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The biggest thing that went wrong in Libya was Gaddafi getting sodomized with a bayonet on video. Apparently a lot of little strongmen around the globe, including dear Vlad, obsessively watched that video over and over and got scared and determined to do whatever it takes to never be in that position. The other thing was everyone abandoning the Libyans once Gaddafi was gone leading to the necrotic, pussing wound it is today. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Sep 28, 2018 |
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Sep 28, 2018 21:34
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I still think flat out lying about our goal and using an internationally recognized no fly zone to implement regime change was the biggest mistake, and one which contributed directly to the suffering in Syria as our pleas for a safe zone or no fly zone were reasonably treated with hostility since there was every reason to believe we'd use them to overthrow Assad too (even if the US didn't actually have that intention at the outset, there was no way for other countries to know that, and we have a way of falling into patterns of mission creep regardless). Yeah. Russia would have backed their ally to some extent regardless, but they had every incentive to double down on keeping us the gently caress away from the country to the greatest extent they could do so instead of allowing us to play any kind of humanitarian role, because we showed that we use such efforts as a trojan horse. It's the same kind of strategic short-sightedness that saw the US use polio vaccination campaigns in Pakistan to try to track bin Laden.
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Sep 28, 2018 22:16
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Volkerball posted:There's a lot to unpack in this story This is somewhat of a dishonest headline, given the rest of the article - the analysis was less "democratic Syria bad" than "democratic Syria infeasible because the opposition probably isn't strong enough to overthrow Assad and we recommend against the active military intervention they'd need to pull it off". It's an interesting glimpse into US military and intelligence thoughts at the time. edit thought the article was from a threadpage later than it was, looks like this already got done
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Sep 28, 2018 22:32
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Sinteres posted:I still think flat out lying about our goal and using an internationally recognized no fly zone to implement regime change was the biggest mistake, and one which contributed directly to the suffering in Syria as our pleas for a safe zone or no fly zone were reasonably treated with hostility since there was every reason to believe we'd use them to overthrow Assad too (even if the US didn't actually have that intention at the outset, there was no way for other countries to know that, and we have a way of falling into patterns of mission creep regardless). Yeah. Russia would have backed their ally to some extent regardless, but they had every incentive to double down on keeping us the gently caress away from the country to the greatest extent they could do so instead of allowing us to play any kind of humanitarian role, because we showed that we use such efforts as a trojan horse. The no fly zone didn't regime change the place. It helped, but I'm pretty sure the rebel groups who ran most of the country did the regime changing.
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Sep 29, 2018 00:53
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Warbadger posted:The no fly zone didn't regime change the place. It helped, but I'm pretty sure the rebel groups who ran most of the country did the regime changing. We actively targeted regime forces on the ground to allow the rebels to advance, which sure as gently caress isn't what a no fly zone means, and those bombings continued well beyond any sort of safe area protecting the rebel holdouts prior to the start of our campaign. It's accurate to say we had a policy of regime change which we enacted by destroying the government's forces and allowing rebels to (try to) fill the vacuum. Next you're going to say we didn't overthrow the Taliban, the Northern Alliance did. Or we didn't drive Serbia out of Kosovo, because the KLA did. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Sep 29, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 01:30
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Sinteres posted:We actively targeted regime forces on the ground to allow the rebels to advance, which sure as gently caress isn't what a no fly zone means, and those bombings continued well beyond any sort of safe area protecting the rebel holdouts prior to the start of our campaign. It's accurate to say we had a policy of regime change which we enacted by destroying the government's forces and allowing rebels to (try to) fill the vacuum. That is actually correct. Though in both of your examples the local groups had a fuckload more assistance than Libyan rebels had, including a significant lasting ground component. Unlike your examples, though, the vast majority of the fighting and destruction of government forces in Libya was done by the rebels.
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Sep 29, 2018 01:47
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Semantics aside, the rebels had been on the backstep for a while before we intervened, and were about to lose their biggest stronghold (thus the urgency of our intervention, after we pretended Qaddafi's ranting meant he was going to murder every civilian in the city), and they won after our intervention, so even though they did take part, it was ultimately our decision to overthrow the regime.
