Empire of the Iguanadons

Over the course of the last three weeks during the uprisings in the middle east, several countries have been on the verge of collapse. Egypt and Tunisia had their governments overthrown. To what end, we can't really be sure. The revolutions sparked protests in Yemen, Oman, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Iran, Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia. Oh, and of course in Libya, where the people rose up against Muammar Qaddafi.

Unlike other protests in the region, the uprising in Libya has turned into a full scale civil war. The media isn't calling it that, but the obvious truth is there. Rebels had captured several cities and were advancing on Tripoli, the capitol of Libya. That is until Qaddafi decided to use his air force to bomb the rebels into paste. It's taken him about 2 weeks to accomplish, but the rebels have been driven back to their holdings in Benghazi. That's their last stand, and it looked as though Qaddafi was about to crush them utterly.

Enter the UN. That completely ineffective body of worthless sniveling diplomats who can't ever decide to do anything worthwhile. A Security Council resolution somehow managed to pass with a 10-0 vote with 5 abstentions. Naturally China and Russia couldn't be bothered but at least they didn't veto it. Apparently the Germans aren't feeling up to it either. The fact that it took them nearly 3 weeks to do something about it is appalling, but it's done, and they authorized the enforcement of a no-fly zone over Libya.

This got Qaddafi's attention briefly as he declared a cease fire with the rebels. As expected though, this lasted all of 12 hours or so. Trying to delay the inevitable. Or maybe he forgot radar can see in the dark.

The end result is what you see now. French warplanes bombing Libyan defenses. Joined this morning by US Navy warships who are lobbing cruise missiles into the country to blow up coastal defense installations. Whether we all like it nor not, we're involved in another war in the middle east. Here's to hoping we don't get yet another instance of the Arabs spitting in our faces for responding to their requests for intervention.
.........................
RIP United States of America

July 1776 - November 2012.

Ooh, another cool video. Its a whole heap of video and photo material taken off dead Qaddafi soldiers.

Nothing real cool in there at all, rather sickening really. How was that one guy, both knees shot and one in the groin, just laying on his back, hands up in the surrender position. Guess he was dead, did not look like he was breathing. Wonder how one can sustain such wounds in a battle? Looks more like a mafia style hit than anything. What kind of sico would video that, its just wrong.

All you need to know. You guys may consider them a legit news service but make no mistake, this is a propaganda video. It has no other purpose. The Arabs may not realize it though but most of us here at home don't support US involvement in Libya.

Hmm, looks like things aren't getting any better for Obama on this issue. Though when a person who is supposed to be an educated representative of the people to be so terribly misinformed is truly a dreadful situation. Though this guy seems to have an agenda defending the various dictators of the embattled Arab nations as they murder their own people.

No reason they would get better. He's leading himself down a very dark hole at this point. Maybe we'll get lucky and the House will grow some balls and call for his impeachment rather than just slap him on the wrist with a defunding. Sure would love to see the Bush haters squirm out of this one

The trouble now is, we have tp get rid of Muammar Gaddafi and finish this mess once and for all. Failure to do so will mean even grater trouble for the Libyan people and general global stability. THe guy is a total loon. I understand that the US is going against its own laws and needs to pull out, and that it just does not have the money to continue anyway with its economy in a total mess, so Nato and the UN started this shit, Nato and the UN needs to finish this shit and be done with it. I say send in the troops and get it over and done with by Christmas.

Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Can't nuke it, we still need their oil. Once the wells are dry, then we can nuke it. By the time the wells are dry, the US economy might have picked up enough for the US to be able to afford to launch a nuke on them.

Top ten myths in the war on Libya

I think this article is really interesting because it shows the arguments the war's future critics will use to justify that the intervention was unnecessary.

As for the arguments themselves, well, I saw some pretty flimsy looking stuff in there. For instance, the author contends that some of the top ranking rebels had ties to the CIA, effectively insinuating CIA involvement in the uprising (ignoring the fact that the west was buddy buddy with Qaddafi prior to the uprising). However, following the link that the author gives to prove it leads to an article talking about a rebel commander who had lived in the US for some time before the uprising, and certainly had CIA ties. The problem is though that he returned to Libya two months after the uprising began, so its hard to use him to suggest that the CIA was involved in the creation of the uprising.

