A Libyan volunteer sits on the back of a car on the outskirts of the eastern town of Ras Lanouf, Libya, Thursday, March 10. Government forces drove hundreds of rebels from a strategic oil port with rockets and tank shells on Thursday, significantly expanding Moammar Gadhafi's control of Libya. (AP Photo)
BENGHAZI - Libya's internecine propaganda war is in high gear here. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has launched his own "Green" movement, but it's nothing like that of Mir Hussein Mousavi in Iran in June of 2009. Seeing the success of the rebels' highly effective marketing campaign with its slick stickers, billboards and retro flags from the pre-1969 rule of the Islamic Senussi movement, Gaddafi has his counter-narrative in full swing with multiple state television channels alternately showing kooky press conferences, fighters denouncing the rebels, and a ticker on television, conveniently in English and Italian, predicting an imminent scandal about to topple the government of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who has recognized the rebel governing council in Benghazi.
Despite the laughable look of Gaddafi's negativist campaign, Tripoli's counter-measures have deadly consequences for rebels and civilians alike as loyalist troops mount massive assaults to retake the key nodes of Zawiya and the oil hub of Ras Lanuf on the central coast.
Asia Times Online witnessed rebel fighters firing wildly into the sky from trucks and tripod mounted anti-aircraft guns as a menacing Russian jet soared past Ras Lanuf's petroleum infrastructure, lobbing a "dumb" bomb near enough to their positions to frighten the uninitiated, but far enough away to cause onlookers to wonder if the inaccuracy was purposeful. Much of the war up until the past few days has been immense displays of bravado by Benghazi's foot soldiers and dedicated volunteers and air power by an encircled Tripoli. The fighting has mostly taken place on a narrow desert highway with the armies far enough apart to barely see one another through shimmering blacktop mirages.
The rebels may have gone too far, too fast in their initial lightening assault, and bolstered by their own machismo and the relatively peaceful fall of nearby dictators, thought they had the upper hand, which in turn inflicted an early psychological coup against regime troops. Now, the opposition will have to strategize or learn to very quickly, or risk fading away as a tangential Arab revolt that peters out, albeit with plenty of bloodshed.
While the areas under rebel control are a literal free-for-all in a wide swath of visa-less territory from the Egyptian frontier to cities and towns ringing south and west of the capital where journalists have free reign, Gaddafi's point men have invited select institutional journalists who couldn't resist the offer to ride out what many thought the regime's dying days.
These journalists based in Tripoli are a key part of the colonel's scheme to buy time while Western powers and Arab, African and Islamic organizations debate, dither and swear they are close to deciding something. When the rebel movement appeared to have the highest degree of momentum, taking town after town following the fall of Benghazi, reporters and photojournalists of every stripe began to stream in thinking Gaddafi's downfall was an imminent event. Not so.
Unlike the authoritarian police states of Tunisia and Egypt that bookended Libya for so long, Libya has never had massive exposure to outside influence like the aforementioned, oil-less states that depended on mass European tourism to stay afloat.
Gaddafi's Libya remained in a permanent state of revolutionary nonsense and paranoia, so the head of state has no official title (and therefore cannot be deposed, as the Gaddafi line goes). The proverbial genie cannot be put back in the bottle here. If Gaddafi's tanks, said to be at the edge of Ras Lanuf's western flank at the time of writing, begin to make a push toward the next oil town east, Brega, the relative calm still felt in a politically turbulent Benghazi may shatter overnight.
Opposition troops have been forwarding countless crates of ammunition toward the front, depleting finite stocks in Benghazi and points further east. Unless an external power decides to step in and arm Libya's rebels, Benghazi, Derna and even Tobruk may face the jittery, iron fist of a man who believes the permanent state of the 20th century's Third World revolution never ended.
Gaddafi is truly fighting the last war, as the expression goes. His Libya was not simply going to be another Twitter domino in the “Arab Spring” that has befuddled American pundits trying to preserve an Israel-first order in the Middle East and North Africa.
While rebels encourage international media to cover their war to the hilt, even ferrying busloads of hungry freelancers to the front, Gaddafi has hit back with looped images on state TV showing groups of men of every conceivable age, shouting: "Allah, Muammar, and nothing else" in squares in several government-held cities to try and create the air, though believed to be in large minority, that Gaddafi's supporters are gathering strength and feeling the wind at their backs.
They march with green flags, green bandanas and green everything else, singing dated nationalists chants adulating the great leader while dancing with posters of the colonel as a much younger man in an array of warrior-chic costumes. One of the most marked differences between Gaddafi's green movement and the rebels is that Gaddafi's followers have a living, breathing and still somewhat agile figure to rally around.
