The New York Times reports on what an insider says about the state of the rebellion in Libya:
After the uprising, the rebels stumbled as they tried to organize. They did a poor job of defining themselves when Libyans and the outside world tried to figure out what they stood for. And now, as they try to defeat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s armed forces and militias, they will have to rely on allied airstrikes and young men with guns because the army that rebel military leaders bragged about consists of only about 1,000 trained men.
A thousand men? If that’s true, then there’s virtually no chance of Qaddafi losing this war. For this and other reasons, Adam Garfinkle believes it’s almost a certainty that the French and British will have to send in ground troops if they’re genuinely committed to expelling Qaddafi, and this in turn could spell trouble for us:
So what happens if the French and British try but do not succeed in a reasonably expeditious way? What happens is about as obvious as it gets: not Suez happens. The Americans come and save the day, as they demurred from doing in October 1956. The French and British know in their heart of hearts that we cannot let them fail miserably at this, or that’s what they suppose. I suppose they’re right.
What this means is that the President may before very long be forced to make the most excruciating decision of his life: to send American soldiers into harm’s way to save the Western alliance—even from an operation that is not explicitly a NATO mission!—in a contingency that has no strategic rationale to begin with; or not, leaving the alliance in ruins and Qaddafi bursting with plans to exact revenge.
What’s worse, even if Garfinkle is being unduly pessimistic and we manage to oust Qaddafi successfully, we still don’t seem to have any idea whether the rebellious tribes are really any better for Libya or for us than the tribes currently aligned with Qaddafi. Helluva war we have going here.
