I promised something more about our interests in Libya, so I guess the time is now. It's a good time, actually, as Canadian CF-18s have now gone "live" on targets in Libya so we're in it in our own small-but-stretching-us-thin way. Our fighter jocks have been shut out in A-Stan, so at least they get a bit of action now, so good for them.
In the bigger picture, why the fuck are we there at all? Yes, yes; UN "whatever means necessary" declaration, NATO partners are involved sure, but the only national interest I can detect here is getting some action for our fighter pilots. Qaddafi is a clown who oppresses his people, but there are a long list of those the world over and he hasn't (recently) attacked any of our NATO partners, so the necessity for our military action is, well, non-existent.
The Arab League wanted a no-fly zone and then squawked when the Tomahawks started taking out Libyan AD assets. There is literally no pleasing that bunch, and by "that bunch" I mean Arab countries as a group. They say one thing in English for media consumption, and something entirely different in Arabic for their own people. They wanted armed intervention, they have lots of planes, let them do it.
Two Arab countries committed to the forces covering the no-fly but have not put up * so they should shut up. As you will know from reading this for years (ha!) I have no qualms about dropping the hammer on people who threaten us, and I have a fairly loose definition of "threaten" and "us". This however is a European and African problem, and mostly related to immigration. Not our fight, and that's assuming that we're actually fighting, which requires an opponent and a goal.
Obama has come out and said that killing Qaddafi is not a "goal". OK, so overt assassination and regime change is out, but then why the bombs and missiles? Protecting the "population" is apparently it, which is fine, but if you're not going to remove that which threatens them how do you protect them?
That's the first problem with what's being done. The next, and closely related, is what do we want to see come from this. In Mil-speak, that's "End State", and if the guys dropping the bombs have one in mind they aren't sharing. There is so much upheaval in the Arab world right now that it's hard to concentrate on just one country, and we don't know much about what will come from all of these revolutions.
Hamas? Taliban west? Hezbollah? Turkey (before they moved Islamic)? No one knows, and it scares a lot of people. I'm sure the results from Tunisia will be different from Yemen, but there is a good chance that most of the resulting governments (whatever their democratic roots) will not be friendly to us.
So what are we fighting for? We have no idea, and that's a problem; hopefully not a big one.
*Update 25 March: Qatari jets engaged. This may be the beginning of something constructive, we'll see.
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