CommanderSock CommanderSock:
Thanos Thanos:
NATO air power vs. Moammar's collection of obsolete Soviet garbage? Ought to be over in about five hours. Or less. Hopefully they have orders to shoot down all his helicopters too in order to prevent a repeat of what happened to the Kurds and Shias in Iraq just after Desert Storm ended.
So why don't we do the same with Yemen? Bahrain? Ivory Coast? Western Sudan?
Why don't we help the Behrani people with liberation? Commit a few high end jets their way? Bomb the Saudi troops imposing order? Perhaps Ivory Coast? Too far from Europe to be of concern? Cocoa not as important as oil? The locals too primitive to be worth the effort?
Why Libya all of a sudden? What's so important about them?
It can't be the civilian deaths, obviously that doesn't phase our leaders, otherwise they'd never have supported Gaddafi and his ilk in the first place.
The Saudi/Bahrani thing is deeply complicated by Sunni/Shia ethnic conflicts. After Iraq this is the last sort of thing to go meddling in again. Sudan is being separated into two states that should hopefully end the worst of that conflict. Ivory Coast is a horrible mess as bad as the Congo that is probably literally impossible to fix. And going into Yemen could be enough to topple the state into Al Qaeda's hands.
Libya has none of these problems. Get rid of Gadhaffi and the problem ends right then and there. It won't be like Iraq or aAfghanistan, it'd be far more like the entirely justifiable international intervention in Kosovo. Just threatening to impose the no-fly zone forced Gahdaffi to back off from attacking Benghazi. Wipe his air force out, and start bombing his armoured forces, and his entire effort would collapse, and a major humanitarian disaster would be averteed with very little effort and without dropping a couple hundred thousand Western troops into the mix to make everything even worse.
This ain't neo-conservative warmongering, it's a clear case where removing a dictator would result in immediate improvement and allow a democarcy movement to flourish. It'd be no different than sending a half-dozen SAS team to Zimbabwe to eliminate Robert Mugabe and his innner circle. Things would be night-and-day different, and much better, after they're gone.
Make it absolutely clear in your minds though that I do not support the massive intervention and phoney war mechanations of the Bush years that led to the unending morass in Iraq and A-stan. A no-fly zone over Libya and attacking Gadhaffis armoured forces is the limit to what I'm willing to support right now.
CKA Uber 
