Attack on Libya imminent?

The title of this week's Economist magazine summed it up pretty well: "Where does this end?"

Obama needs to explain what the hell we are doing. No leadership.

 

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It starts and ends with

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Btw, Operation Desert Shield is what led to Al Qaeda forming a terror organization and planning/executing 9/11. To think that he successfully engaged in "the most delicate of negotiations to reconcile those troops' presence with the Saudis' keen sensitivities as guardians of Islam's most holy cities" is the exact opposite of the truth. Al Qaeda flew two planes into the WTC because America defended the holy cities, and because they stayed in Saudi.

While Saudi agreed to this, I doubt you would pull a "we were just doing what we were asked to do" stunt. We're all adults here. We all know that Desert Shield was going to happen with or without Saudi agreement.

Wishful thinking on your part. The results couldn't have been more disastrous and less measured.

 

Stopping a dictator from invading Kuwait led to 9/11?

That whole region pisses me off. It's inferior to the rest of the world by any measure, yet we all have to walk on eggshells not to offend their sacred misogynistic wackjob religion.

We have a strategic interest but that doesn't mean we can affect any kind of positive outcome. Backwater tribal religious nutjobs fighting each other, what can you do?

I would metaphorically carpet bomb the region with anti-Islamic propaganda day and night. Until they have a Come to Jesus or Martin Luther moment, they will always be stuck in the dark ages and a constant pain to the rest of the world.

How pathetic is it that this is exceptionally rare in Islamic society?

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She'll probably be stoned for blasphemy.

 

Oh yes - cause and reaction...right. It is all the USA's (West's) own fault. Poor Al Qaeda was just REACTING.

Typical Mathloom logic.

 

Religion. Such a shame.

 

You can't defend either side here. US has no business intervening in these civil wars and regional conflicts. Let them fight, and then clean it all up later.

 

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Meybe if the West didnt have a hand in every political decision made, the region would be better off.

Who killed the democratically elceted Leader of Iran (Mossadegh) becasue he wanted to nationalise the oil for the Iranians?

Who helped Saddam kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians?

Who helped all the Royals in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait to come and stay in power, who helped them to kill any rebellion for dictatorship in that region?

Who has backed the oprresive regime of Egypt in all this time? Who helped him kill any rebellion against this dictatorship?

Who created and nad helped and protect Al Qaeda?]

I could on and on for ever.........

Behind every dictator in the middle east (latin america and asia for that fact) there lies the hands of western politicians. Behind every movement that opposed these regimes were killed by the hands of western spy agencies. This is evif=dent through out history.

Trust me the last thing america and the west wants is a fair election for countires in the middle east. Anyone who comes in from a fair elcetion (one that isnt rigged by the west) will want to take back what has been taken from them. This goes againt the interests of big business conglomerates who run your politicians and your country.

Look at who they back and cheat into power in Iraq and Afganistan - one theif after another. Chalabis and Karzais. The west will never allow a leader in the middle east who is good for the interest of the middle east. They will alwasy choose someone corrupt to support the west's interests.

Go read some books and stop relying on CNN and FOX news to teach you history and politics.

 

What intervention in Libya tells us about the neocon-liberal alliance:

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts...ya_tells_us_about_the_neocon_liberal_alliance

 

USA=dictator

 

Obama's Doctrine of Preemptive War

The "anti-war candidate" puts some multilateral lipstick on George W. Bush's war pig

Matt Welch | March 29, 2011

http://reason.com/archives/2011/03/29/obamas-doctrine-of-pre-emptive

Anyone who was expecting the "anti-war" presidential candidate Barack Obama to be anything like an anti-war president was simply not paying sufficient attention to how he campaigned. It wasn't just the daily vows to escalate in Afghanistan, or the repeated promises to act "unilaterally" if need be. It was, as then-Reason Associate Editor David Weigel reported in 2008, that "he has called for, or retroactively endorsed, interventions in Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Sudan."

So we knew that President Obama would not be anti-war, but rather anti-dumb-war, however defined by his braintrust. And we further knew that said braintrust would largely be copacetic with the post-Munich, post-Bosnia worldview of Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power, and a generation of foreign policy minds flexible enough to oppose the war in Iraq almost at least half as vociferously as they endorsed war in Kosovo.

