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Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


drat I really thought the Libyan uprising was going to go the way of the Iranian one and be brutally crushed. Looks like the might actually pull this out. Wow.

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Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


DevNull posted:

It appears that the protesters are expecting and possibly waiting on the rest of the world to step in a bit to help. That is from an AJE reported in Libya.

Sadly, they will likely receive none.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


El-ahrairah posted:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina called on the Obama administration to be “at least as bold as the French."

le sigh..

He can't stand seeing browns get airstriked without the USA getting involved. The fact that it's the French must be very traumatic to his world view. Move over Lindsey, the French and British are old hats in this game and this time they are actually on the people's side.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Devian666 posted:

Eurofighters? Well that's the end of the Libyan airforce then.

Yeah I'm pretty sure all of CQ's pilots are going to have a hand on the ejection handle at all times once they hear about this.

Radar contact! OH FUUUU---- EJECT!

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Please let those departing plane rumors from BBC be true. The rebels obviously need help badly and it would be nice to see Western powers actually helping support a popular democratic uprising in the Arab world instead of crushing it.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


farraday posted:

Hearts and motherfucking minds, woooo. I'm looking forward to one day having a professional military.

What are you talking about? If you need some brown people shot the gently caress up nobody does it better than the USA. :911:

Now that we've pretty much destroyed all fixed surface anti-air and trashed CQs ancient air force, we should definitely hand control over to NATO or France or whoever the gently caress wants control. They can run SEAD missions and organize a NFZ just as well as anybody.

Hopefully the can blow up some of those tanks over near Zintan. Conventional and social media reports are looking pretty bleak.

Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 22, 2011

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Vir posted:

Welcome to war reporting in the Greater Middle East.


I also throw unfired bullets at people to intimidate them.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


A cool drat horse posted:

god why would CNN let Rick Santorum have a voice

Because balance means hearing out both insanity and reasoned debate. Then you "leave it there" and treat both positions as if they are equally valid.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Stroh M.D. posted:

Target acquisition through Twitter? Another first for this war, if that's the case.

They've got satellites, global hawks, special forces and whatever intelligence assets they deployed available. They probably already know about the tanks and are getting ready to send some planes out to blow them the gently caress up, assuming they haven't tied little old ladies to the sides.

And though I agree that Obama's method of using force is against the intent of Constitution and the War Powers Act, those documents assumed that you had a congress that wasn't completely loving worthless. Boehner and McConnel and would have turned this into a 2 week long piece of political theater while the population of Benghazi was massacred. Kucinich is still awesome though and consistent at least.

Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Mar 23, 2011

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Young Freud posted:

I'm wondering 1) how do the rebels take possession of an abandoned tank and 2) what's stopping the coalition from blowing them up once the rebels have gotten a hold of them?

You climb in and drive it away. Tanks are actually easy to drive. And I'm sure there will be some blue on blue. If I was a rebel dude and had a captured tank, first loving thing I'd do is paint the entire thing to look like the old Libyan flag.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


farraday posted:

Later attempts to drive to this neighborhood will fail when the local drivers got confused and ended up at the recently leveled Tajura military base.

Al Jazeera English Libya blog posted:

11:16pm: Our correspondent Anita McNaught, in Tripoli, journalists were driven around the city earlier today with a promise from the government of being taken to see the scene of a coaltion air strike, some civilian casualties, maybe even a hospital.



"But none of this happened. After being driven around for 45 minuets or so, we were being taken back to the hotel and they said they couldn't find the right address."

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


President Assad is relatively popular in Syria (or at least still was last I heard) isn't he? If he does give the protesters what they want and lifts the state of emergency shouldn't it calm back down? Or has this kind of snowballed beyond that at this point.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


DonT15 posted:

Because it took me so long to figure out these basic facts; call me stupid or whatever you want. Population is surely a non-indicator of power in the world (compare: China vs. USA, or Saudi Arabia vs. Iran). Even so, it was interesting to figure out how many people's lives would change in a Yemeni revolution vs. a Libyan revolution, and so on.

