noman Benotman, a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, says:
Gaddafi has tried very hard to give the impression that the Libyan opposition is controlled by al-Qaeda. This ideas flies in the face of all the evidence. The opposition is a diverse coalition of Libyans from many tribal and political backgrounds. Just because some Islamists support the opposition against Gaddafi this does not make the opposition Islamist.
At the same time, there are some extremists who want to manipulate the Libyan conflict for their own ends. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is looking for ways to play a greater role in this conflict. Since the start of the year it has tried to move men and arms into Libya from its bases in Niger and Mali, near Libya’s southern border. At the same time, al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan are trying to portray the international intervention in Libya as a ‘crusader’ attack on Muslim in order to further their own agenda.
In the rush to curtail Muammar al-Qaddafi’s military capacity to attack civilians in Libya, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on February 26 to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Libya. But the measure also unwittingly impeded the effort of the Western-backed rebels to fight Qaddafi’s forces.
Paragraph 9 of Resolution 1970 required all U.N. members to “immediately take the necessary measures” to bar the sale, supply or transfer of weapons, mercenaries, or other supplies to Libya. The arms embargo, which was adopted before the rebels had emerged as a potential threat to the regime, included no exemptions for Qaddafi’s foes.
Ever since the passage of that first resolution, government lawyers from the United States, Britain and France have been looking to see if they can find a way around it, according to U.N.-based diplomats. The United States may have now found one.
In a Pentagon briefing, Rear Adm. Gerard Hueber, the chief of staff for the operational command, told reporters:
As long as the regime’s forces are fighting in and around cities where the allies have ordered them to back off, he said, coalition attacks would continue. He said the allies are in communication with the Libyan units about what they need to do, where to go and how to arrange their forces to avoid attack, but that there was “no indication” that the regime’s ground forces were following the instructions.
A senior British commander said Wednesday that the allies had effectively destroyed the Libyan air force and air defenses and were now able to operate “with near impunity” across the country, Reuters reported. “We are now applying sustained and unrelenting pressure on the Libyan armed forces,” the commander, Air Vice Marshal Greg Bagwell, said at an airbase in southern Italy where British warplanes are based.
At sea, news reports said six NATO warships had started patrolling off Libya’s coast Wednesday to enforce a United Nations arms embargo, but Germany, which has opposed military intervention in the Libya crisis, said it was withdrawing four of its ships in the Mediterranean from NATO command. To offset the impact of its action on other NATO allies, Germany said it would send 300 more troops to Afghanistan to help operate surveillance aircraft, German officials said.
Colonel Qaddafi himself made a brief but defiant appearance on Libyan television on Tuesday night, appearing at what reporters were told was his Tripoli residence to denounce the bombing raids and pledge victory. “I am here!” he shouted from a balcony to supporters waving green flags. “I am here! I am here!” It was his first known public appearance since the allied bombing began on Saturday.
“We will not surrender,” he told supporters. “We will defeat them by any means. We are ready for the fight, whether it will be a short or a long one. We will be victorious in the end,” he said. “This assault is by a bunch of fascists who will end up in the dustbin of history.”
Khaled al-Sayeh, the rebels’ ostensible military spokesman, insists that rebel forces have captured both the eastern and southern gates to Ajdabiyah, bypassing the regime forces dug in at the northern gate by moving along the coast. They have effectively surrounded Gaddafi’s forces and have even begun to encroach on his stronghold of Sirte. Before long, the loyalist forces will run out of ammunition.
At a press conference on Tuesday evening, without so much as glancing at a sheet of paper, al-Sayeh runs off a long list of impressive achievements. In recent days, he says, rebels and allied air forces have destroyed all but 11 of the 80 tanks Gaddafi had sent to Benghazi. Ten other tanks were captured intact, along with 20 pickup trucks, two armored vehicles and a vehicle with radar equipment. He estimates that between 400 and 600 government troops were killed over the weekend.
But al-Sayeh’s message seems to change from day to day. On Monday, he had been more defensive, insisting that “the army is starting from scratch; we are putting the structure in place.” The army needs training. It needs arms. And the real officers and commanders have no control over the youth gathered at the front line. “The youth advanced today and it was spontaneous, as always. They don’t take orders from anyone,” he said bitterly. “If it was up to the regular military, the advance by the youth today would not have happened.”
“I am here to defend Benghazi,” says Muatasim Billah Mohamed, waiting with a crowd of young men on the roadside some 5 km from where the shells are falling. He has gone all the way from Tobruk and has a flag tied around his head like a bandanna, but carries no weapon. God will protect him, he says, pointing to the sky.
Others point to the sky to signify salvation from allied warplanes, expecting to see more wreckage of Gaddafi’s armor. “People now are waiting for the planes to hit Gaddafi’s forces,” explains Ahmed al-Faytoori, a former government bureaucrat, waiting beside his truck on the road. “The revolutionaries cannot proceed without the air strikes because we have very light weapons.”
He has approached the front with a vague intention of fighting Gaddafi, but makes no indication that he plans to move forward into the fray. “There are people here who are prepared to do suicide missions against Gaddafi’s forces, to shake them if the airplanes don’t come,” he says. “But it’s necessary for the planes to come so the rebels can move into Ajdabiyah, and after Ajdabiyah, Ras Lanuf.”
The roar of fighter jets had inspired fear in many of the volunteer fighters and local townspeople along this road less than a week ago. Now it generates excitement. “Air strikes,” a group of young men cheered from a sand dune on Sunday, as explosions to the south sent white clouds of smoke into the air. They turned out to be incoming tank shells, and an older fighter urged them to go down from the dune where he said they were vulnerable.
On Monday, the roar of the warplanes has filled many of those gathered with hope and expectation, but the strikes on Gaddafi’s forces defending the approach to Ajdabiyah never seem to arrive. And as the braver ones press forward into shelling despite their inferior weapons, the war tourists who stay behind get a glimpse of the real horror as well.
Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks recount their experience as captives held for several days by Gaddafi forces.
All of us had had close calls over the years. Lynsey was kidnapped in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004; Steve in Afghanistan in 2009. Tyler had more scrapes than he could count, from Chechnya to Sudan, and Anthony was shot in the back in 2002 by a man he believed to be an Israeli soldier. At that moment, though, none of us thought we were going to live. Steve tried to keep eye contact until they pulled the trigger. The rest of us felt the powerlessness of resignation. You feel empty when you know that it’s almost over.
“Shoot them,” a tall soldier said calmly in Arabic.
A colleague next to him shook his head. “You can’t,” he insisted. “They’re Americans.”
They bound our hands and legs instead — with wire, fabric or cable. Lynsey was carried to a Toyota pickup, where she was punched in the face. Steve and Tyler were hit, and Anthony was headbutted.
Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman.
But moments of kindness inevitably emerged, drawing on a culture’s far deeper instinct for hospitality and generosity. A soldier brought Tyler and Anthony, sitting in a pickup, dates and an orange drink. Lynsey had to talk to a soldier’s wife who, in English, called her a donkey and a dog. Then they unbound Lynsey and, sitting in another truck, gave Steve and her something to drink.
From the pickup, Lynsey saw a body outstretched next to our car, one arm outstretched. We still don’t know whether that was Mohammed. We fear it was, though his body has yet to be found.
If he died, we will have to bear the burden for the rest of our lives that an innocent man died because of us, because of wrong choices that we made, for an article that was never worth dying for.
No article is, but we were too blind to admit that.
Napoleon famously said an army marches on its stomach, and in the case of Libya’s rebel forces, that would be tuna sandwiches, fava beans and a lot of junk food.
As Western air strikes are restarting once thoroughly defeated rebel advance, the once weirdly successful aspect of their rag tag forces should be gearing up again — their food supply lines.
Like everything else about the uprising in eastern Libya seeking to challenge Moammar Gadhafi’s four decade hammerlock on power, the fighters’ food supply was an ad hoc affair of entreprising individuals and local charities with official sanction that somehow seemed to work — even when nothing else really did.
Rebel checkpoints always featured cases of bottled water, juice, piles of bread and plenty of junk food such as biscuits and packaged cupcakes that fighters can grab and throw into their pick up truck before taking off for the front.
