"The United States military “is in the planning and preparing mode” on Libya, and will be able to provide the full range of options for national leaders, Pentagon spokesman Marine Corps Col. Dave Lapan said here today. The U.S. military is moving naval and air forces to the region, he said"
From GlobalSecurity.org "Also Monday, the U.S. and European allies said they were entertaining a full range of options to press Col. Gadhafi to stop a bloody crackdown on antiregime protesters. In Geneva, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Europeans discussed setting up a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace, and the Pentagon repositioned warships and planes in the waters off Libya to be ready to enforce such a zone or to deliver humanitarian aid."
The Middle East’s Third Wave "In a private phone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, almost two weeks after the unrest began, President Barack Obama finally called for Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi to step down. While the President’s inertia may have been mitigated by the need to get Americans out of the country so Qadhafi could not take any hostages, the incident demonstrates again that the wave of revolution currently sweeping North Africa and the Middle East took the Obama Administration completely by surprise. And for good reason: President Obama’s “engagement” strategy toward the “Islamic world” is thoroughly outdated and irrelevant."
An Epochal Disaster for al-Qaeda "For many specialists on terrorism and the Middle East, “the past few weeks have the makings of an epochal disaster for Al Qaeda, making the jihadists look like ineffectual bystanders to history while offering young Muslims an appealing alternative to terrorism.”"
What We Can Do in Libya "Outside of Iran, his regime is the most poisonous expression of a badly dated post-colonial politics that blames the West for all ills. The mullahs have to be watching events in Libya with trepidation — if a revolution can come to Qaddafi’s Libya, one of the most totalitarian societies on earth, it can happen anywhere."
Breaking: Iran Has Several Military Bases in Libya "According to this source, Guards enter Libya under the guise of oil company employees. Most of these companies are under the control of the Revolutionary Guards.
"The source, who is a colonel in the Guards, added that Gaddafi and his government are quite aware of these activities and have even signed joint contracts with those Iranian oil companies so that the the Guards can enter Libya without any trouble."
US weighs hit-and-run raids to disable Qaddafi's air capability "The Pentagon spokesman's indeed remarked that there are "various contingency plans" for the North African country where Muammar Qaddafi's forces and rebels in the east "remain locked in a tense standoff."
"Most military observers interpreted his remark as referring to potential US military intervention in Libya to break the stalemate. It was strengthened by the imminent redeployment off the Libyan coast of USS Enterprise from the Red Sea and the amphibious USS Kearsarge, which has a fleet of helicopters and about 1,800 Marines aboard."
Victor Davis Hanson: Show the World? Exactly what will the people of the Middle East do? "Will popular resistance to a Gaddafi, Assad, or Ahmadinejad translate into pro-Westernism, given those leaders’ hatred of the US and its allies, or will the reformers, in conspiratorial and Pavlovian fashion, manage to blame the US for their own anti-American nightmares?"
STRATFOR "Given that the United States has fought four major land wars in Asia since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — none of which had ideal outcomes, it is useful to ask three questions: First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?"