The "Shabaab," the youth, as the rebels call themselves colloquially, hold up an anti-fascist resistance fighter, Omar Mukhtar, who was hanged by Italian Benito Mussolini's proxies here 80 years ago and was a septuagenarian then.
Gaddafi, 69, seems spry in comparison to his long-deceased rebel counter-icon, or at least nimble enough to keep his captive Western press corps off balance as they await his every incoherent pronouncement, jaws agape. Rumors of him fleeing the country appear to be just that. He makes one defiant appearance after another while the east tries to raise regime defectors as a partially united voice under the banner of the National Transitional Council led by Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil, Gaddafi's former justice minister.
Elsewhere on the dial, a channel aimed at Gaddafi's younger admirers, a fresh-faced young man in hair gel and blazer hosts a cheerful debate among a group of middle-aged regime goons as they calmly debate the reunification of Libya by force.
Gaddafi makes his presence felt on the airwaves with omnipresent green accents everywhere as it is the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya's official color. Green is associated with Libya in the West most notably by Gaddafi's quasi-Maoist inspired pamphlet with the requisite imbued touch of Islamism, al-Kitab al-Akhdar, or The Green Book, which eastern Libyans have been using for kindling in the past few weeks.
Gaddafi and his sons are trying to dominate old media and unilaterally turning off the Internet in the country's embattled eastern half, while the opposition run a rough-hewn, make-do media center with a healthy satellite wifi network that allows their message to reach the outside world and skirt the choking by Gaddafi on Libya's call in-only mobile phones and dead-quiet routers.
While the rebels aren't outwardly pro-Western, even as they ask for a Western-enforced no-fly zone, they certainly know how to reach the great powers across the Mediterranean and beyond with a cadre of energetic, youthful Facebookers undergirding the rebellion.
Libya's revolution, following the collapse of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's tin-pot Tunis and Hosni Mubarak's never-ending emergency law in Cairo, which CNN and the International Committee of the Red Cros s have upgraded to a civil war, is of an entirely different nature.
Rebels began the fight by racing across the desert in spray painted Mitsubishi pick-up trucks toward Sirte and Tripoli without the necessary intellectual infrastructure in Benghazi, their de fault power base, to back them up.
Libya's National Oil Company installations in the coastal outposts of Brega and Ras Lanuf have become key points of territorial contention as spirited but disorderly bands of men try to defend them while undergunned and bereft of strategic outlook. Opposition troops mustered what heavy artillery they could, no match for loyalist forces and their alleged attendant mercenaries to start with, and hurled it blindly toward a largely unseen enemy.
The February 17 revolution has turned into a tactical war with multiple front lines with isolated, vulnerable pockets of rebel control in Zawiya, southwest of Tripoli, which Gaddafi's forces are trying to retake and claim to have "liberated" from rebels, and Misurata, between Sirte and Tripoli which may well be next if the colonel's shock troops are to ever mount a scorched-earth campaign toward densely populated and newly semi-liberal Benghazi.
Virtually all the rebel's manpower and munitions are massed far along over-extended fronts with stressed but busy supply lines running through the night from Benghazi. Much of the makeshift nature of the revolt appears to leave Benghazi undefended and without a way to replenish armaments, unless overt or covert supplies are brought in immediately.
The French, who have historically viewed Gaddafi as a threat to their interests in the sub-Saharan former colonial zone where they still hold much sway, have made the first move in the otherwise discordant European Union. While Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron politely call for the colonel to "step down", there is really nowhere for the robed Arab nationalist to go. With decades of state terrorism, proxy wars, and constant yet flummoxed regional meddling under his belt, or sash, he has few friends other than his bickering sons and Revolutionary Command Council cronies.
The United Nations Security Council is meeting on Friday while Libya's central coast lies under siege as once joyous rebels retreat in the face of Gaddafi's advancing heavy armor. Russia, China and the non-aligned, non-permanent BRICS countries may be fearful to see another oil-soaked, strongman fall. If Libya's rebels fail to coordinate militarily and politically in the next few days if not hours, nothing short of a full North Atlantic Treaty Organization/Western intervention may save their fledgling statelet along the Mediterranean's most southerly edge.
The post-World War II powers do an awkward dance around one another's diplomatic and business proclivities while Gaddafi's troops march east. NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen stated that a no-fly zone could only be imposed once there was an obvious "demonstrable need", or perhaps when the throbbing price of Brent crude oil, currently nearly $115 a barrel, reaches a point the European Union and US markets can no longer tolerate.
