Libyan Uprising - Page 111

On June 10 2011 22:56 KwarK wrote:

The fact that we're partly to blame for him is probably also a factor. Fuck Blair and his deal in the desert.

Libyan rebels fought their way back into Zawiyah, a major oil port just 50km west of Tripoli, forcing troops loyal to Muammar Gaddafi to shut down the vital coastal highway that leads into neighbouring Tunisia.

Guma el-Gamaty, a London-based spokesman for the opposition political leadership council, told the Associated Press news agency on Saturday that rebel fighters have taken control of a large area in Zawiyah's west.

Witnesses and rebel fighters said gun battles were raging inside the port city.

"The situation is very bad in Zawiyah. There's been fierce fighting since the morning," Mohammed, a Zawiyah resident who gave only his first name, told the Reuters news agency.

Anti-Gaddafi forces gained control of the city in March but lost it two weeks later in an assualt by an elite brigade commanded by Gaddafi's son Khamis.

Since then rebels were left with tenuous footholds in Libya's far west near its border with Tunisia.

Foreign journalists travelling through Zawiyah on a coastal highway leading from west Tripoli to the Tunisian border, reported that they were diverted via backstreets with a police escort as parts of it were sealed off by Libyan soldiers.

The highway was clogged with soldiers and loyalist gunmen carrying assault rifles, some patrolling the road, others manning checkpoints.

The coastal road is a key artery from neighbouring Tunisia for delivery for food, fuel and medicine for the Gaddafi regime.

MISRATA, Libya – Libyan rebels Monday broke out toward Tripoli from the opposition-held port of Misrata 140 miles to the east, cracking a government siege as fighters across the country mounted a resurgence in their four-month-old revolt against Moammar Gadhafi.

The rebels gained a diplomatic boost as well when the visiting the German foreign minister said the nascent opposition government was "the legitimate representative of the Libyan people." Guido Westerwelle was visiting Benghazi, the capital of the rebel-held east of the country, to open a liaison office and hand over medical supplies.

He stopped short of full diplomatic recognition of the Transitional National Council, as has the United States, awaiting the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi from his more than 40-year rule in the oil-rich North African country.

Germany has refused to participate in NATO airstrikes in Libya and withheld its support for the U.N. resolution that allowed the attacks.

What started as a peaceful uprising against Gadhafi has become a civil war, with poorly equipped and trained rebel fighters taking control of the eastern third of Libya and pockets of the west.

But the fighting had reached a stalemate until last week when NATO began the heaviest bombardment of Gadhafi forces since the alliance took control of the skies over Libya under a U.N. resolution to protect civilians from Gadhafi's wrath. NATO has been pounding Gadhafi military and government position with increasing vigor and the rebels are again on the move.

On May 23 2011 10:51 HellRoxYa wrote:


Too bad there's nothing backing you up, at all. I'm assuming 9/11 was an inside job as well? It'd have similar reasons, after all.

Libyan rebels have wrested two key villages in the western mountains from forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, the country's embattled leader, as they continued to push deeper into government-held territory south of the capital, Tripoli.

The two villages in the mountain area about 150km south-west of Tripoli had been used for months by pro-Gaddafi forces to shell rebel-held towns.

"The revolutionaries now control Zawiyat al-Babour and al-Awiniyah after pro-Gaddafi forces retreated this morning from the two villages," Abdulrahman, a rebel spokesman in the nearby town of Zintan, told Reuters.

In Gharyan, a Gaddafi-held town that forms the gateway from Tripoli to the mountains, there was an undercurrent of tension as the frontline moves closer to the capital.

A rebel spokesman in Nalut, a town in the western mountains, said there were no casualties from the shelling on Wednesday.

"Gaddafi's forces bombarded Nalut ... Over 20 Grad rockets landed in the town. They bombarded from their positions ... around 20km east of Nalut," he said, adding that they had also shelled the Wazin-Dehiba Tunisia border crossing.

THREE months into the war in Libya, and confident talk of Muammar Qaddafi’s forces being broken by NATO’s bombs is being accompanied by worries that the alliance itself is feeling the strain of a prolonged campaign. The British naval chief says that, if the war drags on beyond the autumn, he will have to take “challenging decisions” about how to deploy his ships. His French counterpart complains that if his only carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, remains off Libya for the rest of the year it will have to be out of service for maintenance throughout 2012. Norway, one of the few stalwarts ready to bomb Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, says its small air force can no longer cope: it will cut back operations now, and cease them altogether on August 1st.

All this is just after Gates parting speech on NATO.

On June 20 2011 04:02 DeepElemBlues wrote:


Who would have thought it would have been a conflict spearheaded by France, of all nations, that would have turned the cracks in NATO into chasms?