“We never run short of food, we have good kids from Benghazi who come and bring it down to us,” said Mohammed Selim, 23, as he cleaned up the empty boxes of Twinkies, cookies and sugary juice drinks piled outside a rebel checkpoint in the oil refinery town of Ras Lanouf, two weeks ago before they were driven out.
Here are the differences between George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the current United Nations action in Libya:
1. The action in Libya was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. That in Iraq was not. By the UN Charter, military action after 1945 should either come as self-defense or with UNSC authorization. Most countries in the world are signatories to the charter and bound by its provisions.
2. The Libyan people had risen up and thrown off the Qaddafi regime, with some 80-90 percent of the country having gone out of his hands before he started having tank commanders fire shells into peaceful crowds. It was this vast majority of the Libyan people that demanded the UN no-fly zone. In 2002-3 there was no similar popular movement against Saddam Hussein.
3. There was an ongoing massacre of civilians, and the threat of more such massacres in Benghazi, by the Qaddafi regime, which precipitated the UNSC resolution. Although the Saddam Hussein regime had massacred people in the 1980s and early 1990s, nothing was going on in 2002-2003 that would have required international intervention.
4. The Arab League urged the UNSC to take action against the Qaddafi regime, and in many ways precipitated Resolution 1973. The Arab League met in 2002 and expressed opposition to a war on Iraq. (Reports of Arab League backtracking on Sunday were incorrect, based on a remark of outgoing Secretary-General Amr Moussa that criticized the taking out of anti-aircraft batteries. The Arab League reaffirmed Sunday and Moussa agreed Monday that the No-Fly Zone is what it wants).
5. None of the United Nations allies envisages landing troops on the ground, nor does the UNSC authorize it. Iraq was invaded by land forces. [Continue reading…]
Britain, France and the United States have agreed that Nato will take over the military command of the no-fly zone over Libya in a move which represents a setback for Nicolas Sarkozy, who had hoped to diminish the role of the alliance.
Barack Obama agreed in separate phone calls with Sarkozy and David Cameron that political oversight would be handed to a separate body consisting of members of the coalition, including Arab countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates that are outside Nato.
The agreement, which will have to be put be to all 28 members of Nato, indicates that the alliance has resolved one of its most serious disagreements. Countries had been splintering as they tried to comply with Obama’s demand that Washington be relieved of command of the air campaign.
Sarkozy moved to portray the agreement as a Franco-American success. In a statement the Élysée Palace said: “The two presidents have come to an agreement on the way to use the command structures of Nato to support the coalition.”
But the agreement represents a blow for Sarkozy, who had tried to persuade Britain set up an Anglo-French command for all military operations in Libya. This was strongly resisted by Britain, who said Nato was best placed to run the military operations.
With his brutal military assault on civilians, and his rantings about spiked Nescafé, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi handed many leaders across the Arab world what had otherwise eluded them: A chance to side with the people while deflecting attention from their own citizens’ call for democracy, political analysts around the region said. And they really do not like him.
Even Arab leaders most critical of the United States’ intervention in the Middle East have reluctantly united behind the military intervention in Libya. That has given a boost to Arab leaders in places like Saudi Arabia who are at the same moment working to silence political opposition in their backyards.
“The Arab street reaction to the Western attacks on Libya has been warm,” said Hilal Khasan, chairman of the department of political studies at American University of Beirut. “This is not Iraq.”
It is another disorienting twist in this season of upheaval in the Arab world. A fierce resentment about a legacy of Western intervention, fed by historical memories of colonialism and present-day anger at the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has given way to a belief that the Libyan rebels desperately needed help that only the West could fully provide. The apparent hypocrisy of repressive Arab leaders endorsing military action against a repressive Qaddafi government did not escape many Arabs.
“I see hypocrisy in everything the Arab leaders do, and I’m talking as a person of the Arab world,” said Randa Habib, a political commentator in Jordan. “I wanted them to take such a decision. There were too many people being killed in Libya. That man is cuckoo.”
This new and unpredictable tone seemed to partly explain the flip-flopping of Amr Moussa, the longtime secretary general of the Arab League who plans to run for the Egyptian presidency. Last week, the Arab League asked the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone in Libya, largely on humanitarian grounds. On Sunday, Mr. Moussa said military action there had gone too far. But he repeated his contention that the no-fly zone could not have been imposed were it not for the Arab League.
“We respect the no-fly zone, and there is no conflict with it,” he said, in a clarification that was seen in Egypt, given his political ambitions, as an overt acknowledgment of the public support for the actions in Libya. A day earlier Mr. Moussa had appeared to back away from support for the military intervention.
“In a way, the Arab League is trying to follow the sentiment of the Arab street,” said Shafeeq Ghabra, a political science professor at Kuwait University. “The street is now more in control. If we ever had an Arab street, this is the moment.”
Little is known for certain about the make-up and political outlook of the rebels’ Transitional National Council, which controls Benghazi and other parts of “liberated” Libya. Even its name is in doubt. It also goes by the title of “revolutionary council” and other variations. Eleven members of the council have been named. The identity of 20 others has been withheld, ostensibly for security reasons.
Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former Gaddafi justice minister who chairs the council, has been condemned as a traitor by his old boss, who put a $400,000 (£240,000) bounty on his head. In an interview with the Daily Beast, Jalil asked the international community “to recognise our council as the sole representative of the Libyan people”. Among the western powers, only France has done so. But Britain, the EU and the Arab League are supportive. And Hillary Clinton met a council representative in Paris last week to discuss how the US could help.
Jalil claimed the council has grassroot support. It derived its legitimacy, he said, from local councils that were organised by revolutionaries in every village and city. “We are striving for a new, democratic, civil Libya, led by democratic and civil government [and] a multi-party system,” he said. ” Members of the council were chosen with no regard to their political views or leaning.”
‘This is not wholly true,” said Venetia Rainey, writing in the First Post online magazine. “The key players of the council, at least those we know about, all hail from the north-eastern Harabi confederation of tribes,” she said. This included Jalil and Major General Abdul Fattah Younis, a former Gaddafi interior minister who also defected to the rebels.
“Although the tribes’ influence has waned … Libya’s tribal divides linger on. Their stance [the Harabi] is not necessarily representative of the wider Libyan attitude to Gaddafi,” Rainey said.
Western tribes loyal to Gaddafi, such as the Hasoony, had flourished at the expense of the Harabi and other easterners, the Wall Street Journal reported from Benghazi. “Early in his reign, Gaddafi targeted Libya’s powerful eastern tribes, redistributing their land to others and awarding them few influential posts … The weaker tribes’ empowerment [following the revolt] helps explain why Gaddafi’s supporters appear to be clinging to power more desperately” than counterparts in Egypt or Tunisia.
“These guys know they aren’t going to fare very well if the regime goes down,” Jason Pack, a Libya scholar at Oxford university, told the journal.
Eastern Libya also has a different religious tradition from the rest of the country and this was reflected in the rebels’ transitional council, argued Andy Stone, a columnist on the Nolan Chart website. “This is no Solidarnosc movement,” he said (referring to the Polish trade union-led anti-communist movement).
“The [Libyan] revolt was started on February 15-17 by the group called the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition [an umbrella organisation founded in London in 2005]. The protests had a clear fundamentalist religious motivation and were convened to commemorate the 2006 Danish cartoons protests which had been particularly violent in Benghazi.” (The 2006 protests had turned into an anti-Gaddafi demonstration).
Stone went on to claim that much of the eastern Libyan opposition to Gaddafi was rooted in the region’s strong Islamist tradition which resulted, for example, in a large numbers of eastern Libyan jihadis taking part in the Iraq war (second in number only to Saudis) and support for the al-Qaida-affiliated, anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, many of whose members had fought in Afghanistan.
“It is these same religiously and ideologically trained east Libyans who are now armed and arrayed against Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s claim that all his opponents are members of al-Qaida is overblown, but also not very far off in regard to their sympathies. Anyone claiming the eastern Libyans are standing for secular, liberal values needs to overcome a huge burden of proof,” Stone wrote.