In another case, in helping to justify his argument about atrocities and other war crimes committed against black Libyans by the rebels (which has happened to some extent, none the less), he links to a video of the Abu Salim hospital in Tripoli when the city fell, pointing out that all the people rotting in the hospital are black and therefore suggesting that they were all killed by the rebels. Its a pity that that video only shows about six of the two hundred bodies there, unlike other videos that show dozens of bodies. And from memory, not all of those bodies were black.

Also, one of the 'reasons' deals with Qaddafi himself. The author basically makes the case that Qaddafi wasn't as bad as he seemed and in many respects brought his people myriad benefits. Which is odd, because the rebels apparently felt the need to get rid of the guy by all means necessary including sacrificing thousands of their lives, which is quite a strange reaction to a supposedly 'good' leader. In fact the entire fact that the author tries to paint quite a gratifying picture of Qaddafi puts me fairly on guard. I don't care how much CIA involvement there was, you don't get a rebellion like that against a dictator unless the people genuinely hate his guts.

I don't generally spend a lot of time calling out dudes for utterly bullshit hardcore leftist drivel, but yeah, that's what that is. There's times in the first six points where if you weren't bothering to fact check it you might go "Well, maybe there's a point there..." Point 7 about Gaddafi? Totally goes off the rails into Marxist fellow traveler land, and that's the point you realize the whole rest of it was lunacy if you didn't already know.

Also, counterpoint of sorts.

Yeah, lunacy all around on that article.

Also, who's taking bets on how soon we start our war with Syria?

Not to hate on the people of Syria, and really guys, good luck against Assad and I mean that, but Christ, I hope not. I don't see a whole lot of ways that ends well at any reasonable cost.

So send in a black-ops team. Assassinate Assad. Game over. Just don't get caught

The Syrian opposition did say that they would accept any sort of help after all. I'd certainly like to see what the regime would do though without Assad. Maybe they'd pull a Yemen and hold an election with only one candidate for president; the vice-president.

In reality though, I say give the opposition weapons. But of course, that's not going to happen because the West has to follow a completely different set of rules while Russia is free to sell big guns to bad people without any loss to its reputation. So yeah, good luck to all in Syria. And don't have an Iraq style sectarian war if you win.

EDIT; Also, reading Dwip's article, would it interest anyone to know that there were something like 2 million Egyptian laborer's in Libya prior to the war (they're gradually returning). Its interesting how Qaddafi managed to make a nation with poverty, high unemployment and such a severe labor shortage that needed to get in such enormous amounts of workers (who were paid twice the average weekly wage than was on offer in Egypt). It probably helped to keep him in power, actually.

Probably also worth noting that the visit the author made doesn't seem to have been long after sanctions were lifted, so it probably had developed somewhat more since then (particularly in areas that were of personal interest to Qaddafi, of course). Not that it really changes the point.

That's why you get the Saudis and the Turks to do the actual arming of the rebels. You make sure Israel stays out of it (at least openly), and you wait for it all to topple. The opportunity to tear the Iranians a new one isn't something we should just piss away.

Getting a pro-Western government in power in Syria would definitely be a good tactical move, considering how Iran has openly backed the regime.

I honestly think Israel has been a bit to conservative in their foreign policy approach to the whole 'Arab Spring' business. Its not secret that the Arab's don't particularly like them and I think the way Israel has simply stated that its 'watching the revolutions carefully to make sure it doesn't become a security threat' or whatever isn't going to help Arab opinion of them...is it too much for them to say 'we also think you guys have a right to liberty and freedom' on the back of that. Not that I suggest that Israel be publicly seen to either endorse arming the Syrian opposition or actively engage in it.

I don't much have time to dig in like I want, so:

- Weren't the Turks pretty much all "oh HELLS no" about most of this? Or am I thinking enclaves.