Well it's a bit tricky trying to guess middle eastern/north african pop numbers by a map. When lots of the land is inhospitable desert, the area of the country in square miles doesn't really correlate to how many people live there.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Sivias posted:

There must be a translation misinterpretation or something. I think the use of the word 'snipers' is a misnomer. Our historical idea of a sniper is a guy sitting in a dark room or a bell tower taking specific aim. One shot, one kill sort of thing. I'm betting when we hear reports of 'snipers' it's indiscriminant fire or people shooting from an advantage (from the roof to the street, etc.)

If you take it in this context, the idea of a 'sniper' being captured or killed in those numbers is far more likely.

A sniper is a guy who knows how to use the iron sights on an AK and can kill someone 100 meters away from a rooftop.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Nenonen posted:

Looks like buccaneers have joined the rebel cause.



I hope that this guy becomes the first Libyan president :yarr:

Is that a flare gun in his right hand?

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Nombres posted:

He'll still find a way to take out a tank brigade with it.

Maybe he will do the whole action movie star thing and ignite some flammable substance at range via flare and then walk towards the camera while the tank explodes behind him.

And from reading AJE and some other sources, it does indeed look like the Syria protests are starting to snowball beyond just "we want emergency law ended". If Assad doesn't want to have to choose between murdering thousands of his people or keeping power he should probably just lift the state of emergency and hope thats enough to make people stop before it gets worse.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Young Freud posted:

IIRC, fired straight up poses little danger, as gravity saps the velocity of the bullet to nothing, at which it falls under normal gravity.

Fired at an angle is where you get problems.

It's actually more of a problem of the bullet keeping spin. If it begins to tumble then it rapidly slows and becomes much less dangerous. It's pretty hard to fire almost perfectly straight up though and the more likely scenario is you will instead get a parabolic arcand when the bullet lands it will still be going fast enough to potentially injure or kill. Even a very high arc can be dangerous.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


J33uk posted:

No. That's loving absurd.

What if he's a sniper from the future?

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


farraday posted:

I think the provisional council may be selling the oil directly? Certainly I think all the companies pulled out their people at this point.

In 18 minutes President Obama is supposed to start his speech on Libya. Predictions on what he's going to say? ("Let me be clear" does not count as a prediction)

Read on AJE that they are letting Qatar handle the oil business side for now.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


farraday posted:

Two slower ground attack vehicles. The US must feel more secure about the issue of portable anti air capability. Helicopters ,other than SAR types, are probably out of the question though.

If they are using AC130s and A10s for CAS missions then that should expedite things a bit, and implies they have guys on the ground coordinating with the rebels.

straw man posted:

Obama is at pains and contortions to project that America does not lead the charge in Libya. Plays better in Brussells, maybe. But here at home, why should we want our sons and daughters to fight in the Middle east for France?[1]

[1] A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

In closing :frogout:

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


feedmegin posted:

Assuming you're an American -

Why have you previously expected French (and British and Australian and everyone else in the 'Coalition of the Willing') to fight in the Middle East for America?

Also, just because you guys aren't the boss for once doesn't make it not worth doing.

Keep your logic out of this okay? Going in and preventing a dictator from exterminating his own civilian opposition with secret police, military, and mercenary forces while having the backing of the international community is obviously much worse than attacking some random guy who we don't like with the excuse of he "Supports Terrorism™" and has :siren:WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTIOOOON:siren:*

*Presence of WMDs not guaranteed.

I mean who cares if it ends with a few tens of thousands of brown people dead and a shattered uprising against a cruel and demonstrably unstable dictator who controls a shitload of wealth.

Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Mar 29, 2011

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Baddog posted:

Hey, you do know that Saddam Hussein killed almost a million of his own people, not even counting the Iran-Iraq war which killed another million.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein%27s_Iraq

Estimates of up to 300,000 Kurds killed with poison gas and other attacks, up to 200,000 killed in the '91 uprising, plus hundreds of thousands in just the day-to-day operations of Hussein's Iraq.

So your whole comparison is pretty lol.

Congratulations on completely missing the point of my post! You get an F for reading comprehension.

