US launches strikes on IS in Libya
Source: BBC
The United States has carried out air strikes on positions of so-called Islamic State in Libya, following a request by the UN-backed government there, the Pentagon says.
The strikes targeted positions in the port city of Sirte, an IS stronghold.
Libyan PM Fayez al-Sarraj, in a televised address, said the strikes caused "heavy losses".
Western powers have become increasingly concerned at Islamic State's growing presence in Libya. The air strikes are the first such US military intervention co-ordinated with the Libyan unity government.
Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-36941934?ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbc_breaking&ns_source=twitter&ns_linkname=news_central
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MowCowWhoHow III
(2,103 posts)WASHINGTON — U.S. warplanes carried out airstrikes in Libya Monday, targeting Islamic State forces near their stronghold in the coastal city of Sirte, the Pentagon announced.
Libyan’s interim government requested the attack, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said in a statement.
The Islamic State has established a presence in war-torn Libya and in Afghanistan. They have been struck by U.S. warplanes in support of local ground forces in both countries. In February, an airstrike in Libya killed 49 fighters from the Islamic State, also known as ISIL.
Additional airstrikes will continue as forces aligned with the Libyan Government of National Accord continues to take ground from ISIL, Cook said. The attacks help deny ISIL territory in Libya that could be used to attack the United States and its allies, he said.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/08/01/us-jets-pound-isil-libya/87910436/
anoNY42
(670 posts)Making war on terrorism has been so successful over the past 15 years!
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)Sounds like an appropriate use of force. There's already a war going on there--ISIS is more than just terrorism.
is that we have been doing this exact same thing for 15 years, along with a whole lot of other things, and "terrorism" has not surrendered.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)and is trying to overthrow Libya's government.
anoNY42
(670 posts)We have been doing this for a while now.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)anoNY42
(670 posts)that evolution was real. Humanity is constantly trying to prove me wrong, it seems.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)ISIS exists, and as long as it can apply organized violence, then organized violence will have to be applied to it
anoNY42
(670 posts)we should be bombing the s*** out of several other nations as well, including North Korea, Russia, various African nations where Boko Haram is active. Why not bomb the cartels in central and south america?
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)the argument for bombing Boko Haram is more compelling than you would probably think.
The cartels have hidden strongholds and operate without occupying territory.
anoNY42
(670 posts)whether or not the terrorist org is occupying territory?
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)"Can they be arrested?" is a good question to ask.
ISIS can't be arrested. They can only be defeated by armies and air forces.
Why not let someone else do it? Someone with a more immediate interest than "better to fight them over there than over here", as another commenter put it?
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)what they don't have is air power
uawchild
(2,208 posts)It certainly has.
Our intervention in Libya has had unintended consequences including allowing ISIS to gain a foothold there.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)uawchild
(2,208 posts)There's nothing moral about Nato's intervention in Libya
t's as if it's a habit they can't kick. Once again US, British and other Nato forces are bombarding an Arab country with cruise missiles and bunker-busting bombs. Both David Cameron and Barack Obama insist this is nothing like Iraq. There will be no occupation. The attack is solely to protect civilians.
But eight years after they launched their shock-and-awe devastation of Baghdad and less than a decade since they invaded Afghanistan, the same western forces are in action against yet another Muslim state, incinerating soldiers and tanks on the ground and killing civilians in the process.
Supported by a string of other Nato states, almost all of which have taken part in the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, the US, Britain and France are clinging to an Arab fig leaf, in the shape of a Qatari airforce that has yet to arrive, to give some regional credibility to their intervention in Libya.
As in Iraq and Afghanistan, they insist humanitarian motives are crucial. And as in both previous interventions, the media are baying for the blood of a pantomime villain leader, while regime change is quickly starting to displace the stated mission. Only a western solipsism that regards it as normal to be routinely invading other people's countries in the name of human rights protects Nato governments from serious challenge.
...
Cameron insisted on Monday in the Commons that the air and sea attacks on Libya had prevented a "bloody massacre in Benghazi". The main evidence was Gaddafi's threat to show "no mercy" to rebel fighters who refused to lay down their arms and to hunt them down "house to house". In reality, for all the Libyan leader's brutality and Saddam Hussein-style rhetoric, he was scarcely in any position to carry out his threat.
