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Libya - civil unrest & now NATO involvement

a US carrier could impose a token no fly zone for a week or two but after that the planes start breaking.
fighter jets make Ferrari's look reliable :)
by the time its set up with UN agreement the whole thing will be over with.
short of van damn throwing a wobbly street fighter style and leading the troops over the dunes on quad bikes the libyan peole are on their own.
 
DownwardDog said:
Not sufficient to sustain a 24 hour NFZ for weeks on end. Also, nobody but the US has anything more than a token amount of ECM, SEAD, AWACS, AAR and all of the other support assets needed.
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Thanks.

You know, of course, that the people reading that don't know what ECM SEAD AWACS AAR are.

I do know what an ARRSE is though. :)
 
dynamicbaddog said:
OMG! the Workers Revolutionary Party are still backing Gaddafi:eek:

http://www.wrp.org.uk/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6150
:D
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Oh the irony

It was a major mistake for Gadaffi not to place himself and Libya in the front line of those supporting the revolutions that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt.

In fact, he opposed them when he should have shown solidarity with them,
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This can only be done by the defeat of the current rebellion ...Further, the Libyan workers must take their place as a leader of the revolutionary wave that is sweeping through North Africa.
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Right so the best way for the Libyan workers to take their place as the leaders of the revolutionary wave that is sweeping North Africa is to......crush their uprising. What a bunch of fucking nutters!

:facepalm:
 
quimcunx said:
You know, of course, that the people reading that don't know what ECM SEAD AWACS AAR are.
Click to expand...

ECM - Electronic Counter Measures
SEAD - Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses
AWACS - Airborne Warning and Control System
AAR - not a scooby :)

Basically, fancy planes, and fancy pods to put on planes, I guess. I only played Nighthawk:F117 a few times, the DownwardDog has rather more real-life experience.
 
Active Array Radar. eg. tracking lots of targets simultaneously, and providing guidance for missiles to those targets
 
To go back very briefly to the WRP and their Gadaffi support in the 70s and 80s, here's yesterdays paper:

WHILE Cameron is in Kuwait seeking to sell more rubber bullets, poison gas and a variety of war machines to the British-trained Gulf monarchies, the Libyan leader, Colonel Gadaffi, remains in Tripoli, fighting for Libyan independence, and making a fool of the British Foreign Secretary Hague,who announced Britain’s real ‘war aim’ when he told the world that Gadaffi was fleeing to Venezuela.

...

We urge the Libyan masses and youth to take their stand alongside Colonel Gadaffi to defend the gains of the Libyan revolution, and to develop it.

This can only be done by the defeat of the current rebellion and a major national discussion about the introduction of workers control and management of the Libyan economy and society, as well as the introduction of the political organs for exercising that political control and management.
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Very important article here on the ideological dangers of the Libyan revolution descending into a long drawn out bloodbath. The essence of his argument is that one of the defining ideological achievements of Tunisia and Egypt has been their democratic nationalist and secular character. It is this ideological current that is the most powerful dynamic of the rolling wave of uprisings across the region.

Libya may raise a challenge to that as the regimes brutality and extraordinary repression brutalises the population and creates a vacuum which gives space for the growth of more extremist ideologies such as Islamism or separatism which could in turn could challenge the predominantly democratic nationalist ideology that has characterised the revolt thus far.

I don't necessarily agree with all of it but it does raise an important point about the radicalising nature of brutality and severe repression of the type we are witnessing in Libya


The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were gratifyingly secular and ecumenical, and clearly reflected the desire on the part of much of the population, especially the educated, under-employed, urban middle, lower-middle and working classes for democracy and good governance. They were strikingly non-Islamist in their character and reflected a sudden and unexpected resurgence of Arab and local nationalism and an amazingly refined sense of social consciousness.

Both of these cultural phenomena -- nationalism that transcends ideology and religious and sectarian identity, and a refined social consciousness -- had been considered if not dead then at least moribund in the Arab world by most observers. It's extremely heartening to see that these were the animating impulses that were able to bring millions of Egyptians and Tunisians onto the streets, and not narrow-minded, obscurantist religious ideology.

One of the most severe long-term political dangers arising from the kind of brutality currently being visited upon the Libyan people is that it could have a severely radicalizing effect on the opposition and throw up a post-Gaddafi era dominated by extremists rather than reformers. Extreme violence has a historical tendency to radicalize movements in an extremely nasty way and to set the stage for gruesome replacements to grizzly regimes. Extreme American bombardment in Cambodia undoubtedly help to transform the Khmer Rouge into the monstrous regime it proved to be once it seized power.

In Algeria, when the military canceled elections in the early 1990s for fear of an Islamist takeover through the ballot box and put FIS members and supporters in concentration camps in the Sahara desert, it set in motion a process of radicalization that ended up with the opposition being characterized by the most extreme version of Salafist-Jihadist mania yet seen anywhere in the Arab world.

I'm not predicting that this will be the outcome of what is, without question, a very heroic uprising by the Libyan people, but rather noting that much of the hope for serious, positive reform in Egypt and Tunisia stems from the fact that the military and parts of the ruling elite refused to confront the demonstrators violently and, in the final analysis, were ready to jettison hated dictators and elements of the regime that were just not acceptable to the general public. A period of confrontation gave way to at least some degree of conciliation and compromise, which in both those cases is no doubt still a work in progress.

My point is that the kind of brutality being unleashed in Libya makes such conciliation and compromise, and purposive work between elements of the military, remnants of the old regime and opposition groups towards reform, far more difficult. It could, if it goes badly wrong, throw up either a chaotic or deeply oppressive outcome, which would then have its own potential negative influence on the unfolding Arab reform protest movement.
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http://www.ibishblog.com/blog/hibish/2011/02/21/libya_nightmare_version_dream_began_tunis_and_cairo
 
On a more serious note. The speech does tell us a couple of things.

First the fact that it was a radio speech and not TV may say something.

Second it wasn't as defiant as before. In fact he even made some ridiculous attempts at half hearted promises of reform. "perhaps we could raise wages" There was definitely a more contrite tone to the speech than the one before. Maybe he is playing good cop/bad cop all by himself

Third he blamed it all on Bin Laden. It was Bin Laden behind the whole thing. Bin Laden gave the kids pills etc and no mention of the CIA, Egyptians or any of the other loony conspiracy stuff of the past speech. He has definately settled on Bin Laden as the culprit.

Finally it was so short, barely half an hour. Very unlike him.
 
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