Killing Libya In Order To Save It: Gulf War Syndrome

By Conn Hallinan
This commentary was published in Foreign Policy In Focus on 02/04/2011

There were two images from the Libyan war that are likely to spell real trouble in the coming years. One was of several U.S. A-10 attack planes, ungainly looking machines ugly enough to be nick named “Warthogs,” taxiing down a runway. The other was of several rebel fighters dancing on top of a burning tank.

That tank, an old Russian-era T-72, was likely knocked out by one of those A-10s, which means those rebels fighters are almost certainly going to be in a world of hurt. Because, while they were celebrating, they were also breathing in the residue from the shell that killed that tank, a 30 mm depleted uranium munition (DUA).

DUA is the weapon of choice when it comes to killing armored vehicles, and A-10s are specialists at using it. The U.S. used 320 tons of it in the first Gulf War, 10 tons in Kosovo, and over 1,000 tons in the invasion of Iraq. It is lethal to tanks, but it also damages anything that comes into contact with it. Common photos back in 1991 were of U.S. soldiers climbing on top of knocked-out Iraqi tanks to have their pictures taken or to look for souvenirs. When they did, they inhaled uranium oxide or impregnated their uniforms with it.

The soldiers didn’t know better because the U.S. Defense Department (DOA) told them DUA was harmless, even though the DOA knew better. In 1991 the U.S. Army’s Armament Munitions and Chemical Command concluded that “any system struck by DUA penetrator can be assumed to be contaminated with DU,” and instructed soldiers to wear protective masks, clothes and respirators “as a minimum,” and dispose of the clothing afterwards.

The only problem was that the Army never told the troops, even those whose job it was to deal with vehicles hit by DUA. No one said a word to the 144th National Guard Supply Company of the 24th Infantry Division which picked up 29 U.S. armored vehicles hit by DUA “friendly fire” to ship them home. When the tanks and armored personnel carriers arrived in South Carolina, they were interned in a radioactive waste dump. If the soldiers didn’t know the objects were “hot,” the brass did.

Many of those members of that National Guard company subsequently came down with the “Gulf War Syndrome” (GWS) that afflicted at least 118,000 out of the 700,000 soldiers who served in the 1990-91 conflict. Veterans suffer from chronic fatigue, headaches, muscle spasms, joint pains, memory loss, anxiety and balance problems; were twice as likely to develop amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig Disease); and between two and three times more likely to have children with birth defects.

DUA is one of the most deadly anti-tank weapons around. The enormous weight of the DUA “arrow” in each shell can penetrate four inches of armor as if it were margarine. It then explodes in a 10,000-degree fireball that reduces up 70 percent of the munition to powder. The powder can travel up to 25 miles from the initial blast site.

Depleted uranium is not highly radioactive, but it has a half-life of 4.4 billion years, and, if it gets into your system, it can be very dangerous. According to the U.S. Environmental Policy Institute, DUA “has the potential to generate significant medical consequences.”

“People have always assumed low doses are not much of a problem,” Alexander Miller of the U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute told the Guardian (British), “but they can cause more damage than people think.” A study by the Institute found that DUA could damage bone marrow chromosomes.

Not all of the Gulf War butcher bill can be laid at the feet of DUA. After 11 years of denying there was anything to GWS, the Pentagon finally admitted that at least 130,000 soldiers had been exposed to chemical weapon residue when the Iraqi arms depot at Kamisiyah was blown up. Modern battlefields tend to be toxic nightmares, and that was doubly so in Iraq.

But there is no question that DUA was a major contributor to the syndrome, particularly for those who developed immune related diseases. A standard effect of radiation is suppression of the immune system.

The effects of low-level radiation are hard to track, because many “hard” cancers take 16 to 24 years to develop. Iraqi medical authorities claim that the cancer rate in Basra—an area that was saturated with DUA in the Gulf war and the Iraq War—has jumped ten fold, and birth defects are much higher than in the rest of the country.

DUA is also used in 25 mm cannon shells, and 105 MM and 120 MM tank shells. The Army is using it to manufacture 50-caliber machine gun ammunition and is experimenting with using it for standard issue infantry weapons. It is also used to coat armored vehicles, making them almost impervious to non-DUA shells.

The U.S. is selling DUA to Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, some of our NATO allies—Germany and Italy won’t use it—Sweden, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Thailand, and other countries that the Pentagon will not reveal in the name of “national security.”

Depleted uranium is also a highly toxic metal and can damage the liver and kidneys, particularly if it gets into the water supply. If a DUA round misses a target, its “penetrators” are so heavy that they tend to go deep into the soil. “A major concern of the potential environmental effects of intact [DUA] penetrators or large penetrator fragments,” notes the World Health Organization, “is the potential contamination of ground water after weathering.”

Because of the dangers associated with DUA, in August 2002 a subcommittee of the United Nations found that the weapons violated seven international agreements, including the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. Efforts to ban it, however, have been vetoed by the U.S., France and Britain. In 2009 Belgium became the first country to ban the use of DUA, and in the same year the Latin American Parliament voted for a moratorium on its use.

The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons that includes 120 non-governmental organizations is currently lobbying to get the weapons eliminated.