- The Syrian military is non-trivial, more on the scale of the 1991 Iraqi army than the Libyan one. That presents a lot of potential problems, not the least of which is that it probably requires a significant investment of airpower (and probably troops) on our part to make a difference.

- Via that last link, this, which I will summarize by noting that the spectre of our various failures of imagination in Iraq remains strong, and that it is very unlikely to be so blithely simple as "just arm some rebels." Too, go big or go home presents its own set of potentially very bad problems.

None of which changes the fact that Assad is a dick and deserves his defenestration. We're at a stage where acceptable cost starts to kick in, and all that.

The Syrian military may be non-trivial, but the big difference here is that we'd have a substantial portion of Syrians helping with the effort, on a scale much larger than with Iraq in 1991. Yes, NATO (or whoever) would actually have to fight, but that's war. You can't avoid that.

At which point can we no longer ignore the problem? When Assad levels Homs? When he carries out his threat to use chemical weapons? When he tells Iran they have a green light to come in and slaughter the entire opposition?

It's not like the 1991 uprisings were any small thing. That didn't turn out so hot, no fly zones notwithstanding.

My point about the non-trivial thing is this. Based on that Abu Muqawama post I linked, even if you assume that only half the Syrian army shows up for work, they've still got enough dudes, plus craptons of armored vehicles and heavy weapons, to equal something like 5/8 or 3/4 of the entire active duty US Army. For comparison, Wikipedia informs me that half the Syrian army is something like six times as large as the entire Libyan army without any defections, etc.

In addition, the Syrian air force has a few hundred planes, though the lion's share of them are totally obsolete MiG-21s, but they've got a few dozen MiG-29s in there, too. Add to that a really big lot of SAMs. I forget precisely where Syria is in the largest air defence network race, but as I recall they're not losing it. For comparison, all of this is most of the size of what the Iraqi military looked like in 1991.

So, what that means is if you're going to take down Syria, you're going to need a really, really big air campaign along the lines of Desert Storm (2k+ aircraft) as opposed to just parking a few dudes off Libya (~100) in addition to just tossing some guns to various ill-defined Syrian rebel groups. A vast chunk of airpower is, of course, currently tied up in Afghanistan, but that's somewhat beside my point.

Even then, things look pretty hazy - air campaigns have never won a war by themselves, and even with our exceptionally capable ground attack, it's entirely probable that significant portions of the Syrian army would survive relatively intact, much as Iraqi divisions did in both Gulf Wars. Similarly, ill-trained and probably ill-equipped rebels are only so effective against armored and mechanized troops.

So, pretty much figure that, no matter what, we win and Assad goes away, but best case on that is a giant NATO air campaign coupled with some kind of Afghanistan 2001/Libya 2011 rebel army thing, and the worst case is something like that, except the rebels get their asses kicked and we start some kind of impromptu ground invasion to save the day.

Either way, it's going to be a really big war, and the thing about really big wars, well:

- Wars are friggin' expensive, and we're seriously broke, and who do you think is going to pay for all of this?

- It's not like we don't have other military commitments elsewhere that are slightly more vital to the national interest, never mind a fairly worn out force facing massive budget cuts, equipment problems, etc.

- I'm going to guess that US popular support for this thing is somewhere close to zero. I mean, shit, look at what happened with Libya? The second this goes into anything that looks longterm, it's going to get ugly here.

And all of that is just having ourselves a war. I haven't heard anyone saying anything particularly profound about what postwar Syria looks like (and track record in most of the Arab Spring countries is thus far spotty at best, not to mention post-2003 Iraq), never mind what happens if we jack Assad and it suddenly turns into random warlords or something.

All of which is to say that I think you're absolutely correct that at the end of the moral equation, ousting Assad is the right thing to do, but I'm a whole lot more shaky on the "is this a good idea" question. I think you know that I'm about as much of an interventionist as anyone, but this is a big one, and not to be rushed into.

Well the main point I'm making is that if it's morally just, and yes, even nutjob Ron Paul thinks something like this is morally just, then you've already answered the question of "is this a good idea". Your only problem now is getting NATO to commit to a large scale force so that we're not going it alone again.

