If the reporting from the New York Times can be believed, Gaddafi’s forces are all over downtown Benghazi, including snipers atop the Foreign Ministry building. Good luck dislodging them without using any foreign ground troops. It could take months. Every day that Gaddafi remains in power is going to be an embarrassment to President Obama, David Cameron, Nicholas Sarkozy, and the United Nations. It’s not a great omen that they are losing the opposition’s capital on the first day of fighting. I don’t want to hear much more of this happy-talk about this being about protecting civilians. This is a down and dirty civil war and our side is getting routed. The policy may lead to some kind of political breakthrough that will make everyone look brilliant, but as a military strategy it is totally for shit.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I want to see how this goes before I say anything. We don’t know what the military plans are at all. We do hear theat the French are flying over Libya.
I heard on rightie radio yesterday that Obama should stay home and not go to Rio because he is on AF1 too much and oh, the birth cert. is in question.
Who is the NY Times’s correspondent in Benghazi?
This report is inaccurate if Al Jazeera’s two correpondents in Benghazi are to be believed.
It’s time you realized that the NY Times is no longer the paper of record.
Believe me, I take what the NY Times reports with a shaker of salt, but, ignoring the headline, the same is reported from Reuters.
Per Al Jazeera, which has multiple correspondents on in Benghazi and at least one correspondent in Tripoli, there are 8000 troops of an elite unit that flipped and joined the rebels currently in Benghazi. This unit, former military, and Benghazi residents are clearing the Gaddafi troops on the ground.
In addition, Benghazi is so far from sources of military supply for Gaddafi’s troops that the supply lines are vulnerable from the air. Especially considering that these routes go long distances across deserted areas with no population at all.
As for what the rebels hold, they still hold Benghazi (normal population 1 million) and Misurata (normal population 200,000), the second and third most populous places after Tripoli (population 2 million).
Gaddafi predictably has his “supporters” plus a few Western journalists at the Tripoli airport and at his armed compound. Speculation is that he is using these as human shields, expecting the international troops to attack as he has been attacked before.
The mandate to provide humanitarian aid leads me to believe that the military action will start will attacks on Gaddafi’s supply lines and heavy equipment, such as artillery batteries and tanks currently shelling Musurata and Benghazi. Then the focus will be clearing the eastern and western borders to permit humanitarian aid to flow in from Tunisia and Egypt.
That is probably as much as anyone can foresee right now. I do not expect early attacks on Tripoli until Gaddafi releases his human shields. There is that much available to do outside of civilian areas elsewhere.
The Guardian also confirms Gaddafi’s troops are in the city.
“In the city” might be technically correct, but not as significant as the fact that Gaddafi troops have been shelling the city with artillery and mortars.
Consider that Benghazi is an urban area of about 1 million population (about the population of the New Orleans urban area.
“In the city” means in more familiar terms something like troops being considered “in the city” of Washington (four times larger than Benghazi) if they were entering Tysons Corners or Manassas.
Troops definitely are not in “the center of the city”. Live video through Al Jazeera shows evening prayers at the center of the city occurring with no gunshots in the backgrounds.
To be fair, driving from Tysons to downtown DC can take weeks under optimal conditions. Benghazi doesn’t suffer from the same sort of mass psychosis with urban planning, I assume.
Psychosis of urban planning? I dunno. I don’t see any indication of expressways in the video from Benghazi. Might be like traversing the City of Chicago within the city and not using the expressways.
Your point is well taken. Leaving Tyson’s Corners at 4am seems to be a good strategy for reaching downtown DC within a week.
If true, and things go all pear-shaped, obviously in that case Obama’s foot-dragging is to blame.
If not true, and things go moderately ‘well’, Obama is to blame for a host of reasons — not doing Darfur/Yemen/Bahrein too, not getting a Congressional declaration of war (Kucinich today), putting in ground troops at all not putting in ground troops (remember McCain and Kossovo?).
I’ll be damned if I can figure out why anybody wants the job.
There are absolutely legitimate questions around why the slaughters in Yemen and Bahrayn are being ignored while Libya is being treated to a share of good, old fashioned Western “humanitarian” military violence. The questions are particularly legitimate given that, unlike Libya’s violent uprising, the revolutionaries in Yemen and Bahrayn have been determinedly non-violent in their methods. It appears the only way to get UN/U.S. assistance is to stage a violent revolt. Of course, the fact that the Bahrayni and Yemeni tyrants are “our bastards” doesn’t help the revolutionaries there, either.