A former British diplomat familiar with Libya said these and other claims that Islamists dominated the rebel movement in the east were exaggerated. Most of the population of Benghazi and other cities were political and religious moderates primarily motivated by opposition to Gaddafi, the diplomat said.
Chris McGreal witnesses the advance, retreat and panicked dispersal of young fighters on the outskirts of Ajdabiya:
The day’s events around Ajdabiya provided further evidence that the rebels stand little hope of defeating Gaddafi’s forces militarily on their own and are relying on coalition air strikes to destroy, or at least greatly weaken, the ability of the government’s army to fight.
Some of the rebels mistake the air strikes for their own victories. They dance on the burned out tanks, wave V for victory signs and declare that they are beating Gaddafi.
But the revolutionaries outside Ajdabiya only advanced because they expected to move into the town with little resistance.
The rebel leadership frankly admits that it cannot defeat the government militarily on its own and acknowledges that if it cannot take a relatively small town unaided, its forces are unlikely to be able to seize the better defended cities further west – leaving France, Britain and the US to decide if they are going to fight the insurgents’ war for them by clearing the way for the revolutionaries to advance.
Alongside the military campaign, the rebels’ political leadership says it intends to encourage fresh popular uprisings in cities still under Gaddafi’s control. But it may find it hard to persuade Libyans to take the risk unless they have the assurance that rebel forces are close enough to come to their rescue.
Members of the revolutionary council have already said they fear that the result of a limited air campaign will be military stalemate and a divided Libya. For that reason, they have called for an escalation of the air strikes to wipe out Gaddafi’s army as a fighting force.
The chaos outside Ajdabiya holds another concern for ordinary Libyans in areas now claimed as liberated territory by the revolutionary council.
There is growing alarm in Benghazi in particular at growing disorder by young men with guns who have claimed the authority for themselves to set up arbitrary road blocks, order people around and fire their weapons for the fun of it.
Even in combat situations, they do not obey orders, shooting at will and wasting ammunition. Rebels manning an anti-aircraft gun were probably responsible for shooting down the revolutionaries’ only fighter plane on Saturday.
Gen Abdul Fatteh Younis, who recently defected from Gaddafi’s military and now commands the rebel forces, was interviewed by the Irish Times:
“This man is stubborn. He will not leave the country or surrender easily . . . The situation is very complicated at the moment and I hope it will not continue for long but all the evidence suggests that Gadafy is trying to make it last even longer.” Younis talks of rumours that Gadafy has left the capital Tripoli and is now in southern Libya, and adds that there is “some evidence” that he has withdrawn money, gold and foreign currency from the central bank. He speculates that Gadafy might use this to establish himself in Chad or Niger, from where he would launch military operations in an attempt to return.
“I’m calling on the international community to realise that the sooner he is gone, the better it is for everybody, for the peace of the world,” he says.
Some opposition figures hope that the US and European coalition strikes against Gadafy’s air defences will trigger more senior defections and weaken Gadafy’s grip on power. Younis seems less certain.
“You cannot bet on something you do not have in your own hands,” he says.
“Gadafy’s strategy now is that he is effectively holding families of some of his cadre hostage in his compound so he can control their movements and make sure they will not defect or leave him. He is keeping them as human shields. He is a shrewd man in this way.”
Younis claims the rebel fighters are succeeding in pushing regime forces west, though eyewitness accounts from the front yesterday challenge this assertion.
“The no-fly zone is very helpful to allow the opposition forces come together and advance to the west . . to free those areas,” he says. He acknowledges that militarily his forces – a mix of fellow defectors and masses of untrained volunteers – are little match for the regime but argues that continuing air strikes on army installations will tip the balance in the rebels’ favour because, he insists, they are supported by the majority of Libyans.
“We are asking the international community to finish his security services because once they are gone then the rest will be done by the Libyan people.”
Younis talks of having between 15-20,000 fighters. “With that large number of revolutionaries, even with the light weapons they have, we can manage to achieve our goals, especially after air strikes help prepare the ground.”
Asked whether the rebels have been receiving foreign military assistance in the form of weapons, Younis replies: “So far we did not receive anything. A lot of countries promised to help us but they haven’t.”
Six villagers in a field on the outskirts of Benghazi were shot and injured when a US helicopter landed to rescue a crew member from the crashed jet, reports Lindsey Hilsum.
Channel 4 News International Editor, Lindsey Hilsum, says that the villagers were shot when a US helicopter picked up the pilot who had ejected from the F-15E Eagle plane after it experienced a mechanical failure.
The US aircraft crashed on Monday night and was found in a field outside Benghazi and landed in rebel-held territory.
The local Libyans who were injured in the rescue mission are currently in hospital. They are the first confirmed casualities of allied operations, almost four days after operations began. At the time of writing, no one had died as a result of the gunfire.
Babak Dehghanpisheh reports on a second American pilot who ejected from the same F-15E jet:
One of the pilots was picked up by rebel forces near the site of the crash and brought by car to the Fadeel Hotel in Benghazi around 2 a.m., according to a handful of people who said they met with the pilot. It’s unclear why the opposition forces brought the pilot to that particular hotel. Dina Omar, 30, an Egyptian cardiologist who has been volunteering at the rebel frontlines was in the Internet café at the hotel at the time. She heard from the hotel staff that a pilot had been brought in and went to see him in a large suite in the hotel. She saw a man wearing a light brown pilot suit in his early 30s lying down on a couch. “He was feeling insecure and unsafe,” she said. “He did not talk much.”
Omar and two fellow Egyptian medical volunteers offered him coffee, which he refused, they said. He did allow the doctors to check out his right leg, which had a slight contusion. Omar, who speaks fluent English, also offered him some Panadol, which he initially refused, until he saw her take a couple of pills from the same pack. He was concerned that the medical staff were Gaddafi sympathizers and Omar tried to convince him of their real work by showing a phone video she had taken of civilian victims from Saturday’s military assault on Benghazi. The doctors stayed with him until he relaxed and opened up a bit, they said. “After two hours, he started to speak and started to smile,” said Omar. The pilot reportedly confirmed he was American and said he thought the plane had gone down for technical reasons. But he refused to give much personal information or confirm whether there was another pilot with him, the sources said.
Not long after the pilot’s arrival, rebel officials brought him a bouquet of flowers, they said. “He was a very nice guy,” said Ibrahim Ismail, 42, a Libyan businessman who said he met the pilot at the hotel. “He came to free the Libyan people.” As Ismail spoke, a fellow businessman said, “I thought we agreed not talk about this,” indicating that rebel officials were trying to keep the pilot’s stay in Benghazi under wraps. Even though the pilot had a radio with a large aerial, he wanted help communicating with his family. Omar, the doctor, took him up to the hotel’s Internet café and tried to help him arrange a Skype chat which didn’t go through. Someone eventually brought the pilot a Thuraya satellite phone which he used to call his family. The witnesses at the hotel say the pilot left in a civilian car in the early morning hours.
This video allegedly shows Gaddafi forces “bombarding eastern regions of Libya” (LibyaFeb17.com)
“A city held by any organized rioters will be attacked generally in the same manner as one held by enemy troops.”
This is not a direction on how to suppress the Libyan uprising handed down from Colonel Gaddafi to his field commanders. It comes from the newly declassified 1945 US military field manual.
The manual provides instructions on how the military should handle civil disturbances in the event that local law enforcement are unable to contain the unrest. Riots and protests are anticipated to be caused by “agitators, racial strife, controversies between employees and employers concerning wages or working conditions, unemployment, lack of housing or food, or other economic or social conditions.”
According to the manual, when necessary, live rounds should be fired directly into a mob (“a crowd whose members, under the stimulus of intense excitement, have lost their sense of reason and respect for law”), aiming low to avoid injuring innocent bystanders. The manual also says: “Bayonets are effective when used against rioters who are able to retreat, but they should not be used against men who are prevented by those behind them from retreating even if they wish to do so.”
As the military operation continued over Libya on Monday, there was some confusion about which country or organization is actually leading it, and for how long. France, Britain and the United States are in charge of their own operations, which each have different code names.
