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Oh hai, mission creep!

April 19, 2011 5 comments

Seriously, I am never going to tire of tossing an “Oh hai…” on the front of anything. Don’t blame me, blame Tommy Wiseau.

A short while ago, I wrote up a blog post about the myriad questions that didn’t seem to have been answered by anyone before the Western world dived in to Libya with both feet. I wondered whether the seeming lack of boundaries, parameters and even an end goal for the mission might lead to the entire mission changing.

Well, that didn’t take long.

Wasn’t this a no fly zone? What exactly does that have to do with using Western air forces to supply close air support missions on behalf of rebel factions? Because that’s what we’re all doing now. Hell, we’re doing it to an extent that the rebel factions are starting to complain that we aren’t dropping more bombs.

A persistent complaint here is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has not done enough since its dramatic attacks last month routed loyalist armored columns poised to take back Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital, where life goes on with an odd sense of normality.

Frankly, it SHOULD have stopped there. But it hasn’t. We keep betting all in on a civil war. Hell, the Brits are now sending in military advisors. And yeah, I’m sure that the rebels are thrilled to see these dudes coming in…probably not that difficult to engineer a situation where they come directly under fire from the Libyan army to try to force yet another escalation. And we’ll go along with it because we’re stupid.

We dived headlong in to a mission with no clear boundaries or end points. That’s what stupid people do. And now we’re stuck there.

“We are going to have to settle in for the long haul. Bombs won’t make him go,” said Nick Witney, European Council on Foreign Relations security expert, adding that it was up to the Libyan people to sort out their own future.

“I’m afraid that frustrating though it is, one has to accept that in military terms it is a stalemate, and it is going to stay that way until Libyans negotiate a solution to it. We just have to be patient,” he said.

Wonderful. Anyone actually think that any lessons have been learned here? Yeah, me neither.

Posted in The Rage! It Burns!
  • Anonymous

    Whattya figure? Price of doing business for being in NATO? Something totally unforseen? Or possibly a slight shift in foreign policy spun as “we totally didn’t see this coming?”

    I don’t want our guys to be fighting someone else’s war. That has a nasty way of making enemies.

  • http://www.peerpressureworks.com Cliff

    There doesn’t seem to be a single, over-riding reason for it. The US is
    being criticized for backing down on the number of strikes they’re even
    participating in, so this seems to be an escalation led by the other
    nations. I get the Gulf states backing it, since the more the West gets
    involved in Libya the less likely it is that anything will be done to stop
    them from stomping a collective jack boot down on their own little
    uprisings.

    I don’t get why the British are so gung ho about this, unless it’s to try to
    save face after they essentially offered international amnesty to Gaddafi
    for the Lockerbie bombing. Sort of a “See? We’re still manly men that won’t
    take shit from nobody!” kind of thing. Not that the agreement that was made
    was a particularly bad one, but they did come under a bit of
    criticism…especially for handing the bomber over to the Libyans, where he
    pretty much returned home to a hero’s welcome.

    I do suspect France see this as yet another way to re-establish a foothold
    on Africa. They held on to their colonial holdings with a death grip after
    WW2, and they’ve been trying to ‘get back in’ on the African continent for
    the last 3 decades or more. They’re also the only country talking about
    sending in combat troops…not advisers/trainers, but full on mechanized
    divisions. A bit easier to establish a bit of regional control when you have
    boots on the ground. And with the US and Britain too stretched out elsewhere
    to really do much more than they already are, this could also simply be a
    way for the French to flex a little military muscle.

    As for why we’re there, that’s easy. It’s a quick and easy way for Canada to
    be involved in an International mission, and it’s a mission that can be sold
    to the Canadian populace as the ‘no fly zone to protect civilians’ that it
    has been falsely sold as ever since it started. Sort of like how older
    missions could simply be labeled ‘peace keeping’ and nobody would ever
    criticize it while they lived under their own fantasy version of what a
    peace keeping mission actually entails.

  • Anonymous

    At Scouts last week, we had a soldier in, talking about his time in Afghanistan and Bosnia. He’s spent time as a truck driver, but also as an artillery dude. You don’t need artillery dudes if you’re not planning on blowing stuff up. Peace-keeping is a noble effort, and I suspect that’s what their aim was, but yeah, that’s not by holding meetings with Oolong Tea and raisin scones with peanut butter and clover honey. God I’m hungry. Anyway, people don’t want to know that the armed forces are actually armed, so they believe what they want to believe.

  • http://www.peerpressureworks.com Cliff

    Exactly. Peace keeping really should be re-branded as peace enforcement.
    you’re actively holding two sides apart and forcing them to negotiate. they
    don’t particularly want to stop shooting each other, so you damn well better
    have a big stick to dissuade them from trying to get past you. Canadian
    troops on ‘peace keeping’ missions in the former Yugoslavia saw A LOT of
    combat, but it wasn’t given any mention…too hard to equate that with the
    simple government position of “It has peace in the name, how bad can it
    be?!”

  • Anonymous

    Armed, non-hostile negotiation facilitators.