A heavily damaged street in the rebel-held city of Misrata, Libya on June 13, 2011.
Paul Jeffrey / AFP / Getty Images
"Where is NATO?" the rebel asks, with no small amount of frustration. It is just after midnight, Friday, June 17, and he is holed up in Dafniyah, a hamlet west of the revolutionary enclave of Misratah on the coast of western Libya. Like all the fighters in the dry fields outside the rebel city, Ashrf Ali, 30, had anticipated that the military alliance would launch a bombing campaign in the early hours of the morning last Friday, hitting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's troops to allow the rebels to push further inland. Instead, NATO planes have merely buzzed the sky in routine reconnaissance and patrol sorties, leaving Ali and his fellow fighters unable to advance.
Throughout parts of Libya under rebel control, people are frustrated with NATO. Between its slow pace of attacks and the errant strikes that have killed rebel fighters, the speculation now is that the Western coalition lacks the resources and resolve to help the rebels topple Gaddafi.
The chief problem plaguing both NATO and the rebels is lack of coordination. Rebel leaders complain that they must jump through hoops to reach NATO officials. Field commanders requesting air strikes and relaying troop movements have no direct communication with the alliance's military command in the region, much less headquarters in Brussels, which must issue the ultimate orders. Instead, they call their senior officers via satellite phone at a rebel command center in Benghazi. The officers then relay the information to NATO officials in the same building, who only then contact Brussels. The byzantine process squanders valuable time in a war where seconds are precious.
(See a setback for NATO.)
Unable to order airstrikes, rebels in the field are forced to wait for unannounced NATO bombings before they can advance. "I never know what to tell my fighters," says Sa'adun Zuwayhli, 29, a field commander in Dafniyah, which is how far the rebels have advanced out of Misratah in their excruciatingly slow advance toward Gaddafi's capital Tripoli. "Advance, retreat, hold — they are all guesses until we see the bombs from NATO," he laments.
The rebels never know when NATO will fly in to their rescue. During a fierce offensive by Gaddafi's forces between June 7 and June 10, one that left more than 70 rebel dead under a barrage of long-range Grad rockets, the soldiers of "Free Libya" waited for a NATO counterattack that never materialized. The coalition's failure to defend the rebels angered their commanders. "NATO is to be blamed for Friday's deaths," Misratah's military council spokesman Ibrahim Bayt al-Mal told journalists. The alliance's officials have responded to such comments in the past by noting that their mandate extends only to protecting civilians, not toppling Gaddafi.
The lack of direct communication between the two sides has left NATO unable to differentiate between Gaddafi's forces and rebel fighters, leading to friendly fire incidents in which rebels were attacked. In April, two errant bombings in the rebel-held areas killed at least 20. Last Saturday, NATO mistakenly targeted a rebel convoy in which at least four were injured. The coalition immediately released a statement explaining that "a particularly complex and fluid battle scenario" led it to believe that the rebel column was a Gaddafi battalion because his forces "had recently been operating" in the area. All three attacks occurred in the area between the cities of Ajdabiyah and Brega in eastern Libya.
(Photos: See Libya's Roman Ruins.)
NATO's explanation, though, did not satisfy rebel leaders. "We are upset when civilians die," explained the rebel's military spokesman in Benghazi Ahmad Bani. Libyans in Misratah were even blunter. "We are fighting against a dictator with advanced weapons. We can't be fighting NATO as well," says Khalid Elaas, 39. "They need to figure out how to run this campaign or the people will be burning pictures of NATO leaders next to those of Gaddafi's."
NATO's actions have left Misratah's rebels not only angry, but puzzled as well. After the military alliance introduced helicopters last week for the first time, it dropped illustrated Arabic leaflets declaring, "NATO forces will take all the steps necessary to destroy the war instruments that threaten civilians." But instead of reaching their intended targets, the leaflets landed in rebel held positions, leaving the fighters there perplexed.
Confusion is the least of the rebels' worries. By the time the sun rises on Friday, Ashrf Ali is exasperated, having waited all night for an offensive that never materialized. "If NATO does not get its act together, this war is never going to end," he complains, as he heads for a nearby canvas tent to get some sleep.
Source: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2078831,00.html#ixzz1PvB7R2d0
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1 comment:
This is the typical incompetence of NATO and UN-led commands. The same disconnected lack of leadership led to the deaths of US Army Rangers in Somalia, where the US command could not even persuade the Pakistani UN commanders to send in troops to rescue the survivors after their Blackhawk helicopters were shot down by Al Qaeda terrorists - not to mention every other conflict where the US command structure was not directly in control of all US forces.
The military forces of the United States should never be deployed anywhere that they are not directly under the command of US commanders.
The US has no military or national interests in this nonsensical military action that is occurring in Libya. And let's face it, if the US had not been ordered into it by the most incompetent President in history, there is no way that the other NATO and UN countries would be there, either.
This war was illegal to begin with, but has now gone even further in passing the time period allowed by even the dubious "War Powers Act" - which was NOT an original part of our Constitution, by the way, and only came to exist during the Vietnam war, for the convenience of LBJ and his bunch of elitist criminals (McNamara, Bundy, etc.)
This, to me, almost seems like a bit of a test by the ruling elite and Obama's people - just to see if the population is so dumbed down by now that they don't even realize that even a President of the United States cannot just go around making wars whenever and wherever they want to.
Sending our brave men and women into harm's way to risk and lose their lives without the consent and approval of the US Congress is not legal. Period.
The whole idea of our Founders was that only the Congress - who are duly elected directly by the people - can declare war, and can therefore also be fired if and when they violate our trust, our laws and the will of the people.
Well, this President and his administration is certainly governing against the will of the American people, and has shown a level of arrogance that has never been seen before in our history.
These acts of war against Libya, of course, also involve the continuation of the ruling elite's plan to dissolve and replace the sovereignty of the United States (and all other nations, with the US simply being the biggest and strongest power to attack, for now) in favor of these globalist supranational organizations - such as the UN, NATO, EU, etc. - which are also illegal under the US Constitution, by the way.
I wonder how many people still realize this fact? This is one of the saddest and most dangerous aspects of the the New World Order propaganda - the fact that so many people don't even remember (if they ever really knew) that this is not where we came from or who we are as a nation.
We are only one (very powerful and sovereign) nation, and we need to continue being exactly that - and leave the other sovereign nations of the world to their own affairs, and stop allowing the ruling elite parasites to use our military forces to constantly dominate and control the destinies of other free people around the world.
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