Not saying that to say the French are cowards, it's just that France left NATO in all but name when DeGaulle was president and its very ironic that NATO has its biggest strains ever thanks to France getting it involved in a war.

Gates is rightly frustrated, the Euros don't pull their weight in Afghanistan and complain about being there, and now that they decided to do something closer to home basically on their own initiative, they can't handle that either.

Europe's spending on defense is seriously out of whack, but with the mess they're in they don't have the money to properly reconstitute their militaries either.

This war was hastily rushed into and there has been little if any proper planning. Now it looks like that with the military strain on Europe and political strains the war is causing here in the US, eventually the rebels will be forced into one big push for Tripoli with NATO giving all the air-support it can. Whether they win or not NATO will be gone after that battle, a perfect recipe for the rebels to not quite succeed and Libya to be in civil war indefinitely.

Great war planning, NATO!

Man, if NATO can't hold it together while bombing a country that's behind 20 years in technology, what are they going to do when China or Russia start making geopolitical moves.

On June 20 2011 04:02 DeepElemBlues wrote:
Europe's spending on defense is seriously out of whack

Man, if NATO can't hold it together while bombing a country that's behind 20 years in technology, what are they going to do when China or Russia start making geopolitical moves.

Not really, it's about in line with our international ambitions. We just don't want to do as much as the US.

On June 20 2011 05:44 0mar wrote:



Man, if NATO can't hold it together while bombing a country that's behind 20 years in technology, what are they going to do when China or Russia start making geopolitical moves.

Winning the war against Khadafi would be easy to do in a swift offensive, but that would mean losing the peace again, just like in Iraq. Now the libyans has a shot at making this their own revolution even if there is an invervention going on.

We haven't been elected world police,

On June 20 2011 06:09 DeepElemBlues wrote:


lolwut

UN Security Council anyone? Like it or not, the UNSC is the "world police," that's what it was set up to do, that's what it does, it was "elected" by all the countries of the world that have signed the UN charter. It's the only body in the world that can give legal permission for war except in cases of self-defence.

On June 20 2011 05:59 DeepElemBlues wrote:


They'll depend on the US to provide 85% of the muscle and 90% of the money, as usual.



I disagree, and give Libya as my example. Europe's military spending is nowhere near in line with their international ambitions. They wouldn't have been able to mount any kind of campaign at all without the US pulling most of the weight.

Libya is about the easiest target Europe could pick to fight a war with, it's right there across the Mediterranean, plenty of land air bases in Italy nearby, and they still have pretty much run through their resources and would have had to stop already if we weren't resupplying them. Even with Italy so close they still need carriers for faster responses to conditions on the ground in Libya and they don't have enough carriers to keep up with the strain. A US carrier goes on a six-month campaign and it's ready for duty again within weeks if necessary. France is now saying that if the Charles de Gaulle has to stay on station much longer participating in the war it will have to be taken out of operation for maintenance and resupply for all of 2012. The Royal Navy is also saying it will have to make sacrifices soon elsewhere to keep up the level of forces it has for use against Libya and even then they will have to start withdrawing soon anyway.

These are not countries whose military spending is in line with their ambitions, these are countries with military spending dangerously out of line with their ambitions.

Afghanistan is another example.

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) -- Libya's government said NATO warplanes struck a residential neighborhood in the capital Sunday and killed nine civilians, including two children. Hours later, NATO confirmed one of its airstrikes went astray.

The incident gave supporters of Moammar Gadhafi's regime a new rallying point against the international intervention in Libya's civil war. The foreign minister called for a "global jihad" on the West in response.

Early Sunday morning, journalists based in the Libyan capital were rushed by government officials to the damaged building, which appeared to have been partly under construction. Reporters were later escorted back to the site, where children's toys, teacups and dust-covered mattresses could be seen amid the rubble.

In a statement issued late Sunday at Brussels headquarters, the trans-Atlantic alliance said airstrikes were launched against a military missile site in Tripoli, but "it appears that one weapon did not strike the intended target and that there may have been a weapons system failure which may have caused a number of civilian casualties."

"NATO regrets the loss of innocent civilian lives and takes great care in conducting strikes against a regime determined to use violence against its own citizens," said Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, commander of the anti-Libya operation.

Foreign Minister Abdul-Ati al-Obeidi told reporters nine civilians, including two children, were killed in the explosion and said 18 people were wounded. He said the strike was a "deliberate attack on a civilian neighborhood," and follows other alleged targeting of nonmilitary targets such as a hotel, an oxygen factory and civilian vehicles.
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