Libya: Now The War Begins
By The Associated Press
August 25, 2011 “AP’ CARACAS, Venezuela—Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Wednesday that Libya’s crisis is just beginning with the fall of Moammar Gadhafi’s government.
Chavez has been a staunch defender of Gadhafi throughout the conflict, and he condemned NATO airstrikes and killings of civilians.
“The drama of Libya isn’t ending with the fall of Gadhafi’s government. It’s beginning,” Chavez said. “The tragedy in Libya is just beginning.”
Libyans hunting Moammar Gadhafi offered a $2 million bounty on Gadhafi’s head and amnesty for anyone who kills or captures him as rebels battled Wednesday to clear the last pockets of resistance from the capital, Tripoli.
Asked about such efforts to hunt for Gadhafi, Chavez said they reflect a “madness let loose.”
“What the Yankee empire and the European powers … want is Libya’s oil,” Chavez said.
Chavez said his country’s embassy in Libya was looted, but the Venezuelan ambassador to Tripoli later corrected that account saying his official residence was looted by “armed groups” who stole belongings and vehicles.
“They didn’t leave anything in the house and fired some shots into the air,” Venezuelan Ambassador Afif Tajeldine told the Caracas-based TV channel Telesur. He called it a violation of international law by armed groups supported by NATO, and therefore by NATO itself.
Chavez said Tuesday that Venezuela would continue to recognize Gadhafi as Libya’s leader and would refuse to recognize a rebel-led interim government.
On Wednesday, he denounced the U.S. role in the conflict, saying it represents “the madness of an empire.”
“They’ve destroyed a country and they continue destroying it,” Chavez said. “How many Libyan children have died?”
He made the remarks in response to questions from reporters after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“Now they’re aiming against Syria,” said Chavez, referring to another ally of Venezuela.
(This version CORRECTS that Venezuelan ambassador to Libya says residence was looted, not embassy)
History Repeats Itself, With Mistakes of Iraq Rehearsed Afresh
With Gaddafi at large, a guerrilla war eroding the new powers is inevitable
By Robert Fisk
August 25, 2011 “The Independent“
Doomed always to fight the last war, we are recommitting the same old sin in Libya.
Muammar Gaddafi vanishes after promising to fight to the death. Isn’t that just what Saddam Hussein did? And of course, when Saddam disappeared and US troops suffered the very first losses from the Iraqi insurgency in 2003, we were told – by the US proconsul Paul Bremer, the generals, diplomats and the decaying television “experts” – that the gunmen of the resistance were “die-hards”, “dead-enders” who didn’t realise that the war was over. And if Gaddafi and his egg-headed son remain at large – and if the violence does not end – how soon will we be introduced once more to the “dead-enders” who simply will not understand that the lads from Benghazi are in charge and that the war is over? Indeed, within 15 minutes – literally – of my writing the above words (2pm yesterday), a Sky News reporter had re-invented “die-hards” as a definition for Gaddafi’s men. See what I mean?
Needless to say, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds as far as the West is concerned. No one is disbanding the Libyan army and no one is officially debarring the Gaddafi-ites from a future role in their country. No one is going to make the same mistakes we made in Iraq. And no boots are on the ground. No walled-off, sealed-in Green Zone Western zombies are trying to run the future Libya. “It’s up to the Libyans,” has become the joyful refrain of every State Department/ Foreign Office/Quai d’Orsay factotum. Nothing to do with us!
But, of course, the massive presence of Western diplomats, oil-mogul representatives, highly paid Western mercenaries and shady British and French servicemen – all pretending to be “advisers” rather than participants – is the Benghazi Green Zone. There may (yet) be no walls around them but they are, in effect, governing Libya through the various Libyan heroes and scallywags who have set themselves up as local political masters. We can overlook the latters’ murder of their own commanding officer – for some reason, no one mentions the name of Abdul Fatah Younes any more, though he was liquidated in Benghazi only a month ago – but they can only survive by clinging to our Western umbilicals.
Of course, this war is not the same as our perverted invasion of Iraq. Saddam’s capture only provoked the resistance to infinitely more attacks on Western troops – because those who had declined to take part in the insurgency for fear that the Americans would put Saddam back in charge of Iraq now had no such inhibitions. But Gaddafi’s arrest along with Saif’s would undoubtedly hasten the end of pro-Gaddafi resistance to the rebels. The West’s real fear – right now, and this could change overnight – should be the possibility that the author of the Green Book has made it safely through to his old stomping ground in Sirte, where tribal loyalty might prove stronger than fear of a Nato-backed Libyan force.