The participants are being “coordinated” by the United States, but not commanded by it, according to the French Defense Ministry. The Americans, with the most assets, seem to be the lead coordinator, but Washington has said it wants to step back after the initial phase and have NATO take charge of maintaining a no-fly zone and arms embargo.
Britain wants NATO to take over but France does not, and Italy is threatening to rethink its participation unless NATO takes command.
George Bush assembled coalitions of the willing, a euphemism for his failure to get the UN to back his invasion of Iraq in 2003. Barack Obama has UN cover for a no-fly zone in Libya, but he has paradoxically produced a coalition of the unwilling to enforce it. US commanders expected that Nato would announce yesterday that it was taking over. That was blocked by Turkey, whose prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for immediate talks. Neither Germany nor eastern European members are keen on Nato heading an operation that has nothing to do with the defence of Europe. That might leave Britain or France carrying the can, “using Nato machinery”.
An operation no one wants to lead reflects deeper unease about the scale of the air strikes and confusion about their strategic purpose. The Arab League is meeting in an emergency session today after its outgoing secretary general, Amr Moussa, called for an immediate halt to the military action and for talks. He clearly believes that the attacks have gone far beyond their stated purpose in protecting civilian lives. Mr Moussa’s position is important for two reasons. Not only have Qatari planes yet to become involved, but Mr Moussa himself is a participant in the democratic revolution in his native Egypt. As a possible presidential candidate of a country that will one day resume leadership of the Arab world, he has a personal interest in what he puts his name to.
In Britain, the government appeared increasingly at odds with its defence chiefs over whether Muammar Gaddafi was a legitimate military target. General Sir David Richards said the Libyan leader was “absolutely not” a target, while Downing Street appeared to side with the view of the defence secretary, Liam Fox, that the Libyan leader was a legitimate target if his forces continued to threaten civilian lives. Three days into this mission, these are not insignificant questions. While much was made of the fact that China and Russia abstained in the security council vote, the fact remains that a large part of the world – including India, Brazil and much of Africa – is against this operation. The Arab League, whose support was so essential to the argument that military action had regional backing, is plainly wavering. Mr Cameron may say until he is blue in the face that it will be up to the Libyans to choose their leader once this is all over, but history in this part of the world is against him.
The longer the bombing campaign goes on, the sooner the real issue will have to be confronted: where is it leading? The answer matters on a day-to-day basis. Yesterday, as our correspondent’s account made clear, an ad hoc motorised cavalry of scores of youth fighters on pick-up trucks charged at Ajdabiya, only to retreat in disarray when Gaddafi’s tanks, which were dug in around the town, fired back. The fighters thought that air strikes had knocked out the enemy’s tanks and rockets. And they were surely entitled to think that what was good for Benghazi was also good for Ajdabiya, or Tripoli for that matter. Some had families trapped behind Gaddafi’s tanks, and in other loyalist-held towns there were reports of civilians being used as human shields. If the rebels lack the military means to take these towns back, are coalition warplanes going to fight their battles for them? And if not, would the revolutionary council in Benghazi accept partition? As things stand, the answer to both questions is no. So even if Gaddafi’s forces accepted the ceasefire, the rebels would keep on fighting.
Members of the council have already said they fear the result of a limited air campaign will be a military stalemate and have called for an escalation of air strikes to wipe out Gaddafi’s army. This is the logic of intervention, but it is not in the remit of the UN resolution. Three days ago, air strikes launched to save innocent lives looked simple enough. Very quickly, they have become part of the war.
President Barack Obama Monday formally notified Congress the U.S. had begun military attacks on Libya, prompting complaints from lawmakers that the president waged war without congressional consent, appearing to contradict his own previous position.
In a letter to congressional leaders, the president said the U.S. had “commenced operations to assist an international effort authorized by the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council” and “to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and address the threat posed to international peace and security by the crisis in Libya.”
Presidents over the decades have conducted military operations without prior congressional approval, including Harry Truman in Korea, George H.W. Bush in Iraq and and President Bill Clinton in Serbia. Congress in 1991 approved the Iraq military action, five months after Mr. Bush deployed forces to the region in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The military action in Libya, which Congress wasn’t asked to approve, irked lawmakers.
More than 8,000 Libyan rebels have been killed in the revolt against Muammar Gaddafi’s rule, it has been claimed.
“Our dead and martyrs number more than 8,000 killed,” said Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, spokesman for the National Transitional Council rebel group.
He criticised Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa over comments that appeared to be critical of military action by the United States and its allies against Libya.
The Arab League had called for the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians from Gaddafi’s forces but Moussa on Sunday condemned “the bombardment of civilians”.
“What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians,” Egypt’s state news agency quoted Moussa as saying.
Ghoga said: “Today, when the secretary general spoke, I was surprised.
“What is the mechanism that stops the extermination of the people in Libya, what is the mechanism, Mr Secretary General?
“If the protection of civilians is not a humanitarian obligation, what is the mechanism that you propose to us?”
After Turkish diplomats were able to secure the release of Stephen Farrell, Tyler Hicks, Lynsey Addario and Anthony Shadid, four New York Times journalists who had been captured by Gaddafi forces six days ago, they have now provided an account of their capture and captivity.
The four had been covering fighting near Ajdabiya when they decided that the battle had grown too dangerous for them to continue covering it safely. Their driver, however, inadvertently drove into a checkpoint manned by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi. By the time they knew they were in trouble, it was too late.
“I was yelling to the driver, ‘Keep driving! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’ ” Mr. Hicks recalled in a telephone interview from the hotel where he and the three others were recuperating. “I knew that the consequences of being stopped would be very bad.”
The driver, Mohamed Shaglouf, is still missing. If he had tried to drive straight through, Mr. Hicks said, the vehicle certainly would have been fired on. In any event, the soldiers flung the doors to their gold four-door sedan wide open so quickly that they had little chance to get away.
As they were being pulled from the car, rebels fired on the checkpoint, sending the four running for their lives.
“You could see the bullets hitting the dirt,” Mr. Shadid said.
All four made it safely behind a small, one-room building, where they tried to take cover. But the soldiers had other plans. They told all four to empty their pockets and ordered them on the ground. And that is when they thought they were seconds from death.
“I heard in Arabic, ‘Shoot them,’ ” Mr. Shadid said. “And we all thought it was over.”
Then another soldier spoke up. “One of the others said: ‘No, they’re American. We can’t shoot them,’ ” Mr. Hicks said.
The intervention is a high-stakes gamble. If it succeeds quickly, and Qaddafi’s regime crumbles as key figures jump ship in the face of its certain demise, then it could reverse the flagging fortunes of the Arab uprisings. Like the first Security Council resolution on Libya, it could send a powerful message that the use of brutal repression makes regime survival less rather than more likely. It would put real meat on the bones of the “Responsibility to Protect” and help create a new international norm. And it could align the U.S. and the international community with al-Jazeera and the aspirations of the Arab protest movement. I have heard from many protest leaders from other Arab countries that success in Libya would galvanize their efforts, and failure might crush their hopes.
But if it does not succeed quickly, and the intervention degenerates into a long quagmire of air strikes, grinding street battles, and growing pressure for the introduction of outside ground forces, then the impact could be quite different. Despite the bracing scenes of Benghazi erupting into cheers at the news of the Resolution, Arab support for the intervention is not nearly as deep as it seems and will not likely survive an extended war. If Libyan civilians are killed in airstrikes, and especially if foreign troops enter Libyan territory, and images of Arabs killed by U.S. forces replace images of brave protestors battered by Qaddafi’s forces on al-Jazeera, the narrative could change quickly into an Iraq-like rage against Western imperialism. What began as an indigenous peaceful Arab uprising against authoritarian rule could collapse into a spectacle of war and intervention.
After numerous statements from officials and military experts on how difficult and time consuming it would be to put a no-fly zone in state, the Pentagon now says that it’s already effectively been put in place.
With his popularity at a record low and facing an election next year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was in desperate need of a boost to his political stature.
And on Saturday, he got it.
The French leader, once dubbed Super Sarko by the local press for his eagerness to take the reins in global crises, summoned leaders from four continents to an emergency war council at the Elysee presidential palace in Paris to agree on military action against strongman Moammar Kadafi in Libya.
