The coalition, in this case apparently France, has reportedly struck the airfield in Sebha Oasis, well into the Libyan Sahara. Sabha, with longtime links to Qadhafi and site of a major airfield said to be where the sub-Saharan African mercenaries Qadhafi recruited entered the country, would appear to be the deepest strikes so far, with the rest of trhe4 action confined to Mediterranean Libya.
While in-flight refueling makes range somewhat irrelevant, it did cross my mind to wonder if the French were operating from the Mediterranean (the carrier Charles de Gaulle is now in the theater) or from someplace like Chad.
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Further to my initial reactions of last night, a few thoughts before anything starts to happen in the Libyan intervention:
A robust European participation. It's good that the US will not be taking the lead, though of course US forces, AWACS and other surveillance assets will be present. The absence of a US carrier contributes to this, but it's best not to let Qadhafi paint this as an American operation.
Air strikes are essential, but may also be enough. Bosnia and Kossovo may be suitable parallels. The main advantage the Qadhafi forces have is their air power and armor. This is classic tank country, made famous by Rommel and Montgomery. If the armor can be blunted by air strikes, it can have real effect.
There probably already are special operators on the ground. Everyone has made clear that there sill be no invasion, no "boots on the ground." In terms of infantry that will surely be the case, but special operations forces are probably already present. Recall that an SAS team already got caught blundering around in eastern Libya. I suspect their American and French equivalents are there too.
The question of Egyptian involvement. Egypt has the most immediate interests in play here, and the largest Army in the region. There are already reports that Egypt is providing small arms to the rebels and may be providing elite special forces to train the rebels as well. I suspect that, short of Qadhafi forces crossing the international border, the Egyptians will keep their involvement fairly low-key and deniable; they are still in the middle of revolutionary ferment and the military, which is running the country now, is understandably preoccupied. But if push came to shove, the only nearby state that could field a large enough Army to crush the Qadhafi forces is Egypt's.
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This week's "Weekend Historical Video" — again poaching from the wealth of YouTube so I can enjoy the weekend — is a BBC documentary on the 1956 Suez War. It doesn't carry a date but must be in the last few years since it includes much information that was only declassified after 40 years or more. [UPDATE: Looks like 2003.] But its strength is it contains, in addition to the inevitable talking heads, a lot of contemporary newsreel clips of Nasser, Eden, etc.
Now that 1956 is more than half a century in the past, the Suez War does not seem to occupy a very prominent place in most Westerners' collective memory; most aren't old enough to remember it. When it comes to Arab-Israeli wars, 1948 is enshrined in Israeli memory as the war of independence, and 1967 and 1973 are much studied as the formative matrices of the modern Middle East. Israel was a bit player in 1956, its invasion of Sinai a pretext (planned in advance) for the Anglo-French intervention. And in Britain and France, it's an incident best forgotten, the last death rattle of empire, when the once dominant powers were brought low by their erstwhile American ally, which turned out in those days to actually mean its anti-colonial rhetoric.
But Suez' memory is still alive in Egypt, for this was Nasser's finest hour, the defiant victory over the former colonial masters, his apotheosis as an Arab symbol, never completely erased even by the disaster of 1967. The victory over the "Tripartite aggression" is still a staple of school history in Egypt.
[In the documentary I do have one historical nit to pick. When discussing Nikita Khrushchev's nuclear threats against London and Paris, the documentary cuts to clips of a silo-launched missile and to another missile which is in fact an SA-2 surface-to-air missile. Neither of these was in service in 1956. The first Soviet ICBM, the R-7, was tested in 1957 (and launched Sputnik later that year) and none were silo-launched in the early days. The SA-2, which is an anti-aircraft defense, was also first introduced in 1957 and most famously demonstrated against Francis Gary Powers' U-2 in 1960. So those clips are anachronisms; though Khrushchev talked a lot about missiles, in those pre-Sputnik days most Westerners interpreted any nuclear threat as involving bombers.][End of Nitpick.]
The BBC documentary is in three parts, totaling about half an hour, below. Have a nice weekend.
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