There are other rough beasts being visited on the Libyans these days as well, including cluster weapons, highly explosive canisters that can shred everything from people to tanks. U.S. warplanes have been dropping CBU-103, 104, 105, and AGM-154 A and B, all of which have a failure rate of anywhere from 5 to 23 percent. These unexploded “bomblets” can kill for decades.

During the bombing of Laos from 1964 to 1973, 90 million cluster munitions were dropped, killing more than 12,000 civilians. The bomblets continue exact a yearly toll of 100 to 200 people. More than 50 million clusters were dropped during the 1991 Gulf War, and in the two years that followed the war’s end, they killed 1,400 Kuwaiti citizens. A U.S. company hired to clear cluster weapons from a small area in Kuwait found 95,700 unexploded MK-118 submunitions from the notoriously unreliable CBU-99 “Rockeye” cluster bomb.

Unexploded clusters are still causing problems in Kosovo, and they take a steady toll of civilians in Afghanistan.

Libya has no-go areas dating back to the Second World War, when Italians, Germans and British seeded their fronts with land mines. Whatever government emerges in Libya today will have to deal with the aftermath of yet another war, this time created by DUA and cluster weapons. “The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without,” Dwight Eisenhower once remarked.

A problem indeed. One hopes Libya manages to avoid what a village in Vietnam experienced, the one that was destroyed in order to save it.

Women Are Often The Losers When The West Weighs In

Afghanistan shows their rights tend to be forgotten in our eagerness to intervene. Libya deserves better

By Catherine Bennett
This commentary was published in The Observer on 03/04/2011

Generally speaking, the less that is heard, politically, from a prime minister's spouse, the better. It was the great achievement of Cherie Blair, even if she justified her ubiquity as a form of feminism, that with every intervention she demonstrated, for the benefit of her successors, the difficulty of convincing an audience that knows you to have zero democratic credentials. To be fair, Mrs Blair was occasionally deployed by her hubby and his mates to dilute their own virility. When Blair invaded Afghanistan, in 2001, it was her job to show that we were mainly fighting out of niceness, for the women.

Goggling through her fingers, to illustrate the view from inside a burqa, Mrs Blair disclosed that the Afghans, our trusty former allies, lagged far behind on diversity, even if they were acting, in a manner she would subsequently consider extenuating, as men of deep religious faith. "The women of Afghanistan still have a spirit that belies their unfair, downtrodden image," she declared. "We need to help them free that spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see."

As "we" know, the better Afghanistan has proved something of a let-down for women, as well as for the many male combatants who have died attempting to create it. Hamid Karzai, the US puppet, was once prepared to give his blessing to Afghan men who want to rape their wives or to keep them imprisoned. Cherie, by contrast, has remained very much at large, with her voice going from strength to strength, so much so that the younger Miliband recently appointed her something or other to do with setting women free all over the world.

Responding to this honour, Mrs Blair said: "We need to look afresh at how countries like the UK, through their development efforts, can help make a real difference to the status and power of women in the developing world." No one, after all, can say the UK, under her own and her husband's leadership, did not make a difference to women in Afghanistan. Now they live with bombing, abduction and rape along with more established forms of abuse – forced marriages, wife-beating, "honour" killings, enforced ignorance.

Nor should we forget Iraq where, in the aftermath of the Blairs' democratic endeavours, women's lives have been transformed. "Militias promoting misogynist ideologies have targeted women and girls for assassination, and intimidated them to keep them from participating in public life," says Human Rights Watch, whose recent report chronicles the loss of social participation and human rights for Iraqi women following the 2003 occupation and the activities of sectarian groups. In Basra in 2008, it records: "Vigilantes killed 133 women, claiming religious or customary sanction." Of these, 79 were judged, by extremists, to be "violating Islamic teachings".

Which brings us to another consort, the exemplary wife of Nick Clegg. In normal circumstances the lawyer Miriam González Durántez would have a strong claim to being left alone, having resisted all attempts to make her the junior partner in her husband's career. Asked why she was not out there worshipping him last year, à la Samantha Cameron, González said: "I don't have the luxury of having a job that I can simply abandon for five weeks." And yet, when a western politician expresses equanimity, as Clegg has done, about the possible triumph of Islamism in Libya, it is difficult for some of us not to speculate about his seriousness when it comes to women's rights, political and personal.

Is he content to help create a society where a Mrs Clegg would campaign on demand, if required to do so by a male Clegg? Or would he rather she just stayed in, where other men can't see her? On his trip to Mexico, Clegg was quoted as accepting that the defeat of Gaddafi might lead to the creation of a "hardline Islamist regime". A Lib Dem source reportedly confirmed that Clegg believes the current dictatorship to be so abhorrent that its British-assisted displacement is worth the "gamble" of an Islamist regime taking its place.

Given a choice of tyrannies, you gather, the coalition plumps for fundamentalist religion over the secular wickedness of a Gaddafi. Or, to put it another way, it prefers the institutionalised oppression and sporadic torture and killing of one sex, as opposed to that of all unhappy citizens, equally. If, numerically, that looks like half the woe, it also represents redoubled misery for women deprived of autonomy inside and outside the home. But the arrangement is certainly tidier, even if the permanently victimised section of a hardline Islamist state is likely to include, if Iran is any guide, other non-people including gays, atheists, adulterers, apostates and Christians.

