bombing
£65 million per week
Submitted by antarchi on October 8, 2011 - 22:49According to the figures compiled by Defense Analysis editor Francis Tusa, the war has cost around £1.75 billion so far...
Based on publicly-released figures from the Royal Air Force (RAF) and numbers quoted during parliamentary questions, Tusa used two different methods to estimate the total costs of the war. His first calculation gave a total between £1.38 billion and £1.58 billion, and his second between £850 million and £1.75 billion.
The figures give the costs incurred due to military operations in Libya alone, ignoring routine training and maintenance costs. They do not include the cost of recent RAF sorties, involving flights from mainland Britain to the North African coast for bombing and reconnaissance missions. Some preparatory logistic operations, such as the transport of tonnes of military hardware to bases in Italy by a fleet of Eddie Stobart trucks, were also left out.
it costs £2.5 million per day to run a single Eurofighter Typhoon fighter-bomber. The UK is operating ten Typhoons from a base in southern Italy. Paveway IV bombs cost £50,000 per mission. These form part of the average £65 million weekly cost of British air operations in Libya.
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postscript to notes on libya
Submitted by antarchi on September 15, 2011 - 23:00Postscript to the child's homework. The child decided that our motives in going in to Libya were not as we had stated, but that it had been worth going in anyway - and the intervention was justified.
Further questions to the child:
1. Is it important whether the new govt is likely to be better than the old, given what we know about them. Mustafa Abdul Jalil who now heads the Libyan interim government [National Transition Council] recently said in a public gathering, "We will not accept any extremist ideology, on the right or the left. We are Muslim people, for a moderate Islam, and will stay on this road. We strive for a state of the law, for a state of prosperity, for a state that will have Islamic Sharia law the basis of legislation."
2. The 'rebels' (now the govt) have engaged in large scale looting of weapons. Since many of those who supported the rebel movement were islamic radicals, it's likely these will be used against 'the west' in other wars. This is exactly what happened in Afghanistan: we armed and trained Bin Laden's men to get the Russians out (in the 80s) and this is now being used against us.
3.The 'coalition' (UK, US, France etc) have broken international law in supporting the rebels and in pursuing regime change. What message does it send to the world if some people are allowed to remove leaders they don't like (but not those they do), and others aren't. Imagine Iran or China or Russia sending in the bombs to support a movement to depose a leader and how we would react to that. The law only works if everyone - including those at the top - respect it, and are brought to justice when they fail to do so.
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notes on libya for a child's homework
Submitted by antarchi on September 14, 2011 - 23:00Homework: Ask each member of your family
a) Why are we in Libya?
b) Do you think it's right that we are there?
Some answers
Surely Gadhafi is the new Saddam / Hitler / Stalin and we are stepping in to protect the Libyan people
Unlikely: there are dictators far more evil who treat their people far worse than Gadaffi ever did. Karimov (Uzbekistan) boils people alive. He is our great ally in the war on terror (and we use intelligence from his torture chambers to ‘win’ that war).
Gadhafi is not a nice man. He tortures people (we also used his torture services to gain ‘intelligence’ - rather than doing it ourselves1). But he has done more to raise the living standards of the Libyan people than the leader of any other African state:
- 1. “A Libyan rebel leader who was rendered to Tripoli with the assistance of MI6 said on Monday that he had told British intelligence officers he was being tortured but they did nothing to help him…
Belhaj was detained by the CIA in Thailand in 2004 following an MI6 tipoff, allegedly tortured, then flown to Tripoli, where he says he suffered years of abuse in one of Muammar Gaddafi's prisons”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/05/abdul-hakim-belhaj-libya-mi6...
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bombs or welfare
Submitted by antarchi on June 12, 2011 - 15:5065,500 people are facing an average weekly cut of £41 due to changes in housing benefit, which the government says will "save" in total £200 million.
The homeless charity Crisis says this could force 11,000 disabled people out of their homes. "We are deeply concerned that some of the disabled people affected by this will end up homeless, and in the worst cases rough-sleeping."
We were told the cost of the war would be "tens of millions, not hundreds", but the government admits that over £100 million has been spent already. It is anticipated that by October over £1 billion pounds will have been spent waging war on a country which poses no threat whatever to Britain.
...It is costing over £2 million a week to station Britain's warships and submarines in the Mediterranean. In total, Britain is spending £3 million a day on the war in Libya. Which means that in the next nine weeks the war will cost the £200 million the government says it has to cut through changes to housing benefit.
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protecting civilians
Submitted by antarchi on June 5, 2011 - 12:57RAF to get 'bunker busters' for Libya mission
The Royal Air Force is to get 2,000lb "bunker busting" bombs to boost its mission in Libya...
The MoD said the bombs had been prepared and could be used in Libya in a matter of hours and would help to protect civilians from being targeted by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime.
[Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox] said: "The introduction of Enhanced Paveway III bombs is another way in which we are developing our tactics to protect civilians and achieve the intent of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973.
"We are not trying to physically target individuals in Gaddafi's inner circle on whom he relies but we are certainly sending them increasingly loud messages.
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rescuing the libyan good guys
Submitted by antarchi on April 10, 2011 - 03:02The Libyan "pro-democracy rebels" are reportedly commanded by Colonel Khalifa Haftar who, according to a study by the US Jamestown Foundation, set up the Libyan National Army in 1988 "with strong backing from the Central Intelligence Agency". For 20 years, Colonel Haftar has lived not far from Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA, which also provides him with a training camp. The mujahedin, which produced al-Qaeda, and the Iraqi National Congress, which scripted the Bush/Blair lies about Iraq, were sponsored in the same time-honoured way, in leafy Langley.
Libya's other "rebel" leaders include Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gaddafi's justice minister until February, and General Abdel-Fattah Younes, who ran Gaddafi's interior ministry...
History suggests nothing less than the kind of machinations exposed by two senior diplomats at the UN who spoke to the Asia Times. Demanding to know why the UN never ordered a fact-finding mission to Libya instead of an attack, they were told that a deal had been done between the White House and Saudi Arabia. If the Saudis would back a US "coalition" to "take out" the recalcitrant Gaddafi, they could put down the popular uprising in Bahrain. The latter has been accomplished, and the bloodied king of Bahrain will be a guest at the royal wedding in London.
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