Sirte, where Gaddafi, at the very start of his dictatorship, turned the region’s oil fields into the first big up-for-grabs international dividend for foreign investors after his 1969 revolution, is no Tikrit. It is the site of his first big African Union conference, scarcely 16 miles from the place of his own birth, a city and region that benefited hugely from his 41-year rule. Strabo, the Greek geographer, described how the dots of desert settlements due south of Sirte made Libya into a leopard skin. Gaddafi must have liked the metaphor. Almost 2,000 years later, Sirte was pretty much the hinge between the two Italian colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.
And in Sirte the “rebels” were defeated by the “loyalists” in this year’s six-month war; we shall soon, no doubt, have to swap these preposterous labels – when those who support the pro-Western Transitional National Council will have to be called loyalists, and pro-Gaddafi rebels turn into the “terrorists” who may attack our new Western-friendly Libyan administration. Either way, Sirte, whose inhabitants are now supposedly negotiating with Gaddafi’s enemies, may soon be among the most interesting cities in Libya.
So what is Gaddafi thinking now? Desperate, we believe him to be. But really? We have chosen many adjectives for him in the past: irascible, demented, deranged, magnetic, tireless, obdurate, bizarre, statesmanlike (Jack Straw’s description), cryptic, exotic, bizarre, mad, idiosyncratic and – most recently – tyrannical, murderous and savage. But in his skewed, shrewd view of the Libyan world, Gaddafi would do better to survive and live – to continue a civil-tribal conflict and thus consume the West’s new Libyan friends in the swamp of guerrilla warfare – and slowly sap the credibility of the new “transitional” power.
But the unpredictable nature of the Libyan war means that words rarely outlive their writing. Maybe Gaddafi hides in a basement tunnel beneath the Rixos Hotel – or lounges in one of Robert Mugabe’s villas. I doubt it. Just so long as no one tries to fight the war before this one.
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‘Gaddafi switching to guerrilla mode’
Russia Today Published: 25 August, 2011, 02:48
Edited: 25 August, 2011, 12:37
Gaddafi has told the Libyan people that his retreat from his compound in Tripoli, which was seized by rebels on Tuesday, is a tactical move. Michael Maloof, an ex-Pentagon official, explains to RT why the war in Libya is far from at an end.
After almost six months of stalemate, the rebel assault on Tripoli came as a surprise to many. But strategically speaking, some analysts find the rebels advance has left them spread thinly and therefore vulnerable to a counter-attack by loyalist forces.
“Two thousand tribes have pledged support to Gaddafi. We have not heard of them yet,” remarks Michael Maloof, who used to be an official at the Pentagon.
Maloof believes Gaddafi’s leaving Tripoli to the rebels “could be a strategic retreat on his part to begin waging guerilla warfare.” And the colonel still has the means to do that.
“Where are the Scuds? Where are all the chemical weapons he is said to have? I don’t think those have been discovered yet,” he continues.
On the other hand, the Libyan rebels look “undisciplined”, especially when they start firing in the air to mark military successes. And the rebels’ National Transitional Council does not seem to be doing anything to bring this under control, Maloof told RT.
Moreover, it is hard to account for rebels’ progress without acknowledging they get foreign assistance on the ground.
“The rebels had to have had some expert assistance in moving and logistical support of some kind,” says Michael Maloof. “They would be there as advisors and moving people around suggesting how to deploy. There also had to be somebody on the ground to coordinate targets for NATO aircraft to bomb.”
Walid Phares from the Washington DC-based National Defense University believes that Gaddafi’s whereabouts and remaining military resources depend heavily on whether he managed to leave Tripoli on the day of the attack.
“If he didn’t leave Tripoli that day, then he is somewhere in Tripoli, hidden,” Phares said. “But that would be a negative thing for him because he would be found. If he had left Tripoli, it’s going to be very difficult for the current rebels, the future government, to find him in the desert.”
“Gaddafi has many supporters in his birthplace Sirt, and many supporters in the south. If Gaddafi has left for the south he could unleash a new insurgency. His regime would go, but would become the new rebels. And the current rebels now will become the new regime,” Phares added.
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