His 20 guests had barely reached an agreement when Sarkozy announced that French planes were already in the air preparing to strike.
With almost theatrical gravitas, Sarkozy said France had “decided to assume its role, its role before history” in stopping Kadafi’s “killing spree” against people whose only crime was to seek to “liberate themselves from servitude.”
Barely more than three years ago, Sarkozy gave Kadafi the red carpet treatment in Paris, welcoming him with open arms and allowing the Libyan leader to pitch a Bedouin tent near the Elysee. Now the French president was announcing that he was sending warplanes in to bomb him.
Beside Sarkozy was British Prime Minister David Cameron, France’s partner in the military offensive, talking tough but overshadowed by his Gallic counterpart.
In Britain, the question Cameron was asked in the Commons after his statement on Friday was an understandable one: is the UK capable of such a military endeavour? The prime minister – speaking coincidentally eight years to the day since Tony Blair asked parliament for its backing for the invasion of Iraq – was in no doubt that the country was in good shape for the campaign, and he reminded MPs that the UK was still the world’s fourth-biggest spender on defence.
Indeed, it is arguable that one of the figures vindicated by events over the past 48 hours was Liam Fox. The defence secretary has overseen a sometimes brutal, relatively successful, campaign to lessen the size of the cuts to trim the Ministry of Defence’s £36bn of debt, arguing that Britain needs to retain its capability to strike quickly and decisively in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Libya, in more ways that one, has bolstered his cause. Only on Thursday – hours before the no-fly zone was approved by the UN – a confident-sounding Fox was promising defence unions that he would still find ways to reduce the fallout of last year’s strategic defence and security review, by promising to save thousands of threatened civilian jobs. Yet, just a fortnight earlier, he had kicked off the month by confirming that more than a 1,000 jobs would be axed from the RAF by September, with almost 1,700 to follow. Speculation clouded the future of the Tornado GR4 strike aircraft with reports that the squadron at RAF Lossiemouth would be axed.
Libya, Fox might believe, would put a stop to such reports, reaffirming the need for a varied and sizeable air force. The Tornado, after all, has excelled in battle and is likely to be the first British assets used against Gaddafi.
As the U.N. Security Council voted the evening of March 17 to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, the international media broadcast the joyous reaction from the streets of Benghazi, the de facto capital of the Libyan opposition. Thousands of Libyans celebrated in the streets, waving the old Libyan flag that has become the revolution’s standard and firing guns happily into the air. A spokeswoman for the Libyan opposition said that the revolutionaries were “embracing each other” over the U.N. decision.
But until recently, Benghazi’s attitude toward outside intervention was different. The rebels’ attitude toward the role of the international community evolved as Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces advanced aggressively over the past week, threatening to use their superior firepower to quash the poorly armed rebellion.
Only two weeks ago, professionally designed posters were plastered on billboards around Benghazi’s elegant palm tree-lined streets reading: “No foreign intervention. Libyan people can do it alone.” Men and women in the city reacted defiantly to suggestions they needed outside support. Qaddafi had already tried to pin the uprising on al Qaeda — they wanted change to come exclusively from a homegrown movement free from allegations of outside influence.
Views quickly changed as Qaddafi’s military continued to advance across the country’s east. Even as the Security Council met to announce its decision, Qaddafi’s forces were shelling Ajdabiya, the last town on their march toward Benghazi. In a radio address, Qaddafi — perhaps in a show of propaganda — vowed that his forces would reach Benghazi that night, and that they would “show no mercy and no pity” to the rebels.
In a Paris hotel room on Monday night, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself juggling the inconsistencies of American foreign policy in a turbulent Middle East. She criticized the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates for sending troops to quash protests in Bahrain even as she pressed him to send planes to intervene in Libya.
Only the day before, Mrs. Clinton — along with her boss, President Obama — was a skeptic on whether the United States should take military action in Libya. But that night, with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces turning back the rebellion that threatened his rule, Mrs. Clinton changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention.
Within hours, Mrs. Clinton and the aides had convinced Mr. Obama that the United States had to act, and the president ordered up military plans, which Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hand-delivered to the White House the next day. On Thursday, during an hour-and-a -half meeting, Mr. Obama signed off on allowing American pilots to join Europeans and Arabs in military strikes against the Libyan government.
The president had a caveat, though. The American involvement in military action in Libya should be limited — no ground troops — and finite. “Days, not weeks,” a senior White House official recalled him saying.
The mere fact that Gaddafi has been served notice that continued military operations will bring reprisals has not been sufficient to persuade him to implement a unilateral ceasefire which he already promised. Benghazi is currently under attack.
Meanwhile, as missiles are coming down on the last refuge of the Libyan revolution, a strange message is going out to the people whose lives are still threatened by Gaddafi’s forces. Social activists and members of the anti-war movement want the revolutionaries to know that they feel betrayed and let down!
There are people in places like Montreal and Chicago who have dedicated their lives — or at least careers, or blogs, or speaking tours — to challenging the mighty forces of Western imperialism, and then the folks in Benghazi hand out an open invitation for NATO to come along and rescue them. Unforgivable!
Elements of the rebel leadership have stained their own name, and stained their revolution. That is inescapable now. But what is damaging to all of us is the narrow, self-centered, provincialism of what is clearly a neo-colonial elite of former regime insiders serving as self-appointed “representatives of the Libyan people,” elites who like the neo-colonized, depend on aid from abroad as part of their self-fulfillment. Cheering for what will be a NATO-led operation, is a validation and legitimation of that organization, and in a time when budgets for education, health, public works, and programs for the poor are all being slashed across the West, they help to validate the need for maintaining heavy military spending. Nobody is out in the streets cheering universities and hospitals, but apparently they are out in the street cheering the bomb. Their provincialism was displayed in their lack of solidarity, or even passing concern, with social justice and anti-war activists in the West, in cases berating those of us who felt we should have a voice — these are, after all, our planes, our bombs, and our political leaders — because all we needed to know was that “Libyans” asked for this intervention. If that is a reflection of the kind of political work and solidarity-building they did at home, then no wonder they had to turn to artificial, prosthetic solutions. Not just the anti-war movement, and the anti-secrecy movement, will be damaged here, as the clock is turned back to 2003 — it is the very meaning of “revolutionary,” which can now be made to include those who would be clients of imperial patrons.
So, the current predicament of the Libyan revolution is not the result of the brutality of the regime and its oppressive rule, but because of its second-rate revolutionary leaders, their lack of political skill and their deficiencies in solidarity-building?
I guess the “fall” of the Libyans actually took place the first day they started shooting back and revealed that they lacked Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence. If only they had possessed the moral strength of their Western supporters-now-turned-critics and realized that Gaddafi could be toppled with pure love.
OK, I’ll dispense with the sarcasm. The fact is, I find it extraordinary, that anyone aligned with any kind of movement whose basis is human solidarity would not have enough empathy to recognize that people whose lives are under immediate threat, do not have the luxury of picking and choosing between possible sources of protection just for the sake of maintaining the ideological purity of their cause.
If revolutionaries in Tunisia and Egypt had been able to join forces with their counterparts in Libya and collectively bring down Gaddafi, that would have been the dream combination. But it couldn’t happen — or at least, it couldn’t happen soon enough.
And the idea that the Arab democratic revolution is now over because of Western intervention in Libya, conveniently skirts over the implications that Gaddafi’s victory might have for the wider revolution.
The Western intervention of the most dangerous and insidious form would be Western non-intervention as autocratic regimes, emboldened by Gaddafi’s success in crushing the Libyan revolution, followed in his footsteps and crushed revolts across the region while the US quietly took comfort in the restoration of “stability.”
Now that the Obama administration has veered off its previously steady and passive response to the region’s uprisings, the remaining regimes have become more — not less — vulnerable. Hence the Arab League’s support for Res. 1973. The Gulf states are desperate to demonstrate how supposedly different they are from Gaddafi because their inequities and centralization of power are so similar. Gaddafi might not indulge in the same level of gross opulence as his royal Arab counterparts, but he shares their fear of political freedom.