Clegg not having had the chance to define "hardline Islamist state", it remains unclear just how much female subjugation and torment he would be prepared to tolerate from such a regime before conceding that it might not – for women – amount to an improvement. Is he thinking along the lines of Chechnya, where women can still work, new dress regulations permitting: "Their heads should be covered with a headscarf, a dress that goes below the knee and sleeves that cover three quarters of the arm"? After all, British multiculturalists have repeatedly assured us that Islamic dress is oppression-free. Or are we talking about our friends in Saudi, where the prohibition on women's voting, on top of sharia-style apartheid and physical obliteration, earns it the lowest score (0) in the global league of female empowerment?

Even less than the length of a piece of string do our leaders seem able to disclose anything coherent about Gaddafi's opponents and the political future we have committed, through assisted regime change, to help them create. For all anyone knows, al-Qaida's gloating in its murderous glossy magazine, Inspire, and Niall Ferguson's talk of a caliphate are just as otiose as Blair's jawdropping exhortation, given his legacy of mayhem, for the west to show "the courage of our convictions, and the self-confident belief we can achieve them". Tunisia and Egypt should also be very afraid. "They now need our help," Blair wrote, adding generously: "It is up to the emerging leaders of those nations to decide their political systems."

As in Britain, these leaders have already shown a marked tendency to be male. In Tunisia, only two women serve in the transitional government. In Egypt a "committee of wise men" was formed. After Mubarak's deposition, women's day was marked by assaults on and arrests of women, some of whom endured virginity tests. There are no women on the committee drafting constitutional change. "We are furious," the Egyptian feminist, Nawal El Saadawi told an American interviewer. "We participated in every part of the revolution, and then as soon as it ended we were completely isolated." She was asked what women in the west could do. "They can support us by fighting their own governments, because your governments are the ones that interfere in our life, by going and invading and colonising other countries

Let The Images Of War Speak For Themselves

By Robert Fisk
This commentary was published in The Independent on 02/04/2011

I hate being called a war reporter. Firstly, because there is an unhappy flavour of the junkie about it. Secondly, because you cannot report a war without knowing the politics behind it.

Could Ed Murrow or Richard Dimbleby have covered the Second World War without understanding Chamberlain's policy of appeasement or Hitler's Anschluss? Could James Cameron – whose reporting on Korea was spectacular – have recorded the live test-firing of an atom bomb without knowledge of the Cold War?

I always say that reporters should be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer. If you were covering the 18th-century slave trade, you would not give equal space to the slave-ship captain. At the liberation of an extermination camp, you do not give equal time to the SS. When the Palestinian Islamic Jihad blew up a pizzeria full of Israeli children in Jerusalem in 2001, I did not give equal space to the Islamic Jihad spokesman. At the Sabra and Chatila massacre in Beirut in 1982, I did not give equal time to the Israeli army who watched the killings and whose Lebanese allies committed the atrocity.

But television has different priorities. "Al Jazeera English" – as opposed to the Arabic version – manages to get it about right. Yes, I occasionally make an appearance on Al Jazeera and its reporters are good friends of mine. But it does say who the bad guys are; it does speak out, and it puts the usually pusillanimous BBC to shame. What I am most struck by, however, is the quality of the reporting. Not the actual words. But the pictures.

In Tunisia and in Bahrain, I often shared a car with James Bays of Al Jazeera (and yes, he is a mate of mine, and yes, I was travelling at his expense, of course!), but I was fascinated by the way he would step aside from the camera with the words "I'll just let you see the scene here for a moment", and then he would disappear and let us watch the tens of thousands of Egyptian refugees on the Tunisian border or the tens of thousands of Shia demonstrators with their Bahraini flags on the Pearl roundabout (the "pearl" having now been destroyed by the king like a ritual book-burning). The pictures spoke instead of words. The reporter took a back seat (watch the BBC's boys and girls, for ever gesticulating with their silly hands, for the opposite) and the picture told the story.

Bays himself is now covering the rebel advance and constant retreat from western Libya – more retreating, I suspect, than Generals Wavell and Klopper (yes, James, look him up) – did in the Libyan desert in the 1940s, but again, he steps aside from the picture and lets us watch the chaos of panic and fear on the road from Ajdabiya. "I'll just let you see this with your own eyes," he says. And by God, he does. I'm not sure this is how war should be reported. Can you report on the 1945 fall of Berlin without General Zhukov? Or June of 1940 without Churchill? But at least we are left to make up our own minds.

When Dimbleby reported on the Hamburg firestorm – "All I can see before me is a great white basin of light in the sky", still haunts me – we needed his words. Just as we needed Ed Murrow's comment that he would move his cable "just a bit" to allow Londoners to flock for cover outside St Martin-in-the-Fields during the Blitz. But there is something indelibly moving about a straight camera report without a reporter. Eurovision often does this – "without words", it calls the tapes – and I wonder if it does not presage a new kind of journalism.

