The next phase of the Libyan war

Yesterday, I wrote that if Ghadaffey thinks the end may be coming, that he gets very dangerous.

During the entire 6 months this thing has dragged on, I’ve remarked a number of times how odd it is that Qadaffi and his forces have taken no aggression at all toward NATO forces.   His forces have confined themselves to trying to kill the people trying to overthrow the government.

Despite reportedly having 10,000 portable SAMs, I’ve heard no reports of a SAM fired to try to shoot the NATO bombers.   The fixed and mobile SAMs have been left parked where they are (and mostly blown up).   Nothing has been launched at any of the NATO ships at sea.  

The closest Gadhafi has come is to lay mines in the harbor of Misurata – laying mines in your own harbor inside your territorial waters is hardly an act of aggression.   It’s obviously a defensive tactic to prevent an invasion.

So one report mentions that Libya has fired its first SCUD missile.  It was fired from near Sirte, Ghaddaffi’s home town toward Brega.  The report characterized it as “it landed harmlessly in the desert – haha, you missed”.

There is no tactical reason to fire a scud at Brega…  it’s an inaccurate medium range missle that you may remember from first Iraq war when Saddam Hussein lobbed them into Israel and Saudi Arabia.   Despite all the efforts of the US military to find them, they never stopped coming.     At best, maybe they could have been trying to hit an oil storage tank, but those could have been blown up any time in the last 6 months if Qadaffi wanted to do that.    The missile was either a test or a warning to NATO, or both.    There are large parts of the desert that NATO can’t easily see or reach, and SCUDs are mobile devices that launch from the back of a truck.

Large parts of Southern Europe are within the range of SCUD missiles, depending on where in Libya they are fired from.   A few SCUDs flying toward the beaches of Southern France at the peak of holiday season might really be disruptive to the tourist season, even if they hit nothing.

Another thought – Gadhafi has promised a plague of locusts will devour Europe.   I’ve always taken that as symbolic language.   Could a missile loaded with real locusts survive and not kill the locusts inside?     I need to do more research about locusts and their history in Europe, their reproductive cycle and what can be done to eradicate them.