Fatigue shows in Libya by Victor Kotsev [View All]

May 5, 2011

TEL AVIV - Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi is showing first signs of military strain, if mostly because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has become so desperate that it has embarked on an assassination campaign against him. It is yet to be seen how many more self-declared red lines the leaders of the intervention will breach to avoid - or delay at great human cost - losing the "humanitarian" war.

It is hard to overlook that operations to "crush the head of the snake" (kill or capture rogue leaders that refuse to be defeated) seem to be the latest military fashion in the West. First it was Ivory Coast's Laurent Gbagbo, who is persistently rumored to have been captured by French commandos rather than by the local forces of his enemy, Alassane Ouattara. Former South African president Thabo Mbeki lays out the case for how the intervention on the part of the international community, and specifically the French, was misguided and morally dubious from the start. <1>


More recently, Osama bin Laden's assassination in Pakistan has raised considerable controversy. <2> Somewhere in between, at least two of what looked a whole lot like attempts on Gaddafi's life took place in Libya - one about 10 days ago, <3> and another one on Saturday, killing his obscure youngest son, Saif al-Arab Gaddafi. "Targeted assassinations have become an increasingly favorite tool of US security policy," Stephen Walt, Harvard international affairs professor, writes in Foreign Policy. "...And there's certainly some reason to believe that this is how NATO is trying to resolve the civil war in Libya, though of course we will never say so openly."

It bears noting that the bombing that took the life of Saif al-Arab came roughly at the same time as a new peace offer from Gaddafi, which NATO and the rebels rejected promptly. The moral ambiguity - or outright hypocrisy - of the assassination attempts is also underscored by the fact that Obama has publicly ruled out killing Gaddafi several times in the past.

in full: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ME06Ak02.html