From the NYT:
NATO Attack Destroys Much of Qaddafi Compound
By JOHN F. BURNS
TRIPOLI, Libya — In a sudden, sharp escalation of NATO’s air campaign over Libya, warplanes dropped more than 60 bombs on targets in Tripoli on Tuesday, obliterating large areas of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya command compound.
Obama's basic foreign affairs philosophy appears to be that it's stupid to invade some third world country when you can score just as many political points by shooting or exploding one guy (along with various bystanders, of course).
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28 comments:
You keep saying this like it's a bad thing.
... not that there's anything wrong with that.
It's better than the alternative. If John McCain had won, we'd probably have 70,000 troops there by now.
Obama's basic foreign affairs philosophy appears to be that it's stupid to invade some third world country when you can score just as many political points by shooting or exploding one guy (along with various bystanders, of course).
We could have saved ourselves a lot of problems if that had been standard US policy post-9/11.
Makes more sense when you can do it.
Wouldn't have helped in WW2, because Hitler and Tojo mobilized huge forces that didn't depend on personal loyalty.
But in the specific case of Sheikh Osama it was exactly the right thing to do. If Clinton or Bush had pulled the trigger on Osama when the special forces had him in their sights, we'd be a lot better off. Both chose not to pull the trigger, apparently preferring permanent chronic war.
Qaddafi is different: we have no business interfering in Libya at all, so killing one man is just as wrong as killing lots of soldiers and civilians.
What exactly are those bombs hitting? How is he still alive after all this time?
How much has been spent trying to kill this one guy and when will we see a return on our investment?
Poor Gaddafy Duck. Should have kept your nuclear program, bro. You would have been untouchable.
Our stated mission in Libya is, and always has been, to simply enforce a no fly zone to prevent civilian casualties.
If Qathaf'y's compound is flying over Tripoli threatening the lives of innocent civilians it's our responsibility to take it out.
Obama's basic foreign affairs philosophy appears to be that it's stupid to invade some third world country when you can score just as many political points by shooting or exploding one guy (along with various bystanders, of course).br>
Birth-certificate notwithstanding, Obummer is a black guy. In Africa assassinating an unwanted rival is business as usual. This idea of nations going to war for their honor, or leaders fighting it out in a duel etc. seems foreign there.
Sounds good to me.
"Well, it seems to me, sir, that God gave me a special gift, made me a fine instrument of warfare. Well, what I mean by that, sir, is... if you was to put me and this here sniper rifle anywhere up to and including one mile of Adolf Hitler with a clear line of sight, sir... pack your bags, fellas, war's over. Amen."
"If Qathaf'y's compound is flying over Tripoli threatening the lives of innocent civilians it's our responsibility to take it out."
There unconfirmed reports (and at least one song) about "magic carpet rides", worth sending in Apache squadrons to investigate.
Qathaf'y with an apostrophe-y.
:-)) :-)) :-))
Qadaffi killed a lot of US citizens: Pan Am 103, the German Disco, to name two mass casualty terror attacks. We owe it to nail the SOB. Not the least, to make a big statement that its bad for your rule to kill Americans by the boatload.
That being said, his enemy is pretty bad too (AQ) and shaping events on the ground (favorable regime that is pro-American, gives US companies lots of favorable concessions, pumps lots of oil, holds the tidal wave of refugees back) requires boots on the ground. Zapping a guy from a Predator Drone is not going to get it done. Suppose we kill Khadaffi? What then? You think the fighting will end? Seriously? And all that gold just won't pass to his lieutenants? When Alexander died did the Greeks just say, "Oh well he's dead, lets all go home. You lot rule yourselves. Nevermind!"
He must still be a Colonel. (Why he did not promote himself to General is a mystery.) Because military action was supposed to be necessary in order to protect civilians. So if he was a civilian they wouldn't be allowed to kill him.
"Obama's basic foreign affairs philosophy appears to be that it's stupid to invade some third world country when you can score just as many political points by shooting or exploding one guy"
g-dub did both in iraq and it didn't work out well. libya won't work out well either, though obama may not be in office for the post-gaddafi chaos years. it matters less since libya is much smaller than iraq so it will be chaos on a smaller scale. nevertheless, once the rebels show they have no idea what they're doing, it's yet another destabilized nation the US may have to "temporarily" help out.
killing bin laden destabilized nothing, killing heads of state saddam and gaddafi destabilizes nations with millions of people. see the difference?
it also sends thousands of africans heading for the exits and on a boat to europe, but that's not america's problem, rather the EU's.