Maybe Benghazi is not populated by failed revolutionaries but the failure comes from the outside through a projection of revolutionary aspirations by those who are disappointed by the lack of revolutionary tendencies in their own societies.
The driving force behind the Arab democratic revolution in Libya and elsewhere is not a lofty desire to change the world — it’s simply a hunger among ordinary people to be able to control their own lives.
Finally, after much “dithering” – which seems to be the consensus word choice for Obama’s sputtering Mideast policy – the US has finally suggested that it can, sometimes, do the right thing, even if it does it three weeks later (I looked back to see when I had written my Slate article calling for international intervention – February 23).
The arguments against military intervention struck me as surprisingly weak and almost entirely dependent on raising the spectre of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was somewhat unclear how and why Iraq 2003 should be compared to Libya 2011. Michael Cohen, whose preference for foreign policy restraint is admirable, worried recently that John McCain and Joe Lieberman’s support for a no-fly zone portended bad things to come. Just because McCain and Lieberman support something doesn’t automatically mean it’s bad.
Cohen writes that Iraq and Afghanistan “are daily reminders that the use of U.S. military force can have unforeseen and often unpredictable consequences.” Yes, but that’s sort of the point with bold action. It’s supposed to be risky (in fact, if it’s not, you may not be going far enough). Success isn’t guaranteed. And no one is pretending that a positive outcome in Libya is a foregone conclusion now that the UN Security Council has adopted a resolution authorizing military force. But it does make a successful outcome more likely. Leon Wieseltier, in a moving must-read, writes:
It may be, as Clinton said, that the consequences of a no-fly zone would be unforeseeable, but the consequences of the absence of a no-fly zone are entirely foreseeable. They are even seeable.
For realists, I would love to hear how doing nothing in Libya was going to help U.S. security interests. Having an oil-rich pariah state that could very well return to supporting terrorism and wreaking havoc in the region would be disastrous, creating Iraq part 3 and making it more likely we’d have to intervene sometime further into the future, at much greater cost and consequence. Did we not learn from the quelched Shia uprisings of 1991? Or from standing by idly (or supporting) the military coup that ended Algerian democracy in 1991? The Arab world suffered for the international community’s failure to do the right thing. Literally, hundreds of thousands died as a result. Having Libyans and Arabs feel that we betrayed them yet again would do wonders for our already plummeting credibility, particularly after the Obama administration has moved to back autocratic regimes in Bahrain and Yemen, rather than the peaceful protesters struggling for their freedom and getting shot in the process.
At the start of this week, the consensus around Washington was that military action against Libya was not in the cards. However, in the last several days, the White House completely altered its stance and successfully pushed for the authorization for military intervention against Libyan leader Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi. What changed?
The key decision was made by President Barack Obama himself at a Tuesday evening senior-level meeting at the White House, which was described by two administration officials as “extremely contentious.” Inside that meeting, officials presented arguments both for and against attacking Libya. Obama ultimately sided with the interventionists. His overall thinking was described to a group of experts who had been called to the White House to discuss the crisis in Libya only days earlier.
“This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values,” a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.
But Obama’s stance in Libya differs significantly from his strategy regarding the other Arab revolutions. In Egypt and Tunisia, Obama chose to rebalance the American stance gradually backing away from support for President Hosni Mubarak and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and allowing the popular movements to run their course. In Yemen and Bahrain, where the uprisings have turned violent, Obama has not even uttered a word in support of armed intervention – instead pressing those regimes to embrace reform on their own. But in deciding to attack Libya, Obama has charted an entirely new strategy, relying on U.S. hard power and the use of force to influence the outcome of Arab events.
“In the case of Libya, they just threw out their playbook,” said Steve Clemons, the foreign policy chief at the New America Foundation. “The fact that Obama pivoted on a dime shows that the White House is flying without a strategy and that we have a reactive presidency right now and not a strategic one.”
The time at which this became a question whose answer could not be avoided was this beginning of this week. It was not in reference to a no-fly zone or any other form of international military action aimed at Libya. It was in reference to Muammar Gaddafi’s advance on Benghazi.
For those who want to draw parallels with Iraq, the equivalent question was: what happens if we don’t remove Saddam? The neocon answer, long before the war had been launched, was that Saddam possessed and was destined to use weapons of mass destruction. How does this end? If we don’t stop Saddam it could end with a mushroom cloud.
In the face of widespread skepticism, Colin Powell had to “prove” the case for WMD in front of the UN Security Council.
This time around, no one had to prove that an attack on Benghazi was imminent and very few were in doubt that if or when it happened there would be a massacre. One could debate how many lives would be lost, but it would have been hard politically or morally to say: here’s the threshold — this becomes a matter of international concern only if it’s reasonable to assume X number of casualties are likely.
As soon as it appeared highly probable that a massacre was a matter of days away, the international debate turned to the question of how this could be prevented.
The answer provided by UN Resolution 1973 is quite persuasive.
How does this end? By a massacre in Benghazi being prevented.
But now there are a flood of other questions — will this operation result in the removal of Gaddafi? What would a post-Gaddafi Libya look like? Which governments are contributing forces for enforcing the NFZ? How will the NFZ be implemented? How long will it take to put in place? What happens if Gaddafi respects a ceasefire but his opponents don’t?
When those who sought and secured the UN authorization to intervene in Libya were, just a few days ago, skeptical about intervention, it’s a bit unrealistic to believe that they now already have all the answers about how this is supposed to play out in theory, let alone predict what will actually happen.
This isn’t the culmination of a long campaign to reshape the Arab world hatched by a cabal of liberal interventionists. It is a chapter in a process that began on December 17 in Tunisia when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire. Not a single person on the planet could have foreseen what that desperate act by a street vendor was going to trigger.
So to those who now vex about an intervention in Libya is going to play out, I would remind them that the drama we are now witnessing and have been following for the last three months has no script — but not only that — the fact that there’s no script is what’s good about it!
Muammar Gaddafi’s ceasefire offer will not satisfy western leaders queuing up to take a shot at him – but it’s unclear what will. When the US and its allies invaded Iraq in 2003 the aim was to overthrow Saddam Hussein. When Nato entered Kosovo in 1999 its purpose was to stop ethnic cleansing by Slobodan Milosevic’s army. The precise objectives of the Libyan war 2011, and how they will be achieved, are less well-defined – and therefore, potentially problematic.
The ceasefire hastily announced by Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa in the wake of UN resolution 1973 authorising foreign military intervention will be seen as a welcome first step. Except that regime forces bombarding Misrata and other cities appeared not to hear the news. Given Tripoli’s talent for lies, the enforcement, verification, and permanence of a ceasefire could be a vexed and lengthy matter. It will not happen overnight.
Downing Street has tried to clarify what its eclectic alliance – including France, the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Italy and Denmark (and maybe Malta) – thinks it is doing in Libya. David Cameron and Barack Obama agreed that “the violence against the Libyan people needed to cease, that Gaddafi should depart from power now, and that the Libyan regime should comply with the [UN] resolution immediately”, it said.
William Hague, the foreign secretary, added root and branch regime change to this wish list. “The Libyan people must be able to have a more representative government and determine their own future,” he said.
On this basis, the expanding aim of the intervention is not only to stop the violence and remove Gaddafi (and his sons) from power. Its more ambitious purpose is to oversee a democratic system on western lines in a largely undeveloped country that has never known representative governance and has no tradition of civil rights and individual freedoms. This sounds more like Afghanistan-style nation-building every minute.
Finally confronted by a far stronger adversary, Muammar Gaddafi’s pragmatic instincts will be to stall, secure a truce and negotiate continued control of a rump regime based in Libya’s west.
His life as well as his rule at stake, the veteran autocrat will also tighten security control over his entourage to avert any repetition of the numerous coup attempts that have marked his 41 years in power, analysts say.
But his options have shrunk dramatically since the U.N. Security Council on Thursday evening endorsed a no-fly zone and “all necessary measures” to shield civilians from his forces.
Analysts who know Gaddafi, an old hand at surviving prolonged international isolation, say the goal of U.N.-backed action must be regime change.