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Sep 29, 2018 01:52
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Shockingly, the plan announced to prevent the rebels from being killed was a plan to prevent the rebels from being killed! Truly a huge lie!
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Sep 29, 2018 01:53
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fishmech posted:Shockingly, the plan announced to prevent the rebels from being killed was a plan to prevent the rebels from being killed! Truly a huge lie! Soft partition of the country would have sufficed if that was our only goal, and that's the one strategy we found that finally worked in Syria as well. Coordinating with them to go on to Tripoli was well beyond the ostensible purpose of our intervention.
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Sep 29, 2018 01:54
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Sinteres posted:Soft partition of the country would have sufficed if that was our only goal. This makes absolutely no sense. Sinteres posted:Coordinating with them to go on to Tripoli was well beyond the ostensible purpose of our intervention. It absolutely isn't. Did you have a stroke recently?
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Sep 29, 2018 01:55
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Sinteres posted:Soft partition of the country would have sufficed if that was our only goal, and that's the one strategy we found that finally worked in Syria as well. Coordinating with them to go on to Tripoli was well beyond the ostensible purpose of our intervention. Syria isn't over, yet. The past tense is premature.
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Sep 29, 2018 02:04
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Syria isn't over, yet. The past tense is premature. Nothing's forever, and I'd prefer a negotiated end to the American presence in the country over permanent occupation, but we seem to at least have a stable enough situation there now for everyone to take a deep breath and try to figure out where this needs to go. That doesn't mean they'll make the right decisions, but east of the Euphrates the immediate crisis seems to have subsided. Obviously Syria is far more complicated than Libya ever was though, so even if (for example) Turkey forces the issue and things get ugly in some way, that's not something anyone was really in a position to do if we'd carved out space for the rebels in Cyrenaica. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Sep 29, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 02:08
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fishmech posted:
The official reason for intervention in Libya was to enforce Security Council Resolution 1973, which was mostly about protecting civilians via a no-fly zone. General airstrikes against Gadaffi's forces, and helping the rebels take over the country, were not at all what anyone talked about and certainly not what the resolution called for. Of course the resolution was so vague as to practically guarantee a big escalation of violence.
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Sep 29, 2018 02:29
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Count Roland posted:The official reason for intervention in Libya was to enforce Security Council Resolution 1973, which was mostly about protecting civilians via a no-fly zone. So you agree it was part of the resolution then, like, come the gently caress on. You don't leave such things vague and open ended unless you want them to go beyond the most immediate event. It was completely understood that this would be an open mission governed by what was happening on the ground as to what would be done with it.
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Sep 29, 2018 02:35
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People forget the UN Resolution also said "authorizes all necessary means to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas, except for a "foreign occupation force"" and contained a bunch of anti-government planks like asset freezing, arms embargoes, preventing the importation of mercenaries, etc. They even amended the arms embargo to not include rebel groups by saying that the arms embargo didn't apply if supplying arms was meant to protect civilians and the civilian population. It was designed as a cassus belli against the Libyan government and Putin was absolutely furious at Medvedev for not vetoing it at the UN. It's one of the reasons Putin decided Medvedev wasn't cut out to remain Russia's head of state.
