Operation Odyssey Dawn

Better late than never! (Unless, of course, talking bout that 28 day cycle thingy - uh, yes ma'am!)

It's on bay bee - coalition air power shredded an ad hoc armor column belonging to Colonel Khadaffy's forces just to the east of old Benghazi - smoking and smoldering panzers and charred corpses make a wickedly wrecked monument to RAF's Sturzkampfflugzeug Stuka moment l'geurr.

Hot gossip rumours most of Libya's ancient Collectivist Union made and cloned air defenseless systems have been marginalized, destroyed and totally rendered ineffective.

Cruise missiles shrieked by the hundreds to devastate airfields and as best understood - the Libyan Air Force is now consigned to the same loser pile as Waffen Ss or Confederacy.

Now is the moment to consider how, uh broad, the mission actually is.

UN Sec Reso #1973 doesn't just call for a no-fly zone; #1973 also authorizes attacks on Libyan army vehicles and artillery on the ground. It focuses on preventing a humanitarian disaster, but it also calls for "the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution."

Protecting the civies is very noble sounding but the mission constraints seem to render this totally bass ackwards 

As awesome as NATO air power is - it's not the end all be all to estab a No Fly Zone

"...Once coalition aircraft begin attacking conventional military targets, Khadaffy will switch to irregular warfare techniques. His soldiers and mercenaries will abandon their uniforms and travel by bus, accompanied by civilians, refugees, and friendly media for shielding against air attack. 

"...Once inside cities like Benghazi and in close quarters with the rebels, Khadaffy's infantry will similarly be immune from air attack, especially if the coalition is prohibited from deploying ground troops as forward air controllers.

"...Finally, Khadaffy is a particularly unscrupulous and ruthless adversary with long experience using terrorism as a strategic weapon -- Libya was a large source of suicide bomb volunteers during the Iraq war -- so members of the coalition should expect terror retaliation in various forms.

Operation Odyssey Dawn is kicking off to a rocking start but a true quagmire free solution is NOT to sweetly nibble about the Colonel's periphery of power - it should be to annihilate the entire regime (and all their precious assets).

Protecting the pop pop population is a wonderfully sounding centric - yet aerial sorties alone are hardly convincing - and announcing ground forces are verboten by design is just asking for trouble.

 Arab League's casus belli carte blanche' has an expiration date yet projections of perception about the mighty mighty (impotent) collective of failing autocrats and freshly fallen despots or what they may or may not think about fiddling about with gross violators of R2P Clause is lolable to the nth

"...After all, nothing—nothing!—could be worse than the perception that the United States was “invading” another Muslim country.
 
"...Rubbish. Our “invasions” have in fact been liberations. We have shed blood and expended treasure in Kuwait in 1991, in the Balkans later in the 1990s, and in Afghanistan and Iraq—in our own national interest, of course, but also to protect Muslim peoples and help them free themselves. 

"...Libya will be America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation.


Pic - "Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn is commanded by U.S. Navy Adm. Samuel J. Locklear aboard the command ship USS Mount Whitney"