Two very senior members of the Libyan government defected today, but Muammar remains defiant:
Colonel Qaddafi, who has not been seen in public recently, was quoted on state television as saying that the leaders of the allied countries were “affected by power madness,” The Associated Press reported.
“The solution for this problem is that they resign immediately and their peoples find alternatives to them,” he said in remarks that ran on the “scrawl” at the bottom of the screen.
It’s quite amazing how he has this almost infinite capacity for Freudian Projection.
Meanwhile, I continue to be pleased with the performance of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He told Congress today that we wouldn’t be putting any uniformed boots on the ground in Libya while he is serving in this administration and then he told them that we shouldn’t arm the rebels.
“What the opposition needs as much as anything right now is some training, some command and control and some organization,” Mr. Gates said. “It’s pretty much a pick-up ballgame at this point.” But, he said, providing training and weapons is “not a unique capability for the United States, and as far as I’m concerned, somebody else can do that.”
As far as I am concerned, somebody else could have done the whole thing. I wish they had. I am somewhat more hopeful today, though. Things look bad on the battlefield, but maybe Gaddafi’s team is starting to break up. Obama took a big gamble, but it could still pay off.
“… almost infinite capacity for Freudian Projection.”
With Qadafi I don’t think it’s so much Freudian projection as it his 4- or 5-decade pose as the great African revolutionary and the audience he is playing to. Many of the things he says about neocolonialism (in more or less the language of the 1960s revolutionary left) may be true, but he himself is a typical tyrant and probably has been all along.
Well, typical tyrants and neocolonialism have always gone hand-in-hand. It is and has always been a symbiotic relationship. They feed off of each other.
every fucking thing they demand – cutting domestic spending and no tax increases for anyone. He bends over and grabs his ankles when any Republican enters the room. When they say “jump” Obama says “how high”?
And you’re worried about his Libyan gamble “paying off”?
On the Budget/Appropriations, it’s not over until it’s over, and it isn’t over yet despite the “behind-the-scenes reports”.
The jockeying is the Republicans trying to position themselves so they won’t be blamed for the government shut-down.
Talk about rose-colored glasses. When the other side demands everything and your side agrees to it – it’s over.
There are some folks who do have to vote before it is real.
And as long as there is not heavy blowback from the public, they will keep batting it back and forth. The Democrats will try to get Republican fingerprints on it and the Republicans will try to get Democratic fingerprints on it.
One notes first of all the sexually demeaning language based on pretty ugly stereotypes that you feel are necessary in order to express your point. But stripped of emotional content and free floating sex/gender-role insults, your complaint is that the House Republicans may be able to slice $30billion from a more than $1Trillion budget while offending both their sane and insane constituents. It’s clear that winning policy objectives is not your issue, you have some sort of self-respect problem that you want Obama to assist you with.
Gaddafi’s team is breaking up because of something going on on the battlefield that we don’t yet know about. My WAG is that communication between the field and Tripoli have been affected by coalition strikes of command, communication, and control assets. Or critical supplies available to the field either are running low or cannot be moved. Or the pressure within the leadership circle has gotten so great that paranoia is rampant and the Gaddafi family is distrusting outsiders, even loyal outsiders.
I don’t buy the UK version of Moussa Koussa’s story that he left because he didn’t believe in attacking Libyan civilians. And news in Tripoli is suddenly more available, and international correspondents act like the minders have either flipped or are few and far between.
And the apparent bad news for rebels on the battlefield might not be so bad. They are taking casualties mostly when someone gets to enthusiastic and advances too far. They are beginning to get the enthusiastic and green troops to realize that discipline will help them win and survive. And the terrain of battle is in the desert with few civilians to complicate air strikes on the heavy equipment and supply line of the pro-Gaddafi forces. And because of the back and forth movement, civilians between Ajdabiyah and bin Jawad have fled to Benghazi. Ideal terrain for degrading Gaddafi’s advantage in materiel.
And for those asking why the US did not engage in the situation in the Ivory Coast, there was no need to. The French have troops there, the UN has peacekeepers there, and the UN Security Council just stiffened the sanctions on Laurent Gbagbo. And yes, the Ivory Coast does export oil.
We will be OK unless someone gets foolhardy and decides we need to do some “nation building”. I regard the presence of the CIA in Libya as a very bad sign.
And what’s with the public announcement of Obama signing a secret directive to the CIA? Not very secret was it?
And what’s with the numerous reports that flatly contradict Gates’ assertion that we aren’t providing weapons? Granted, I don’t trust the reliability of any reports at this point, but one gets the sense there’s a lot going on we don’t know about, and it may or may not line up with official pronouncements.
I suspect that we aren’t providing weapons directly; US weapons would require US weapons trainers as most of the captured arms from Gaddafi forces are Russian. Supplying Russian arms eliminates the need to put in people to train in their use.
Someone is apparently supplying handheld communications equipment. It’s generic enough that it could be any country.
My guess is that the US is still discussing the possibility of sending arms but authentically has not decided yet. And that the public announcement of this ambiguous fact is more important to the strategy than is the actual delivery of arms.
I think your guess is right.
I regard the fact that someone leaked the fact of the presence of the CIA in Libya as a very bad sign. Someone is not on board with some policy or just wants to sabotage Obama’s actions in general. If it’s a policy dispute, one would have thought that they would have also leaked about the mission. If it’s partisan politics, we have descended further into the partisan morass–in which politics does not stop at the water’s edge and someone is willing to sabotage US interests for political gain.
BTW, every embassy and consulate of every country generally has at least one intelligence officer routinely.
Speculation goes to these possible missions: finding out who the rebels are (what factions are likely to come to power), spotting targets for coalition bombing, gathering intelligence about the state of Tripoli, providing escort out of the country to defecting officials of the Gaddafi government.
Disgruntled CIA agents worked against Humphrey and Carter. The FBI was on a mission to destroy Clinton.
The “security” establishment is full of right wing clowns with dubious sense of legality.
In the case of Carter, it was a substantial number of ex-CIA agents loyal to George H. W. Bush. It had something to do with the Church Committee hearings that occurred during Carter’s administration.
“Colonel Qaddafi, who has not been seen in public recently, was quoted on state television as saying that the leaders of the allied countries were “affected by power madness,”“
He’s not wrong.
He should know. It takes one to know one.
Maybe I should endeavor to translate some of his remarks to other Arab leaders, particularly the ones in the Gulf. They are spot on.
“I continue to be pleased with the performance of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He told Congress today that we wouldn’t be putting any uniformed boots on the ground in Libya while he is serving in this administration…“
And yet word is that there are now covert (i.e. UNuniformed) boots on the ground, so it seems the U.S. is still sticking its fingers deeper and deeper into the pie – or quagmire.