Any endgame short of that will offer openings he can exploit. For example, some expect Gaddafi, adept at brinkmanship, to call for talks mediated by African statesmen to gain time and carve rifts in the coalition ranged against him.
“He’s a manipulator and a survivor,” said Saad Djebbar, a UK-based Libya expert.
“He shouldn’t be allowed to negotiate to stay on in Tripoli. He wants to engineer the division of Libya, like Korea was split into a North and a South in the 1950s.”
Muammar Gaddafi’s government said it was declaring a unilateral ceasefire in its offensive to crush Libya’s revolt, as Western warplanes prepared to attack his forces.
But government troops pounded the rebel-held western city of Misrata on Friday, killing at least 25 people including children, a doctor there told Reuters. Residents said there was no sign of a ceasefire.
And in the rebel-controlled east, the government declaration was dismissed as a ruse or a sign Gaddafi was desperate.
“We have to be very cautious. He is now starting to be afraid, but on the ground the threat has not changed,” a French spokesman said. Britain, like France a strong advocate of armed action, said it would judge Gaddafi by “actions, not his words”.
Even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the ultimate goal for the U.S. was to see Libya’s president cede power, a senior administration official says the U.N.-mandated no-fly zone and military action to support it would not necessarily last until Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi steps down.
This official, who spoke on background because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, said that “right now, we’re focused on stopping the violence.”
Clinton said Friday, “The first and overwhelming urgent action is to end the violence. And we have to see a clear set of decisions that are operationalized on the ground by Gadhafi’s forces to move physically a significant distance away from the east, where they have been pursuing their campaign against the opposition.”
The purpose of the no-fly zone, the administration official said, is to prevent Gadhafi from attacking his own people.
“It’s not designed to have him go. That’s not the purpose,” the official said. “The purpose of the military action is to prevent massive humanitarian loss of life, to stop the violence. If the violence stops, then you shouldn’t leap to say then the military action will continue until he leaves.”
How soon before the no-fly, no-drive zone in Libya is enforced by US forces? According to US Air Force chief of staff Norton Schwartz, speaking to senators in Washington yesterday and reported by Foreign Policy – plans to impose a no-fly zone in a few days were “overly optimistic” and said: “It would take upwards of a week.”
In the streets and alleyways of this cowed and fearful city, the lingering traces of a crushed revolution are fading fast.
At one junction, the charred remains of incinerated tires burned by demonstrators are being flattened by traffic as Tripoli gradually returns to a semblance of normality. A scorched police station is operating again, with police in black uniforms and green bandanas sitting on stools outside. The bloodstains in a sandy side street where residents say soldiers opened fire with live ammunition have been washed away by spring rains.
And in Green Square, the symbolic heart of the city, government supporters gather on a daily basis, not anti-regime protesters, to chant slogans and brandish portraits in a triumphal assertion of Moammar Gaddafi’s continuing grip on power.
While the United Nations has now authorized military action to protect rebels in the far east of the country, it may now be too late to revive the failed uprising in the capital. Libya’s foreign minister may have declared a cease-fire on Friday, but in Tripoli, Gaddafi’s stronghold, the real battle for Libya appears already to have been fought and won by a regime that was willing to use live ammunition against its opponents.
Four New York Times journalists who were captured by Libyan forces while covering the conflict there will be released on Friday, the Times reported.
The son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Seif al-Islam, told ABC News they would be released, and the Times reported that Libyan officials told the U.S. State Department on Thursday evening that all four would be released.
In a rapidly changing Islamic world, the Obama administration is weighing how best to talk with adversaries such as the Taliban and, perhaps, Hezbollah.
One model for the administration, as it thinks about engagement of enemies, is the British process of dialogue during the 1990s with Sinn Fein, the legal political wing of the terrorist Irish Republican Army. That outreach led to breakthrough peace talks and settlement of a conflict that had been raging for more than a century.
In the case of the Taliban, the administration has repeatedly stated that it is seeking a political settlement of the war in Afghanistan rather than a military one. That formula sometimes seems hollow when more than 100,000 U.S. troops are in combat. But it got more definition last month from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who opened the doors wider for dialogue.
Clinton, in a Feb. 18 speech to the Asia Society, subtly altered the terms for Taliban participation in peace talks. She repeated the administration’s “red lines for reconciliation” — that Taliban representatives must renounce violence, reject al-Qaeda and abide by the Afghan constitution. But rather than making these preconditions for talks, as before, she said they were “necessary outcomes of any negotiation.”
The global community must act to stop Gaddafi and his forces reaching Benghazi. If he gets here, he will kill everyone. We in Benghazi, in what is left of Free Libya, have a very simple message for the Security Council. Please, do something. We are desperate for your help and you must do it now. It is the time to act and if you don’t there will be genocide. We are called rebels, but we are not rebels. We are a people that simply wants the same freedoms and liberties enjoyed by the people in the West. For 42 years, one man and his family have denied the people of Libya their dignity.
Whenever he gets to Benghazi, he will deny us our lives too.
Days ago, a no-fly zone could have been imposed and that would have helped. It would still help, but now it may be too late. Even so, it is not too late to help to stop him reaching us.
There are soldiers here, willing to fight for us, but we have no weapons. We are walking around gathering up what we can use to defend ourselves. I am a mother, not a member of al-Qa’ida; not a mujahideen. But when Gaddafi gets to Benghazi, I will have to be a fighter, not only to defend myself and my family, but also to defend the dignity of a people who have told the tyrant that has raped our country to go.
The world needs to know this will not happen unless we get help. We are a brave people and we will fight. But we will also lose without the help of the rest of the world. And if the international community does not act, it will remain of the conscience of the people that did nothing. China, with your riches; America, with your power; Europe, with your history – you will all be guilty of standing aside and letting Gaddafi massacre his innocent people. We did not want to fight, but we were forced to, and now, in our moment of need, we are calling for the world to come together and defend us from this evil man. It has been said the Libyan people do not want foreign troops on our soil, but which country does? Now it is too late for these arguments. Libya is not Iraq: it is full of desperate people and if the international community decides to send its armies, they will be greeted with joy; a joy that will replace what is now a growing sense of hopelessness.
We pray that our brothers and sisters can hold Ajdabiya. Gaddafi says that he has taken the town, but we know that our friends are still fighting for their lives, even if we know in our hearts that they won’t be able to hold on forever without assistance. And when Ajdabiya falls, there is then nothing to stop Gaddafi and his thugs reaching us here in Benghazi. We are all so frightened of what he will do when he gets here. We are all going to die.
We are all desperately waiting for the UN, or Nato, or the EU or anyone to act. Even the Arab League has called for action – what more of an invitation do people want? It the first time that the Arab League has called for action against one of its members: we have heard the call, but God knows that we have to see the action. We all know intervening in the affairs of another state is a controversial act. The world was sick when it released that inaction led to the deaths of thousands in Rwanda; the world said “never again”. That was only 15 years ago and, without urgent action, what happened in Rwanda will be repeated on the streets of Benghazi, maybe as soon as tomorrow.
We have all heard the speeches of Gaddafi and his sons: does the international community really believe that we are al-Qa’ida and on drugs? It will know that answer soon enough when, after Gaddafi reaches Benghazi, the pictures of our murdered children are shown around the world.
Egypt’s military has begun shipping arms over the border to Libyan rebels with Washington’s knowledge, U.S. and Libyan rebel officials said.
The shipments—mostly small arms such as assault rifles and ammunition—appear to be the first confirmed case of an outside government arming the rebel fighters. Those fighters have been losing ground for days in the face of a steady westward advance by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
The Egyptian shipments are the strongest indication to date that some Arab countries are heeding Western calls to take a lead in efforts to intervene on behalf of pro-democracy rebels in their fight against Mr. Gadhafi in Libya. Washington and other Western countries have long voiced frustration with Arab states’ unwillingness to help resolve crises in their own region, even as they criticized Western powers for attempting to do so.
Even as the votes to take on the Libyan regime were cast last night, the battle for Benghazi had begun. Col Gaddafi’s warplanes carried out several strikes on the city as artillery volleys started to come in from units approaching from several directions.
The skies above were lit up by constant streams of anti-aircraft fire. Rebel fighters, buoyed by reports that the vote in New York had gone for military action, began to stream towards the western gates of the city.
