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Former Libyan Leader's War Machine Left to Rust in the Desert
[Tripoli Post] Former Libyan leader Muammar Al  Qadaffy... one of those little rainstorms from the Arab Spring... dreamt of becoming the leader of a united Africa and spent billions of dollars building up the continent's biggest arsenal. As such, he went on a huge spending spree, totally out of proportion with the needs of a nation with Libya's population. Karim Bitar, from the French Institute of International and Strategic Studies (IFRIS), told AFP that Al Qadaffy's obsession highlighted the "excesses and delusions of grandeur suffered by the Guide of the Revolution." In its report, the news agency says that what emerged after the dictator's downfall is a picture of a grandiose but decrepit war machine. Proof of this are the "crumbling jet fighters and rusted tanks, commanded by yes-men rather than competent officers in the desert/ It went on to say that the army that Al Qadaffy inherited from the monarchy of King Idriss when he overthrew him in a bloodless coup in 1969, was not insignificant, but Libya's huge oil revenues allowed Al Qadaffy to shell out on supersonic warplanes, tanks by the thousands, missiles and astronomical quantities of munitions. The materiel is stored in a still uncounted number of bases around the country, most of them dating from the early years. One of those bases is in the Jufra oasis of Hun, about 500 kilometres southeast of Tripoli. Soviet MiG 25s and Tupolev TU-22s, built in the 1960s, are rotting alongside French two-engine Transalls. "None of them take off any more. Their fuselages are crumbling, jet engines and propellers rusted, cockpit windows almost opaque from the effects of ultraviolet light," Mi>AFP said. Nearby is a stockpile of Russian armoured vehicles, around 500 of them, which was attacked by NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis.... warplanes. Again, the ageing T55 tanks and BMP-1 troop carriers are mostly rusted, apparently not having moved in years. After the euphoria of the 1970s, money began to grow tight. Then Libya was hit with a first set of international sanctions in 1982 over its interference in neighbouring countries. A second set of of sanctions was imposed after Libya was blamed for the 1988 downing of a Pan Am jumbo jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. Then in late 2003, Al Qadaffy renounced all attempts to develop a non-conventional arsenal, paving the way for a lifting of sanctions. Despite that, the regime bought little new materiel - some Russian T-90 tanks, and some Russian and French missiles. Bitar said that Al Qadaffy's defeat in just eight months stemmed from various factors. He had hundreds of thousands of tonnes of munitions, some of it obsolete but still dangerous, "which should have been more than sufficient to fend off the initially amateurish and under-equipped rebels." NATO's air strikes "levelled the playing field," he said, but that was not all. He also pointed to the "mediocrity of the military hierarchy, with Al Qadaffy's paranoia leading him to push aside the most competent members of the officer corps and relying on cronies or even mercenaries ... without structure or ideology." Posted by: Fred 2011-11-06 |
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