John Simpson tried to do this on the BBC before the fall of Kabul in 2001, but he used a different method. He allowed viewers to see his second camera crew. They became part of the dispatches as he moved from scene to scene, and slowly we got used to the idea that there was a four-man crew with him, to the point that they became natural participants in the story, as obvious as the reporter himself. I'm all for this. The idea that we still have to do "noddies" – where the reporter, long after an interview, nods meaningfully in front of the camera as if he were still listening to his long-departed interviewee – is ridiculous. And to go back for a moment, please, please, will television reporters STOP playing with their hands as if they are some Shakespearean extra, trying to explain themselves in front of bored theatre audiences.

Bays still uses his hands a bit – I noticed that I did on Al Jazeera the other day – but more often than not, it's to invite the audience to look at something he has seen. I once wrote that you cannot describe a massacre in print without using the language of a medical report, and I fear that television (even Al Jazeera) does not yet give us the full horror of atrocities. The claim that the dead cannot be shown – when we journos have to see them in all their horror – always seems to me dissembling. If governments go to war (how many saw pictures of the Libyan dead after coalition raids this week? Answer: zero), then we should be allowed the see the true face of war.

For the moment, however, watch Al Jazeera, have a look at my good friend James Bays – and pray that he doesn't have to retreat any more. Also, after this column, that he still lets me travel in his crews' cars.

Arab Spring: Follow The Money

Those Arab states that have erupted this year – and others that may follow – want freedom and democracy, but also to end the way their countries have been run for the financial benefit of rulers and their friends

By Samir Aita
This commentary was published in Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2011 Issue

The reasons for the Arab spring go deeper than immediate demands for freedom and democracy. The protesters want to end the political economy and the authoritarian regimes in place since the 1970s.

Monarchies in the Arab world have been absolute, and life-long presidents (with hereditary office) ruled the republics, because they created a supreme power above both state and post-independence institutions (1). They set up and controlled their own security services to ensure that their powers would endure; the services escaped parliamentary or government supervision, and their members could reprimand a minister and impose decisions. It costs money to run such services, and the clientelist networks of one-party states. The funds derive not from public budgets, as do those for the police and the army, but from different sources of revenue. (The New York Times recently reported that Muammar Gaddafi had demanded in 2009 that oil firms operating in Libya should contribute to the $1.5bn he had promised to pay in compensation for the Lockerbie terrorist murders – or lose their licences. Many paid. And Gaddafi’s immediate cash holdings of billions of dollars are thought to be funding his mercenaries and supporters to defend him.)

After the spectacular 1973 rise in crude oil prices, Middle Eastern revenues increased considerably. Through the distribution circuits, and in collusion with major multinationals, part of the revenue went direct to the coffers of the royal or “republican” families instead of to the state. Nor was oil their only source of revenue. After there were no more commissions on major public contracts, civil and military, because of budget deficits and structural adjustments, new opportunities arose. In the 1990s there were mobile telephone network launches, and the first major privatisations of public services, with public-private partnerships and build-operate-transfer (BOT) contracts. Mobile networks had massive margins, especially at the start when better-off clients were prepared to pay high prices. The major multinational operators, influential businessmen and governments fought to capture the income. (There is evidence for this in the legal dispute over Djezzy, the Algerian branch of the Egyptian operator Orascom, and the Algerian military, and in a previous dispute between Orascom and Syria’s Syriatel, which happened just as the first large Arab multinationals emerged.)

The globalisation of Arab economies and the demands of the International Monetary Fund – supported by the European Commission for the Mediterranean countries – tightened the regimes’ hold on the economy, especially after the oil price crash of 1986. The ensuing decline in public investment and weakening of the governmental regulatory role ensured that the major multinationals held monopolies or oligopolies in exchange for sharing revenue with the powers-that-be. The senior management of the global corporations knew exactly where major decisions were taken and who the imposed local partners were for any new investment: the Trabelsi and Materi families in Tunisia, the Ezz and Sawires in Egypt, the Makhlouf in Syria, Hariri in Lebanon. The Sawires sold their shares in Orascom-Mobinil to France Telecom and offloaded their cement holdings before the Egyptian revolution. Najib Mikati, who had sold Investcom to the South African group MTN, is currently in charge of appointing the new government in Lebanon.

Enthralled by the Dubai miracle, all the Arab countries ventured into real estate transactions that allowed them to dissimulate a public/private interest mix. Land was expropriated and then sold cheaply to property developers. Historic city centres were neglected but the local riad (traditional palaces) were renovated by international investors, charmed by the exotic East, and property prices rose on a par with London, Paris or Tokyo. None of this would have been possible without banking, which facilitated the laundering of revenue and found ways to recycle it in real estate and commercial transactions. Banks were also the instruments of governments, providing credit to secure the lasting allegiance of local entrepreneurs.

Erosion of public services

But the state weakened and public services eroded. Where there was a need to send representatives abroad or to tap expertise at home, government members were co-opted; the good ones were technocrats from major international institutions such as the World Bank, but they lacked electoral legitimacy or programmes for which they would be accountable. The state ceased to be seen as a bureaucracy. Even the army weakened as well-equipped praetorian guards guaranteed the continuity of power (2).

