Britain and France Lead NATO, Not US

Long War: France and Italy have joined Britain in sending teams of military advisers to help the Libyan rebels. Italy is the first country to mention sending soldiers to Libya to serve in a humanitarian role, not actual combat; nevertheless, even broaching the topic of boots on the ground is positive.

After fierce and bloody fighting, the rebels utterly defeated Gaddafi's troops in the battle for the Wazin outpost on the Libya/Tunisia border. About 100 Gaddafi soldiers fled into Tunisia after being routed by the rebels. The rebels now hold the Wazin outpost and this opens up a supply line to the anti-Gaddafi Berber tribes, who are battling the bad guys in the western mountains, as well as the regular Free Libya troops now dug-in around the outpost. All this action is taking place in the western half of the country, territory that Gaddafi is supposedly controlling.

Warships operating NATO's embargo against Gaddafi have seized a regime oil tanker and confiscated it. Up until now the naval blockade has not really been doing its job as southern European nations greedily continue to buy oil from Gaddafi. Keeping the oil flowing is probably the reason why Italian jets have not been striking Gaddafi's forces. Perhaps we are witnessing a literal sea change with the sudden effectiveness of the NATO naval blockade and maybe a hardening of the Italian military.

France says the tempo of NATO bombing of Gaddafi's forces is set to dramatically increase. The NATO mission in Libya is called Operation Unified Protector. OUP is the first ever NATO mission not led by the US. It has floundered without the US in charge until (apparently) now.

VP Joe Biden defended Team Obama's Libya policy by saying resources are being funneled to other Long War hot spots. Of course he doesn't use the term "Long War", but instead rattles off a list of Islamic countries that are key to the LW. On the top of his list is Egypt. The only US resources that could be deployed in both Libya and Egypt are CIA. Biden has a big mouth and says stuff in public that he shouldn't. So here we have a set of CIA fingerprints in Egypt. The weekend blog will examine all possible CIA Egyptian fingerprints that can be sleuthed from the public domain.