Headache said
or leaders fighting it out in a duel
Is this common practice in the West?
Its interesting that you rarely hear costs, or much of anything negative or otherwise mentioned about this war from the MSM, because the US involvement entirely arose from the left wing president, Obama. We got a non-stop barrage about the negative aspects of the other war efforts when Bush was at the helm.
Whiskey,
So many SOBs, so much ground, so few boots.
Gilbert Pinfold.
He must still be a Colonel. (Why he did not promote himself to General is a mystery.
No, it's not. Colonel has a revolutionary cache that General does not. Staying a Colonel means he's "keeping it real."
I wonder what the advances in air warfare are that make this possible. Downed pilots, either shot down or suffering mechanical trouble, get in the way of raining down death from the sky like detached, omnipotent thunder gods.
I'm a conservative & I am so glad we don't have McCain in office.
>Zapping a guy from a Predator Drone is not going to get it done. Suppose we kill Khadaffi? What then? You think the fighting will end?<
So how many people (them and us) should die before you're willing to say it's over? Seriously, give us a ball park. All of them?
Colonel Kurtz kept it real.
Yeah, man, dig it.
"You keep saying this like it's a bad thing."
Exactly.
Kudos to him and our glorious, shooting from 300 miles away military.
This is not worth 1 American life, and, frankly, those missiles have a "best used by" date after which they go bad, so, hey, have fun.
Also, personally, after reading the book STASI and already knowing about the Pan Am bombing, I hate Quack Daffy and wish him a long, painful, non natural death.
Don Draper: ...Nixon is from nothing. A self-made man, the Abe Lincoln of California, who was Vice President of the United States six years after getting out of the Navy. Kennedy? I see a silver spoon. Nixon? I see myself.
http://www.tv.com/mad-men/long-weekend/episode/1120869/trivia.html
Of the US Presidents who joined the military during World War II (Eisenhower and Reagan were pre-war officers in the Army and Army Reserve, respectively), all of them served as US Navy officers. In contrast, the entry level position for those, like Qaddafi, on the coup leader career path is army officer.
AmericanGoy:
Are we really short of things to blow up with our million-dollar-a-pop missiles? I mean, we're still at war in Afghanistan, we're effectively at war in (but not with, thanks to AQ Khan) Pakistan, we're still in Iraq (there are still a bunch of US soldiers there, despite having formally withdrawn), and we've got soldiers and drones in Yemen. It strikes me that perhaps we have an excess of targets for our incredibly expensive missiles, rather than a dearth.
It will be no great loss to mankind when the artist formerly known as Ghadaffi gets blown up. But what the hell do we get out of this stuff? Why should I think our inept dicking around in Libya is any better thought out than our decade-long clusterfucks in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Reminiscent of the story that Saddam's attempt to switch oil sales from dollars to euro denomination was the real WMD that provoked the BushII attack, we have this interview from Russia TV about the sudden curious selective Western attack on Libya:
The reason for the Western media having certain countries tagged – such as Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea – is “they all have or had one thing in common – that is they are free of debt of the World Bank.”
“They are not locked in the World Bank or IMF, they have their own banks, they issue their own currency,” said the researcher.
“We also have to recognize the remarkable coincidence between the Gaddafi statement that he was going to start issuing a gold dinar and demanding that his oil is purchased with gold – and the next thing we know we have a popular uprising [in Libya],” points out Crane.
The researcher believes that the ongoing riots in any other country in the region, particularly the clashes between the army and rioters in Syria, “is deliberately contrived to take the attention away from Libya – the goal is Libya.”
“The goal is not just to control the oil in Libya. Libya’s debt was less than one month of its GDP, so it was not debt – it was just a working capital.
Crane's BP Oil Spill analysis makes little sense, but is the curiously sudden and selective Libya attack a conspiracy or is money/finance the prime mover behind most international events and history?
Could the rebels have been failing because they were armed with these? It appears the instructions to convert them into combat rifles weren't included.
For those looking for motives, Glenn Greenwald has a theory. I kind of doubt it's this clean, though--this sort of misadventure seems to result more from the vector sum of interest group pressures, short term political alliances, and random eddies of media coverage than any kind of deep planning.
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