Of course, should Obama by some miracle actually grow a pair and try to pull this off, the risk of dragging Russia into a conflict over Syria is probably somewhere a lot higher than zero. China will bitch, but they have no capacity to back their bitching up. Russia still has a credible military and nuclear arsenal and could turn this ugly in a heartbeat. Shades of NATO vs Warsaw Pact all over again.

So yeah. If you weigh it that way, my gut tells me assassinate Assad. Let Syria descend into civil war with warlords going apeshit. Iran will get their noses bloodied on that one, the rebels will have a much better chance when the military fractures, and they cease to be much of a threat to anyone else for the next 10 years or so.

Now, if you're a Revelations kind of guy, this whole situation is looking mighty nasty right about now. Or if you're a Mayan calendar type, given what year it is....

Well.

- From the perspective of national prosperity and survival, things that are morally just are not always good ideas - a bunch of weapons shipments is one thing for our strapped national budget, another large shooting war rather another.

For that matter, is going the weapons shipment route the best plan? As I attempted to note before, probably not - hand an untrained rebel a bunch of ATGMs or mortars or whatever and they are still not going to be anywhere near as effective as trained soldiers. The pre-NATO performance of the Libyan rebels among other things bears this out, I think. I can dig up other examples. And, if the goal is to eliminate Assad and provide a free Syria, this action alone won't accomplish it, thus requiring the bigger intervention.

- I can't particularly see any possible reason for Russia or China to do much of anything other than bitch about it and continue their previous relationships with Assad. Absolutely nobody wants to suddenly enact Red Storm Rising for reals. We're a long ways from the Cold War.

That said, Russia in particular does have strategic interests in the area (big naval base, etc), so you can probably expect them to stonewall like mad to keep that going.

- Assassinating Assad would seem to me to have two main problems. The first and most practical is that assassinating heads of state is pretty hard - we tried to kill Saddam umpteen gazillion times, and how well did that work? Also, OBL.

Second, if the moral justification for all of this is providing a free and democratic Syria where people aren't getting killed all the time, the "let's purposefully collapse Syria" thing doesn't pass the test, because it's going to kill a lot of people and drag on forever. This was not a particularly great outcome when it happened in Iraq in 2004-2007, and it also wasn't all that great when Yugoslavia disintegrated. Creating MegaLebanon right next to Israel seems like an idea particularly fraught with peril and excitement. We don't know enough about the rebels to know that they'll suddenly unite the clans and free ScotlandLibya. They might also decide to rock it like Hezbollah. You never know, and I'm not sure we want to.

So the answer then is to do nothing at all? I fail to see how that solves anything.

Maybe. Or maybe we should have a big war. What I'm trying to get at here is that if we're going to have big wars, we need to recognize them as being what they are, and be clear eyed about what we're getting into - emotional outrage isn't a substitute for strategy and planning.

All that said, obviously my sympathies lie with a free and hopefully democratic Syria. Intellectually, though, I'm a lot more of a pessimist. Also, having witnessed the aftermath of our wars of the past couple of decades, I'm feeling pretty conflicted between the concept of go big or go home and the idea that maybe we create more problems than we solve, but that may be beside the point.

Well I'm not saying go off half cocked here. Obviously it needs to be planned well and executed well. Which pretty much means not while Obama is in office.

I'd also mention that if we're going to do this, we have a plan for getting ourselves out that doesn't amount to "But they love us".

If the Syrians get liberated and then willingly choose to put themselves back under the thumb of another jackbooted thug, that's on them. They should be given that choice though, and right now they seem to be rejecting that idea.

It probably is worth noting as a precaution that there is a sizable Shi'ite community in Syria, unlike Libya where everyone is Sunni.

That doesn't necessarily mean that there will be an Iraq style fallout; Syria's already Sunni dominated anyway. Its also worth noting that the revolution has a Sunni core, which means that when Assad's Sunni dominated army is sent to shoot the 'armed terrorist gangs' (protesters) they find themselves in a situation of having to shoot their own families. Which is why the Free Syrian Army is getting plenty of recruits.