The doctrine of Proportionate Response goes something like this:\u00a0 You hit me, I hit you back.\u00a0\u00a0 You hit me harder, I hit you harder.\u00a0\u00a0 You impose a cost for attacking, but don’t escalate.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ronald Reagan was a big advocate of this approach toward the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n
Qaddafi appears to also follow that.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The moment the Reagan administration walked in the door in 1981, they clearly wanted to topple Qaddafi.\u00a0\u00a0 In 1981, Exxon pulled out of the Libya oil fields without warning or explanation – just walked away.\u00a0\u00a0 [That was the answer to my history question on the prior blog – what happened in 1981].\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 1977, Libya started financing the opposition in a civil war in Chad, the country to the South of Libya.\u00a0\u00a0 In the old days, the country was known as French Equatorial Africa.\u00a0\u00a0 In 1960, Chad broke away from French rule and declared independence.\u00a0 In the early 1980s, Chad broke out in a civil war, with Libya supporting the opposition in the North and France sending in troops to arm the South.\u00a0\u00a0 The US started overtly aiding the government in Chad – the man now trying to organize the Benghazi military was a former Libyan general who the CIA “flipped” – and has been living in Virginia for the past 20 years minutes from CIA headquarters.<\/p>\n
Here is a pretty complete list of the sequence of events: Reagan made it clear from the beginning that his goal was to topple Libya, then a client state of the Soviet Union.\u00a0 The Gulf of Sidra was the lever – Libya claimed it as territorial waters, Reagan claimed it as international waters and sent in the U.S. Navy to challenge Qadaffi.\u00a0\u00a0 When Libya launched aircraft in response, Reagan ordered them shot down.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The blowing up of Pan Pam 103 happened (accepting that Qadaffi did order it) came after the failed attempt to kill Qadaffi.<\/p>\n So it looks like last night, “NATO” tried to kill Qadaffi again.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe Libya has no friends or asymmetrical warfare assets left – but if I was living in France or England, I would be very cautious about what I did from this point on that could be vulnerable to attack by Libyan assets.\u00a0\u00a0 The stakes are now at “Have nothing left to lose”.<\/p>\n To a large degree, the ball is now in Russia’s court, and to a lesser extent Turkey.\u00a0 NATO has clearly exceeded the scope of the UN authorization.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It’s unlikely Russia would engage in a direct confrontation with the United States like having one of their subs try to sink a U.S. aircraft carrier, but they\u00a0could do something like send tanks spilling into one of the former\u00a0Soviet Republics and see just how weak the UN, NATO and the U.S. have become.<\/p>\n You’ll remember the Russian intervention in Georgia was based on the\u00a0Duty to Protect civilians of Georgia of Russian ethnicity who Russia claimed were being abused by the Georgian government.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m confident it wouldn’t be too hard to find other situations like that in Eastern\u00a0Europe of perhaps some of the oil rich places like Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The doctrine of Proportionate Response goes something like this:\u00a0 You hit me, I hit you back.\u00a0\u00a0 You hit me harder, I hit you harder.\u00a0\u00a0 You impose a cost for attacking, but don’t escalate.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ronald Reagan was a big advocate of … Continue reading
\nhttp:\/\/thebrokenelbow.com\/category\/reagan\/<\/a><\/p>\n