Given that his ramshackle forces were unable to fully retake towns like Misurata or even Ajdabiya when the rebels were on the back foot, the idea that they would have been able to overrun an armed and hostile city of 700,000 people any time soon seems far-fetched.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/23/nothing-moral-nato-intervention-libya
==================
THIS is a scathing comment: "Only a western solipsism that regards it as normal to be routinely invading other people's countries in the name of human rights protects Nato governments from serious challenge."
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)He's trash.
uawchild
(2,208 posts)The Obama administration said it was just trying to protect civilians. Its actions reveal it was looking for regime change.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/22/libya-and-the-myth-of-humanitarian-intervention/
Is Foreign Policy magazine trash too?
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)side to lose
uawchild
(2,208 posts)We were just protecting innocent people. That's the official story, please try to stick to it.
uawchild
(2,208 posts)Seumas Milne
Seumas Milne (born 1958) is a British journalist and political aide. In October 2015 he was appointed the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications, on leave from The Guardian.[1][2]
Milne joined the newspaper in 1984.[3] He was a columnist and associate editor at The Guardian at the time of his Labour Party appointment, and according to Peter Popham writing for The Independent in 1997, "is on the far left of the Labour Party".[4][5][6] He is the author of The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, a book about the 1984–5 British miners' strike which focuses on the role of MI5 and Special Branch in the dispute.[7][8]
Career[edit]
Journalism[edit]
Milne then worked as a staff journalist on The Economist magazine from 1981 before joining The Guardian newspaper in 1984 on the recommendation of Andrew Knight, the magazine's editor at the time.[3][9] Milne's early responsibilities on The Guardian included posts as news reporter, Labour Correspondent (by 1994),[14] and Labour Editor. In 1994, Milne's colleague Richard Gott resigned from The Guardian over his connections to the KGB, and Milne defending Gott against allegations which "seemed absurd", claimed the journalists who had written the expose of his friend for The Spectator magazine were connected to MI5.[14][15]
Milne was Comment Editor (for six years from 2001 to 2007).[12] According to Peter Wilby in a New Statesman profile of Milne, his most controversial decision among Guardian staff, was a 2004 article by Osama bin Laden, assembled from recordings of one of his speeches. While almost all thought it should have been published, a small majority thought it should not have been run as a comment piece, although the readers' editor later defended this decision.[16]
Milne's period in this role was described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine as having turned the Guardian's comment section into a "truly global debating forum".[17] Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan claimed that Milne's greatest achievement "was to take full advantage of the expansion of The Guardian’s comment pages ... making them the most thought-provoking opinion section in Britain".[5] Hannan also praised him as "a sincere, eloquent and uncomplicated Marxist".[5] Following changes in staff responsibilities, he was succeeded in this last role by Georgina Henry,[18] with Toby Manhire as her deputy.[19] Milne was moved to his role as associate editor in 2007, according to Peter Wilby because he was building up too many writers in his own image, and devoting too much space to Palestine.[16]
Milne has reported for The Guardian from the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and South Asia,[20] and has also written for Le Monde Diplomatique[21] and the London Review of Books.[22] Milne is reported to have lobbied within The Guardian in 2015 for new editor Katharine Viner to succeed Alan Rusbridger in the post.[23]
Milne served on the executive committee of the National Union of Journalists for ten years,[4][20] and is a former chairman of the joint Guardian-Observer NUJ chapter. In the 1980s, he chaired the Hammersmith Constituency Labour Party when Clive Soley (now Lord Soley) was the constituency's MP.[24] "Resistance and the unity of the working class is what will progress our movement", Milne told a 2015 May Day rally in Glasgow.[24] Kate Godfrey, who has worked as an aid worker in conflict zones such as Libya and Syria,[25] wrote in The Daily Telegraph in October 2015: "I think Milne is an apologist for terror, and will always be an apologist for terror. I think that he never met a truth he didn’t dismiss as an orthodoxy and that nowhere in his far-Left polemic are actual people represented".[26]
Labour's Director of Communications[edit]
Appointment[edit]
It was announced on 20 October 2015 that Milne would become part of the team behind Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications. Reportedly on a one-year contract,[27] he is "on leave" from his post at The Guardian and assumed his new role on 26 October.[2][28] "Just what the doctor ordered", Milne's friend George Galloway tweeted in response to the news.[29][30] Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore, after expressing her dislike of leftists from Milne's background, speculated (in a soon deleted tweet[14]) that his appointment meant "Bye bye Labour".[31]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seumas_Milne
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)About Richard Gott:
In November 1963, working as a freelance journalist for The Guardian in Cuba, Gott was invited to a celebration of the revolution party at the Soviet Union embassy in Havana. During the evening, a group of invited journalists who were chatting in the garden were joined by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara for a few hours, who answered their questions.
