Tag Archives: Libya

More Western Military Meddling in Libya Is a Bad Idea, by Ivan Eland

Posted on April 5, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Ivan Eland at antiwar.com:

Unbelievably, after causing the chaos in Libya by overthrowing Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the United States is about to lead another Western military intervention designed to unify the country to fight ISIS’s strongest cell outside Iraq and Syria, which has arisen from the post-Gaddafi anarchy. Repeating the same mistake will only make a bad situation worse.

In my book The Failure of Counterinsurgency, I note that insurgencies usually love to drape themselves in the “liberator from foreign oppression” cloak, and further U.S. intervention will allow ISIS to do just that. Of course, because of the American public’s understandable exhaustion with foreign brushfire wars, the United States will be reluctant to put significant forces on the ground, other than maybe a few furtive Special Operations types, and will instead wail away from the air by bombing targets from above. The United States has already done some of this in the country on a selected basis.

Another caution the book has for counterinsurgency campaigns is that foreigners never get the benefit of the doubt, as we have already seen in the U.S. drone campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Even if the great powers using air power attempt not to hit civilians (the Russians didn’t even try in Syria), they inevitably will kill some inadvertently. Because they are foreigners killing indigenous people, the locals usually frown upon this big time. The hawks will say that “collateral damage” occurs in any war, but when battling an insurgency, support of the people is much more vital than in conventional war. Because most of Libya’s militias, including ISIS, are not easily identified by uniforms, they can hide among the population and gain support and recruits from that universe. Thus, bombing groups from the air, without friendly local troops on the ground to direct and benefit from the air strikes, only needlessly angers the population and thus creates more insurgents.

To continue reading: More Western Military Meddling in Libya Is a Bad Idea

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Always Attack the Wrong Country, by Dmitry Orlov

Posted on March 30, 2016 | 4 comments

By Dmitry Orlov at cluborlov.blogspot.nl:

There are numerous tactics available to those who aim to make problems worse while pretending to solve them, but misdirection is always a favorite. The reason to want to make problems worse is that problems are profitable—for someone. And the reason to pretend to be solving them is that causing problems, then making them worse, makes those who profit from them look bad.

In the international arena, this type of misdirection tends to take on a farcical aspect. The ones profiting from the world’s problems are the members of the US foreign policy and military establishments, the defense contractors and the politicians around the world, and especially in the EU, who have been bought off by them. Their tactic of misdirection is conditioned by a certain quirk of the American public, which is that it doesn’t concern itself too much with the rest of the world. The average member of the American public has no idea where various countries are, can’t tell Sweden from Switzerland, thinks that Iran is full of Arabs and can’t distinguish any of the countries that end in -stan. And so a handy trick has evolved, which amounts to the following dictum: “Always attack the wrong country.”

Need some examples? After 9/11, which, according to the official story (which is probably nonsense) was carried out by “suicide bombers” (some of them, amusingly, still alive today) who were mostly from Saudi Arabia, the US chose to retaliate by attacking Saudi ArabiaAfghanistan and Iraq.

When Arab Spring erupted (because a heat wave in Russia drove up wheat prices) the obvious place to concentrate efforts, to avoid a seriously bad outcome for the region, was Egypt—the most populous Arab country and an anchor for the entire region. And so the US and NATO decided to attack EgyptLibya.

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We Didn’t Lose a Single Person in Libya, from Townhall

Posted on March 17, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Townhall via theburningplatform.com. 

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Barack Obama says David Cameron allowed Libya to become a ‘s*** show’ by Tim Walker and Nigel Morris

Posted on March 11, 2016 | Leave a comment

Barack Obama has run out of Americans to blame for his mistakes, so now he’s turning overseas. From Tim Walker and Nigel Morris at independent.co.uk:

Barack Obama has sharply criticised David Cameron for the UK’s role in allowing Libya to become a “shit show” after the fall of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in an unprecedented attack on a British leader by a serving US President.

Mr Obama said that following a successful military intervention to aid rebels during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt, Libya was left to spiral out of control – due largely to the inaction of America’s European allies.

In a candid US magazine interview, Mr Obama said: “When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong… there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.”

‘Distracted’ Cameron helped turn Libya into a mess, Barack Obama says
Singling out the British Prime Minister, he suggested that Mr Cameron had taken his eye off Libya after being “distracted by a range of other things”.

Mr Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French President, pushed hard for the bombing raids on Colonel Gaddafi’s forces that led to his fall, but since 2011 Libya has sunk further into violence and civil war, and latterly has become a focal point for Isis in North Africa.

Mr Obama went on: “We actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1bn – which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.”

Referring to that mess in private, Mr Obama reportedly uses the more colourful term, “shit show”.

To continue reading: Barack Obama says David Cameron allowed Libya to become a ‘s*** show’

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Intervention Fail: Back to Libya, by Ron Paul

Posted on February 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Ron Paul at ronpaullibertyreport.com:

The use of the US military overseas seems to have become so commonplace that the Obama Administration can bomb a country with no Congressional input and very little media interest at all. Such was the case on Friday, when the US military killed some 49 people in a bombing run near Tripoli, Libya.

