Watching Morning Joe twist in circles continues to be an awful lot of fun.
I know somedisagree but why should we let the left off the hook for this kind of thing. All it does is enable them the next time they come after conservatives. Additionally the insistence of “limited war” against Gaddafi is nonsense.
He also referred to the French and Europe as the “JV” team.
There is a conflict here in one sense, If this was going to be done it needed to be done faster and a vote could have been asked of congress. I believe when the president spoke the words “Gaddafi must go” he did so without considering what that meant for the US. There is also the possibility that this was done as a sop to Egypt who fought a war with Gaddafi in the past.
In the meanwhile I intend to continue to tweak the left, in the end I hope this will all work out. As for the president regardless if the move was right or wrong or late we are committed and we have to stand behind the fight. In the words of a particular Giant: “I hope we win.”
Let’s stipulate the following right at the beginning.
1. We are in a fight, I hope we win.
2. Gaddafi being removed is a good thing.
3. Libyans have the right to determine their own fate.
All of that being said I must confess each day brings a new surprise to me.
I was surprised when Gaddafi was smart enough to offer a ceasefire outside of Benghazi, but I was even more surprised when he decided to flaunt. Honoring it would have put the allies in a difficult position, Gaddafi must have decided he could get by on bluff, bad move.
The willingness of the French to do close support against Armor surprised me. If the Libyan armor is struck on a regular basis this is going to stop any offensives in its tracks.
I’m wondering how long the Tomahawk strikes was planned, I suspect there have been existing contingency plans for such a strike.
Since a lot of Gaddafi’s fighters are from Niger I wonder how that will effect that country’s reaction to all of this, what will it mean?
Hugo Chavez was loudly supporting Gaddafi, He Castro and Morals of Bolivia are not amused:
“We know what’s going to happen: bombs, bombs, war, more suffering for the people, more death,” Chavez said in a televised speech in Caracas.
The socialist leader has been joined by Latin American allies including Castro and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega in strongly opposing U.S. and NATO military involvement in Libya, and in suggesting that reports of atrocities by Gadhafi’s troops were overblown or unproven.
In a column published in Cuba’s state media Saturday, Castro asked why the U.N. Security Council exists, and said NATO wields such a colossal military force that it “serves only to show the waste and chaos generated by capitalism.”
Speaking in Bolivia, President Evo Morales condemned the military intervention and said the strategy of some powerful countries has been to “invent a problem, and the problem is wanting to take control of oil.”
Birds of a feather and all that.
Politically the attacks by Michael Moore, Louis Farrahkan and Andrew Sullivan are going to help rather than hurt Obama in the long run.
It is actually funny watching the mainstream left twist itself into pretzels to support this war.
In 2001, the usual suspects had scheduled a Sept. 29 protest (“S29″) against the IMF and World Bank, which were scheduled to meet in D.C. that weekend. But after 9/11 the IMF/World Bank meetings were canceled, and so the “anti-globalization” rally instead became the first major anti-war protest of the Bush era.
Even more interesting, you might recall that the left always stressed that it was the Saudi’s that provided hijackers on 9/11 yet we are hitting Iraq. Now we see this from of all places the Huff Po:
According to a cache of al Qaeda documents captured in 2007 by U.S. special operations commandos in Sinjar, Iraq, hundreds of foreign fighters, many of them untrained young Islamic volunteers, poured into Iraq in 2006 and 2007. The documents, called the Sinjar documents, were collected, translated and analyzed at the West Point Counter Terrorism Center. Almost one in five foreign fighters arriving in Iraq came from eastern Libya, from the towns of Surt, Misurata and Darnah.
On a per capita basis, that’s more than twice as many than came from any other Arabic-speaking country, amounting to what the counter terrorism center called a Libyan “surge” of young men eager to kill Americans.
During 2006 and 2007, a total of 1,468 Americans were killed in combat and 12,524 were badly wounded, according to Pentagon records.
This division in our leadership could not have been more evident today watching Obama speak from Brazil followed by Clinton’s Paris conference. Obama was a blip, his vaunted verbal facility from the ’08 presidential election now seeming a distant memory from a particularly bland and pompous advertising campaign. Meanwhile, Clinton handled her press conference like a true statesman, fielding questions exactly with ready answers. She had thought things through and it showed. The woman had not been off playing golf or taking samba lessons in Corcovado. She obviously skipped the March Madness, as well, for more significant matters.
The protesters, some shouting anti-war slogans and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” were arrested Saturday after ignoring orders to move away from the gates of the White House. The demonstrators cheered loudly as Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon’s secret history of the Vietnam War that was later published in major newspapers, was arrested and led away by police.
Libya is now Vietnam? How about that.
Pam Geller reminds us of this quite from a certain Chicago Reverend:
Obama’s spirtual svengali, former Nation of Islam adherent Jerry Wright’s longtime close association with Farrakhan is well known. In April 2008, when he appeared at the National Press Club in order to address the controversy that had engulfed the Obama campaign because of his incendiary anti-American remarks from the pulpit, his security detail was made of members of the Nation of Islam. He and Farrakhan even once traveled to Libya to confer with Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi – as Wright recalled during the 2008 campaign: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit [Gaddafi] with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”
As you recall that didn’t happen, apparently they considered Sarah Palin a bigger threat after all it’s not like she would be the type to have Purim dinner with the PM in Israel or something. But we are apparently seeing the Palin Doctrine in action.
I have no idea how this is going to end, but the tribal nature of his military support is likely going help keep them loyal.
I still think that April 1st Gaddafi will still be in charge of most of Libya. What do you think?
Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa says Libya is declaring an immediate cease-fire and stopping all military operations.
Friday’s decision comes after the U.N. voted to authorized a no-fly zone and “all necessary measures” to protect the Libyan people, including airstrikes.
Koussa says the cease-fire “will take the country back to safety” and ensure security for all Libyans.
I actually didn’t think that Gaddafi was this smart. By calling a ceasefire he gets the chance to consolidate the gains he has made. He takes away the ability of NATO and the west to strike. As long as they are not attacking they will have a hard time justifying bombing.
This will also force the rebels in Benghazi to actually form a government and act like one. How they act and what they do will also be instructive.
Additionally Gaddafi is an old man, if this goes into a long diplomatic negotiation he will be able to string things along for at the very least months, and perhaps years. The end result? Either a partition or a face saving resignation and transfer of power to his sons.
This may or may not work out, but the solution will not be a quick one.
Imagine if the UN had been pressed into action two or three weeks ago. Rebels would still hold a large portion of Libya, and Gaddafi’s military would be forced to make a choice between an aging tyrant rapidly losing leverage and a populace clearly ready to seize its own destiny. Even a week ago, rebels still held key positions and Gaddafi was having trouble mounting any large-scale offensives.
Now Gaddafi can afford to offer a cease-fire. It protects his air force while changing very little on the ground. He has the main rebellion cut off in Benghazi and has secured his control over the other rebellious areas. He can afford to wait out the rebels and lay siege to Libya’s second-largest city, secure in the knowledge that the West won’t further intervene. It took them this long to arrange the no-fly zone, and Gaddafi knows that the West has no interest in another ground war in the region (and for good reasons).
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