...
". He asserted that his resignation was "a debt of honour to my paper, not an admission of guilt", because his failure to inform his editor of three trips abroad to meet with KGB officials at their expense had caused embarrassment to the paper during its investigation of Jonathan Aitken.[7][8]
Other tidbits from this bio:
Doctrinaire Marxists are .... predictable in their anti-USA polemics.
More:
From his wiki page:
Sorry, I don't care what Communist Tankies have to say about the US--they're the flip side to Trump.
uawchild
(2,208 posts)How about posting some links where Milne is actually BEING a STALINIST?
You post a quote about a colleague at the Guardian who partied with Che Guevara as proof Milne is a STALINIST? lol
In short, do you have anything beside McCarthyism-like exaggerations?
Come on, you called the man A STALINIST. Provide some links backing up your claim that he is a STALINIST.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)uawchild
(2,208 posts)In your haste to label Seamus Milne a STALINIST, did you not bother to check what STANDPOINT magazine is?
It's another rightwing rag dressed up nice. lol
Standpoint was founded in May 2008 and immediately labeled a "Right-wing answer to journals such as Prospect".[10] The advisory board includes, amongst others, playwright, Tom Stoppard; tenor Ian Bostridge; the Labour MP and former minister, Frank Field; artist David Hockney; Nigel Lawson, the former Chancellor; novelist, V. S. Naipaul; and the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_(magazine)
Did you catch one board member Michael Gove? LOL
Michael Gove (/ˈɡoʊv/; born 26 August 1967) is a British Conservative politician, who was Secretary of State for Education from 2010 to 2014 and Secretary of State for Justice from 2015 to 2016. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Surrey Heath since 2005. He is also an author and was a columnist for The Times.[2]
Creationist schools[edit]
In June 2012, Gove approved three creationist schools, such as Grindon Hall Christian School in Sunderland,[78] which opened in September 2012. This led to concerns about whether Department for Education (DfE) requirements not to teach creationism or intelligent design as science would be met.[79] The other creationist schools included Exemplar-Newark Business Academy, whose previous application was rejected because of concerns over creationism, and a third school in Kent. Both of these schools said they would teach creationism in RE but not in Science.[79] The British Humanist Association (BHA) said teaching creationism in any syllabus was unacceptable.[79] In 2014, Gove's department acceded to the BHA's campaign by banning creationism from being taught as science in state-funded English schools, including Academies and Free Schools, as well as introducing a requirement that such schools must teach evolution.[80]
Criticism from the teaching profession[edit]
Gove was criticised by teaching professionals for his attempts to overhaul British education.
At the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) Annual Conference in March 2013 a motion of no-confidence in Gove was passed.[87] This was followed up the next month at the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), who unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in Gove, the first time in its history that it performed such an action, and called for his resignation. The audience at the NUT conference were told that Gove had "lost the confidence of the teaching profession", "failed to conduct his duties in a manner befitting the head of a national education system", and "chosen to base policy on dogma, political rhetoric and his own limited experience of education."[6]
Gove was further criticised at the May 2013 conference of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), for what was said to have been a climate of bullying, fear and intimidation during his time as Education Secretary. The conference passed a vote of no confidence in his policies.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gove#Creationist_schools
LOL Ok, again, where is your PROOF, from someplace other than right-wing rags, that Seamus Milne is a STALINIST?
