Britain Saves America's Bacon

Long War: Britain is sending military advisers to Libya. The stated purpose of these advisers is a mass of contradictions. Essentially the British Army is saying these advisers are going to Libya to work on their tans. This obfuscation is good, it means that the real reason for sending the advisers is to clobber Gaddafi.

The assistance that Qatar has been providing the rebels is beginning to bear fruit. In the besieged rebel city of Misurata, the good guys are saying they killed 50 bad guys today, while suffering no combat deaths themselves. This might be an exaggeration, but the rebels are indisputably tearing chunks of the city away from the bad guys.

In the western mountains of Libya the anti-Gaddafi Berber tribes are also gaining ground against the bad guys. Probably the Berbers are receiving weapons and training from the Qataris and the CIA.

The US is still taking a backseat and allowing its allies to do the heavy lifting. American wobbliness is taking a toll in the rest of the Islamic world and other Long War hot spots. But the parallel to the late 1940s and the Cold War are still very stark, which is good.

The instant WW II was over, Harry Truman disbanded the CIA (then called OSS) because the spy agency was filled with hardcore anti-New Deal Republicans. Truman was slow to get NATO up and running for the same reason: only Dwight Eisenhower could get NATO off the ground because only he could convince voters and allied military men that it was okay to rearm Germany. No Eisenhower = No NATO. Eisenhower was a Republican and wanted to run for President. Making him Supreme Commander of NATO practically handed the White House to him on a silver platter. In the end Truman relented and reformed the CIA and let Ike create NATO. Because Truman was blindly political, the US did not fight the first two (almost three) years of the Cold War. But Britain and its advanced Commonwealth allies were fighting the CW this entire time.

Back to the present: Qatar is a former British colony that loved its time serving the Queen. The two nations are working well together in Libya. Just like in the Cold War, America can't sit on the sidelines for long. But for now the war effort is muddling along. The Libyan rebels are winning so that's what counts.