I've been thinking the same of all the people trying to equivocate this action with Iraq and hoping no one notices all the glaring differences. But, I really came to post about psyops. I hadn't heard much about psyops in the news, but figured they must be doing stuff because the best way to win would be for Libyan soldiers to desert. So, here's a little article I found. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011...Libya-includes-lead-roles/UPI-81281301383800/ [rquoter]U.S. support in Libya includes lead roles Published: March. 29, 2011 at 3:30 AM WASHINGTON, March 29 (UPI) -- A U.S. air campaign to turn the Libyan army against leader Moammar Gadhafi will expand, even as Washington turns the operation to NATO, military officials said. U.S. President Barack Obama emphasized in a speech Monday night the U.S. role in the assault would be limited, saying the United States would "play a supporting role -- including intelligence, logistical support, search and rescue assistance, and capabilities to jam regime communications." But this support work includes taking the lead in gathering intelligence, intercepting Libyan radio transmissions and using the information to attack Libyan forces on the ground, military officials told The New York Times. It also includes using psychological operations in the hope of breaking the Gadhafi force's will to fight, the officials said. This includes broadcasting messages in Arabic and English, telling Libyan soldiers and sailors to abandon their posts and go back to their homes and families, and to defy Gadhafi's orders. The idea is to hit Libyan forces hard enough and fast enough that they'll give up and oust Gadhafi on their own, the officials told the Times. Obama has said Gadhafi must go, but he stressed Monday, in his first major address since ordering the U.S. airstrikes on Gadhafi forces and artillery March 19, that directing U.S. troops to forcibly remove him from power would be a step too far. "If we tried to overthrow Gadhafi by force, our coalition would splinter," he said. "We would likely have to put U.S. troops on the ground, or risk killing many civilians from the air. The dangers faced by our men and women in uniform would be far greater. So would the costs, and our share of the responsibility for what comes next." The White House strategy is to persuade the Libyan forces through military might and psychological actions that "they're fighting for a lost cause," retired U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper told the Times. "You're probably dealing with a force that may not be totally motivated to continue this for the long haul," he said. The United States has supplied much more firepower than any other country, officials also told the Times. The allies have fired nearly 200 Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles since the campaign began. All but seven of them were from the United States. The United States and its allied partners have each flown about 370 attack missions, but U.S. forces have dropped 455 precision-guided munitions compared with 147 from other coalition members, the newspaper said.[/rquoter]
Not as much fun as watching idiot republicans like Newt and Mr. 911 Giuliani stump their toe and lose their minds opposing all things Obama.
And you become an even bigger joke. If your little mind can't distinguish this from Iraq , stop doing drugs. It's probably too late though. Seriously, you must have no conscience at all because so much of what you post is completely dishonest. The truth of an issue doesn't matter to you at all, just the point of trying to make one side look bad while protecting the other.
You're right, it's indistinguishable - from the no fly zone over northern iraq which existed throughout the 90's.
watch to the end, but Scott Ott? that's a man i could get behind. no homo. <iframe title="YouTube video player" width="853" height="510" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JiL-mDY__ac" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Rest assured, nobody will commit this error; because nobody watches the beginning, nobody will watch the end. Uploaded with ImageShack.us
<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/s8Cvs1wkOrY?hd=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Since at least the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy has been drifting- comprising a series of ad hoc interventions absent a national consensus about when to use force and lacking an underlying set of reliable, core principles. That drift continues with President Obama's speech about our war with Libya- and includes the simple fact that our commander in chief couldn't even acknowledge that we're in a war and that we've taken sides against someone he calls a "tyrant who murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized innocent people around the world -- including Americans who were killed by Libyan agents." Dropping bombs, shooting missiles, deploying massive amounts of personnel and power - all of these are generally understood as acts of war. But Obama can't admit that we're waging war because then he would have to acknowledge what his critics correctly underscore: Constitutionally, he doesn't have a right to do this sort of thing unilaterally when the country isn't facing a clear and present danger. We know this because of Obama himself. In 2007, while a US senator and presidential candidate, he flatly told The Boston Globe, "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." No president was worse at foreign policy than George W. Bush, who came to power amid promises of a "humble foreign policy" and then mired us in two intractable conflicts that even supporters grant were poorly executed under his command. Yet even Bush pushed to get a fig leaf of authorization from Congress before the shooting began. Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, instead brandished unanimity among NATO leaders as proof we were doing the right thing: "All 28 allies have...now authorized military authorities to develop an operations plan for NATO to take on the broader civilian protection mission under Resolution 1973." As if NATO, a Cold War alliance conceived to protect the free nations of Europe from a threat that went missing 20 years ago, is a substitute for, say, the American people and their elected representatives. Who knows how long will be in Libya - whether under US or NATO command. It might be a few months or it might be many years. But this much is certain: Our actions there won't have been authorized by the American people. And they provide no guide to where we'll end up next.