Where did I say anything about Saddam Hussein? The point is that in Libya you have a UN sanctioned intervention backed by the majority of the international community and does not involve us basically rolling in the tanks cause we could. This isn't an American force unilaterally imposing regime change via arms, it's a world backed force basically going; "I'm going to wave my arms over here. If I hit your heavy weapons and your own people end up overthrowing your government, maybe you should have tried being less of an rear end in a top hat." There aren't American armored divisions sweeping through the desert fighting on the ground with the Libyan military, there are Libyans doing that. We are just making it so a) CQ stops blowing up his loving cities and murdering people and b) taking out his heavy equipment that he is using to do this with (which coincidentally puts his guys on more equal footing with the large number of irregular light infantry that they were blowing the gently caress up with near impunity before).

Also, though Saddam was indeed a similar rear end in a top hat, that was not part of the stated reason why the US intervened. It was all WMD and fear hype and if we were going in to save the Kurds and Shiites maybe we should have done that during the uprising after Gulf War 1 before they were all slaughtered and thrown into mass graves.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Baddog posted:

:words:

Your entire post is just :ughh:

No one is arguing that that CQ or Saddam aren't shitheads. Also thanks for the random :hurr: personal attacks. There is a huge loving difference between 1) a UN/World backed NFZ/Aerial attack enabling a popular uprising/preventing them from being crushed (Libya) in the face of extreme violence being perpetuated against civilians by the military and 2) fabricating a cassus belli with very little international support (apart from allies you can arm twist or bribe) into running in and imposing regime change via military force without any kind of civilian uprising or current humanitarian crisis. If you can't understand how these two interventions are so extremely different due to your own bias then there's really nothing more to say.

Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Mar 29, 2011

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


slay0r691 posted:

It is about one thing only, exploitation of other countries in whatever way benefits the west most. There's a reason we ignored rowanda and the sudanese genocide, because there's no benefit for us. Here in libya there is the potential to have access to more oil, and to install another central bank in a country who didn't play ball with the rest of the global banking system. Its so obvious, but the western media constantly plays into the emotions of gullible americans. Did you hear lindey lohan is changing her name?

At the root of it, most likely. If Libya didn't have significant oil wealth and as a result, some level of international importance, no one would have probably gotten involved or given a poo poo beyond us bleeding heart liberals going all :qq: over images of civilians being massacred while the west did nothing.

However, if your only interest was that THE OIL MUST FLOW, the easiest way to have that happen would have been to simply let CQ finish crushing the rebels and resume business as normal. His forces were literally miles away from Benghazi when the air strikes started and turned this thing around.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


slay0r691 posted:

Its about gaining control over that oil through western backed corporations

??? After the sanctions started getting lifted in 2004 there were lifted a whole bunch of western oil companies, including American ones swooped in pretty drat rapidly and started securing contracts. They hold quite a few at this point.

Here's an old article from when it all started going down after the sanction lift. http://articles.latimes.com/2005/oct/03/business/fi-libya3

Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Mar 29, 2011

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Nombres posted:

Wow, I remember there was a lot of talk in the thread about a week ago about how Gadaffi's forces were done, they were going to disintegrate, and then it'd be a wonderful little jaunty picnic in Tripoli. Now the loyalists are whooping rear end again.

I wanted that to be true, I really did. Go Benghazi, boo Tripoli. :(

I wanted it to be true too, but realistically civil wars usually take longer than that unless the west is willing to go all :black101: and just go around basically obliterating Gaddafi's military to help the rebels.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Yaos posted:

Looking at his previous articles he's the Glenn Beck of MarketWatch articles except he's left-wing and not the personification of all evil.

So just the :saddowns:/:tinfoil: part?

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Xandu posted:

CJ Chivers, who I usually trust, says that right before NATO bombed that rebel convoy, one of the rebels had fired into the air. Although it's not clear to me that small arms fire would be enough to attract attention.

According to an AJE interview with a rebel who was there, one of the trucks started firing at the aircraft and in return they rebels got bombed. The rebel claimed that it was a Gadaffi supporter who had infiltrated their ranks.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Brown Moses posted:

The Syrian government is now claiming Al Jazeera is building sets of Syrian cities to smear the government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xQ-qhB1uzg

I'm sure they convinced roughly no-one with that amazingly retarded statement. Who thought that was a good lie?