Arab governments bore no resemblance to those after independence, which had electrified the countryside and established universal public education. Public services deteriorated, as reports by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) observed, because of privatisations entirely for revenue raising. Even Jeddah in oil-rich Saudi Arabia only has running water one day a week; and a Saudi prince authorised construction work in a valley without planning drainage, resulting in lethal floods.

After every scandal there was an anti-corruption campaign, to little effect. The campaigns implied that corruption was a moral or religious issue rather than a systemic predation by leaders in alliance with business. Human dignity and work values were flouted. About a third of the working population in Arab countries is in the unofficial economy, in small jobs not included in unemployment statistics, which have been in double digits for a decade. Another third are self-employed, or employees without work contracts, social security, retirement or union rights. The concept of the employee is disappearing, outside the public sector and government. There, social rights have been maintained and so jobs are coveted, especially by women, but openings are rare, because of the “structural adjustment” policies required by government spending cuts. The labour market is also fragmented by massive migration, both permanent (Palestinians, Iraqis or Somalis fleeing war) and temporary (mainly Asian), where migrants’ economic and social rights are eroded, because the exploitation of migrant labour is now a source of revenue.

When the generation of the Arab demographic boom reached working age in the 2000s, connected by the new internet culture, the base toppled the summit in Tunisia and Egypt, and the entire social structure was shaken. People have been surprised by the many demands, social and otherwise, released by the revolution. Arab countries now have to rebuild the constitutional state, where power is finite and subject to institutions, instead of levitating above them. Government-dependent sources of revenue will have to be dismantled, as will monopolies, to release entrepreneurial energy. There will have to be states that guarantee public and social freedoms for all, so that workers have rights, and the states will have to be accountable, based on social consensus. It isn’t going to be easy, because the world, including Europe, isn’t going that way.

Notes & Refeferences

Samir Aita is editor of the Arabic editions of Le Monde diplomatique and the author of Les travailleurs arabes hors-la-loi, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2011

(1) See Samir Radwan and Manuel Riesco, “The Changing Role of the State”, Economic Research Forum, 2007.

(2) Read Salam Kawakibi and Bassma Kodmani, “To shoot, or not to shoot?”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, March 2011.

This Week At War: Don't Arm The Rebels, Train Them

The ragtag anti-Qaddafi forces need basic combat skills a lot more than bigger guns.

By Robert Haddick
This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 01/04/2011 

Two weeks ago, when an armored column loyal to Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi was poised to crush the rebellion in Benghazi, U.S. President Barack Obama dramatically reversed his policy and endorsed a limited air campaign against Qaddafi's forces. A week ago, the rebels were on the march toward Tripoli and seemingly on the verge of removing Qaddafi from power. Alas, it was not to be. A Qaddafi counterattack has sent the scattered rebels fleeing once again back toward Ajdabiya and Benghazi. This second setback for the rebels has resulted in a debate inside the White House over whether the coalition should arm the rebels, another escalation in the conflict.

On March 30, it was reported that CIA officers were in Libya with the rebels, making an assessment of their situation and possibly directing airstrikes in support of their fighters. We can gather from open sources much of what these intelligence officers are likely to report. As a military force, Libya's rebels are a disorganized rabble and seem incapable of preparing and holding defensive positions or maneuvering effectively against rudimentary enemy resistance. The rebels need boot camp, fundamental infantry training, and the development of some battlefield leaders, not a new stockpile of weapons.

Those Western leaders whose plan currently consists of hoping that Qaddafi will be spontaneously overthrown need to think again. Absent a Western invasion of the country, the rebel force is the only means of removing Qaddafi, and the rebels will need many months or even years of training before they are capable of defeating loyalist ground units and marching all the way to Tripoli.

A comparison with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance is instructive. The anti-Taliban Northern Alliance was the battle-hardened survivor of a decade-long struggle against the Soviet Red Army. After that Darwinian test, the Northern Alliance had capable leaders, a disciplined command structure, and proven tactics. When CIA and Special Forces advisors arrived in October 2001 to assist the Northern Alliance, they found a capable military force to support. By contrast, just a few weeks into their struggle, Libya's rebels are far from being able to accomplish the military goals they seek.

Some analysts have suggested that the rebels only need some anti-tank weapons to deal with Qaddafi's tanks and armored personnel carriers. The rebels already have a very effective anti-tank weapon at their disposal -- NATO airstrikes. But as I predicted two weeks ago, Qaddafi's forces have adapted to the arrival of coalition air power by abandoning their armored vehicles and now move about in the same pickup trucks used by the rebels. Out of fear of striking either rebel vehicles or civilians, coalition air attacks on Qaddafi's forces west of Ajdabiya appear stymied for the moment, which is allowing Qaddafi's superior firepower to batter the rebels in eastern Libya.

Obama's team and other Western policymakers fear a stalemate in Libya. A deadlock would make these leaders appear ineffectual against Qaddafi. They also fear an erosion of political support for the intervention both at home and internationally.

However, one advantage of a stalemate is that it would give the rebels, assisted by Special Forces advisers, the time necessary to organize and train for the long fight that will be required to push on to Tripoli. If Obama and other Western leaders are serious about removing Qaddafi from power -- without Western "boots on the ground" -- they and Libya's rebels will have to brace themselves for a long and nasty slog.

