It will be a miracle if the opposition to Qaddafi, armed only with a small supply of weapons seized from government arsenals, is able to withstand heavily armed attacks on the positions it now holds. While the administration dithers, and debate swirls around “no fly zones,” there is an urgent, immediate need to get anti-tank and anti-air weapons into the hands of those rebels who would free Libya–and not turn it over to Islamist radicals. If we don’t assist the rebels, Iran and other Islamists will, with disastrous consequences. (They are probably there already). We helped the Mujahideen defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, but we allowed the Pakistanis and the Saudis to decide who would be armed. Of course they armed the Islamist groups they wished to promote–and we got the Taliban. Now the administration is said to be debating whether to ask the Saudis to send weapons to the rebels–because we don’t have the courage it do it ourselves. Guess who will wind up running Libya?
Mr. Perle,
Training and organization are the issues here, not availability of weapons. Competent military forces were a threat to Gadaffi earlier so he didn’t have any. This is true of despotisms in general, and Arab despotisms in particular.
Competent paramilitary, aka security forces, are another matter. I agree with Jim Dunnigan of Strategy Page that Gadaffi has about a brigade equivalent of competent security forces who won’t fold like wet cardboard when attacked by greater numbers of motivated but inexpert rebels. There is world of difference, though, between a paramilitary force which can defend territory against ragtag rebels and a true ground combat force which can successfully seize ground from those same rebels. Jim is of the opinion that Gadaffi’s security forces can hold his western third of Libya, but simply lack the ability to regain the middle and eastern two thirds of the country.
Jim Dunnigan reports that Gadaff has rented, for the moment, about 20,000 Saharan tribesmen of the sort who routed his army in the 1980′s “Toyota Wars”, but those guys are just in it for the money and won’t risk their precious hides by trying to drive home any attacks on the rebel-held 60-67% of the country. Rushing at ‘em all guns blazing, firing away at nothing in particular, and then tearing back to their starting positions might impress credulous Western journalists, but doesn’t do diddly squat in terms of actual results.
Neither side can currently take the other. Eventually the rebels will organize & train the equivalent of several brigades of real ground forces and finish the job. Or Gadaffi will leave Dodge while he can.
No. No way, no how. We were foolish enough to believe that whole “Islam can tolerate democracy” BS back in 2001. We have learned (or should have learned) that if Islam is the faith of the land, you either have a brutal strongman looking out for himself, or you have Islamists looking to topple other countries.
We have no dog in this fight. There’s no good will to be earned in this situation.
Khaddafi is a douche, sure. But I’ll take a Khaddafi scared of the U.S. over Islamic councils funding terrorists.
American first from now on. American first. No more dead Americans for ungrateful Muslims.
Indeed, no American participation in North Africa.
We Americans have been the ones subtly tasked by others with the actual “doing” with American lives in this type of thing for far too long. It starts with American “advisers”, then our “special forces”, then creeps deeper and upwards.
Other nations such as the former Colonial masters Italy, France and Britain their with decades of experience in those forsaken areas with their artificial former colonies’ hand drawn borders…..are the ones best suited for that warfare over there…..not Americans. Why Americans?
Moreover, it’s past time for us to consider this whole North African/Central-West Asian theatre of war to be fought by other Arabs such as the Saudi’s with their modern weapons-technology-training supplied by the United States; or purchased from us using the dollars we’ve spent on their oil.
Perhaps the hypocrites will be revealed as all of those other nations unwilling to “get involved” will proffer their evasions and taqiyya tactics. They’ll no doubt claim that they can’t kill their co-religionists.
If so, then containment from off-shore as we did in the Soviet era is applicable.
Note that the Egyptian military does have an interest in Libya, lots of ex-Soviet arms in storage (not all of those went to Afghanistan 1979-88) and, allegedly, special operations troops already in eastern Libya setting up liason with the dominant tribes there.
The U.S. has carefully cultivated a whole raft of relationships with the Egyptian armed forces in the past 30+ years. There are many reasons for this. Some will be evident if you think about it a bit.