Reply #34: I think that is extremely important and was achievable in Egypt and Tunisia [View All]

[pampango]

without "too much" bloodshed.

If someone like Qadaffi is willing to use live fire from soldiers and militia using tanks, helicopters and airplanes to attack civilians - unlike in Egypt and Tunisia for the most part - we could be faced, at some point if not today, with a choice between a failed revolution (a victory for the use of military force against civilians protesters) or an "unclean" (at least slightly) successful revolution. (How "unclean" would be subjective and somewhat dependent on the level of outside involvement - simple air cover to take the use of airplanes, helicopters and tanks away from him or something more substantial like troops on the ground. Of course, his use of foreign mercenaries takes away some of the stigma of foreign involvement on the side of civilians.)

I don't know that we are there today, since I think there's a decent chance that Libyan civilians can still win a "clean" victory over Muammar. Things do not seem to be going his way. But he still has plenty of money to get more foreign mercenaries if he wants to, so I wouldn't count him out. At some point in the future, if he is successful in hanging on,it may become a tough call to determine when a "clean" people's victory cannot be expected to overcome massive military force (if it continues to exist.

I imagine there are other kings and dictators in the Middle East and elsewhere that would be happy to see that "stern warnings" and "nasty letters" were the only consequences of using tanks and planes on civilians. On the positive side, it might aggravate Mubarak and Ben Ali that their failure to convince their militaries to open fire on their civilians using every weapon in their arsenals (perhaps because they thought that the West wouldn't tolerate such an extreme crackdown) was a more grave failure than they realized at the time. And there may be elements in the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries that look now at Libya and wonder if the West's warnings to them about the consequences of using extreme force on civilians was just so much hot air.