When military planners for Operation Odyssey Dawn received orders to demolish Libya's air defense system, they turned to a weapon they have used since the 1991 Desert Storm campaign against Iraq: the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile. British and U.S. warships fired 110 Tomahawks during the first night of the conflict and have launched nearly 100 more over the following two weeks. War planners use the low-flying and virtually unstoppable missiles against air defenses and other targets they consider too dangerous to attack with manned aircraft.

With the Tomahawk missile once again performing the most dangerous missions, particularly against air defenses, why does the Pentagon insist on spending billions on a new stealth bomber, which is designed to foil the same air defenses the Tomahawk has been reliably neutralizing for two decades? Although the Pentagon has yet to disclose its description of the new airplane (a successor to the Air Force's B-1, B-2, and B-52s), the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a well-connected Washington think tank, foresees a program costing as much as $56 billion for 100 new, heavy, long-range bombers.

Defenders of the next-generation stealth bomber point to two arguments for why their airplane will trump long-range stand-off missiles like the Tomahawk. First, bomber proponents believe the economics are on their side, at least given certain assumptions. Their case comes from an introductory microeconomics textbook. As explained in a report from Rand Corp., the Tomahawk missile, at a replacement cost of $1.5 million, is an example of a business with low fixed costs but high variable costs. Its competition in this case is a cheap old-fashioned gravity bomb fitted with a GPS guidance kit that costs only $22,000. Dropped from the exotic and very pricey stealth bomber, the Tomahawk's competition is an example of a high fixed-cost, low variable-cost business.

According to Rand, just 20 days of heavy cruise missile use over a 30-year period (the projected life of the new bomber) is enough to make the bomber the more economical alternative. If over that 30-year period, the bombers leave their hangers only a few times, it will be cheaper to attack those difficult targets with Tomahawks. But if the United States has more than 20 days of heavy bombing over those 30 years, it will be cheaper to send the pricey bomber armed with cheap GPS-guided bombs.

Bomber advocates also note that the Tomahawk cannot threaten those targets some adversaries value the most, those that are inside hardened bunkers or deep underground. The Tomahawk's maximum warhead weight is only 1,000 pounds, which is woefully inadequate against targets such as North Korea's buried nuclear facilities or Iran's underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. The Air Force's bombers are the only aircraft capable of the delivering the huge bunker-busting bombs that can penetrate very hardened and deeply buried targets.

The return of the Tomahawk cruise missile to combat may renew the debate over whether the U.S. Air Force needs a pricey new stealth bomber. According to Rand, the answer is a simple matter of break-even analysis. Over the past two decades, U.S. presidents have shown themselves quite ready to turn to air power to solve foreign-policy problems. Given that penchant, hitting Rand's break-even mark should be an easy assumption to make.

 Robert Haddick is managing editor of Small Wars Journal.

Will Libya Become Obama’s Iraq?

By Meghan O’Sullivan
This commentary was published in The Washington Post on 01/04/2011

In making his case this past week for the use of force in Libya, President Obama sought to assure the American people that this intervention is prudent and wise, and that it bears no resemblance to the controversial and costly war in Iraq. He even tried to preempt the comparison altogether, explaining why his administration will not attempt to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi by force: “To be blunt,” Obama said, “we went down that road in Iraq.”

Message: I am not Bush, and Benghazi is not Baghdad.

Given the most obvious differences between Iraq and Libya — no ground troops in Libya and no U.N. resolution in Iraq — few will take issue with Obama’s protestation. Yet, Obama’s road in Libya may prove more similar to President George W. Bush’s than it now appears.

For those of us who were deeply engaged in the Iraq war, it is hard not to hear the echoes and recognize the potential pitfalls in America’s new military intervention. Despite the different circumstances, the Iraq war, and the Afghan war as well, offer hard-won insights about the nature of coalitions, the limits of military force and the power of unintended consequences. Considering them now offers us a chance to avoid repeating past mistakes in Libya, particularly ones that proved so costly to us and the people we were trying to help.

To succeed, you need clear goals.

The Bush administration went into Iraq with a multitude of objectives, from finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction to building a new democratic country in the heart of the Middle East. But even at the highest levels, U.S. officials disagreed over how central the creation of a democratic Iraq was to American ambitions and interests. This ambiguity of purpose helped create a serious dilemma: The United States undertook a complicated, multifaceted occupation and nation-building project without the planning and resources required for it to succeed.

Yet, even after Obama’s speech Monday at the National Defense University, it remains unclear what the president considers an acceptable outcome in Libya. Engaging in military action and claiming a desire for regime change, yet expressing unwillingness to use force to achieve that aim, even while providing support to those seeking to oust Gaddafi — this is a recipe for confusion, both within the administration and among the public. The president’s lack of clarity could erode domestic support for the operation, particularly if it grows lengthy and messy. It could also slide the administration into a more ambitious mission than is in U.S. interests or lead to Arab disappointment over a more limited American role.

Don’t sell the American public on a best-case scenario.

Bush’s national security team was criticized for suggesting that the invasion of Iraq would be quick, cheap and simple. This presentation turned out to be wrong, not because the costs and difficulties of ousting Saddam Hussein by military force were higher than expected, but because the administration failed to factor in the potential difficulties of a post-Hussein Iraq and the possibility of a protracted and complicated U.S. role in the country.

