From Human Events:
Burning Libya Question: Exactly Who Are Gaddafi's Opponents?by John Gizzi
03/30/2011
On March 1, British Prime Minister David Cameron said it would be a good idea to find out a little more about the Libyan opposition to Muammar Gaddafi before going any further with talk of any kind of military intervention.
Nearly a month later, with Cameron’s Britain one of several countries involved in Operation Odyssey Dawn, which has been key to the rebels' latest advance, we still know very little about those who seek to rule Libya after Gaddafi.
This could be a case of the age-old warning to be careful of what one wishes for. As Morgan Norval wrote in the Selous Foundation For Public Policy Research News and Analysis of March 12, “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [region of North Africa] has voiced its support for the Libyan rebels and they have developed and stoked underground and Islamic hard-line fundamentalist currents in Libya and have played a role in eastern Libyan efforts against Gaddafi.”
Citing Andrew McCarthy’s recent claim in the National Review Online that Libya’s “main opposition is the Muslim Brotherhood,” Norval noted that “McCarthy’s view is bolstered by a study of captured personnel records in Iraq by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. This report studied foreign jihadis who joined al-Qaeda in Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007. It found that Libya produced ‘far more’ foreign fighters per capita than any other country. Over 80% of the Libyan recruits came from two Libyan cities: Benghazi and Darnah, a city lying east of Benghazi. This region, Cyrenacia, is the center of the rebellion against Gaddafi.”
In his address to the nation on Monday evening, President Obama voiced strong support for those seeking to topple Gaddafi, but offered no details as to who they were. This was in striking contrast to, say, Ronald Reagan spelling out who the contras in Nicaragua were in the 1980s, or the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and likening them to America’s Founding Fathers.
Hours before the President’s address, I hoped to learn more about the enemies of Gaddafi at a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute titled “What Will Odyssey Dawn Bring?” No such luck. Although Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute discussed the “fuandamental tension” between the jobs of removing Gaddafi and using force toward humanitarian ends, and the institute's own Paul Wolfowitz discussed the issues around resolving Libya “as quickly as possible” because of the dynamics of the Middle East as a whole, there were no specifics on who and what we would be dealing with post-Gaddafi.
When HUMAN EVENTS pointed out to Wolfowitz that he had not so much as mentioned any names of those he wants recognized as the legitimate government of Libya, the former Pentagon official and World Bank president replied, “I don’t have the names off the top of my head, but in fact you can Google and find out who they have named as the provisional prime minister and who they’ve named as provisional cabinet ministers. And they have a spokesman."
He was referring to Mahmoud Jibril, former economics official in the Gaddafi regime who has defected, graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and interim prime minister of the rebel regime in Benghazi.
“We don’t have to sit here in Washington and put our finger in the air and figure out who the opposition leaders are in Libya," Wolfowitz continued. "We should be using resources and I would say not CIA resources—this isn’t a secret operation and we shouldn’t reinforce the notion in the Middle East that the CIA is behind everything the Americans do. We should be right out in the open, talking with those people. I have yet to hear a good reason why we shouldn’t recognize them as the provisional government. But even if we’re not going to do that, we could certainly have a presence in Benghazi, we could be talking to them on a daily basis, and we could be putting out that kind of information.”
Wolfowitz concluded by noting that “if we would help them get up in broadcasting, you and I would know the names of these people. They’d be out every day the same way Saif Gaddafi [son of Muammar] is every day.”
He’s probably right on that point. And if we saw them, perhaps our leaders would be a bit more curious to find out more about just who “the good guys” in Libya are.
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John Gizzi is Political Editor of HUMAN EVENTS.
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Burning Libya Question: Exactly Who Are Gaddafi's Opponents?by John Gizzi
03/30/2011
On March 1, British Prime Minister David Cameron said it would be a good idea to find out a little more about the Libyan opposition to Muammar Gaddafi before going any further with talk of any kind of military intervention.
Nearly a month later, with Cameron’s Britain one of several countries involved in Operation Odyssey Dawn, which has been key to the rebels' latest advance, we still know very little about those who seek to rule Libya after Gaddafi.
This could be a case of the age-old warning to be careful of what one wishes for. As Morgan Norval wrote in the Selous Foundation For Public Policy Research News and Analysis of March 12, “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [region of North Africa] has voiced its support for the Libyan rebels and they have developed and stoked underground and Islamic hard-line fundamentalist currents in Libya and have played a role in eastern Libyan efforts against Gaddafi.”
Citing Andrew McCarthy’s recent claim in the National Review Online that Libya’s “main opposition is the Muslim Brotherhood,” Norval noted that “McCarthy’s view is bolstered by a study of captured personnel records in Iraq by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. This report studied foreign jihadis who joined al-Qaeda in Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007. It found that Libya produced ‘far more’ foreign fighters per capita than any other country. Over 80% of the Libyan recruits came from two Libyan cities: Benghazi and Darnah, a city lying east of Benghazi. This region, Cyrenacia, is the center of the rebellion against Gaddafi.”
In his address to the nation on Monday evening, President Obama voiced strong support for those seeking to topple Gaddafi, but offered no details as to who they were. This was in striking contrast to, say, Ronald Reagan spelling out who the contras in Nicaragua were in the 1980s, or the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and likening them to America’s Founding Fathers.
Hours before the President’s address, I hoped to learn more about the enemies of Gaddafi at a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute titled “What Will Odyssey Dawn Bring?” No such luck. Although Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute discussed the “fuandamental tension” between the jobs of removing Gaddafi and using force toward humanitarian ends, and the institute's own Paul Wolfowitz discussed the issues around resolving Libya “as quickly as possible” because of the dynamics of the Middle East as a whole, there were no specifics on who and what we would be dealing with post-Gaddafi.
When HUMAN EVENTS pointed out to Wolfowitz that he had not so much as mentioned any names of those he wants recognized as the legitimate government of Libya, the former Pentagon official and World Bank president replied, “I don’t have the names off the top of my head, but in fact you can Google and find out who they have named as the provisional prime minister and who they’ve named as provisional cabinet ministers. And they have a spokesman."
He was referring to Mahmoud Jibril, former economics official in the Gaddafi regime who has defected, graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and interim prime minister of the rebel regime in Benghazi.
“We don’t have to sit here in Washington and put our finger in the air and figure out who the opposition leaders are in Libya," Wolfowitz continued. "We should be using resources and I would say not CIA resources—this isn’t a secret operation and we shouldn’t reinforce the notion in the Middle East that the CIA is behind everything the Americans do. We should be right out in the open, talking with those people. I have yet to hear a good reason why we shouldn’t recognize them as the provisional government. But even if we’re not going to do that, we could certainly have a presence in Benghazi, we could be talking to them on a daily basis, and we could be putting out that kind of information.”
Wolfowitz concluded by noting that “if we would help them get up in broadcasting, you and I would know the names of these people. They’d be out every day the same way Saif Gaddafi [son of Muammar] is every day.”
He’s probably right on that point. And if we saw them, perhaps our leaders would be a bit more curious to find out more about just who “the good guys” in Libya are.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Gizzi is Political Editor of HUMAN EVENTS.
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