Rebel forces beat a retreat from the strategic oil port of Ras Lanouf on Thursday, speeding back to opposition territory by the hundreds as Moammar Gadhafi's army pounds the town with artillery.
The opposition fighters fled eastward in cars and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns. One said government forces were raining rockets or tank shells on the city in what appeared to be preparation for a full-scale advance.
This does not look good for the rebels. With this first drive east (1), the loyalists can stage another offensive to reach as far as Ajdabiya (2) that will put them in a position to threaten multiple rebel positions (3):
The map itself is from http://www.ezilon.com/maps/africa/libya-road-maps.html
First, will the rebels be able to counter-attack Ras Lanouf or are they falling back to Al Uqaylah?
Second, can the loyalists push all the way to Ajdabiya? At some point, the loyalists start to drive into areas with lots of pro-rebel sympathisers. We can see how tough it has been for the loyalists to take isolated Zawiyah and Misrata. Will access to the armories of the east allow the rebels to mount a better defense in the eastern cities?
I'm getting ahead of the ground situation, of course; but if loyalists can take Ajdabiya, their options open up immensely.
If the loyalists think they can successfully take pro-rebel cities, they can drive north to Benghazi into the heart of the rebellion to drive a stake in its heart.
If the loyalists think that the rebel heartland is too tough to take on for now (and are air strikes on oil facilities at Marsa al Burayqah (Brega) an indication that the loyalists don't think they can take the facilities?), they could drive to the southeast to cut off or capture the southeastern oil fields and deny the rebels a source of revenue in a long war.
The loyalists could also drive to the northeast to either capture Tobruk or advance to the east of that city to cut off the rebels from supply lines to Egypt. This would have the advantage of exploiting the loyalist advantage in armor by avoiding cities and using mobility as a weapon to confine the rebels into a coastal enclave rather than being an eastern rebellion.
We've said that Khaddafi has to go. If we don't want to look like a helpless giant, we'd best get moving to help the rebels simply hold on. Forget those heady early days of people power promise. The reality of firepower is coming to the fore as the loyalists recover from the shock of their initial losses (the Libyan navy is getting involved, too, with gunboats shelling the rebels). We have options, as I've written, short of direct intervention with either troops or pointless no-fly zones.
There is only one way a no-fly zone would not be pointless--if it was put in place to raise the morale of rebels while we do the semi-covert and covert actions that I've noted earlier to get heavy weapons to the rebels from existing arms depots they hold and give them some organization and leadership to fight.
Khaddafi could win this civil war. Don't assume he can't and that our job is to find a nuanced way to appear in the rebel victory parade without taking any risks to defeat Khaddafi.
And again, excuse the lousy graphics. I can make lovely stuff in Word but my photo viewer doesn't have the tools I'd like (or, more likely, I just don't know how to use the tools to make nice arrows and graphics)
