TEL AVIV - The caption of an al-Jazeera
photo inadvertently says it all: "Libyan rebel
fighters carry their commander to celebrate after
believing they pushed back forces loyal to Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi."
In the past week
or so, the absurdities of the Libyan war reached a
new level. American officials say Gaddafi's
associates want to negotiate his exit; Gaddafi
says he will die as a martyr (in reality, the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been
trying to help him do just that for some time
now).
Rebels say they are progressing with
"difficulty", but their large casualty numbers and
the situation on the ground emphasize the
difficulty. The International Criminal Court (ICC)
says it wants to
add mass rape to Gaddafi's
war crimes indictment while Turkey offers the
colonel "guarantees" should he step down.
Meanwhile, the opposing banners of humanitarian
intervention and state sovereignty fly so high
that they seem to have lost any anchor to the
ground.
Believe what you will. How we will
one day remember this war will be determined only
once it is over, likely a long time from now, by a
variation of the universal rule that history is
told by the victors. In the foreseeable future,
however, no victors are set to emerge, only more
chaotic strife and carnage. Such moments are the
blind spots of history; Libya is thus in a dark
period, not only from a humanitarian point of
view, but also from the perspective of history.
Gaddafi, as influential American
think-tank Stratfor claims, seems to be banking on
a stalemate. In a recent report, Stratfor writes:
Gadhafi has lost any chance of being
able to reunify Libya under his rule, but he
continues to maintain hope that he can outlast
the NATO air campaign. Whether or not he truly
believes he can reconquer all the areas he has
lost since February is impossible to discern.
Regardless, should Gadhafi continue to hold on
for the next several months, he could compel the
West to come to an agreement on some form of
partition, as unpalatable as that may sound to
the countries leading the air campaign and to
the rebel council umbrella. Publicly he denies
that partition is his objective, but with total
victory out of the question, this is the best
possible outcome remaining for the Libyan
leader.
Indeed, much of the recent
fighting has occurred around important oil export
terminals, and reports have it that a stiff
competition between Gaddafi and the rebels is
underway for oil production capacities.
Translation: both sides on the ground are looking
for a stable source of longer-term income, most
likely in anticipation of a prolonged stand-off
that would require constant rearmament. With
powerful weapons smuggling networks having already
taken root in Libya, the arms embargo, routinely
violated by all sides anyway, is little more than
a nuisance.
On the ground, the government
has resorted to much the same strategy in western
Libya as the one it used earlier to force a
stalemate in the east. Its superior military
tactics and equipment demoralize and inflict heavy
casualties on the rebels. The heavy civilian toll
serves to broaden the divide and to instigate
hatred between Gaddafi's supporters and the
rebels, thus ossifying the conflict and
consolidating the colonel's support base. (The ICC
is planning to indict Gaddafi of war crimes
against the civilian population; NATO's ever more
intensive air strikes are also reportedly
producing heavy "collateral damage")
Militarily, Gaddafi is facing a relatively
newly-recruited militia in the west, much of it
likely made up of disgruntled men from the large
port city of Misurata, the main rebel stronghold
in that part of the country and the epicenter of
heavy fighting and in the last two or three
months. Apart from unrelenting NATO bombardment on
government forces from the air, a major factor
behind the recent rebel advances has been the
availability of manpower and light weapons
smuggled by sea.
"[The rebels in Misurata]
have a large pool of potential manpower," a BBC
report explains. "Many among the 300,000
population have hardened in their opposition to
Col Gaddafi during what Western leaders have
compared to a ‘medieval siege', residents say. [1]"
The rebels are strong while fighting in
the city, on short supply and communication lines
and in a terrain that is intimately familiar to
them. Once they advance toward Gaddafi's capital
Tripoli, however, as they repeatedly tried to do
in the last couple of weeks, their lack of
discipline and basic training becomes decisive.
They are liable to fall into traps and
ambushes where Gaddafi's heavy weapons, hidden in
places that are difficult to discover in advance
and bomb from the air, decimate them. This is what
happened on the eastern front between the towns of
Ajdabiya and Brega a couple of months ago [2]; in
fact, it happened there again on Sunday, when a
rebel attack on Brega was pushed back with more
than half of the force wounded or killed [3].
The battle line today between Misurata and
the neighboring towns in the west seems very
similar to the fluid battle lines in the east from
the early days of the NATO campaign. The rebels
pushed the government troops out of Misurata, and
advanced in the direction of Tripoli, with heavy
fighting in the towns of Zlitan and Zawiya.
Subsequently, however, Gaddafi's forces
counterattacked, and by late last week the
fighting was again around Misurata, with dozens
rebels killed and an unknown number wounded. On
Sunday, the government took foreign reporters on a
brief and tense tour of Zawiya's center [4]. Early
Monday, reports came in that the rebels had
advanced towards the town again.
A
separate Berber rebel militia took over the town
of Yafran, but reports claim there was little to
no resistance, and the Berbers seem unlikely to
advance on Tripoli. According to some sources,
Gaddafi keeps his best-trained crack troops in
reserve; currently, he seems to rely on a strategy
of mobile warfare and counterattacks in order to
delay the campaign and consolidate his control
over a base territory.
NATO, meanwhile,
has intensified its bombing raids; the capital
Tripoli and Gaddafi's now empty headquarters are
drawing many of the bombs. This seems to be a
strategy to demoralize the colonel's core circle
with hopes that he will be removed by an internal
putsch. United States Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton recently claimed that "numerous and
continuing" offers by people close to Gaddafi to
negotiate his stepping down were coming through to
her [5].
Reports notwithstanding that a few
close associates of Gaddafi were killed, wounded,
or defected, the strategy does not seem to be
working. Gaddafi insists that he will stay in his
country (meaning, in some form of power) to the
end, and it is unlikely that his inner circle,
full of his relatives and people whose fortunes
are intimately intertwined with his, would take
action against his will.
Turkey's offer of
"guarantees" for him, presumably against
persecution, seems empty, particularly in light of
the ICC's declared intention to indict him of war
crimes. The example of Nigeria, which went back on
similar guarantees to former Liberian President
Charles Taylor and extradited him in 2006, is
likely fresh on Gaddafi's mind.
The
stalemate can perhaps be broken by one of two
developments [6]: if Gaddafi and a large part of his
inner circle are physically eliminated, or if NATO
sends ground forces into Libya. A number of NATO
bombing raids in the last months looked very much
like attempts on his life; one of them allegedly
killed Gaddafi's obscure son Saif al-Arab and
several of the colonel's grandchildren. In an
ironic twist, Gaddafi's daughter recently filed a
war crimes suit against NATO on the basis of that
incident.
Even though it is hard to say
how many people besides Gaddafi NATO would have to
kill to bring down his regime, some NATO officials
have already started to prevaricate (rather than
issue denials) on whether Gaddafi is an official
target of the campaign. "While the killing of
foreign leaders is generally frowned upon and
rarely admitted to, Qaddafi probably shouldn't be
counting on the law to protect him," Joshua
Keating concludes in a recent legal analysis in
Foreign Policy [7].
As for a ground invasion,
this is an even riskier option, and a sign that
NATO considers everything else to have failed.
There are some indications, however, that the
alliance is laying the groundwork for a potential
land war in Libya, including the use of
helicopters and the ratcheting up of war crimes
allegations.
Save for these two options,
there seems to be little that can remove Gaddafi's
regime from power. We should consider the
colonel's tactical retreats in light of these
threats. Should they fail to materialize, a
stalemate in Libya seems to be practically assured
down the road. Meanwhile, more chaos and confusion
is in store.
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