To the people here, that reads as once enough Libyans have been killed or maimed for the tetchy West, still scarred from Iraq, it can then flex its legalized, military muscle. As Libya's hearty, mismatched fighters camp through the night in the Sahara's frigid fringe awaiting the next day's battle, they at least have the Guide's blubbering propaganda to laugh about.
Despite the laughable look of Gaddafi's negativist campaign, Tripoli's counter-measures have deadly consequences for rebels and civilians alike as loyalist troops mount massive assaults to retake the key nodes of Zawiya and the oil hub of Ras Lanuf on the central coast.
Asia Times Online witnessed rebel fighters firing wildly into the sky from trucks and tripod mounted anti-aircraft guns as a menacing Russian jet soared past Ras Lanuf's petroleum infrastructure, lobbing a "dumb" bomb near enough to their positions to frighten the uninitiated, but far enough away to cause onlookers to wonder if the inaccuracy was purposeful. Much of the war up until the past few days has been immense displays of bravado by Benghazi's foot soldiers and dedicated volunteers and air power by an encircled Tripoli. The fighting has mostly taken place on a narrow desert highway with the armies far enough apart to barely see one another through shimmering blacktop mirages.
The rebels may have gone too far, too fast in their initial lightening assault, and bolstered by their own machismo and the relatively peaceful fall of nearby dictators, thought they had the upper hand, which in turn inflicted an early psychological coup against regime troops. Now, the opposition will have to strategize or learn to very quickly, or risk fading away as a tangential Arab revolt that peters out, albeit with plenty of bloodshed.
While the areas under rebel control are a literal free-for-all in a wide swath of visa-less territory from the Egyptian frontier to cities and towns ringing south and west of the capital where journalists have free reign, Gaddafi's point men have invited select institutional journalists who couldn't resist the offer to ride out what many thought the regime's dying days.
These journalists based in Tripoli are a key part of the colonel's scheme to buy time while Western powers and Arab, African and Islamic organizations debate, dither and swear they are close to deciding something. When the rebel movement appeared to have the highest degree of momentum, taking town after town following the fall of Benghazi, reporters and photojournalists of every stripe began to stream in thinking Gaddafi's downfall was an imminent event. Not so.
Unlike the authoritarian police states of Tunisia and Egypt that bookended Libya for so long, Libya has never had massive exposure to outside influence like the aforementioned, oil-less states that depended on mass European tourism to stay afloat.
Gaddafi's Libya remained in a permanent state of revolutionary nonsense and paranoia, so the head of state has no official title (and therefore cannot be deposed, as the Gaddafi line goes). The proverbial genie cannot be put back in the bottle here. If Gaddafi's tanks, said to be at the edge of Ras Lanuf's western flank at the time of writing, begin to make a push toward the next oil town east, Brega, the relative calm still felt in a politically turbulent Benghazi may shatter overnight.
Opposition troops have been forwarding countless crates of ammunition toward the front, depleting finite stocks in Benghazi and points further east. Unless an external power decides to step in and arm Libya's rebels, Benghazi, Derna and even Tobruk may face the jittery, iron fist of a man who believes the permanent state of the 20th century's Third World revolution never ended.
Gaddafi is truly fighting the last war, as the expression goes. His Libya was not simply going to be another Twitter domino in the “Arab Spring” that has befuddled American pundits trying to preserve an Israel-first order in the Middle East and North Africa.
While rebels encourage international media to cover their war to the hilt, even ferrying busloads of hungry freelancers to the front, Gaddafi has hit back with looped images on state TV showing groups of men of every conceivable age, shouting: "Allah, Muammar, and nothing else" in squares in several government-held cities to try and create the air, though believed to be in large minority, that Gaddafi's supporters are gathering strength and feeling the wind at their backs.
They march with green flags, green bandanas and green everything else, singing dated nationalists chants adulating the great leader while dancing with posters of the colonel as a much younger man in an array of warrior-chic costumes. One of the most marked differences between Gaddafi's green movement and the rebels is that Gaddafi's followers have a living, breathing and still somewhat agile figure to rally around.
The "Shabaab," the youth, as the rebels call themselves colloquially, hold up an anti-fascist resistance fighter, Omar Mukhtar, who was hanged by Italian Benito Mussolini's proxies here 80 years ago and was a septuagenarian then.
Gaddafi, 69, seems spry in comparison to his long-deceased rebel counter-icon, or at least nimble enough to keep his captive Western press corps off balance as they await his every incoherent pronouncement, jaws agape. Rumors of him fleeing the country appear to be just that. He makes one defiant appearance after another while the east tries to raise regime defectors as a partially united voice under the banner of the National Transitional Council led by Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil, Gaddafi's former justice minister.
Elsewhere on the dial, a channel aimed at Gaddafi's younger admirers, a fresh-faced young man in hair gel and blazer hosts a cheerful debate among a group of middle-aged regime goons as they calmly debate the reunification of Libya by force.
Gaddafi makes his presence felt on the airwaves with omnipresent green accents everywhere as it is the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya's official color. Green is associated with Libya in the West most notably by Gaddafi's quasi-Maoist inspired pamphlet with the requisite imbued touch of Islamism, al-Kitab al-Akhdar, or The Green Book, which eastern Libyans have been using for kindling in the past few weeks.
Gaddafi and his sons are trying to dominate old media and unilaterally turning off the Internet in the country's embattled eastern half, while the opposition run a rough-hewn, make-do media center with a healthy satellite wifi network that allows their message to reach the outside world and skirt the choking by Gaddafi on Libya's call in-only mobile phones and dead-quiet routers.
While the rebels aren't outwardly pro-Western, even as they ask for a Western-enforced no-fly zone, they certainly know how to reach the great powers across the Mediterranean and beyond with a cadre of energetic, youthful Facebookers undergirding the rebellion.
Libya's revolution, following the collapse of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's tin-pot Tunis and Hosni Mubarak's never-ending emergency law in Cairo, which CNN and the International Committee of the Red Cros s have upgraded to a civil war, is of an entirely different nature.
Rebels began the fight by racing across the desert in spray painted Mitsubishi pick-up trucks toward Sirte and Tripoli without the necessary intellectual infrastructure in Benghazi, their de fault power base, to back them up.
Libya's National Oil Company installations in the coastal outposts of Brega and Ras Lanuf have become key points of territorial contention as spirited but disorderly bands of men try to defend them while undergunned and bereft of strategic outlook. Opposition troops mustered what heavy artillery they could, no match for loyalist forces and their alleged attendant mercenaries to start with, and hurled it blindly toward a largely unseen enemy.
The February 17 revolution has turned into a tactical war with multiple front lines with isolated, vulnerable pockets of rebel control in Zawiya, southwest of Tripoli, which Gaddafi's forces are trying to retake and claim to have "liberated" from rebels, and Misurata, between Sirte and Tripoli which may well be next if the colonel's shock troops are to ever mount a scorched-earth campaign toward densely populated and newly semi-liberal Benghazi.
Virtually all the rebel's manpower and munitions are massed far along over-extended fronts with stressed but busy supply lines running through the night from Benghazi. Much of the makeshift nature of the revolt appears to leave Benghazi undefended and without a way to replenish armaments, unless overt or covert supplies are brought in immediately.
The French, who have historically viewed Gaddafi as a threat to their interests in the sub-Saharan former colonial zone where they still hold much sway, have made the first move in the otherwise discordant European Union. While Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron politely call for the colonel to "step down", there is really nowhere for the robed Arab nationalist to go. With decades of state terrorism, proxy wars, and constant yet flummoxed regional meddling under his belt, or sash, he has few friends other than his bickering sons and Revolutionary Command Council cronies.
The United Nations Security Council is meeting on Friday while Libya's central coast lies under siege as once joyous rebels retreat in the face of Gaddafi's advancing heavy armor. Russia, China and the non-aligned, non-permanent BRICS countries may be fearful to see another oil-soaked, strongman fall. If Libya's rebels fail to coordinate militarily and politically in the next few days if not hours, nothing short of a full North Atlantic Treaty Organization/Western intervention may save their fledgling statelet along the Mediterranean's most southerly edge.
The post-World War II powers do an awkward dance around one another's diplomatic and business proclivities while Gaddafi's troops march east. NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen stated that a no-fly zone could only be imposed once there was an obvious "demonstrable need", or perhaps when the throbbing price of Brent crude oil, currently nearly $115 a barrel, reaches a point the European Union and US markets can no longer tolerate.
To the people here, that reads as once enough Libyans have been killed or maimed for the tetchy West, still scarred from Iraq, it can then flex its legalized, military muscle. As Libya's hearty, mismatched fighters camp through the night in the Sahara's frigid fringe awaiting the next day's battle, they at least have the Guide's blubbering propaganda to laugh about.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist specializing in the Middle East and South and Central Asia.
Source: atimes.com