Welcome home Will. the word you're looking for is Mercenary. The Libyan Job Your sons and daughters in Libya, fighting for France. By William Saletan Posted Monday, March 28, 2011, at 7:28 AM ET Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went on the Sunday shows to defend the U.S. military intervention in Libya. They emphasized its "humanitarian" motives, noting repeatedly that Muammar Qaddafi had vowed to crush his domestic adversaries with "no mercy." But under interrogation, Gates and Clinton exposed what's really driving our participation in the Libya campaign: the wishes of other governments. On This Week, Jake Tapper asked Gates: "Do you think Libya posed an actual or imminent threat to the United States?" Gates answered, "It was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest, and it was an interest for all of the reasons Secretary Clinton talked about: the engagement of the Arabs, the engagement of the Europeans, the general humanitarian question …" On Meet the Press, David Gregory asked why we're committing military resources if Libya isn't a vital U.S. interest. Clinton responded by citing other considerations: Do [the Libyans] have a major influence on what goes on in Europe because of everything from oil to immigration? And, you know, David, that raises a very important point. Because you showed on the map just a minute ago Afghanistan. You know, we asked our allies, our NATO allies, to go into Afghanistan with us 10 years ago. They have been there, and a lot of them have been there despite the fact they were not attacked. The attack came on us, as we all tragically remember. They stuck with us. When it comes to Libya, we started hearing from the U.K., France, Italy, other of our NATO allies. This was in their vital national interest. The U.K. and France were the ones who went to the Security Council and said, "We have to act, because otherwise we're seeing a really violent upheaval with a man who has a history of unpredictable violent acts right on our doorstep." In short, attacking Libya was the Europeans' idea—not just for moral but for self-interested reasons—and we're going along to pay them back for helping us in Afghanistan. When Clinton tried her humanitarian shtick on Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer pointed out that we aren't attacking Syria's ruling family, which has massacred many thousands of dissidents. To this, Clinton could only answer, "Well, if there were a coalition of the international community, if there were the passage of a Security Council resolution, if there were a call by the Arab League, if there was a condemnation that was universal …" Advertisement In other words, morals alone won't move us to attack. We'll do it only if other nations care. When Tapper asked the same question—why we're attacking Libya but not Syria or the Ivory Coast—Clinton argued, "There's not an air force being used. There is not the same level of force. The situation is significantly different enough that the world has not come together." The no-air-force claim may be true of the present crackdown in Syria. But in 1982, Syria's ruling family used its air force to bomb a rebellious city and then sent in tanks and ground troops to complete the massacre. Amnesty International estimated the death toll at 10,000 to 25,000. In the current Libyan crisis, by comparison, Amnesty reported a week ago, "It is clear that hundreds have died in Libya since unrest began. This has included people deliberately killed, killed as a result of excessive or indiscriminate use of lethal force, those who were caught in the ongoing armed conflict, and as a result of human rights abuses." That's hundreds versus thousands. So a regime's level of violence against its citizens obviously doesn't drive our military decisions. Nor does the use of air power to slaughter civilians. What has drawn us into Libya but not Syria is the last thing Clinton mentioned: "The world has not come together" to call for action in Syria or the Ivory Coast. Fatalities and air power don't matter unless they produce international support for intervention. "Each of these situations is different," said Clinton. "But in Libya, when a leader says, 'Spare nothing, show no mercy,' and calls out air force attacks on his own people, that crosses a line that people in the world had decided they could not tolerate." The key phrase isn't no mercy or air force. It's they could not tolerate. Not we, but they. We're outsourcing our standards for intervention. That's why our role in the Libya mission is so limited. This project isn't our baby. We're doing