But what we didn't know was, where do they draw the all-important line of whether and when the United States should use deadly force? Until last night, that is.

"We knew that...if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world," the president said last night. "It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen....Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action."

Do you remember when Democrats recoiled at the doctrine of preemptive war? Last night was the final reminder that, with the exception of some diehards like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), Democrats when wielding power are only against Republican preemptive war. If anything, they are more promiscuous in choosing conflicts than their warmaking brethren on the other side of the aisle; just less likely to go all-in with ground troops. Does it satisfy the consciences of Bush-hating interventionists merely that Obama made more nice-sounding comments about subsuming America's lead role within a United Nations-blessed coalition? And have they thought through even for one moment the kind of bar-lowering precedent they're setting for the next Republican president to send ground troops into wherever the hell?

This latter question is not rhetorical, and the answer to it is occasion for despair. Here's what Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough told the Associated Press in an article published yesterday: "[W]e don't get very hung up on this question of precedent because we don't make decisions about questions like intervention based on consistency or precedent. We base them on how we can best advance our interests in the region."

Set aside the administration's ever-elastic definition of "interests," and instead grok this: The Democratic foreign policy best and brightest have admittedly adopted as their causus belli for dropping bombs on a sovereign country the same test that former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used for p*rnography: They know it when they see it. As for the rest of us taxpaying, war-weary plebes, we'll receive an "update" from the president now and then to let us know where his own eyes have taken him next.

So what's the danger of selectively and opportunistically preventing massacres? In Obama's relentless Third Way or Goldilocks-style interventionism—in which he's constantly taking some mythical middle road between the never-existing option of "turn[ing] away from the world" and a more plausible John McCain-style unrestrained war—there are always the dangers of an undefined mission, a fraying coalition, and a potential stalemate that exposes the faultline between a U.S.-led military action that falls short of beheading Libya's leader and an official U.S. policy that aims to accomplish precisely that task through some kind of non-military means.

But those are short-term concerns that may all turn out as well as can be expected. The medium-term issue is whether Washington has now irreversibly thumbed the scale on Arab Spring, making a complicated, sometimes thrilling and sometimes harrowing story of cross-border liberation into a conventional up-down question of America's will and blatant inconsistency on human rights. You could see that mission creep last night in Obama's own remarks, when he said things like, "I made it clear that Qaddafi had lost the confidence of his people and the legitimacy to lead, and I said that he needed to step down from power." And you could especially see it when he gave a stirring and inaccurate Bush-like boast that "wherever people long to be free, they will find a friend in the United States." (Tell it to the poor saps who live in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Mr. President.)

The Arab Spring, if the history of post-communist Europe is any guide (and it may not be!), will be successful in proportion to the ownership that the post-totalitarian countries have of their own revolutions and transitions. Injecting the overwhelming force of America into that process will, I think, delay, and not speed up, the eventual and hopefully inevitable Liberation Day.

And for those Democrats who are either cheering on or grimly supporting the president's actions, just remember this: Unless a Ron Paul-type miraculously emerges from the GOP field, the next Republican president now has an even lower bar than before when it comes to launching a preemptive war. There's a reason why the biggest fans of last night's speech were hawks like William Kristol: If you didn't like Iraq, you really won't like Iran. And when that day comes, please don't debase yourselves by crying crocodile tears over the Constitution, or pretending for even one second you are anti-war.

 

US launches new missile barrage at Libya

By LOLITA C. BALDOR and DONNA CASSATA Associated Press © 2011 The Associated Press

March 29, 2011, 1:16PM

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/top/all/7495879.html

WASHINGTON — A U.S. defense official says U.S. ships and submarines unleashed a barrage of cruise missiles at Libyan missile storage facilities in the Tripoli area late Monday and early Tuesday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discussed military details, said 22 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from the Mediterranean — the most in at least several days.

The latest barrage raised to well over 200 the total number of Tomahawks that have been fired at Libya since the Western military intervention began March 19.

