Andrew Bacevich has written an excellent article on the need to end our ongoing “war for the Greater Middle East.” This part jumped out at me in connection with the debate over the Libyan war:
A particular campaign that goes awry [bold mine-DL] like Somalia or Iraq or Libya may attract passing attention, but never the context in which that campaign was undertaken [bold mine-DL]. We can be certain that the election of 2016 will be no different.
Shadi Hamid writes another defense of the Libyan war:
Critics erroneously compare Libya today to any number of false ideals, but this is not the correct way to evaluate the success or failure of the intervention. To do that, we should compare Libya today to what Libya would have looked like if we hadn’t intervened. By that standard, the Libya intervention was successful: The country is better off today than it would have been had the international community allowed dictator Muammar Qaddafi to continue his rampage across the country.
Submitted by Mike "Mish" Shedlock of Mishtalk
Italy’s Interior minister Angelino Alfano warns the refugee “system is at risk of collapse” following an 80 per cent spike in the number of arrivals to Italy across the central Mediterranean Sea in the first quarter of this year compared to 2015.
Alfano fears that Syrians headed for Turkey will inetead head for Libya for an even more hazardous Mediterranean Sea crossing to Italy.
ISIS terrorists retreating from Iraq and Syria to establish an Islamic State in Libya are going to find it difficult to break away from their coastal enclave. The barren deserts of Libya devoid of shelter and the sectarianism that was rife in the Middle East is not conducive to Jihadist causes. According to a new report, the terrorist group face major roadblocks to establishing a true back-up capital there. The Independent reports: The Combating Terrorism Center report, published on 17 March, said the terrorist group Isis suffered “setbacks” in Libya and is struggling to expand there.
Submitted by William Reynolds via Medium.com,
Something that has gone unnoticed in all the talk about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails is the content of the original leak that started the entire investigation to begin with. In March of 2013, a Romanian hacker calling himself Guccifer hacked into the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal and leaked to Russia Today four e-mails containing intelligence on Libya that Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton.