Qaddafi's Last Hurrah

Two weeks ago I said not to discount Colonel Qaddafi just yet.

I may well be right in the end. As Libya has fallen further into what is now a civil war, Colonel Qaddafi made a conscious decision to gamble the future of his country on his ability to crush the insurgency. Colonel Qaddafi's bet, after watching forty years of Western planning, is that he can secure his country, crush the insurgency and restore a semblance of peace and order in his before the world community aligns itself to take military action against his regime. In the past two decades, he has seen several cases in which the United Nations or NATO have taken months to mount an effective response to the actions taken by a state.

Remember the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990? Desert Shield lasted for five months before a counter-attack to liberate Kuwait was launched. Before NATO's intervention in the Balkans was initiated by a two year long no-fly zone, during which time ethnic continued to operate with little restriction until Operation Deny Flight, whose bombing campaign formally brought Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia, to the negotiating table during the Dayton Accords. NATO's second intervention in 1999 took months for forces to be mustered - and Serbia was just across the Adriatic Sea from Aviano Air Base.

The threat of a no-fly zone does not scare Qaddafi as much as we think it does. No-fly zones are exactly that - unless rules of engagement are changed to allow for attacks against Libyan forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, in which case the intervention is a targeted bombing campaign.

Colonel Qaddafi is trying to beat the clock here, and unless the United Nations Security Council can reach an agreement to provide forces for a formal humanitarian intervention, which is unlikely considering China's opposition even to the implementation of a no-fly zone, Colonel Qaddafi may well be "Colonel Qaddafi" for a few more years.