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Sep 29, 2018 03:06
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Sinteres posted:Semantics aside, the rebels had been on the backstep for a while before we intervened, and were about to lose their biggest stronghold (thus the urgency of our intervention, after we pretended Qaddafi's ranting meant he was going to murder every civilian in the city), and they won after our intervention, so even though they did take part, it was ultimately our decision to overthrow the regime. It was the rebel's decision to overthrow the regime and they did the actual overthrowing of the regime, including the vast majority of the fighting and dying against loyalists. The Misrata rebels were definitely on the retreat prior to intervention - but they weren't the only or even the largest rebel group in the country. They weren't even the ones who overran Tripoli. The current trend to downplay Qaddafi's threats and general disregard for civilian casualties at every point in the conflict is revisionist as gently caress, and it likely would have played out into a protracted grind even if the government forces won the siege in Misrata (and even if they hadn't literally killed every person). Warbadger fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Sep 29, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 03:46
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fishmech posted:So you agree it was part of the resolution then, like, come the gently caress on. You don't leave such things vague and open ended unless you want them to go beyond the most immediate event. It was completely understood that this would be an open mission governed by what was happening on the ground as to what would be done with it. e: paragraph removed. no point in arguing with fishmech of all people over little details ^^^ I never understood why Russia didn't veto the thing. Or China for that matter. I read the document myself and it was completely clear to me that this gave a free hand for almost anything. How these great powers, opposed to Western interventionism, let is pass is beyond me. Count Roland fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Sep 29, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 03:48
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Count Roland posted:^^^ I never understood why Russia didn't veto the thing. Or China for that matter. I read the document myself and it was completely clear to me that this gave a free hand for almost anything. How these great powers, opposed to Western interventionism, let is pass is beyond me. The answer is that 2011 was still a period of relative cooperation between the Eurasian states and the West including Russia. If anything there was some moderate mending of fences and Xi wasn't in power yet in China. If anything it has been a downward slope from that point onward.
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Sep 29, 2018 04:15
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Count Roland posted:e: paragraph removed. no point in arguing with fishmech of all people over little details At the time most experts figured neither the US nor Europe was actually interested in getting involved in a major conflict. Ghaddafi looked incredibly bad raving about just how hard he was gonna massacre people or blaming the rebellion on LSD in the Nescafe so China and Russia were interested keeping some visible distance - the last big no-fly zone certainly hadn't stopped Saddam from massacring people after all. They also weren't counting on the French being quite so enthusiastic about it or, more importantly, Ghaddafi's forces being so close to utter collapse.
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Sep 29, 2018 05:16
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https://twitter.com/nadabakos/status/1045904452220153857
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Sep 29, 2018 06:45
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Count Roland posted:e: paragraph removed. no point in arguing with fishmech of all people over little details It kinda puzzles me too. Some things that come to mind 1) nobody really liked Ghaddafi anyway, so it wasn't worth any effort to defend him. Mining the Red Sea after all is not a good way to make friends. 2) China probably wanted to minimize disruptions to Libyan oil production above all else, looking the other way while the west efficiently dispatched the government may have seemed like the best way to accomplish that at the time. 3) Maybe France et al. may some promises under the table? It's hard to identify quid pro quo in diplomacy because nobody ever wants to admit it.
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Sep 29, 2018 07:58
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Fuckin incelamists.
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Sep 29, 2018 09:44
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The real problem with Libya is how tge West just abandoned them (and Tunisia, for yhat matter) once Gaddafi was gone and didn't give the nee government the assistance it wanted or needed.
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Sep 29, 2018 10:19
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Yet Another Middle East Intervention (even if all it amounted to increased aid and training) would have been seen as political suicide to those oh so levelheaded folk in power at the time, even if it was undeniably the right thing to do, if only to bolster against oppurtunists rushing in to fill a power vacuum.
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Sep 29, 2018 10:28
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Rigged Death Trap posted:Yet Another Middle East Intervention (even if all it amounted to increased aid and training) would have been seen as political suicide to those oh so levelheaded folk in power at the time, even if it was undeniably the right thing to do, if only to bolster against oppurtunists rushing in to fill a power vacuum. Lmao. You are objectively wrong but you claim to be “undeniably right”? When was the last time Western intervention actually turned out to be the right thing? WWII?
