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Gaddafi goes Mao
Muammar Gaddafi's purported Long March from Benghazi to Tripoli, which began on Friday, was cut short on Tuesday as his army routed and then - almost as if carried by inertia alone - chased the rebels back across a few small towns along the Mediterranean coast. The opposition performed so poorly in its advance on his town of birth, Sirte (which it claimed - falsely - to have captured on Monday), that Gaddafi did not even get to use the full gamut of asymmetric warfare tactics he had in store. As he struggles to hide his considerable forces from increasingly powerful coalition air attacks but nevertheless holds sway on the ground, the Libyan leader is very likely to be spicing up the long hours of hiding by brushing up on legendary Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong's experiences in using mobile warfare against the Kuomintang and the Japanese. ...In all, Gaddafi seems to be in a good position right now to wait patiently while consolidating his control in the west. His enemies are in a bind - as NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen put it on Tuesday, ''Clearly there's no military solution, solely, to the problems in Libya.'' It is unlikely that, even if it tries seriously, NATO can train and equip the rebels well enough to take on his army in the next few months. Meanwhile, as the air campaign draws on, costs for NATO will pile up and backlash against the operation will grow. Equipment failure - if not anti-aircraft fire - can even bring down a few warplanes, hurting the morale of the allies. At a later stage, according to Mao's doctrines, mobile warfare turns again into positional warfare, and the enemy is conquered. The Libyan leader, who left most of the oil infrastructure intact even as his forces withdrew over the weekend from key oil towns such as Ras Lanuf and Brega, appears confident that this is how his battle will develop as well. The burden is on the coalition and the rebels to prove him wrong. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2011-03-31 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=319427 |