Cornered Gaddafi defiant to the last

[xchrom]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MH23Ak03.html

TEL AVIV - For the second time since the start of the Libyan uprising, the days of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi appear to be numbered. The first time around, in late February, he made such an impressive comeback that a coalition of countries led by the United States, France and Britain felt compelled to intervene forcefully against him by mid-March. Now, as jubilant rebels are seen dancing in the center of the capital Tripoli, he seems truly vanquished.

However, it is unlikely that we have seen the last of him. The "astonishing speed" (to quote The New York Times) with which his forces pulled back before the rebel advance raises a lot of eyebrows, and suggests that some of the most difficult battles may be ahead.

Gaddafi could launch a surprising last-minute counter-attack, or


he could choose to emulate the legendary Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong once again (in March he borrowed successfully Mao's military strategy of positional warfare; see Colonel Gaddafi goes Mao, Asia Times Online, March 30, 2011), and lead the remnants of his army out of Tripoli in a long march of his own.

It could also be that we are seeing a kind of replay of the siege of Baghdad in 2003, where American information warfare and overwhelming American air power caused a near-complete disintegration of Saddam Hussein's defenses in very little time. Back then, the dictator had little choice but to go into hiding; he was captured in a hole in the ground toward the end of that same year, tried and hung in December 2006.

[EFerrari]

1. I really don't get Qaddafi.

I get the way he sounds different to his own people than he does to us but I don't get his calculations. Hopefully, hundreds of more people won't get killed before this is over.

[ellisonz]

3. That's because he's a madman.

[EFerrari]

6. No, that's media propaganda. Madmen don't survive

to rule for forty years.

[ellisonz]

24. Says who?

Either way, you're basically saying it's a sane thing to brutalize your own people.

[fishbulb703]

26. Wha? You serious? nt

[EFerrari]

27. It's a mistake to buy into the media cartoon of Gaddafi.

He's outsmarted several of our presidents, he's been competent enough to stay alive this long.

[Arkana]

31. Saddam Hussein was in power for a pretty long time too.

Didn't mean he wasn't a homicidal, brutal dictator.

[EFerrari]

36. He was also caricatured in our media as a "madman".

I never saw any indication that he was "mad". Did you? It's our habit over here to call what we don't understand "madness". That doesn't make is accurate.

[Arkana]

43. You're really going to sit there and white knight Saddam and Gaddafi?

You're really gonna do that?

[demwing]

35. Its also a mistake to assume that madness negates competency

in fact, there seems to be a link between great intelligence and destructive behavior

[EFerrari]

37. Competancy is what docs use to screen people.

Unless you're Bill Frist and then all you need is old video tape. :)

[demwing]

40. But there's a difference between 1 type of competency and another

One type is the competency you must show a doctor to assure her that you are competent to stand trail, or take care of your own basic needs.

The other is the competency required to be a brutal dicator for 40 years. I'm pretty sure we're looking at a different skill set

[FreeJoe]

38. Sort of a "dictator savant"?

I can see that.

[bluestate10]

29. The guy talks crazier than Michelle Bachman. He is a madman. nt

[Tunkamerica]

7. uh... where did you read that?

[ellisonz]

33. The Amazonian bodyguards aren't enough?

What do you need? Sharks with fricking lasers on their heads?

[Tunkamerica]

45. So he has female bodyguards...

insanity?

Actually, dogs that shoot bees out of their mouth would be proof.

[xchrom]

4. I think he believes in his own greatness.

It's the only thing I can think of.

[EFerrari]

8. He's intrepid. Maybe that's how you have to be to survive

in a tribal culture on one hand and in a global economy dominated by western politics. He did better than many leaders that got dead less ceremoniously.

[xchrom]

10. ain't that right. nt

[aquart]

5. Yeah, they will. Another son is marching in.

It's over. But it isn't over.

[cali]

11. you mean thousands more. 1300 were killed yesterday.