Obama could be setting himself up to make the same mistake. In his Monday speech, he focused on America’s role in the military intervention and appeared confident that U.S. engagement could be significantly scaled back, even before that phase of the effort is complete. There was little suggestion that a future American role could depend on what happens in the aftermath of military action. Instead, Obama’s decision to commit U.S. forces seems to have been based on a cost-benefit analysis focused on the military intervention, without consideration of the likely uncertainties of a post-Gaddafi Libya.

Should unintended consequences of military action require more extensive U.S. involvement in Libya — as they did in Iraq — Obama might wish that he had better prepared the American public for the possible downsides of this intervention.

Military force alone can achieve only so much.

Ask any American — military or civilian — his or her greatest takeaway from serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, and you are likely to hear some variant of this lesson. In both cases, overwhelming U.S. military superiority created quick initial victories but did little to secure medium- and long-term objectives. Washington needed to commit much greater political and economic resources to consolidate gains and fill the vacuums created by the removals of Hussein and the Taliban.

In Libya, while military force quickly gave rebel fighters a reprieve, the current situation is neither desirable nor sustainable. Whatever the outcome of the military operation — be it a divided country or the end of the Gaddafi regime — Libya will require significant infusions of political capital and financial resources, either to sustain the rebels in their enclave or to rebuild the nation.

Don’t expect local authorities to do too much too quickly.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States went in with plans for rapid transfers of political power once the bad guys were gone. In Afghanistan, the United Nations was immediately to take control of the country’s political future; in Iraq, the initial plan was for a quick handoff of authority to Iraqis. But in both cases, the United States was unable to move to the sidelines and instead became embroiled in the intricacies of nation-building.

On Libya, Obama has already begun speaking of a handoff to international and Libyan authorities to create a legitimate government in a post-Gaddafi nation. “While the United States will do our part to help,” he said Monday, “it will be a task for the international community and — more importantly — a task for the Libyan people themselves.”

Regardless of the talents of the Libyan people, they will need substantial international help. Societies that have endured decades of oppression rarely flourish quickly once the dictator is gone. In Iraq, the traumas and international isolation of the Hussein era have permeated efforts to rebuild the country, making even seemingly straightforward activities, such as choosing a new flag, complicated and painful. Certainly, Libya’s reconstruction might be smoother, but if it becomes harder or more expensive than expected, Obama’s pledge of limited American involvement might ring hollow. The United States may struggle to disengage from a bickering, stalemated Libya without incurring sharp criticism from the Arab world, raising doubts about its credibility as a partner or encountering new security threats that come from a weak state or a civil war in North Africa.

Security, often provided by outsiders, is needed to build sustainable political institutions.

The Bush administration spent much of the early years in Iraq believing, mistakenly, that political progress would bring security. To its credit, it revised its thinking during the strategy review that led to the troop surge that Bush announced in early 2007; the new strategy was based on the premise that local and national leaders needed some modicum of security to make tough decisions about sharing power and resources. The extreme insecurity that Iraqi citizens had experienced was the single most important factor leading to rising sectarianism and the vicious civil conflict in 2006 and 2007.

Who will provide that security for the Libyans? A country such as Egypt may have security institutions that remain legitimate and workable after a revolution or regime change, but Egypt is the exception. People rejecting decades of dictatorial rule are unlikely to accept the security forces that were the primary instruments of oppression once they have overthrown the government. Gaddafi’s army, having completely discredited itself in the eyes of most Libyans, will not offer a stabilizing force should the dictator fall. A neutral, outside peacekeeping force will be needed, at least in the interim, to provide security while Libyans construct their new political future.

Coalitions require constant care and attention.

The political benefits of a coalition (particularly one involving Arab countries) are enormous in an intervention such as the one in Libya. But maintaining a wartime coalition is in­cred­ibly difficult and requires continued American leadership, especially when the operation is managed by NATO. In Afghanistan, even though countries such as Canada, Denmark and Britain have made important contributions to the war effort, the United States remains far and away the dominant force; the “handing off” of Afghanistan to NATO in 2006 arguably proved more style than substance.

The Obama administration has made much of the handover of the Libya mission to NATO oversight. Given that European governments consider Libya more vital to their interests than Afghanistan, a NATO mission in Libya may command more political backing from Europe. However, such support is unlikely to translate into more economic or military resources, simply because European countries are cutting their already modest military and diplomatic budgets, not expanding them.

Quite apart from the question of resources is the issue of alignment. Coalitions are marvelous things as long as all the parties agree on strategy. When members disagree, as the United States and Britain fundamentally did over the approach toward narcotics in Afghanistan, valuable time is lost. In Libya, Obama’s open embrace of regime change — which goes beyond the ambitions expressed by the Arab League and United Nations — probably already sits awkwardly with some U.S. allies.

Don’t forget the neighborhood.

At least at the outset, the Bush administration did not appreciate how fundamentally the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq would reshape the regional balance of power. The removal of both the Taliban and Hussein — Iran’s neighbors and greatest enemies — was a major boost to Tehran and its drive for regional dominance. In retrospect, actions against Hussein and the Taliban should have been accompanied by a broader regional strategy to deal with a predictably emboldened Iran.

