Various people have noticed that this Libya thing has been dragging on for a while now, and various explanations are being trotted out. But not by me! I was against intervention in the first place, but now that it’s happened I think it’s going reasonably well.
What’s “reasonably well”? Isn’t Qaddafi still in power? Well, yes he is. But he’s also continuing to lose ground on every front. I already wrote about the “correlation of forces” notion; nothing has changed in the three weeks or so since then. If I stare very closely, it does look like the speed of disintegration may be slowing, which would be bad — but he’s still not winning any battles, morale in Tripoli is still low, and defections are continuing. A while back, I predicted that he’d be gone “by August, give or take a month” — in other words, between July 1 and September 30. I’ll stand pat on that.
Meanwhile, four quick thoughts.
(1) Most of the action seems to be taking place in the western mountains and around Misrata. The eastern front, out by Benghazi, has been relatively quiet. That seems a bit odd, given that Benghazi is the rebel capital and, presumably, the largest concentration of forces are located there. Thinking out loud: if the war ends after a string of victories in the west and central fronts, without anything much having happened in the east, you’d expect that to affect the postwar balance of forces in the country.
(2) France has resorted not just to arming the rebels, but arming them via large, random weapon dumps out of planes. This suggests some things, both bad and good. Bad: the French aren’t coordinating with Tunisia or the various rebel groups in the west. Good: the French chain of command (including, but not limited to, President Sarkozy) is getting anxious. Libya is a much bigger deal in France than in the U.S., and Sarkozy has an election coming up next year. (An election he’s currently favored to lose in a landslide, I should add. But ten months is a long time.) I don’t see Sarko caring to start his campaign without having resolved Libya — somehow. So while I’m ready to be wrong about September 30, I will be astonished if Qaddafi is still clinging to power by next February — the point at which the French presidential campaign really takes off.
(3) The fact that the Libyan rebels are willing to tolerate and work together with large numbers of armed Berbers strikes me as cause for cautious optimism. (Qaddafi spent 40 years demonizing the Berbers as dim, treacherous primitives who are Not Really Libyan.) Of course, the Berbers seem to be doing more than their share of the fighting.
(4) Two big question marks: Egypt and Tunisia. Egypt is a poor country, and its military is no great shakes, but they’re so big that even a very modest intervention could have disproportionate effect. Tunisia is much smaller — but even Tunisia has half again the population of Libya, and they’re right next to the most intense theater of fighting. I have the strong impression that both countries are being very very cautious and moderate in their responses because they’re both internally unstable at the moment, having just come through their own revolutions. Still, it’s interesting that nobody in either country cares to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.
Let’s see how it looks in August.
Do we get another prognostication on Libya, Doug?
Posted by: Will Baird | October 22, 2011 at 01:20 AM
And Ghadaffi is dead.
What's left? I am sure that the fighting hasn't subsided completely. Not with the NTC executing G's loyalists.
Posted by: Will Baird | October 26, 2011 at 07:43 PM