Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar slowly seizes control of Libya; marches on Tripoli - Polidicks

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/04/un-chief-urges-restraint-as-libyan-army-leader-plans-tripoli-assault Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who commands the “Libya National Army” (LNA) based in the east, described his forces’ move as a “victorious march” to “shake the lands under the feet of the unjust bunch”. He ordered forces, which have taken over the town of Gharyan, 30 miles from Tripoli, not to open fire on any civilians, saying “whoever raises the white banner is safe”. Haftar, backed diplomatically and sometimes militarily by Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and France, has seized ground across the south of the country in recent weeks. A range of countries including Saudi Arabia have been urging Haftar to show restraint, but under the guise of eradicating terrorism he seems to be intent on taking control of the whole country. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/05/western-libyan-militias-vow-to-confront-haftar-advances Libyan militias allied to the government in Tripoli have taken prisoner 145 troops from a rival force advancing from the country’s east as fears mounted of a renewed civil war and the UN secretary general prepared to meet the eastern forces’ powerful leader. Libya is riven between two rival factions, one broadly supporting Haftar in the east and another based in Tripoli in the west, including the UN-backed government led by Fayez al-Sarraj. LNA forces took Gharyan, about 50 miles south of Tripoli, but they failed to take a checkpoint about 18 miles west of the capital in an attempt to close the coastal road to Tunisia. An LNA-allied militia withdrew overnight from so-called Gate 27, leaving it abandoned in the morning, a Reuters reporter said. Across many of the towns in Libya’s west there would be deep resistance to Haftar or any effort to impose military rule, partly because they would fear reprisals by Haftar forces and because they do not want to return to the authoritarian rule of the Gaddafi era.

“fears mounted of a renewed civil war” uhh, they’ve been in a (second) civil war since like 2014. I remember checking the wikipedia detailed map of the situation in Libya and one day just being like woah... where did the government of national accord go? all i see is Haftar (his government is the House of Representatives and he also basically controls the army) and a few splashes of islamist militias and such, and it even shows Tripoli as being contested. Glad to see other people are taking another look at Libya to see how great everything’s been since our intervention. (not that i would have said we shouldn’t fuck Gaddafi up, but it always seems to go sideways once we leave, but also if we stay too long...)

The US really didn't do all that much for Libya. IIRC the French were more involved, and they weren't even all that much. While we backed the revolutionary forces against Gaddafi, they more or less overcame their dictatorship on their own.

the US basically just dropped the bombs where the french and the brits told us.

By we, I mean NATO. And that's true, we didn't really intervene that hard, but maybe that's the problem. . .Or maybe we shouldn't have intervened, and perhaps things wouldn't have deteriorated as much (I don't think it's likely, but an argument could maybe be made). I guess it's just like, NATO did something, and thus now they're open to criticism for either interfering too much and possibly being accused of being responsible for later events that happened in the country, but also criticism that they intervened and then dipped out without seeing the situation through, and didn't do enough. Nobody really knows what the right thing to do was, and nobody can run a simulation or use a time machine to go back and see what would have happened if NATO had done nothing, or what had happened if NATO had put boots on the ground all the way until a new internationally recognized government was elected, situated, and stable. But NATO did insert themselves into Libya's time stream, and its certain that they had some effect, but its hard to say if it was positive or negative or a mix of both because despite causality being an obvious and basic concept to grasp, at the scale of states and nations and complex geopolitical situations, it can almost be a black box. We inputted this into the box, and this happened later, but we have no idea what the machine did with our input that led to this output, or if our input even mattered at all. So can you blame NATO for the current situation? Probably not. But does NATO's intervention have absolutely nothing to do with Libya's current situation? Probably not. In conclusion, there is no conclusion. I hope this made some sort of sense.

Is this the second or third time that Libya has lost a civil war this decade?

It's been 8 years since the poorly handled hit job that was the West's intervention in Libya came and went, and the country continues to be fucked because as per usual we did nothing but take out the local leader we didn't like and skedaddled. Big surprise. When are we going to learn to quit sticking our dick in foreign countries to the detriment of those involved and then do nothing worthwhile to fix it? Oh wait, because we aren't actually interested in that, we just want to continue battering any semblance of progress or ascendancy in countries we want to continue domineering over.

The west hardly intervened in Libya though. Complain about Iraq or Afghanistan all you please, but Libya was fairly hands-off. You may as well complain about the insurgency in Mali being the west's fault.

Tens of thousands of sorties on military targets, blockades, embargoes, and a no-fly zone enforced by the most powerful elements of NATO is not "hardly intervened". Just because it wasn't a full scale Operation Desert Storm invasion doesn't make it light-handed.

How do you lose a civil war

same way you win one

Dunno, ask the South.

Did USA win or lose its civil war?

If it's a civil war between pro-government forces and some opposition, I'd say a government victory counts as 'winning'. So the US won its civil war, because the North won, whereas the Russians lost their civil war, because the supporters of the old regime lost and a new regime replaced them.

You guys are looking faaar too deeply into the absent philosophy of a joke post.

All US diplomatic staff and US AFRICOM have been evacuated by LCAC by the US Navy as Tripoli is over run. https://imagesvc.timeincapp.com/v3/foundry/image/?q=60&url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fthe-drive-cms-content-staging%2Fmessage-editor%252F1554632212427-asdasdccc.jpeg https://mobile.twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1114811897675644929?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1114811897675644929&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedrive.com%2Fthe-war-zone%2F27314%2Fvideo-out-of-libya-shows-u-s-navy-hovercraft-evacuating-u-s-personnel-near-tripoli https://mobile.twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1114811897675644929?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1114811897675644929&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedrive.com%2Fthe-war-zone%2F27314%2Fvideo-out-of-libya-shows-u-s-navy-hovercraft-evacuating-u-s-personnel-near-tripoli

I hope Libya is ready for Gaddafi 2.0