[cajonnmu]

Wired: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011...alemate-libya/

Just a few weeks ago, western observers were absolutely positive that the NATO air and sea campaign in Libya was going nowhere.

“Can NATO actually win any of its wars?” the Guardian wondered. “Why can’t NATO whup Libya?” Time’s Mark Thompson asked. Center for a New American Security analystAndrew Exum answered that the NATO wasn’t really trying all that hard to oust the dictator Moammar Gadhafi– and anyway, “it’s likely that a stalemate is going to continue.”

...

19,751 NATO sorties later, that seems like a flawed assumption.

The operation was massive. Predators and other intelligence aircraft told their rebels where pro-government forces were, and what they were saying. Plus, the drones did some damage of their own, launching 92 strikes since late April. Apache gunships, launched from the carrier HMS Ocean, took out Gadhafi checkpoints, to “encourage rebel fighters in the east to move forward,” according to theIndependent. The frigate HMS Sutherland was one of several ships blocking suspicious vessels from possibly resupplying the regime. B-1 stealth bombers flew all the way from South Dakota to get in on the action, destroying 100 targets in one 24 hour stretch.

This effort didn’t exactly get off to a good start, however. This was a campaign organized on the fly, with (to put it mildly) murky demarcations of roles and responsibilities. At the beginning, one top U.S. general even pinky-swore that the Americans would never directly support the rebels. Then the announced mission — to stop the slaughter of civilians — fell away, and was quickly replaced by the real (if imperfectly articulated) objective of removing the Colonel and his Glamazon bodyguards. All the while, the Obama administration had the stones to call Libya “a limited humanitarian intervention, not [a] war.” It’s hard to argue that this is what the United Nations authorized. Certainly the U.S. Congress never really agreed to any of this.

It’d be a mistake to give alliance air and sea power all the credit for Gadhafi’s fall. The rebels did the vast majority of the fighting. (Although you do have to wonder how many contractors and western intelligence operatives are on the ground, to add some veteran heft to the rookie rebels.)

...

In mid-April, less than three weeks after the NATO campaign began, Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Les Gelb noted that care, and concluded that Iran and North Korea were taking comfort in the alliance’s inability to exercise its military might. “To Tehran and Pyongyang, the lesson of Libya is that the West can’t do decisive harm to them,” he wrote. Do those regimes now draw the opposite conclusion, with Gadhafi on the run?

[radikal]

This is, I'm sure, part of the reason the GOP is screwing with the economy: They have to have some reason to attack Obama. After all, between this and Osama's death, his stategy on the war on terror has been flawless. Or the GOP's take has been pathetic (I'd believe the latter. They like to keep enemies here and there, so they have someone to attack when the war machine gets slow). Granted, I don't know how much of a threat Gadhafi was to us these days, but for past transgressions against us and his ongoing issues with his own people, he was still noteworthy.

Yes, the GOP has to keep this country poor and starving for now because they have been slaughtered on the only subjects they always had as their trump card: military and security. Obama had Libya pegged from the get-go, and was continuously attacked by the Right for it.