The bulk of U.S. and NATO missile and bomb attacks on Libya have targeted air defenses, ammunition bunkers and other facilities that support Libyan ground forces and enable NATO to maintain a no-fly zone over the country.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

As the United States and other nations build ties with rebels and political opponents trying to oust Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, intelligence suggests al-Qaida and other terrorists have a small presence within the opposition group, a top military commander said Tuesday.

Adm. James Stavridis, the NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told Congress that officials have seen "flickers" of possible al-Qaida and Hezbollah among the rebel forces, but at this point no evidence there are significant numbers within the group's leadership.

Questions about who the rebels are have escalated as the U.S.-led coalition moved into its second week of attacks against Gadhafi forces, halting their progress and paving the way for the ragtag opposition to regain lost ground. At this point, Stavridis said, there is "more than a reasonable chance of Gadhafi leaving."

Despite those assertions, however, Stavridis and other U.S. officials have yet to articulate an end game for the operation, despite repeated criticism from Congress that the mission has not been clearly defined.

"As you look at the spectrum of how this unfolds it's premature to say what is our exit strategy," Stavridis told the Senate Armed Services Committee, adding that events are too fluid right now.

In London, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Mahmoud Jibril, a representative of the Libyan political opposition fighting Gadhafi, "to talk about the path forward." And she implored an international conference meeting on the Libya's future to band together to free the North African nation from Gadhafi's grip and convince his loyalists to abandon the regime.

A senior administration official said the U.S. will soon send an envoy to Libya to deepen relations with leaders of the rebels. But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, said the meeting doesn't constitute formal recognition of the opposition.

Eleven days into a military assault that has cost the Pentagon roughly $550 million so far, the U.S. was in the process of turning over control of the mission to NATO in the next day or two. The U.S. military, however, is likely to continue to play a significant role in the operation, including continued airstrikes, intelligence gathering, electronic warfare and aerial refueling.

The military has insisted that it is not coordinating attacks with the rebels to help advance their offensive, but simply working to protect the people. But the strikes paved the way for the rebels to regain a key city over the weekend, and begin again their march west toward Gadhafi strongholds.

President Barack Obama told the American people Monday night that U.S. intervention in Libya was necessary to prevent a slaughter of civilians. But he also said that ousting Gadhafi militarily would be a mistake, and suggested that the diplomatic road to his removal was the path to take.

Addressing officials from more than three dozen countries at the London conference, Clinton said military means alone won't force Gadhafi out after about 42 years in power, and that further sanctions and diplomatic pressure ought to be applied.

"All of us must continue to increase the pressure on and deepen the isolation of the Gadhafi regime through other means as well," Clinton said at the London conference. "All of us seated around this table must speak with one voice in support of a transition that leads to a brighter future for Libya."

Members of Congress, meanwhile, continued to express concerns about the cost of the mission.

The $550 million figure on the initial U.S. costs is not complete because it does not include such money as pay for U.S. sailors, airmen and other forces who would have been deployed somewhere in the world anyway. But it is the first official figure released on the cost of setting up the no-fly zone in Libya and protecting civilians.

Of that total, about 60 percent was "for munitions, the remaining costs are for higher operating tempo" of U.S. forces and of getting them there, Cmdr. Kathleen Kesler, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said Tuesday.

She said officials expect to spend about $40 million over the next three weeks as U.S. forces are reduced, and then see that level of costs continue monthly as the operation goes on.

Obama announced Monday that NATO would take command over the entire Libya operation on Wednesday, and Stavridis told senators the U.S. transfer of control would be in 24-48 hours. The turnover would keep Obama's pledge to get the U.S. out of the lead fast, but neither could estimate when the conflict might end.

 

Ummm, a preemptive war means starting a war before the other side does. With Libya, in case you weren't paying attention, the US inserted itself into a war that was already going on. There can be many legitimate arguments for or against intervention, but none of them are related to the concept of a preemptive war.

 

Uh, anti-war candidate?

Hardly.

That's what conservatives painted him to be to make him seem weak, but it was never anywhere near the truth, especially as we've seen over the last 3 years.

 

justified or not, what's hilarious is this and iraq being mentioned in the same breath by chicken hawks, you guys obviously still have issues about justifying that war