uawchild
(2,208 posts)Controversy[edit]
Standpoint ignited nationwide controversy with its first issue, in which Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, called for the Church to regain a prominent position in public life and blamed the "newfangled and insecurely founded doctrine of multiculturalism" for entrenching the segregation of communities. Nazir-Ali claimed that the decline of Christianity and the rise of liberal values in the UK during the 1960s had created a moral vacuum which radical Islam threatened to fill. "We have argued that it is necessary to understand where we have come from, to guide us to where we are going, and to bring us back when we wander too far from the path of national destiny", the bishop wrote.[6] The Guardian newspaper devoted its leader (lead editorial) to criticizing the bishop, although it described his writing as "neatly underlining [Standpoint]’s expressed intent ‘to defend and celebrate Western civilisation’".[7] Nazir-Ali was condemned by the Ramadhan foundation and the President of the National Secular Society, who accused him of "doing the BNP’s work", but was praised by The Daily Telegraph.[8][9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_(magazine)
WOW, nice article they published: "the decline of Christianity and the rise of liberal values in the UK during the 1960s had created a moral vacuum which radical Islam threatened to fill" THE RISE OF LIBERAL VALUES IS THE PROBLEM?!? omg.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)It was pure people power: the street reclaiming democracy from a thuggish kleptocrat. There was plenty for the leftist Milne to cheer here, right? Wrong. And then Ukraine’s larger neighbour took advantage of the revolutionary government’s weakness to annex its southern province. That’s something for Milne to disapprove of, right? Wrong again.
“The crisis in Ukraine is a product of the disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s,” he told his readers on March 5. “The US and its allies have since relentlessly expanded NATO up to Russia's borders… it is hardly surprising that Russia has acted to stop the more strategically sensitive and neuralgic Ukraine falling decisively into the western camp.”
“Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive,” he wrote, a couple of months later.
...
Why did Anders Breivik slaughter 77 people? “What is most striking is how closely he mirrors the ideas and fixations of transatlantic conservatives.”
Why did two maniacs in London decapitate an off-duty soldier? “They are the predicted consequence of an avalanche of violence unleashed by the US, Britain and others.”
Milne’s geopolitics spared us having to read how the children of Beslan or the theatregoers of Moscow only had themselves to blame, but office workers in New York had no such luck. “Recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent.”
He's also an apologist for ... Slobo Milosevic, because Milne has one principle: North America and Europe are always the villains.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/aug/02/warcrimes.serbia
So, in his view, Slobo Milosevic is a poor, victimized man of the people.
He's as anti-USA/NATO as ISIS.
uawchild
(2,208 posts)"Why did Anders Breivik slaughter 77 people? “What is most striking is how closely he mirrors the ideas and fixations of transatlantic conservatives.”
JESUS H. CHRIST, he is RIGHT, Breivik is a rightwing nut job similar to American conservatives!
"For Milne, geopolitics is more important than people. Whatever crisis strikes the world, the West’s to blame. Why did a group of psychopaths attack a magazine and a supermarket in Paris? “Without the war waged by western powers, including France, to bring to heel and reoccupy the Arab and Muslim world, last week’s attacks clearly couldn’t have taken place”.
OMG, what STALINISM. lol A lot of people feel that the US invasion of IRAQ has indeed led to the rise of terrorism.
You are shooting blanks here, I get it you don't like Milne's politics, but calling him a STALINIST reeks of pure McCarthyism.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)Not sure why you think Stalinist is such an out of bounds term--you think he's a Trot instead?
uawchild
(2,208 posts)Why not reply to the SMEAR that your Standpoint Magazine did to Hillary Clinton?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=1538450
That sort of undermined the credibility of your sources, hmm?
Sorry, but shouting STALINIST is simply 1950's era McCarthyism.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)So, he's a lifelong Communist who has never stopped hating Western governments and blames them for every trouble in the world, and who is an apologist for the USSR.
He's a reliable voice of support for Soviet-aligned thugs like Putin and Milosevic.
But calling him a Stalinist instead of a Trot is what crosses the line?
uawchild
(2,208 posts)Yet more exaggeration and hyperbole? Seems so.
