[JamesTornC]

Gaddafi's military falling apart rapidly:

ROME -- Eight top Libyan army officers, including five generals, who have defected from Moammar Gadhafi's regime appealed to their fellow officers Monday to join the revolt to hasten the end of Gadhafi's 40-year rule...

One of the officers, Gen. Melud Massoud Halasa, estimated that Gadhafi's military forces are now "only 20 percent as effective" as what they were before the revolt broke out in mid-February, and that "not more than 10" generals remain loyal to Gadhafi...

Another general, identified as Yahmet Salah, told reporters that Gadhafi had only two brigades left that were allegedly carrying out the arrests and killings. source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_868768.html

[StevenS]

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticl...aspx?ID=268770
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Sunday said he was confident that time was running out for Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, despite the prolonged stalemate between his forces and rebels who seek his ouster.

However, Rasmussen also acknowledged the brutal war that has raged for nearly two months would be resolved politically, not militarily.

"First of all, we have to realize that there is no military solution. We will need a political solution" to break the stalemate, said Rasmussen.


-AFP/NOW Lebanon

[BronUVT]

Robin Shepherd: Libya’s a quagmire because our war aims were defined by liberal-left prejudices

Back in Libya, it is perfectly arguable that the end of Gaddafi would plunge that country too into bloody internecine warfare. It’s also perfectly arguable that Libya is a strategic irrelevance, and that if we’re dropping bombs on anybody in the Middle East it should be Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But that’s not the point, which is that the fetishisation of international law by Messrs Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy means that without a change of course we’ll never know whether the Libyan people were capable of building something which looks like Denmark, or whether the best they can manage is Iraq circa 2005.

The price of getting the hallowed UN resolution past the Russians and the Chinese was that we were forbidden from decapitating the regime or providing direct support to the rebels (not that we have any real clue who they are) via the use of ground forces.And what that means is that Gaddafi is more likely than not to die in his bed many years from now while his country settles into de facto partition ruled by him and his cronies on one side and by God (but not Obama, Cameron or Sarkozy) knows who on the other.

So it breaks down like this: plant your flag atop the gigantic dunghill known as international law and a dictator lives; pay lip service to said dunghill, get some sort of resolution that just about does the job, but go in there “shock and awe” style with the clear aim of regime change and a dictator dies.

What bothers me is why we have to persist with this whole charade just to please the Guardian and the BBC. If it was right to go in in the first place – and there are strong arguments both for and against that proposition – we should have gone in with war aims designed to achieve a real-world objective.
http://www.thecommentator.com/articl...eft_prejudices