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Sep 29, 2018 10:39
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I dunno Hard to say what could have happened, but completely dropping the ball and pretending nothing happened sure helped noone but extremist militia who were already poised to jump in. They couldve propped up an actual democratic process, couldve provided more aid to the people, all of these are couldves, only seen in retrospect, since Islamists throwing a shitfit after an election loss is a certainty. Im not a proponent of western intervention, far from it, and unanimously decrying intervention has a 99.9% chance of being right, but nothing is what has led us here, and here is pretty bad. (Also i didnt claim to be right, but an intervention would be, given earlier western contribution, its more a fix of what they broke thought.) Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Sep 29, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 13:18
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Nothingtoseehere posted:The real problem with Libya is how tge West just abandoned them (and Tunisia, for yhat matter) once Gaddafi was gone and didn't give the nee government the assistance it wanted or needed. Not really. The Libyan interim leadership purposely kept their distance from the West to avoid the appearance of impropriety.
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Sep 29, 2018 14:56
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https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1045771010342047745?s=19
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Sep 29, 2018 16:26
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Nothingtoseehere posted:The real problem with Libya is how tge West just abandoned them (and Tunisia, for yhat matter) once Gaddafi was gone and didn't give the nee government the assistance it wanted or needed. the West did provide it a lot of of the help the government asked for though. What European and the United States didn't provide though, but what Libya needed more than anything, security, was something the revolutionary government didn't want and couldn't ask for. Libya was somewhat unusual for a revolutionary government in that due to its oil wealth, it wasn't desperate for foreign capital or aid. I mean it wasn't all peaches, but immediately post-Qaddafi the government wasn't destitute. Libya's biggest problems were that there was no authority that could confidently command and control all the competing militias. The Ghadafist state, always small and unprofessional, had lost much of its authority and technical experts. What the government really needed was a reliable force that could defend important infrastructure like airports and reassure the public that they were safe again. It needed modern training for the nascent military and other professional jobs. The Libyan government though, and probably most of the Libyan public, adamantly opposed any peacekeeping presence. The opposition came from all kinds of directions, Islamist, leftist, nationalistic. Basically is was grounded in a fundamental lack of trust in western forces, and a fear that what happened in Iraq would be repeated in Libya. Meanwhile the security situation was so bad, training couldn't be done in country. I think its easy to talk in hypotheticals. 'Oh if only America hadn't abandoned Libya, it just needed more assistance, more aid.' However what if the medicine was a pill Libyans didn't want to swallow? If western diplomats couldn't wrangle a deal for peacekeepers, how would we feel about the marines landing again at the shores of Tripoli? Given real history I think there's no doubt lots of Libyans would have sought to drive them out by any means necessary, but who knows, maybe that would have been counteracted by a central government that's not constantly at risk of being kidnapped and murdered by random gangs of thugs.
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Sep 29, 2018 17:43
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As it is, the small American presence that did exist in the country was attacked, and that attack very likely cost the ruling party the presidency in 2016. In actual news, Russia says they've completed the first deliveries of the S-300 to Syria now. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Sep 29, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 17:50
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https://twitter.com/LibyanBentBladi/status/1046176611656249344
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Sep 30, 2018 04:39
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Was it Egypt that has such a bad sex creep problem that some women's rights metric rated them below Saudi loving Arabia in the Arab World? lol in Cyprus whenever there's creepy Arab tourists they just immediately assume Egyptians.