Even as the violence flared they believed that, at last – a month to the day after Libya’s revolution began – their only realistic hope of avoiding defeat at the hands of the regime had finally come true. But there is a fierce battle ahead. The firefights took place with the constant background sound of mosques in the city playing chants of “Allah hu Akhbar” at high decibel through loudspeakers. The chant was taken up by the rebel fighters, the Shabbab, as they traded fire. Many of the exchanges were chaotic with heavy calibre guns used at random. Flames appeared in parts of the city with black smoke blending into the night sky.
Down below, however, Benghazi was a bright target for the warplanes. No attempt had been made to dim the lights in any of the public buildings in the centre and residential areas also lit up as people came out to windows and balconies to watch the action with some women ululating. The mood of the rebel fighters, who had suffered repeated defeats in recent weeks and had been forced to withdraw from town after town was buoyant. As he manned his anti-aircraft gun, Selim Astersi shouted: “The devil Gaddafi wants to come into Benghazi, we shall throw him back. Tonight we shall prove ourselves. We shall avenge all those he killed.”
Khalid Ibrahimi stopped his truck, carrying five fighters in the back, to ask: “Is it true that they have voted [at the UN] yes ? That is what we needed my brothers, we have got help at last.” At just after 1am local time, two explosions echoed through the waterfront followed by machine-gun fire. Shabaab fighters claimed infiltrators had come into the city but it seemed more likely that some ammunition had detonated.
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.
The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries”.
A leading group of doctors in the US concerned with the ethical treatment of patients has questioned the role of military psychiatrists in Quantico, Virginia, where the suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning is being subjected to harsh treatment that some call torture.
The advocacy body Physicians for Human Rights has sounded the alarm over the role of psychiatrists at the brig in the marine base where Manning has been in custody since last July.
The group sees the psychiatrists as trapped in a situation of “dual loyalty”, where their obligations to the military chain of command may conflict with their medical duty to protect their patient.
Christy Fujio, author of a forthcoming report on the issue, said the main concern was that psychiatrists were allowing Manning’s continuing solitary confinement.
“Even if they do not officially approve it, by continuing to examine him and report back to the government on his condition, they are effectively taking part in security operations. Their failure to call it what it is, cruel and inhumane treatment, constitutes a violation of their ethical duties as doctors.”
Voting for the resolution:
Permanent members: United States, Britain, France
Non-permanent members:: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa
Abstentions:
Permanent members: Russia, China
Non-permanent members: Germany, Brazil, India
The Resolution authorizes member states “to take all necessary measures… to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamhariya, including Benghazi, while excluding an occupation force.”
With a boldness that the world had begun to believe he lacked, Barack Obama has gone for broke. The US wants Muammar Gaddafi’s head. It will not rest until he is deposed and there is regime change in Libya. And it will fight to get it.
Obama spent weeks pondering, prevaricating and posturing, infuriating Britain and France, arch advocates of military intervention. He used public appearances to prate professorially about plans, contingencies and downsides. He allowed senior administration officials such as Pentagon chief Robert Gates to give full vent to their doubts and misgivings about a possible Libyan quagmire.
Obama is already fighting two wars in Muslim countries he did not start – in Iraq, now all but finished, and Afghanistan. He did not want to author another. He did not want another foreign distraction ahead of his presidential re-election bid next year. He did not want the cost, the corpses or the inevitable collateral damage – political and human.
But gradually the pressure from hawkish Democrats such as John Kerry and Republicans such as John McCain began to tell. The escalating rhetoric from Downing Street and the Elysee Palace will have had an impact, too.
Obama finally made his mind up. The US would intervene to stop him. And there would be no half measures. All steps short of boots on the ground, as the US under-secretary of state William Burns put it are now urgently contemplated, with a view to immediate implementation.
That means possible, imminent air strikes as well as an air exclusion zone. It means direct head-on combat with Libya’s air force, if it chooses to fight. It means, potentially, western casualties, if pilots are shot down or bail out or are taken hostage. It could mean innocent civilian deaths as the EU’s foreign policy chief Lady Ashton warned last week. And if things do not go well, it may mean escalation beyond all that is envisaged now. Who knows when it will stop.
The immediate impact may be to stop Gaddafi’s advance on Benghazi in its tracks. If that happens, the revolution will have been salvaged, albeit at the very last moment. Whether it can endure is another matter entirely.
The US and its European and Arab allies will hope that Gaddafi, facing the prospect of overwhelming, punitive force, will quickly back down, observe the UN demand for a ceasefire, even agree to negotiations. But to be sure of saving Benghazi, a no-fly zone will not be enough. To drive home the point the game is up, it is likely allied air strikes on Gaddafi’s heavy armour and artillery will be required, and possibly also attacks directed at him personally, as Ronald Reagan tried in 1986.
Gaddafi acts like a bully and a coward. But he is full of bluster. Only a sudden, bloody nose will convince him to desist. This is he is probably about to receive. And the betting must be that, once the revised odds become clear, those remnants of the Libyan army and security forces that have so far remained loyal will desert him, too.
The longer term impact of the intervention is immeasurable – but disaster is certainly one possible outcome. Like the first Gulf war, the involvement and support of Arab countries means the Libyan war will not be defined, except by hardline jihadis and al-Qaida, as another western assault on Muslim lands. But if the fighting is prolonged, if Gaddafi does not quit and run, if his more able sons take up his cause, if the intervention makes things worse not better for ordinary people (as in Iraq), if there is no clear-cut win but ongoing low level conflict and resistance (as in Afghanistan), then Arab opinion will turn against the westerners once more. The post-9/11 nightmare of the Pentagon’s long war without end will reproduce on the shores of the Mediterranean.
But there is a reasonable prospect of success, too. If the rebels, rescued from annihilation, prove capable of creating a government able to take over the running of all of Libya, and not just the rebellious east, then Obama’s gamble could pay off.
If Gaddafi, no longer able to deploy superior firepower and mercenaries, is overthrown by his own people, it will be hailed as an improbable triumph for, among others, David Cameron, who took a harder line than most, earlier than most. Britain (and not Germany, which opposed intervention) may profit from the gratitude of a grateful people. If Libya falls to democracy, then like-minded reformers in Bahrain and elsewhere will be greatly heartened.
Obama and Cameron are looking for another Kosovo or Kuwait, not another Iraq. It’s a story, as they would prefer to write it, with a happy ending, producing a newly independent country, and another friend for the west. But they cannot control the outcome. Now they can only wait and hope they were right.
In the most strident verbal attack on Colonel Qaddafi to date by an American official, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that the Western powers had little choice but to provide critical military backing for the rebels. “We want to support the opposition who are standing against the dictator,” she told an applauding audience in Tunisia on Thursday. “This is a man who has no conscience and will threaten anyone in his way.”
She added that Colonel Qaddafi would do “terrible things” to Libya and its neighbors. “It’s just in his nature. There are some creatures that are like that.”
The Qaddafi government responded to the potential United Nations action with threats.
“Any foreign military act against Libya will expose all air and maritime traffic in the Mediterranean Sea to danger and civilian and military facilities will become targets of Libya’s counter-attack,” it said in a statement carried on Libyan television and the official news agency, JANA, Reuters reported. “The Mediterranean basin will face danger not just in the short-term, but also in the long-term.”
There were reports on Thursday that warplanes were already bombarding the outskirts of Benghazi for a second day, opening shots, perhaps, in the battle. And after days of batterings at the hands of Qaddafi loyalists, the opposition forces welcomed the promise of Western assistance.
Rebel leaders doubted that the loyalist forces could mount an assault on Benghazi tonight, in that they were still contesting Ajdabiya, 100 miles to the south, on Thursday morning. But witnesses said there were skirmishes on the road to Benghazi in the afternoon, about 30 miles from Ajdabiya.
Mohamed, a rebel spokesman in the embattled, rebel held city of Misurata — the last major rebel foothold in the west — welcomed the new American tone. “We are very heartened yesterday by the moves in the United Nations Security Council and the urgency of the American stand,” he said, speaking over a satellite phone.
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