I share you fears here, although the reports coming in quickly now from Al-Jazeera and the Beeb suggest the French airforce is quickly turning Gaddafi’s ground forces into oatmeal.
have been conducted by the French.
In the war in North Africa circa 1943 captured German and Italian troops would beg the US and British forces to shoot them rather than turn them over to the Free French.
We’ll just have to stand back and see how this “No Fly Zone” plays out in terms of the application of operational air superiority and close air support. I confess I don’t even know the degree to which English and French air forces are capable of such things as laser sighting and precision guided munitions. The French, I suppose, have exocet class missiles and equivalent guidance systems. But I don’t know if they have much guidance in gravity ordnance.
And then another question is the use of drones in those air forces. Would the US divert drones from it’s lovely and admirable adventure in southern Asia to support this bold new enterprise in nation building?
AND the big question for me is: targeted attempts on the Qaddafi inner circle, including urban targets as in Baghdad circa 2003. I mean, dare we envision cavalry style incursions of high speed attack helicopters? Or has that whole approach been discredited?
I’ll have to consult my Jane’s Air Forces of the World reference.
Plus, if no troops will ever be on the ground (except for maybe the odd disavowed “former” cia dude who just happens to have a gun fight in tribal territories and drop two security agents, while a personal support vehicle crushes a cyclist and swoops in to take him), then perhaps operational command for this, what, “NATO” protectorate?-should rightly fall in a four star from the Air Force?
But presumably CNN and MSNBC will provide some nice diagrams and holograms and what not to clear this all up?
The blogosphere lost a brave, committed citizen journalist, Mohammed Nabbous, to the shelling of Bengazi today. In one of the last of his reports, picked up by Al Jazeera, he reported on a mortar attack on apartment buildings in a neighborhood in the edge of Benghazi.
Go over to Democratic Underground and see the same people who lionized him loudly denouncing military action directed at taking down the regime whose forces killed him.
The Left is all over the map on this one. Oil makes everyone crazy. Qaddafi was behaving himself, pumping oil for the Western — and Chinese — oil companies like Billy-be-damned. But UN/EU intervention on behalf of his enemies is just further evidence that oil companies rule the world.
This operation has fault lines that cross the ideological spectrum. Wingnuts are divided between those who want to take out Gaddafi and those who are opposed to everything President Obama does.
And average folks, sometimes the same person, are of two minds about it.
We are in a new geopolitical environment, and folks have not caught up mentally with it. They are still in a post-9/11 mindset.
There are people who, if they are to be taken at face value, are now complaining that we’re not bigfooting enough national-liberation struggles, insisting that for the sake of consistency we now have to ‘do’ Yemen. And Bahrein. And Côte d’Ivoire. But it’s because of the oil. Except Darfur — Sudan is an oil state — because then it’s not about oil. Or do nothing. Or something. Depending.
We’re not doing Yemen and Bahrain because logistically and politically Libya is much easier and we can only do so much.
Not to mention the fact that the regimes of Bahrayn and Yemen are “your bastards” and Qadhdhafi is not.
P.S. Does anyone really believe that the Sa`udis went into Bahrayn without a clear green light from the U.S? No one I know of does.
You are painting the “left” with a very broad brush.
Some of us on the “left” oppose the use of military violence for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with oil. Some of us oppose it because piling violence on violence always makes things worse for the innocent men, women, and children in the war zone (and some of us have first-hand experience of what that does to the lives of innocent people on the ground, most particularly women, children, and elderly). Some of us oppose U.S. and other western intervention because it never comes without a price, and the price is always to do with obtaining political and economic control of whatever government results, and some of us on the “left” are all about self determination. Some of us particularly oppose military violence for “humanitarian” reasons, because there is never anything humanitarian about military violence.
“see the same people who lionized him loudly denouncing military action directed at taking down the regime whose forces killed him.“
There is no contradiction there at all. It is quite consistent to decry a regime and its actions and at the same time oppose military violence to “take it down”.
Obama embarrassed?! Oh, horror of horrors! What could be worse?
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