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Sep 30, 2018 04:51
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Has anyone here traveled to maurutanie recently? Outside the capital? Is it all super jihadiats in the north
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Sep 30, 2018 06:31
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https://twitter.com/ShibleyTelhami/status/1046300635933671425
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Sep 30, 2018 08:28
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It's 100% unfair, but it's hard for me to see how things like this help their cause. Of course we help the Saudis and UAE bomb their civilian infrastructure and immiserate/starve millions, but becoming a provable threat to major international hubs just seems likely to increase US support for the campaign against them. Grape posted:Was it Egypt that has such a bad sex creep problem that some women's rights metric rated them below Saudi loving Arabia in the Arab World? IIRC there was a significant amount of sexual assault happening during the major Arab Spring protests in Egypt, and I've definitely heard the line from someone living in Saudi Arabia that Egypt proves there are worse things for women than guardianship (though he made the same comment about sexual assault in the West). Just to be clear, I obviously reject that view and don't think the answer to bad behavior by men is the near-enslavement of women--I'm just pointing out a view from the region I've heard. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Sep 30, 2018 |
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Sep 30, 2018 12:03
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Grape posted:Was it Egypt that has such a bad sex creep problem that some women's rights metric rated them below Saudi loving Arabia in the Arab World? Egypt had really bad problems with street harrassment of women a few years ago. No idea if that changed, or how the country was ranked. Well, google turns up a lot on the subject: Cairo named world's 'most dangerous' city for women https://www.france24.com/en/20171016-cairo-deemed-worlds-worst-city-women Long form: http://www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/almost-every-egyptian-woman-is-subjected-to-sexual-harassment-a-1198328.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_sexual_assault_in_Egypt
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Sep 30, 2018 13:28
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Sinteres posted:It's 100% unfair, but it's hard for me to see how things like this help their cause. Of course we help the Saudis and UAE bomb their civilian infrastructure and immiserate/starve millions, but becoming a provable threat to major international hubs just seems likely to increase US support for the campaign against them. Dubai airport is presumably also a major supply hub for the coalition. They may calculate that disrupting that is more valuable than trying to play nice with people who are already trying to exterminate them. I mean, the Houthi banner should probably have been a bit of a clue that PR is not something they have ever had the slightest interest in.
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Sep 30, 2018 13:36
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Sinteres posted:It's 100% unfair, but it's hard for me to see how things like this help their cause. Of course we help the Saudis and UAE bomb their civilian infrastructure and immiserate/starve millions, but becoming a provable threat to major international hubs just seems likely to increase US support for the campaign against them. Unfair of course. The Houthi’s are in a war of extermination. They and their families may be killed. It’s the same as Syria’s war against its rebels in Idlib. They deserve the option to fight in any way they can manage against a much larger and more powerful opponent. It also can act as a form of propaganda warfare against UAE and Saudi populations that these enemies are not soon to be defeated. In peace, these attacks will disappear. It’s actually a good thing that states being heavily pressured and attacked have any means of defence. Before it was very difficult to bring the war home to the enemy. Makes the war seem not like something over there which doesn’t matter to me. It also can activate peace movements at home, the only way to win asymmetric war is when the more powerful enemy decides to stop fighting.
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Sep 30, 2018 16:49
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Coldwar timewarp posted:Unfair of course. Dubai's airport seems to be fully functional today, so what they did was validate Saudi Arabia and the UAE's contention that the Houthis are too dangerous to be allowed to take root in Yemen rather than demonstrate a legitimate deterrence capability. The Saudis and Emiratis will be saying that ending the campaign would just give the Houthis more time to develop more sophisticated methods of attack (and give Iran more space to set up shop themselves, whether it's true or not), and ensure that the next war will be far more costly, so they have no choice but to continue. I'm not saying the attack was unjustifiable (holding the smaller side to a higher moral standard than the bigger side is bullshit), but that it's only likely to extend the suffering of the Yemeni people, whose interests may not be the same as that of the Houthis. I've probably condemned the Saudi/Emirati campaign as much as anyone itt, so I'm not taking their side, just bemoaning the likelihood that this eases any pressure which might be building to force them to rein it in, just as the radicalization of the Syrian rebellion (notably including an ISIS attack on air travel) was seized by Russia as an excuse to support the Syrian government in their murderous campaign. I guess a reasonable counterpoint is that any international pressure to stop the campaign seems to be mostly imaginary though, since everyone keeps tripping over themselves to avoid offending the Saudis.
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Sep 30, 2018 17:17
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Maybe you are right, but they have a captive audience for their propaganda anyway, its a long war and people may get sick of it, reminded that its still going on. I don't think if they didn't use ballistic missiles or drone attacks the war would be any more just or brutal, them fighting back and not submitting is the problem. Israel reaches detente with Gaza and Lebanon who use rocket attacks, which are basically harassment tactics. When the conflict or flare up is over, back to normal. Those aren't enviable examples, but its way better for the Houthis if the conflict ends the same way.
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Sep 30, 2018 19:13
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