We had to bomb Libya, we are told, because Libya has become a hotbed of ISIS activity. The group has been moving training facilities into the country, taking advantage of the chaos. Ironically, it was five years ago this week that the “Arab Spring” uprising began in Libya — an uprising that was supported by US military force and led to the overthrow of the Libyan government and the murder of its leader, Gaddafi.

We were told that the US had to intervene to overthrow Gaddafi so that democracy and human rights could flourish, yet five years after the US-led intervention no one would argue that the country is better off. Instead of bringing Libya democracy, US intervention brought Libya ISIS. So now the US has to go back and bomb Libya some more to take care of ISIS.

Will this work? No. Logic tells us you cannot do more of what caused a problem and expect it to fix the problem.

As Middle East analyst Hillary Mann Leverett observed after Friday’s US attack on Libya, “the problem is, for each one of these targeted killings, what we have seen in the data that at least two more people sign up to join.”

The United States has made a habit of lecturing other countries about the need to follow the rule of law, yet this seems to be a matter of “do as we say, not as we do.” How else can we explain a US attack overseas with no Congressional input? Certainly there was no Congressional authorization for Friday’s bombing. The Administration claimed that its authority came from the 2001 authorization to use military force against al-Qaeda in retaliation for the attacks of 9/11. But ISIS did not even exist on 9/11. How can the 2001 authorization be twisted to include bombing Libya in 2016?

To continue reading: Intervention Fail: Back to Libya

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How Republics Perish, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on February 12, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:

If you believed America’s longest war, in Afghanistan, was coming to an end, be advised: It is not.

Departing U.S. commander Gen. John Campbell says there will need to be U.S. boots on the ground “for years to come.” Making good on President Obama’s commitment to remove all U.S. forces by next January, said Campbell, “would put the whole mission at risk.”

“Afghanistan has not achieved an enduring level of security and stability that justifies a reduction of our support. … 2016 could be no better and possibly worse than 2015.”

Translation: A U.S. withdrawal would risk a Taliban takeover with Kabul becoming the new Saigon and our Afghan friends massacred.

Fifteen years in, and we are stuck.

Nor is America about to end the next longest war in its history: Iraq. Defense Secretary Ash Carter plans to send units of the 101st Airborne back to Iraq to join the 4,000 Americans now fighting there,

“ISIS is a cancer,” says Carter. After we cut out the “parent tumor” in Mosul and Raqqa, we will go after the smaller tumors across the Islamic world.

When can Mosul be retaken? “Certainly not this year,” says the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart.

Vladimir Putin’s plunge into the Syrian civil war with air power appears to have turned the tide in favor of Bashar Assad.

The “moderate” rebels are being driven out of Aleppo and tens of thousands of refugees are streaming toward the Turkish border.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is said to be enraged with the U.S. for collaborating with Syrian Kurds against ISIS and with Obama’s failure to follow through on his dictate — “Assad must go!”

There is thus no end in sight to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, nor to the U.S.-backed Saudi war in Yemen, where ISIS and al-Qaida have re-arisen in the chaos.

Indeed, the West is mulling over military intervention in Libya to crush ISIS there and halt the refugee flood into Europe.

To continue reading: How Republics Perish

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Obama Readies To Fight in Libya, Again, by Jack A. Smith

Posted on February 6, 2016 | 1 comment

The US and Europe’s intervention in Libya has been an unmitigated disaster, and Hillary Clinton’s role in it should be enough to disqualify her from public office. Further intervention will be insanity. From Jack A. Smith at antiwar.com:

Nearly five years after the U.S., Britain and France launched a bombing campaign against the Libyan government to bring about regime change, these same countries are contemplating a resumption of the war they thought was won when rebel forces they supported grotesquely tortured to death the country’s leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

The result today in Libya is utter disarray. But at the time, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – a leading advocate of the bombing who justifies the deed to this day – was ecstatic when told the news of Qaddafi’s death while she was appearing on a TV talk show. Laughingly she shouted to the cameras, “We came, we saw, he died!”

No one is laughing in Washington now. President Obama came, saw and created the very opposite of what he sought, a hardly unusual outcome for the Obama and Bush Administrations in the Middle East. Instead of a pliable dependent government willing to do the bidding of Washington and its NATO foreign legion, there has been an explosion of civil war and Sunni jihadism.

The US and UN have been striving for months to unite the two factions in Libya that claim to be the country’s government. On Feb. 1 the faction that that has been recognized by the US and many nations rejected unity with its opposite number. The bedlam in Libya caused by the 2011 overthrow has allowed the Islamic State (IS) to grow strong and occupy several territories.

Agence France-Presse reported Jan. 29: “Barack Obama has asked key advisors to draw up options for ratcheting up the fight against the Islamic State group, including opening a new front in Libya…. Potential options are said to range from intensified air strikes to participation in a UN-backed ground force that would help take on Libya’s estimated 3,000 Islamic State fighters…. The Defense Department announced it stands ready to perform the full spectrum of military operations a required.”