Nenonen posted:

During these harsh times it's nice to hear that the Libyan propaganda masterminds found themselves new jobs :)

Oh

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


AtomikKrab posted:

Possibly the case could be made for treason or something like that? I dunno really we probably blow up a lot of u.s. citizens on U.S. soil anyway (mishaps and accidents though).

You are supposed to be convicted of treason before they can legally execute you.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


d3c0y2 posted:

Didnt he end up boxing someone from SA, I know he was outright crazy but its mental that a crazy person such as him was able to hide it to the extent he could get A. medical training B. Guns and equipment.

No he got a ban for that mod challenge. It's on his SAclopedia entry.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Zeroisanumber posted:

So what would the anti-interventionist's answer to the Libya situation have been?

Let Gaddafi cleanse Benghazi and finish crushing the revolt. While he does this you have angry interviews, send sternly worded letters, and apply sanctions which only further hurt the populace.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Bulky Brute posted:

As a trot I believe the working classes can and must liberate themselves by their own hands. So yeah, in a better world NATO would have stayed the gently caress out of Libya and let Libyans deal with their dictator, like many others have done throughout history. I don't mean to attack the genuinely good intentions of people that believe this NATO intervention was a positive development, I just think their beliefs are wrong.

If you recall, before NATO intervened the Libyan rebels were on the verge of being exterminated and were pretty much begging the outside world for help. They didn't have the equipment, training or manpower to stop the military which was attacking them. Without NATO intervention, they would have been crushed and thousands of people would have been murdered in Benghazi.

I'm sure western nations will do their best to be shitheels in the aftermath and try to secure contracts which loot Libya's natural resources/meddle in the new government. The Libyan revolution may result in a new lovely government replacing the old lovely government. However, this use of force is one of the very few times in my lifetime that I saw as justified since it averted what would likely have been a horrifying massacre in Benghazi, and enabled the revolution to succeed

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Nuclear Spoon posted:

Didn't Libya ask NATO to intervene?

No you see, that was just the western backed puppet "revolution" *handwave*

EDIT: That video... Ali Tarhouni for Treasury Secretary/Fed Chairman/President!

Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Oct 24, 2011

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


farraday posted:

The threatening of Lady Liberty is good, but I feel like you need to include a niqabi somehow since there always seems to be one thrown in.

Yeah and she needs to look sad or scared and be in chains.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


esquilax posted:

You are very much idealizing him if you think the best phrase to describe his actions in the past year is "defending Libya against foreign aggression".

I too believe that when dictators summarily execute, imprison, and torture their own citizens they are "defending their country against foreign aggression"

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Hamelekim posted:

Then I suppose those regulars will remain ignorant of what is really going on around them. I'm not going to suppress my viewpoint just because someone disagrees with it. I don't base my views on how popular they are or how well liked they will make me. I could care less whether or not someone laughs at my views. I care about the truth, nothing more. What I see from people in this thread is an extremely simplistic worldview that ignores most of human history. It's as though you live in a bubble and the only truth is what you see on CNN.

Do some real research on what the West is doing in the world, how they are expanding their empires, and how they are reshaping the middle east to meet their own needs. If you can't see that then you are hopelessly ignorant.

The Truth™ [citation needed]

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Holy gently caress, I saw the thread title and expected stupid irony, not this :smith:.

RIP Vilerat. gently caress extremists.

Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009


Forums Terrorist posted:

Arrest those who spilled blood, arrest the filmmaker and his backers. If this were a perfect world, of course.

Stupid movies are not illegal and shouldn't be, even if fuckwits half a world a way get their panties in a bunch.

The film maker and his intolerant backers are terrible human beings but it would be an extreme overreaction to start jailing people because they made a movie that contains a political/religious message you don't agree with.

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Nuclearmonkee
Jun 10, 2009



They've found our achilles heel! It was our KFC command and control centers all along. We are doomed :negative:

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