Libya War Drones On

FoxNews.com

Print Email Share Comments Recommend Tweet

U.S. Commits More to Libya War

"Libya free, Qaddafi go away -- thank you America, thank you Obama."

-- Chants from a group of 50 Cyrenaican tribesmen welcoming Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to the city of Benghazi.

The Middle East is hell on consistency for American politicians.

In 2008, Barack Obama blistered John McCain for saying he didn’t care if there were U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years as long as they weren’t being killed. In 2011, Obama’s administration is negotiating with the Iraqi government for a permanent U.S. base in the country.

In 2008, Obama pummeled both Hillary Clinton and McCain for authorizing the use of force in Iraq and denounced the Bush administration for exceeding its mandate there. In 2011, Clinton and McCain are the leading cheerleaders for Obama’s congressionally unauthorized use of force in Libya.

As King Ozymandias might have told Obama, nothing lasts for long in those shifting desert sands.

At Clinton’s and McCain’s urging, Obama is pushing the U.S. deeper and deeper into the Libyan war. The Pentagon announced Thursday that the U.S. was adding attack drones to the fight in order to beef up the anemic NATO bombardment of Libyan positions.

We also learned this week that the administration is supplying financial support to the insurgents, a coalition of tribesmen locked in a multi-generational feud with the tribes loyal to Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi and Islamists whose efforts for theocratic rule Qaddafi has long and cruelly repressed.

Vice President Joe Biden said earlier this week that NATO could fulfill the mission in Libya without American assistance. It looks as if the world will never know.

One of the great NATO concerns in the war is having a pilot captured by loyalist forces. Having seen the public uproar over murdered journalists, Obama and his fellow heads of state cannot be pleased at the thought of a flyboy in Qaddafi custody. The war is already unpopular and a hostage situation would hardly enhance it.

But those fears have allied forces flying their bombing runs at impossibly high altitudes to avoid being shot down. The high-altitude sorties mean fewer available targets because of concerns about collateral damage

View the Original article

Obama Approves Use of Predator Drones in Libya

AP/FILE

A Predator drone takes off on a U.S. Customs Border Patrol mission from Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

The U.S. is not at war with Libya and has not taken sides, but President Obama nevertheless has signed off on the use of armed predator drones in the North African nation that has been torn by a weeks-old bloody conflict, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.

"What the president has said that where we have some unique capabilities, he is going to use those, and in fact he has approved the use of armed predators, and I think today may have been in fact their first mission," he said.

The president approved the use of two unmanned aircraft around the clock to pick off targets in urban areas in Libya. The U.S. military tried to launch them Thursday but turned them back due to bad weather.

Obama already uses the drones to target terrorists along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Gates said the drones will enable more precise attacks against Col. Muammar Qaddafi's forces.

The move carries political risks as it could further alienate the president's anti-war base as he ramps up his re-election campaign. And several members of Congress already feel spurned by the president because he launched "limited" military operations without consulting them first. Stepping up the U.S. effort there could draw more ire from them.

Obama has gone to great lengths to portray the U.S. military as taking a backseat role in the international campaign, sanctioned by the United Nations, to protect Libyan citizens from Qaddafi's bloody crackdown on dissenters. 

But his efforts have been complicated by the stalemate in Libya, where the presence of a NATO-led mission has not been able to give the upper hand to rebel forces who have resembled the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

Gates pushed back against suggestions that the drones provides more evidence that the mission in Libya is expanding beyond its original goals

View the Original article