it for the Europeans. As Clinton put it: NATO assuming the responsibility for the entire mission means that the United States will move to a supporting role. Just as our allies are helping us in Afghanistan, where we bear the disproportionate amount of sacrifice and the cost, we are supporting a mission through NATO that was very much initiated by European requests joined by Arab requests. So the good news is that exposure of U.S. forces in Libya will be carefully restricted. The bad news is the reason for this restriction: We're just there to do a job for the Europeans. That doesn't mean we're insincere about the moral case for intervention. But it does mean that, ultimately, we're basing our military decisions on the wills of other governments. In fact, the Obama administration appears to be taking this idea one step further. Tapper asked Clinton to reconcile the Libya mission with two quotes from 2007. One was Obama's: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." The other was Clinton's: "If the administration believes that any—any—use of force against Iran is necessary, the president must come to Congress to seek that authority." Yesterday, looking back, Clinton explained the discrepancy this way: "I don't think that this kind of internationally authorized intervention, where we are one of a number of countries participating to enforce a humanitarian mission, is the kind of unilateral action that either I or President Obama was speaking of several years ago." In other words, when the mission is "internationally authorized," the president doesn't have to consult Congress. I'm no Tea Partier, but that sure sounds like a substitution of foreign for congressional authority. It's worse than outsourcing. Outsourcing is when you hire somebody abroad to do what you want. In Libya, we're doing the opposite. We're hiring ourselves out to do what somebody abroad wants. We're providing what Gates calls our "unique capabilities"—scores of Tomahawk missiles, tanking equipment, surveillance and reconnaissance systems—to an international coalition whose authority somehow replaces consultation with our elected representatives. I don't see any basis for that in the text or spirit of the Constitution. And when many of the regimes being consulted aren't exactly democratic themselves, I wonder where this doctrine of deference will lead us.
Looks like Will just silenced SamFisher. SamFisher had to resort to a deflecting, non-content related response.
IMO, just because it's not in your immediate national interest, doesn't mean it's not in your long-term national interest. As long as America doesn't decide to stay in Libya, this will be great for them. A free, democratic Libya will appreciate their work, they have a lot of oil, and there will be a lot of business to be done when reconstructing the country's infrastructure. An added bonus is that it wins the hearts of some Arabs/Iranians. As long as the US does not establish a presence in Libya, this could end up being one of the best millitary decisions they've made in recent history. Little risk, lots of reward, costs will be covered. Many may not realize it, but right now the US is not in a position to lose allies (France/Italy/Turkey) or inflame enemies (Arab terrorists). Being in a weak financial situation, with a population that seems to be on the edge and the armed forces heavily engaged in two countries, there is not much room to take risk. Unfortunately, the benefits of this action will be spread out over a long period of time, so few will attribute it directly to Obama's government.
How high do we think is the risk that this develops into a similar situation to Afghanistan (where the USA also supported the rebels, only to realize that they later turned against the West)?
Gadafi was once the young revolutionary. We once trained the Taliban. I hope they learned from the mistakes.
Well one thing is for sure the military industrial complex wins either way. They get to replace tomahawk missiles at $1.5 million, probably on a no-bid caost plus basis. In addition Qadafi's forces are fighting with arms we sold them when he was one of our dictators prior to a couple of months ago. After the fall of Qadafi we will need to give "defense" aid to the new Libyan government. Sweet for the military contractors. Sucks for Texas teachers and kids.
I was concerned about this from the very beginning because of how fragmented Libya is. But when the bloodshed started and continued, I became more open to the idea regime change was necessary. IMO, once NATO got engaged, it became clear the vampire had to go.