The US and France are preparing for “decisive military action” in Libya against the IS, according, to a statement Jan. 22 by Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said a final decision would be made in a matter or weeks, and that President Obama “has made clear that we have the authority to use military force.”

To continue reading: Obama Readies To Fight in Libya, Again

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US, Britain, France Ready Military Action In Libya As ISIS Closes In On Country’s Oil, by Tyler Durden

Posted on January 28, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

On January 19, representatives from Libya’s rival factions negotiating in Tunis announced they had formed a unity government comprised of a new 32-member cabinet.

Yay.

Six days later, lawmakers for the country’s internationally-recognized Parliament in Tobruk rejected the proposal.

Damn.

“The Parliament rejected the 32-member cabinet out of concern that it was too large, and that its members had been chosen not for their competency but to satisfy various regional factions,” The New York Times said on Monday.

As a reminder, there are two governments in Libya, an internationally recognized body operating out of Tobruk in the country’s east (where the House of Representatives was exiled in 2014 after elections produced an outcome that wasn’t agreeable to Islamist elements in the west) and another group in Tripoli which claims to be the only legitimate authority.

The country’s inability to come to some manner of political consensus has opened the door for ISIS which recently mounted a series of assaults on the country’s oil infrastructure. Earlier this month, Libya’s National Oil Corp issued a “cry for help” in the midst of the fighting. “Pray for us,” a spokesman for Ibrahim Jadhran (the militia leader who controls the forces tasked with guarding the nation’s oil) said.

“[Islamic State’s] objective is to prevent the new government from stabilizing the economy, and unless they are stopped, they might succeed in their aims,” Mustafa Sanalla, the head of Libya’s state oil company warned on Sunday.

Even if officials in Tobruk manage to float a proposal that’s agreeable to their rivals in Tripoli, there’s little chance the fledgling government will be able to consolidate in time to halt the ISIS advance which means it’s time once again for the Western powers to get involved.

To continue reading: US, Britain, France Ready Military Action In Libya As ISIS Closes In on Country’s Oil

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Libya: We’re About To Return to the Crime Scene, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on January 27, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

The New York Times reports that the “government” of Libya is hiding in a hotel room in Tunis:

“Officials said there was agreement that the United States and its allies needed to find ways of shoring up Libya’s new government of national accord – established just this week with help from the United Nations but stuck, as of now, in a hotel in Tunis. France, General Dunford said, will work closely with the United States Africa Command on a plan.”

Plan? What plan? Why,the plan to fuck up“liberate” Libya for the second time in four years, which is even now in the works:

“Worried about a growing threat from the Islamic State in Libya, the United States and its allies are increasing reconnaissance flights and intelligence collecting there and preparing for possible airstrikes and commando raids, senior American policy makers, commanders and intelligence officials said this week.”

Having destroyed the country in their 2011 intervention – when the US and its allies bombed the place to smithereens, funded Islamist militias, and had Ghadafi hideously murdered – the regime-changers are returning to the scene of their crime on the theory that repeating the same failed “solution” endlessly will somehow solve the problem they created in the first place.

The plan, we are told, could go into operation “soon,” which is interesting on at least two levels. To begin with, Congress hasn’t authorized US military action in Libya, and is unlikely to do so. Secondly, the idea that the “government of national accord” – voted for by exactly nobody inside Libya – has one iota of legitimacy is a joke. Indeed, Libya is suffering from an oversupply of governments at the moment, with one in Tripoli and the other in the eastern city of Tobruk: only the fools over at 405 East 42nd Street could possibly imagine the addition of a third will help matters.

To continue reading: Libya: We’re About To Return to the Crime Scene

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“We Came, We Saw, He Died” – Revisiting the Incredible Disaster That Is Libya, by Michael Krieger

Posted on January 8, 2016 | 1 comment

From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

In retrospect, Obama’s intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other U.S. interests as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian cooperation at the UN, and fueling Syria’s civil war.


As bad as Libya’s human rights situation was under Qaddafi, it has gotten worse since NATO ousted him. Immediately after taking power, the rebels perpetrated scores of reprisal killings, in addition to torturing, beating, and arbitrarily detaining thousands of suspected Qaddafi supporters. The rebels also expelled 30,000 mostly black residents from the town of Tawergha and burned or looted their homes and shops, on the grounds that some of them supposedly had been mercenaries. Six months after the war, Human Rights Watch declared that the abuses “appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity.”

As a consequence of such pervasive violence, the UN estimates that roughly 400,000 Libyans have fled their homes, a quarter of whom have left the country altogether. 


– From the post: The Forgotten War – Understanding the Incredible Debacle Left Behind by NATO in Libya

Shortly after the NATO-led war which ousted Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ebulliently boasted with a characteristic sociopathic giddiness, the following on network television:

From Iraq to Libya, and indeed across the entire planet, the U.S. government has an uncanny ability to take an already bad geopolitical situation and turn it into a complete and total chaotic humanitarian disaster. It’d be one thing if the woman in the above video clip had been disgraced and forced into exile in Chappaqua, but the disturbing reality is she will most likely be promoted to the next President of these United States.

To continue reading: Revisiting the Incredible Disaster That Is Libya

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