military action against Libya

Excellent point. Revolutions happen when the citizens become sick and tired of dictatorships, less freedoms and jobs.

Thank you. I saw a brilliant comedy about Islamic terrorists the other night.

Comedy is the best way to deal with it.

Does that mean their is hope for us? No waterman, I dont mean Obama.

Hope lives eternal; it's the only game we have.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15415378,00.html

It has been widely reported that Sarkozy expected making war in Libya to help him politically back home, but it most certainly has not. I am not sure that it has helped Cameron either, and certainly has not prevented Obama from further loses of American citizen support.

OOPS.

Should have left Arabs to solve their problems. You only upset another bunch if Arabs by helping one bunch. It is a neutral thing. The main loss is the military expenditure.

Not only...we are going to leave the middle east anyway as we slip from being a global superpower, but our poor response to the Arab Spring speeds up the process. We have been daft and ham handed, so our reputation suffers another blow...in this case we brought to power in Libya a group that is barely a group, is militarily and politically incompetent, and most likely is largely composed of radicals who hate us. This is never a smart move, and those who make it predictably come off looking stupid. The leaders of France and Britain were in this war for largely personal political reasons (though they miscalculated) but Obama never had an upside so far as I can see other than perhaps some pipe dream of trying to build trans-Atlantic unity. What he has done however is to make it clear to the Saudis that it does not matter what we say today nor how much they have helped us under the table over the years, when the rebellion takes shape we will sell them out just like we sold out Mubarak, just as we sold out Gaddafi, and to a lessor case Assad and Abdullah.

It is very hard to see any successful path were we to try to intervene to save Mubarak. Such action would likely have further aroused the population and worsened his situation. We are already deeply committed in two efforts at nation building both of which have proved to be far more costly and time-consuming and involving far more adverse side effects than were planned or even imagined when we entered them. The Mubarak government of Egypt lost the confidence of the Egyptian people and it fell. We really didn't have the ability to alter that outcome.

Indeed I believe President Obama's decision to limit our actions in the Libyian intervention was a wise one. It is past time for the European Powers to take some responsibility for disorder in their own neighborhood, and the limited aspect of their intervention, so far appears to have yielded good results, without undue entanglements (yet).

It is interesting to speculate what the world might be like today if we had in 1990 refrained from any effort to restore the independence of Kuwait after Saddam's invasion. After a ten year war with Iran (a nation with three times the population of Iraq), Saddam was broke and needed money - Kuwait had lots of that. There is something to be said for the continued struggle between two equally hateful regimes (Iraq & Iran in this case) that are locked in a life or death struggle with each other.

There was no saving Mubarak, he had become incompetent over the last years, but we did not need to work against him.

How is the creation of the next Somalia a good result? The nation is splintering, the people are running out of food, and weapons are everywhere...the assumption is that Libya can not be somalia because they have oil to sell, but that only works if there is enough stability to pump the oil, which at this point there is not.

It is past time for Europeans to carry their weight when it comes to defending themselves and their interests...not to mention the interests of the West, but the US has happily enabled them live for today for decades.

Now they don't have the military capabilities to be left on their own, particularly if there are any actual US interests at stake.

When the US invaded a Middle Eastern nation beset by a vicious dictator who had proven time and again he was ready willing and able to murder his own people it was described by both internal and external critics as a shameful effort to serve the energy interests of America. Fast forward a few years and another US president has gone to war in another Middle Eastern nation beset by another vicious, murdering dictator. This time, however, the fury of the critics (both internal and external) has been muted; when the only difference I can find is that now the shameless effort is to serve European energy interests rather than those of America.

I suspect the most impactful result of the war in Libya (at least for the West) will be the eventual use of Kaddafi’s arsenals against Western civilians and interests.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/09/27/report-20000-heat-seeking-missiles-may-be-missing-from-libyan-warehouse/

If I'm correct, the stench of irony will enough to choke a long dead Rod Serling.

There's so much in this article that you have to love:



No problem with acknowledging this vicious dictators stockpile of WMDs, because we didn't invade his country to find them. The reason this time was, of course, to prevent him from slaughtering thousands of civilians in Benghazi.

In any case, thank Goodness the U.N. chief weapons watchdog assures us the really nasty stuff is "believed to be secure." What with that stalwart a sentinel on duty I, for one, can sleep soundly at night.



That's our worst nightmare? Not matching up a terrorist with chemical or biological weapons, nor opening a cupboard of nuclear material to one?

Well if anyone should know it must be Barbara Boxer because she's the expert, (just look at her committee assignments) and that's the classic line of an expert, or at least the ones crafted by Hollywood screenwriters.

"That's our worst nightmare."

"Our" of course referring to all the experts in the field. You know, Boxer and that general she dressed down because he called her ma'am.

"We experts know all of the scary things that can happen in the world and so if it's our worst nightmare...you better look out!"

What a laugh. Boxer's worse nightmare is walking through the Capital Building and everyone calling out to her "Hey lady."

If our going to war with Libya saved thousands of Benghazi civilians from being slaughtered by Kaddafi’s forces that's good thing, but then there was never really any reason to believe, in the first place, that he was going to level the city and exterminate its inhabitants. Although President Obama agreed that going around the world and saving thousands of people was a good thing he made it clear that we couldn't keep doing such a thing because it made us feel good, it had to also serve the interests of our country and its allies. Of course he stopped short of telling us why saving Benghazi lives was in our national interest, but I'm sure he had a good reason.

