GMTom wrote:NATO can do it no problem, and just as Turkey (part of NATO) wants nothing to do with this, so could the US.
Cruise missiles are nice but not absolutely required, certainly not for a no fly zone only (as was the original intent)
Command is trying to be handed off to NATO so that's a non-issue
Courage? that's simply stuff of Presidential speeches, aside from France, their is plenty of courage to go around without the US taking part. That part is downright insulting to the other nations! (again, except France of course)

U.S. officials said at the outset of the missile strikes Saturday that the goals are to prevent Gadhafi from inflicting further violence on his own people and to degrade his military's ability to contest a no-fly zone. ...for a day so that he could be in Washington to monitor the operation's launch.

Navy Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, director of the Pentagon's Joint Staff, told reporters the cruise missile assault was the "leading edge" of a coalition campaign, named Operation Odyssey Dawn.

He said it would take six to 12 hours to assess the damage, and if the main targets — Libya's SA-5 surface-to-air missiles — were taken out, then it would be safe to send an unmanned Global Hawk surveillance drone to get a better picture of the area.

Libya's overall air defenses are based on older Soviet technology but Gortney called them capable and a potential threat to allied aircraft.

Also targeted: early warning radars and unspecified communications facilities, Gortney said. The U.S. military has extensive recent experience in such combat missions; U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft repeatedly attacked Iraq's air defenses during the 1990s while enforcing a no-fly zone over Iraq's Kurdish north.

Cruise missiles are the weapon of first choice in such campaigns; they do not put pilots at risk, and they use navigational technologies that provide good precision.

The first Tomahawk cruise missiles struck at 3 p.m. EDT, Gortney said, after a one-hour flight from the U.S. and British vessels on station in the Mediterranean.

They were fired from five U.S. ships — the guided-missile destroyers USS Stout and USS Barry, and three submarines, USS Providence, USS Scranton and USS Florida.

The U.S. has at least 11 naval vessels in the Mediterranean, including three submarines, two destroyers, two amphibious warfare ships and the USS Mount Whitney, a command-and-control vessel that is the flagship of the Navy's 6th Fleet. Also in the area are Navy P-3 and EP-3 surveillance aircraft, officials said.

Ray Jay wrote:I think you have to take a step back to evaluate Obama's performance in the Middle East. If you can build a continuum of success and failure, I would describe success as:

1. greater democracy
2. decline of Iranian power (which is the key to israeli cooperation in the West Bank)
3. reduced blood shed
4. flowing oil
5. better relations between the west and the Muslim world
6. Limited cost for the west (given our budgetary situations)

And I would describe failure as the opposite of these 6 and

1. increased opportunity and desire for terrorism.

Let's evaluate our intervention in Libya and the rest of this on a bigger picture. If you were to evaluate Iraq on these dimensions, at best we are 1 or 2 out of 7.

Can anyone imagine how the Arab spring would have played out if a keystone Arab state, oil-rich and heavily armed with a track record of intervention in its neighbors' affairs and a history of all-out mass repression against its own civilians, were still the private property of a sadistic crime family? As it is, to have had Iraq on the other scale from the outset has been an unnoticed and unacknowledged benefit whose extent is impossible to compute. And the influence of Iraq on the Libyan equation has also been uniformly positive in ways that are likewise often overlooked.

On the first point, I admit that Egyptian and Tunisian and other demonstrators did not take to the streets waving Iraqi flags, as if in emulation. (Though Saad-Eddin Ibrahim, intellectual godfather of the Egyptian democracy movement, did publicly hail the fall of Saddam as an inspiration, and many leaders of the early Lebanese "spring" spoke openly in similar terms.) This reticence is quite understandable since, apart from the northern Kurdish region of Iraq from which Foreign Minister Zebari hails, the liberation of the country was not entirely the work of its own people. But this point has become a more arguable one since the Arab League itself admitted that there are certain regimes that are impervious to unassisted overthrow from within. Qaddafi's is pre-eminently one of these, and Saddam's was notoriously so, as the repeated terror-bombings and gassings of the Shiite and Kurdish populations amply proved. Meanwhile, Iraq already has, albeit in rudimentary and tenuous form, the free press, the written constitution, and the parliamentary election system that is the minimum demand of Arab civil society. It has also passed through a test of fire in which the Bin Ladenists threw everything they had against an emergent democracy and were largely defeated and discredited. These are lessons and experiences that are useful not just for Mesopotamia.
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As for the Iraq effect on Libya: Here is what I was told in confidence by the British diplomat who helped negotiate the surrender of Qaddafi's stockpile of WMD. Not by any means a neoconservative (a breed in any case rare in her majesty's Foreign and Commonwealth Office), he emphasized three factors. First, and on this occasion at least, the West had extremely good intelligence and was able to astonish and demoralize Qaddafi by the amount it knew about his secret programs. Added to this, and acting cumulatively over time, was the adamant persistence of the Scottish courts in the matter of the Lockerbie atrocity. (Don't mess with Scottish law, a maxim imperfectly understood by the sort of people who style themselves "king of kings.") Third, and very important in the timing, was Qaddafi's abject fear at watching the fate of Saddam Hussein. This has been amply reconfirmed by many Libyan officials in the hearing of many of my friends. He did, after all, approach George W. Bush and Tony Blair, not the United Nations. So now Qaddafi's stockpiles are under lock and key in Oak Ridge, Tenn. —their trace elements having successfully incriminated the A.Q. Khan network in Pakistan—and who can conceivably wish it had been otherwise?

That of course raises the question of Iran. If they do get the bomb, the whole equation really does change

rayI think you have to take a step back to evaluate Obama's performance in the Middle East. If you can build a continuum of success and failure, I would describe success as:

1. greater democracy
2. decline of Iranian power (which is the key to israeli cooperation in the West Bank)
3. reduced blood shed
4. flowing oil
5. better relations between the west and the Muslim world
6. Limited cost for the west (given our budgetary situations

Minister X wrote:

Faxmonkey wrote:In Iraq you guys let the Shia rebells be killed after Desert Storm without so much as blinking.

That's not entirely fair. More than a few voices here were raised in outrage. On the other hand, I don't recall any of our European allies complaining.

Minister X wrote:

Faxmonkey wrote:In Iraq you guys let the Shia rebells be killed after Desert Storm without so much as blinking.

That's not entirely fair. More than a few voices here were raised in outrage. On the other hand, I don't recall any of our European allies complaining.

Doctor Fate wrote:I'll be waiting on the retraction.

Beyond that, Bush went to the UN--and had more authority to do what he did than Obama does. How does a "no-fly zone" morph into attacking ground troops in a few days?

Ray Jay wrote:The Israeli ambassador to the US made a similar point in today's WSJ. Qaddafi gave up the bomb because of the US invasion of Iraq.

danivon wrote:

Ray Jay wrote:The Israeli ambassador to the US made a similar point in today's WSJ. Qaddafi gave up the bomb because of the US invasion of Iraq.

Did he though? Was he even getting close to having the bomb? Or was there a lot of misinformation about? I have to say I found the whole episode quite odd. Almost as if Gadaffi was lying (say it ain't so!) about his capabilities all along.

rickyp wrote:ray

... NATO without the US could have secured the skies over Libya. It was simply a wish to do so without casualties that required Cruise Missiles. And a wish to do so quickly which required a larger air fleet. And a wish to do so inexpensively....as military expenditures are more closely budeted elsewhere.
NATO is also more likely to plan and execute close support air strikes with the Rebels

It was about the US having looser budgets?

and French soldiers would have been VERY nice in Iraq as well, the extra numbers could have also saved US lives. So it seems French lives are worth more than US lives