[pinboy3niner]

13. The Libyan regime is not a credible source for casualty numbers

The claim of 1,300 dead was a sudden change from the regime's original claim of 1,300 casualties:

A Libyan government official told Reuters that 376 people on both sides of the conflict were killed in fighting overnight on Saturday in Tripoli, with about 1,000 others wounded.


http://af.reuters.com/article/libyaNews/idAFL5E7JL0LD20110822?sp=true

[EFerrari]

16. Neither is NATO a credible source for casualty numbers

especially since they claimed indiscriminate killing as a pretext that no one can document and that the best data refutes.

[pinboy3niner]

20. What casualty numbers has NATO issued?

[EFerrari]

22. NATO was protested by a number of NGOs for not issuing good

casualty reports back in April, iirc. But I was referring to the repeated claim NATO leaders have made that they prevented a genocide.

[Taverner]

28. Beware the man who has nothing to lose

[aquart]

2. I don't think he has the tactical skills for a longmarch with mercenariesl.

But it looks like the counter-attack has begun.

[EFerrari]

9. The use of mercenaries was exaggerated in the Western media

to give us the impression that he had no Libyan support, imo.

[aquart]

12. Okay, can you link your evidence?

He's always had some tribal support and some not. He called for the tribes to march into Tripoli and there is certainly a counter-attack beginning...but its composition? What have you got?

[EFerrari]

15. Well, at this hour, what I have is the fact that large numbers of mercs

have not been captured but some black migrant laborers have been. If there are thousands of mercs defending Qadaffi against his own people, where are they?

There other thing I remember is the French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy putting out a letter signed by a good number of reps from different tribes, like a hundred or so, calling for him to step down. That was plastered all over DU. But another letter in support signed by 3X that number never got the same attention.

I suspect we're about to learn the names and locations of the influential tribes of Libya just as we learned a great deal about Iraq.

[aquart]

18. Okay, I buy that.

That is a scary lotta tribes.

But Tripoli wasn't that hard to take. It startled everybody. (And Tweetdeck just told me the Brits are about to hand Libya's money to the rebels.) Now Khamis is finally riding to the rescue. What took him so long and how far afield did he have to go for support?

Looks to me like the tribes are waiting to throw in with the winner and they've figured it won't be the old guy or his kids.

Nothing as useless or as dangerous as an old dictator (although I feel like excluding Fidel Castro).

[indurancevile]

14. gee, i hope obama's stage management is better than bush's was.

saddam hussein died like a mensch, despite all bush's efforts to humiliate him.

please obama, no underwear, no hidey-holes.

fuck this pnac war. and fuck the hypocrites crying "freedom" with corpse breath.

[EFerrari]

17. I hadn't thought of it but it looks like PNAC won.

Damn.

[aquart]

19. The all-seeing, all-knowing, all-controlling PNAC.

It is absurd how much it hurts us to think we might not be pulling all the strings. We don't even mind that it's people we hate who are pulling the strings, just as long as it's our guys.

Because if we aren't in control, ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN AND WE WOULD BE HELPLESS. And that is too terrible to imagine.

[EFerrari]

25. No, I meant their policy prevailed. n/t

[leveymg]

21. Libya wasn't on the PNAC list. Gaddaffi was the victim of contagious uprising

The original "Clean Break" list (1996) called for regime change in the following order: Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and finally Iran. To that list, one can read in this document that essential to this sequence is a fundamental shift of the the terms of its relationship the U.S. has with Israel - a change from restraining guardian to hired gun. See, http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

In other words, regime change in the U.S. was seen as required by the neocons, along with the transformation of Israel into a Right-wing regional superpower. Well, they appear to have gotten much of what they wanted, along with our role in overthrowing Iraq - but, the rest has not be so easy.

[indurancevile]

23. "contagious uprising" my ass. The US has ties to the "rebels" dating back years.