Heh, you haven't commented on your source STANDPOINT smearing Hillary Clinton yet:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=1538450
Too busy shouting STALINIST, I suppose. Seriously, the 1950's called, they want their McCarthyism back. lol
uawchild
(2,208 posts)
"Hillary Clinton: Likely to be an unloved President, attempting to force-feed the country a diet of more tax and political correctness"
"Therefore it seems almost unavoidable that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the next President of the United States. This is not to say that Mrs Clinton is a particularly attractive candidate. She has never faced a serious opponent in any election except one — the primary she lost to Barack Obama in 2008. She is utterly unlike her husband, who derives energy from the contact with crowds and loves the rough and tumble of retail politics. Actually, as one commentator put it, she regards campaigning as “something of a nuisance”. She feels more comfortable on television than meeting ordinary people, some of whom are quite tiresome, and meeting them by the thousand if not hundred thousand.
She has a sense of entitlement which she does not always disguise, and which seems out of place for a candidate who pretends to run from left of centre. Her casual remark early in the campaign that when she and her husband left the White House in 2000 they were “flat broke” (they were down to $5 million in the bank, which assuredly is “flat broke” among the super-rich whom they know and with whom they prefer to spend their leisure time). Her family foundation provides a very useful device to interface with people anxious to buy influence in the next Administration, some of whose funds probably bleed into non-charitable causes. Moreover, both she and her husband are seen as mercenary; they have become fabulously wealthy since leaving the White House by paid speeches (Goldman Sachs shelled out $675,000 for three of these, and the cash-strapped University of California at Los Angeles paid her $300,000 for a single engagement). On top of all of this, the FBI is investigating her use of a private email server for her correspondence, much of it classified, during her tenure as President Obama’s Secretary of State. There is always the possibility of an indictment for violation of secrecy laws, but no one who knows Democratic politics thinks that Obama’s Justice Department will move against her, whatever evidence is brought to light. As she herself says when asked, “That is not going to happen.”
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-april-2016-mark-falcoff-hillary-clinton-us-presidential-election-disaster?
OK, tell us AGAIN now how we all should believe STANDPOINT that Seamus Milne is a STALINIST. STANDPOINT is an intellectualized rightwing talking points machine, its so biased I can't believe you are using it as a source here on DU.
David Zephyr
(22,785 posts)We shouldn't be bombing anymore in Libya. At all.
We already have done enough damage there already.
Overthrowing governments as Bush did in Iraq which I opposed (see the DU archives) or Bush's invading Afghanistan (which I was in a tiny handful of a minority here at the DU in 2001 that opposed the military exclusion into Afghanistan. Again see the DU archives) only leads to more war and chaos.
The newer-improved Libyan "government" is not even a real government. Who does it govern? What part of Libya is under its "government". It's an artifice.
glennward
(989 posts)Right now they are slamming ISIS hard and they are being routed. They may be out of Libya by the time folks actually know what is going on.
Just like terrorism is now "out" of the ME.
Just because the Libyan government requests something doesn't make it a good idea to provide it.
yeoman6987
(14,449 posts)You do know they are in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. If we don't do anything, they will be in North America in the not so distant future.
ISIS is just going to steamroll every Arab and African nation that opposes them, huh? Then I guess they will hijack the Libyan Navy and sail over to NYC or something?
actslikeacarrot
(464 posts)...fight them over here." Lol remember that shit? Now dems are using it.
anoNY42
(670 posts)right?
yeoman6987
(14,449 posts)anoNY42
(670 posts)or did you not notice just how much "safer" our bombing campaigns have made us?
uawchild
(2,208 posts)WASHINGTON — Libya is a failed state, according to the top U.S. general in Africa, who said that foreign fighters, weapons and illegal migrants are flowing through the oil-rich North African country, supplying the conflicts in Syria and Iraq with combatants and threatening U.S. allies.
In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Army Gen. David Rodriguez said the recent agreement to form a unity government in Tripoli is an important step. Yet even with strong international support, the new government will struggle for the "foreseeable future" to establish its authority and secure Libya's people and borders, he said.
Rodriguez estimated that it would take "10 years or so" to achieve long-term stability in Libya. He cited a "fractured society" and the lack of government institutions as major hurdles to overcome.
"The continued absence of central government control will continue to perpetuate violence, instability and allow the conditions for violent extremist organizations to flourish until the (government) and appropriate security forces are operational within Libya," Rodriguez told the committee.
http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/capitol-hill/2016/03/08/us-commander-africa-says-libya-failed-state/81486032/
