Seems a scattered uprising against Ghaddaffi [Qadafi, Gadaffi, Ghadaphi, whatever], led in a rather haphazard way by a gaggle of folks divided in their aims and their loyalties, grew into a civil war as military units in eastern Libya and elsewhere defected and took up arms against their former master. So far so good. Yet, there's something amiss here - we really don't seem to know what the hell is happening in Libya, and the reason I think is that we have no means of reflecting in any depth on the mind at work in Tripoli. This, along with what is obviously a lack of tactical and strategic wit, will doom any military intervention in Libya, even if such intervention is legitimate.
To begin. The revolutionary fervor sweeping across north Africa and into Arab nations like Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, has taken many forms in its protean growth, and in this way this regional unrest resembles somewhat Europe in 1848. Consider the differences between Egypt and Libya. Libya is a 'nation' cobbled together from two lopsided halves, and eastern Libya has never sat easy with the much larger western region. Instead of a unified people with a shared history or ideology, what we have is a loosely tied gaggle of tribes and a swirling current of interests often at odds. In fact, it's safe to say that in western and central Libya, the Maximum Leader enjoys considerable support for any of a number of reasons. This is why the larger success of the rebel forces have been concentrated in the east, and why moreover those successes have not included any advance through conquest of territory.
What's more, Ghadafi has more or less systematically destroyed every mediating institution that could stand between him and 'his people'. Not even the military is unified. It has a weak officer corps, and there seems to be an uneven connection between the military and people it supposedly serves. This is all simply consistent with Kadafi's radical ideology. To his mind, his will is the immediate manifestation of the General Will of The People. When he says therefore that 'The People' love him, he means it quite literally - how could they not love the Leader who incarnates their universal, general will, and thus rules with justice and a sure hand?
How different Libya is from Egypt. The latter has, for instance, a unified military with a strong officer corps, a military moreover that commands the respect and even, it seems, the love of the people as a whole. And Egypt itself is a land with a long, complicated, often contradictory history, but one the Egyptian people claim with pride. Just think of how often we heard about the 'four thousand years of history' as the early movements of their revolution unfolded. Finally, whatever one may say of Mobarak, he did not spend decades dismantling every mediating institution in the country so that there would be nothing and no one between him and the Egyptian people. Indeed, it seems that one of the problems in Egypt was and is that many of those institutions may just be too sclerotic and thus in need of radical overhaul. For these and other reasons, it's safe to say that while the Egyptian revolution is far from over, it will always be a far different affair from the civil war in Libya.
Note that I call it a civil war. As soon as the first shots were fired, and troops defected and brought their artillery units and fighter jets along, the uprising in Libya became a civil war - it's just that simple. So, we and other nations are intervening in a civil war, which by definition is a vicious fratricidal struggle, even when the various factions barely recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. To take up arms and wade into a civil war is - again, by definition - to take sides.
Yet we steadfastly deny this reality. Thus we have embarked on a venture that is muddled from the start. Consider - the supposed mandate of this action is to 'protect civilians', but who are the civilians in this case? How do you distinguish between those who are protesting and thus applying pressure through civil disobedience, and the rebel forces that provide the force to back up that political pressure? Those marching and gathering in city squares, and those firing artillery and strafing loyalist positions are two sides of the same movement. When Gadaffi attacks either one of 'em, he attacks the same movement. Do we only bomb his forces when they are attacking the protesters, but not when the attack the rebel armies? Whatever the impossible answer to that intractable question, it's irrelevant in a way since we have mounted concerted aerial and missle bombardments designed to 'degrade Libyan command and control abilities', which is tantamount to helping rebel forces destroy the official Libyan military and thus overthrow the regime.
What's more, the tactics used in this baffling engagement are incoherent. Cruise missiles, strategic bombers, and strike fighter-bombers are impressive and powerful, and they certainly allow 'allied forces' to deliver massive firepower efficiently, but I hardly think they are the best tools at hand if the goal is the protection of civilians, even if one wishes to protect 'em while helping one side win the civil war. They make a notoriously blunt instrument, and inevitably kill civilians, often in large numbers. As soon as the first civilian casualties are counted, especially if they are in loyalist strongholds like Tripoli, the veneer of 'legitimacy' will come right off this thing. Far better would have been the use of such close air support aircraft as the A10, the C130 gunship, and various attack helicopters, all of which could take out loyalist armor and artillery and troops, while allowing their pilots greater precision. Fighter-bombers could then be restricted to engagements with their like numbers in the loyalist air force.
Of course, to take such action would require that we come clean and, as I've said ad nauseum, admit that we've intervened in a civil war within a sovereign, if criminal, nation, and that we're determined that one side prevail over the other. The allied air power would in that case constitute the de facto air force of the rebel forces.
Now, I offer no brief in support of such intervention. I find it dangerous and futile. It is dangerous for several reasons. We really don't know who if anybody is really leading the rebel forces, and thus we have no one to talk to and treat with as the war comes to an end, if indeed we know what the 'end' of such a civil war might look like. [What does 'winning' look like if you have no unified opposition?] We can understand this by way of contrast - consider that whatever one thinks of the Confederacy, a Confederate victory would have been as clear as that of the Union, because the Confederacy was a unified political body. We can't tell what the hell the opposition in Libya really is, or what they really want, apart from their well-justified loathing for Qadaphi. So, such intervention is dangerous. It is futile for all the reasons already given: the ambiguity of the objective given the nature of the opposition, the poor tactics reflecting poor strategic thinking, and so on.
Still, if we are going to do it, the let's at least do it right. To do so, however, would expose pilots to immediate risk - they could be captured or killed, as they would be vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. It would be politically unpalatable, as much amongst the Arab League and here in the US. Finally, to intelligently and effectively intervene in such a civil war would require the kind of strategic and tactical, as well as political, reflection that no one in Washington, London, France, or anywhere else among the 'allied nations', is capable of. The only real strategic thinking manifest in the whole affair has been among the Russians and the Chinese - let that terrify you as it may. The result is that we do not get a coherent military and political intervention in a messy civil war, but we get instead a half-assed 'no fly zone', historically the costliest and most pointless response to a regime's dastardly deeds. I don't see how any good can come from this.
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