Libya is listed as a hostile power along with Iraq, Iran, NK, Syria, Lebanon in PNAC documents, e.g.:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf


PNAC members were urging war from the beginning as individuals & have made several formal statements as a group, e.g.:

In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage US intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to "immediately" prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.

The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organised and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/02/2011227153626965756.html



"A Clean Break" isn't a PNAC document.

[leveymg]

30. Wurmser, et al. were all key neocon operatives at OSP. Their ties to PNAC are clear.

As for that particular PNAC publication, Libya is mentioned once on page 52 in conjuction with Iraq, Iran and Syria as possessing some ballistic missile capability.

By the 1990s, Libya was not really seen as a threat to Israel, which is why it gets scant attention from PNAC.

Gadaffi and Libya was a convenient boogey man and front for terrorist groups run by far more powerful nations and terrorists. Like Mubarak, he was viewed as a vulnerable but largely domesticated dictator who knew how to preserve the status quo and keep deals.

[indurancevile]

32. they may have ties to pnac; it still ain't a pnac document. the pnacers have been pushing for this

war from day one, literally, and libya is definitely mentioned as part of the evil empire in a number of pnac documents.

i have no idea what you're pushing when you pretend this ain't a pnac war.

[leveymg]

34. Gadaffi was "our man in Tripoli" from 1966 when CIA prevented a British coup

that would have toppled Captain Gadhaffi's junta and reinstalled King Idris. Like other CIA operatives, Hussein in Iraq and Noreiga in Panama, we've had our ups and downs, and things ended badly. Same can be said of bin Laden.

PNAC, and its successors, promote views that reflect the most hawkish neoconservatives. While they're still tremendously influential, Libya has not been a primary focus of the necon agenda for the reason stated above. US-Libyan relations "normalized" after Gadhaffi cooperated in dismantling the AQ Khan WMD network and in the GWOT after 9/11. Also, from day one Gadhaffi was smart enough to set aside 30% of Libyan oil production for the multinationals, and has made many men around the world fabulously wealthy with all nature of procurement contracts and kickbacks. That's why he survived so long, and that's why I say his overthrow was almost an accident.

[Distant Observer]

39. Gaddafi coup was in 1969. Guess your "facts" are a little off. -- to say the least

[leveymg]

41. Ok. I was working from memory on that. '66 or '69, the main point applies.

Are you nit-picking, or do you have a point? Do you deny that that the US saved Gadhaffi from an attempted counter-coup by SAS and that he allowed western oil companies 30 percent of the spoils, buying himself some high-level support and security?

Do you actually believe he would have survived all this time if he didn't have powerful protection in the west?

[Prometheus Bound]

42. Lest we forget: "US neo-cons urge Libya intervention"

US neo-cons urge Libya intervention

Signatories to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) demand "immediate" military action.
Jim Lobe Last Modified: 27 Feb 2011 16:00 GMT

In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage US intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to "immediately" prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.

The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organised and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

.....In particular, it called for Washington to press NATO to "develop operational plans to urgently deploy warplanes to prevent the regime from using fighter jets and helicopter gunships against civilians and carry out other missions as required; (and) move naval assets into Libyan waters" to "aid evacuation efforts and prepare for possible contingencies;" as well as "(e)stablish the capability to disable Libyan naval vessels used to attack civilians."

The usual suspects

Among the letter's signers were former Bush deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Bush's top global democracy and Middle East adviser; Elliott Abrams; former Bush speechwriters Marc Thiessen and Peter Wehner; Vice President Dick Cheney's former deputy national security adviser, John Hannah, as well as FPI's four directors: Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; Brookings Institution fellow Robert Kagan; former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor; and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman.

It was Kagan and Kristol who co-founded and directed PNAC in its heyday from 1997 to the end of Bush's term in 2005.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/02/2011227153626965756.html

[amborin]

44. more here on the U.S. and Nato role:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/liby-a22.shtml