Sometimes I Just Scream

Long War: The Libyan rebels through heroic small arms tactics have knocked Gaddafi's superior army almost entirely out of Misurata, with only two pockets of bad guy resistance holding out. The bulk of Gaddafi's army is sitting just outside the hugely strategic port city and firing tremendous barrages directly into civilian population centers, a grotesque terror tactic. With his army knocked back, Gaddafi says he is arming various tribes, step one in unleashing tribal warfare across the desert country. Fighting rages unrelentingly in the western hills, and in the central coast around Brega.

America is running two Predator attack drones against Gaddafi, a small step in the right direction but not enough to break the stalemate. The clearest voice on the Libya War is Sen. John McCain. He says a very dangerous stalemate is setting in and if it continues, NATO is essentially handing Libya over to AQIM (Al-Qaeda North Africa). The Algerian government has been telling us that AQIM is rapidly gathering strength and Sen. McCain, who has access to classified information, is now confirming this to be the case. McCain says that America needs to unleash every A-10 warthog and AC-130 gunship available and take out Gaddafi's army yesterday.

The danger in Libya is not "mission creep." The true danger is a growing menace from Al-Qaeda which could create a future war that will make the current North Africa conflict look like a Boyscout jamboree. As long as it remains hidden, the stock market will probably ignore the danger of AQIM's gathering might.

In the Pak tribal lands, CIA drones killed 21 bad guys and 5 women and children. The Pak government quickly held a press conference and hammered the point home that women and children had been slaughtered by America's flying robots. It then sanctioned a number of anti-NATO protests. Islamic Pak political parties are now blockading a key NATO supply route with thousands of civilians. The Taliban routinely attacks NATO supply routes that run through Pakistan, but never before have Pak political parties joined in. And never before has the Pak government openly turned against the drone campaign like this.

America would stop all drone flights immediately if the Pak Army would attack North Waziristan, where Al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network have for all practical purposes created their own nation-state. Instead Pakistan is preparing to negotiate a peace treaty with the Afghan Taliban. It already has a peace treaty with the Haqqani network. It bears repeating that the Pak Taliban has in the past briefly taken control of Pakistani nuclear weapon assembly stations.

The stock market doesn't react to deterioration in the Long War as quickly as it did to Cold War setbacks. I remind you that Black Monday 1987 was caused by the US shelling Iranian offshore oil platforms, a Long War event. It was the single worst day in stock market history, an entire bear market encapsulated into a single trading day. It took years to recover the losses from that one day. In early 1987 the stock market ignored the growing tension between the US and Iran until one day it didn't.

At the beginning of the Libya War I hammered into my keyboard: Warthog! Warthog! Warthog! A-10s and AC-130s were flown in combat against Gaddafi for two days and his army had to retreat 200 miles during and after that onslaught. Just a few more days of warthog and gunship sorties and the Libya War would have been over, dammit. Since then warthogs and gunships have been sidelined and Obama's approval rating has plummeted downward, the price of oil has rocketed upward and every theater in the Long War has gone to hell as America's Islamic allies are treated to the sight of a giant stumbling about on feet of clay. Obama's foreign policy approval ratings are exceptionally low. The general public is in no position to hold coherent opinions concerning military strategy. If pushed by bad news it will say bring all the troops home from every corner of the globe. Thus a feedback loop is created where American weakness creates more weakness.

And yet rays of sunlight pierce the gloom. The tiny kingdom of Qatar has shovelled weapons into the eager hands of the Libyan rebels, including anti-tank and anti-armor TOW missiles. Kuwait is loaning the rebels hundreds of millions of dollars. The CIA is leaking to the media that it is still in Libya and helping the rebels, almost certainly training them alongside Qatari commandos. It's no way to run a railroad, but the train is still chugging fitfully forward. Gaddafi's army is in fact losing ground. I go to the Warthog News website and see the main stories are about unique decals on the warplanes' fuselages, fold my head into my hands, and scream.