A beleaguered Muammar Gaddafi vowed on Wednesday to fight on to death or victory after jubilant rebels forced him to abandon his Tripoli stronghold in an apparently decisive blow against the Libyan leader's 42-year rule.
Rebels ransacked Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya bastion, seizing arms and smashing symbols of a ruler whose fall will transform Libya and rattle other Arab autocrats facing popular uprisings.
It would have been nice to surround and capture him, but putting him on the move will make it more likely that the NATO aerial armada will drop a smart bomb on him. That would be far more convenient that arguments over who tries him and how he is punished.
Khaddafi could try to hide in the shrinking real estate in Tripoli where his supporters live. But that's a dead end. That's victory or death terrain. He lives only by winning. I don't think he can recover. But does he believe that?
Going to Sirte seems like an option, but that goes into the teeth of NATO's aerial surveillance and strike net. That's a bad place to be.
Going south to Sabha where his loyalists still stand seems the best option to survive. Maybe he can rally forces and hire mercenaries from Africa to counter-attack. And his supporters might go along since they might be able to escape to Algeria or Chad from there. Plus it is at the outer edge of NATO aerial capabilities, meaning it will be a ground game for the most part. Can the rebels mount a serious offensive that far south?
I think Khaddafi is finished. He won't drive back into Tripoli to waving supporters. But the form of his defeat is still in doubt. Could he hang on in the south where it really won't matter? Will he flee to a sympathetic African state? Will he go out in a blaze of gunfire against rebel troops? Or will a NATO smart bomb take him out and leave the question of his fate to forensic examination of DNA?
The real question is what does NATO do. Max Hastings is clear that he does not want NATO to send troops. Max Boot is clear that NATO should send in troops. I respect both. But while I think the overthrow of Khaddafi was an American interest (both to prevent him from being a firewall in the Arab Spring and because President Obama put our prestige on the line by saying Khaddafi had to go), the fate of Libya is a European and Arab issue.
Hastings doesn't want British troops sent. Fair enough. British troops are scarce and we need them in Afghanistan. I don't want American troops there for peacekeeping or stabilization (although I assume our post-war plan is simply awesome). But Boot is right that security forces are needed and the rebels can't provide them yet. Spain, France, Italy, and Greece have an interest in keeping Libyan refugees from fleeing north. Tunisia and Egypt have an interest in a stable Libya. The Arab League itself turned on Khaddafi to provide the justification for intervention. But will they have the guts to stay the course when the going gets tough? Cheers from the liberated could not suppress for long resentment and resistance in Afghanistan and Iraq--and let's not forget Somalia where a mission of mercy for the starving turned to Blackhawk Down.
As an aside, I'd like to quibble with Boot:
Some may argue that an international stabilization force — which means sending foreign troops into Libya — risks replaying the key mistake of the Iraq war. But that depends on what you think the mistake was. Was it the very presence of U.S. troops that sparked that insurgency? There probably would have been Sunni Muslim resistance to a Shiite-dominated regime in any case. What allowed the situation to spin out of control was that the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi security forces and did not send enough of its own troops to fill the vacuum.
Yes, let's analyze Libya without the baggage of Iraq misguiding us. And yes, I agree that resistance was not caused by our troop presence. But I absolutely reject the idea that "disbanding" the Iraqi military had a role in stoking the revolt. One, it self-disbanded and our order to disband it only formalized fact. Second, how could we gain the confidence of Iraqi Shias and Kurds if we kept Saddam's army intact? If Saddam's army had been sitting quietly in its barracks, we should have disbanded it rather than use it.
And while initially there probably were too few total troops, I think the major mistake was how they were used and not how many there were. In time we had enough troops and used them well.
Anyway, the question right now is Libya. I say let the Europeans, Middle East, and African countries handle what comes after Khaddafi. We're busy elsewhere. We should certainly have special forces, spooks, and private contractors scouring Libya to scoop up WMD and government records and intelligence people to exploit (before the Russians do the same to cover their tracks), but other than that, we should stay out.