What unintended consequences might come from military action in Libya? How will events there ricochet elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East? The Obama administration certainly deserves sympathy for having to deal with such remarkable events in the region in such a short period. But the quick pace of history will be no excuse for a failure to forge a regional strategy that manages and capitalizes on the ripple effects of both the Libya intervention and more homegrown transformations in the region.

Small decisions today are magnified tomorrow.

The experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly demonstrate that decisions made about Libya in the next weeks and months will disproportionately affect the course of the nation for years to come. For instance, the early choice to declare Iraq a federal country allowed the Kurdish north to thrive, but it also seeded current battles over who has the authority to develop Iraq’s oil and gas. Similarly, early decisions to exclude certain groups from politics — senior Baath party members in Iraq or those associated with the Taliban in Afghanistan — determined who was invested in the new states, and who would fight their emergence and consolidation.

Libya, Tunisia and Egypt cannot escape this path dependency — the ability of one decision to force history down a particular avenue. But recognizing the importance of these early choices should encourage everyone involved — whether in Washington, Europe or the Middle East — to slow down and focus more on crafting a legitimate process for decision-making than on delivering specific outcomes at this early stage.

Meghan O’Sullivan served as President George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. She is now the Jeane Kirkpatrick professor of the practice of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Fatah Al-Islam Terrorist Group Re-Organizing In Ain Al-Helwa

By Paula Astatih from Beirut 
This article was published in Asharq al-Awsat on 02/04/2011
 
The Ain al-Helwa Palestinian refugee camp is in the spotlight once more, after more than 10 months of relative calm following a shake-up of the Fatah security operation in the camp, and the establishment of a monitoring committee made of various representatives of Palestinian factions to deal with any daily problems. However the spotlight has returned once more to the Palestinian refugee camp – which witnessed fighting and clashes in 2007 between the Jund al-Sham terrorist group and the Lebanese army – with reports that the Fatah al-Islam terrorist group are set to attack a number of Lebanese targets. Palestinian security sources have claimed that this plan is being driven by "suspicious Lebanese and regional hands."
 
Head of the Palestinian Armed Struggle, Colonel Mahmoud Issa, who heads security in the Ain al-Helwa refugee camp, told Asharq Al-Awsat that "the remnants of the disbanded terrorist organization Fatah al-Islam are trying to re-organize their group at the Ain al-Helwa camp to carry out suspicious [terrorist] operations."
 
He added that "some parties that have an interest in targeting the security of the [refugee] camps and the surrounding area stand behind these operations and the attempt to revive Fatah al-Islam."
In a telephone interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, Colonel Mahmoud Issa, who goes by the nom de guerre of "Al-Lino" revealed that the Ain al-Helwa refugee camp has been experiencing security breaches over the past week, and stressed that he would "strike these remnants [of the Fatah al-Islam group] with an iron fist."
 
He added that "we enjoy factional and popular support and we will not allow these groups to breath; we will deal with anybody who tries to circumvent Lebanese security."
 
Colonel Issa promised "to arrest these elements and to put an end to all the extremist groups that use Islam as a cover." He added "despite the official declaration of the disbandment of the Fatah al-Islam group, it seems that the group's Emir Osama al-Shehabi has received orders to return to operations" stressing that "we are on the lookout for him and his group, who are well-known by us, and we will take action against them."
 
Over the past week, the Ain al-Helwa Palestinian refugee camp has seen armed confrontation between the Palestinian Fatah group that is in charge of the camp's security and members of the disbanded terrorist organization Fatah al-Islam, resulting in a number of injuries to the group's members, as well as civilians.
 
Well informed sources within the Ain al-Helwa camp informed Asharq Al-Awsat that "a series of security incidents have taken place at night over the past week…including grenades being thrown into the street, as well as explosives planted [in several areas]." The sources also indicated that there was a failed assassination attempt on Fatah member Ayman al-Dajjani.
 
The source added that "security events culminated after a group made up of Fatah security guards confronted an armed group of 6 individuals they believed were members of Fatah al-Islam, after 3 explosions shook the camp's eastern side.
 
These successive security breaches in the Ain al-Helwa camp have resulted in schools being closed, and the camp's monitoring committee holding emergency meetings, which announced that "there has been a series of security breaches carried out by suspicious figures with the aim of undermining the security and stability of the camp." The committee also confirmed that "all [Palestinian] group's and factions stand together against any breach of security, on the basis of national participation and mutual respect."
 
The disbanded Fatah al-Islam group is a radical Sunni Islamist terrorist organization that was first formed in November 2006. It has been described as a militant jihadist organization, with some reports claiming the group has ties to Al Qaeda. The Fatah al-Islam group found itself in the news in May 2007 after taking part in bloody clashes against the Lebanese Army at the Nahr al-Bared UNRWA Palestinian refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. In clashes which lasted for over three months, more than 400 people were killed, including civilians, before the Lebanese army was able to re-establish control of the camp. Fatah al-Islam leader, Abdul Rahman Awad was killed by the Lebanese army in August 2010; he was succeeded by Osama al-Shehabi.