If there ever was a legitimate America national interest at stake it was security and the risk of Kaddafi’s arsenals getting into the wrong hands. The Pentagon and the CIA knew what weapons Libya had (remember these were his guys not the boot licking stooges of GWB - they could be trusted), and even the UN chief weapons watchdog knew he had a stockpile of chemical weapons.

Obama's guys at the Pentagon and CIA also knew that there was a lot we didn't know about just who the Rebels are. They know there is good reason to believe that Islamists have either infiltrated the Rebel movement or established a faction within it. The Jihadi are no dopes, if they can't hijack the Rebellion, they can find out if and where weapons stockpiles are vulnerable to misappropriation.

But no we couldn't protect that national interest by keeping track of destroying weapon caches because to do so would have meant sending armed me in, and the word was spread very quickly: No Boots On The Ground! Not even ones covering the feet of Special Forces experts.

I can appreciate why Obama might have been extremely reluctant to mention weapons of any kind as a reason to invade another Middle Eastern country.

(He's one of the guys who worked so hard to make sure it can't be used by any president for another 20 years at least!)

Hell, he used the saving innocent civilians line to cover helping the Europeans try and resolve their Libyan oil headache, surely it would not have been such a big deal to open the door for a squad or two of SEALs to just track the damned weapons.

Instead we lead from the rear and followed a strategy that guaranteed a fair degree of chaos on the ground during which 20,000 heat seeking missiles (Our worst nightmare for God's sake!) could be spirited away.

Here's some more irony. There's a darn good chance that if we hadn't gone to war in Libya, Khadafi would have ultimately defeated the rebels and these heat seeking missiles that are missing would have remained safely within the government's arsenal. The Iraq War had already convinced the Colonel to give up any remaining plans on using weapons against the West, and if NATO hadn't attacked and the rebels were defeated, Kaddafi would have no reason to be pissed at the West and reconsider his post-Iraq stand own from terrorism.

One last irony: There are Obama stooges who actually claim that the Libyan Kinetic Military Action and leading from the rear has been one of his most successful achievements.

God forbid Barbara Boxer's worst nightmare comes true and one of these missing missiles brings down a Western airliner; killing hundred of passengers, what do you think the chance will be that the Media connects the dots between that tragedy and why we went to war in Libya?

The West has backed a minority group which will disappear once Western support is gone from Libya.

Our official answer is that we gave the people the power to decide their future, and what ever happens is not our fault. That is so not how history will be written, this will go down as a opportunistic war intended to help a couple of national leaders with who have big political problems, as yet another ill advised military adventure that spent down treasuries with barely the pretext of justification. The Naivete of the official explanation is stunning. Equally alarming is that the citizens of the UK, France and US did not object when we were so blatantly played for fools.

There were already boots on the ground when that promise was made. The line about no boots on the ground is a lie. The CIA/"Mi6" were publicly known to have entered Libya before that promise were made and British Special forces have been fighting alongside the rebels (out of uniform). The notion that they were not going to send troops on the ground is a lie for domestic audiences. They are just doing it discreetly anyway.

British special forces are on the ground in Libya helping to spearhead the hunt for Col Muammar Gaddafi

Even for the nation leading from behind, UK Special Forces are not US Special Forces.

I don't think there is anyone who believes there weren't CIA assets "on the ground" before or during the kinetic military action.

I don't mean to disparage UK Special Forces, but if their mission was to help the rebels find Kaddafi, it wasn't to keep track of his serious weaponry. US Special Forces wouldn't have had a better chance of success in tracking the weapons, if they hadn't been given the mission either.

I'm sure any examination of Obama's "no boots on the ground," pledge was related to US troops and not those of our NATO allies, and so if it only SAS operators running around Libya, Obama can still lay claim to having spoken the truth when he made it.

If this was all pre-planned between Obama Administration and the governments of NATO allies ( as it easily could have been) then not only was Obama guilty of lying, he's guilty of incompetence.

It wasn't just the US that pledged no boots on the ground, all of the external belligerents made similar pledges to sell the "no-fly zone" in the UN and to their domestic audiences.

Anyway, my point was only tangentially related to yours about weapons caches in that I wanted to point out that the talk of "no boots" was just rhetoric used to sell the war and there is plenty of evidence already in public domain that each nation is willing to blur those lines. There have been publicly confirmed cases of uniformed US troops on the ground as well, and when the forces are covert they are the same military guys anyway but just out of uniform.

The rebels would never have taken Tripoli if NATO special forces didn't blend in with them and lead the fight. The fall of Tripoli was quarterbacked by NATO special forces and this war was prosecuted not much differently than the start of the ground war in Afghanistan where NATO special forces blended into a local force and fought alongside them, out of uniform.

In this day and age fighting out of uniform is very nearly the norm, the promises about boots mean nothing more than that our soldiers won't be wearing military-issue clothing, and will operate as covertly as possible, not really that they won't be deployed.

Getting back to your concern about weapons caches, the US has been publicly known to be involved in intelligence and monitoring of them, and have worked with the rebel and covert forces on the ground to secure them in at least one incident that I've read about. I think they are likely doing what they can covertly in many more that won't be publicly confirmed.

So don't.

The best in the world.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/sharia-law-declaration-raises-concerns-libya-174347939.html

Thank you NATO. We may have another Islamist nation like Iran.

Ghadaffi is dead for what? Two to three days?

Yeah, Sen McCain we knew all we needed to know about the rebels.

$1 billion to pave the way for a "sharia democracy."

If that's true, there may be some dark, difficult days ahead for the women of that country. I fear for them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/armed-clashes-intensify-in-divided-tripoli/2011/11/12/gIQAnRplFN_story.html?hpid=z10

HECK OF A JOB, AMERICA!