The war on Moammar Gadhafi is in its fourth week and NATO doesn’t know how to dislodge the Libyan dictator, a fact that’s leading the coalition to internal bickering. So when the war bogs down, the alliance turns to a tried-n-true tactic: releasing weapons’ eye video to show how tough its bombing campaign is. Rarely are psyops focused internally.
France and Britain, the most gung-ho members of the anti-Gadhafi coalition, couldn’t contain their frustrations at what they consider the alliance’s impotence. NATO “must prevent Gaddafi from using heavy weapons against the civilian population,” said French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, flabbergasted that other NATO countries have cumbersome restrictions on their pilots’ ability to bomb Gadhafi loyalists besieging Libyan cities.
So it comes as quite the coincidence that the NATO military command released the video above, showing an alliance warplane destroying a loyalist tank outside of Misrata. That city is so beleaguered that naval analyst Raymond Pritchett calls it the Stalingrad of the Libya war.
But so far on Tuesday, NATO has stepped up its PR war, bragging on blowing up five tanks outside of Misrata and another four near Zintan. NATO also wants you to know that it iced 11 regime tanks on Monday and 25 on Sunday. The obvious subtext of the video: boom-shack-a-laka.
Whether that’s the message Gadhafi hears is a different story. His forces remain on the offensive. His preferred route to a ceasefire, rejected by the rebels, leaves him in power. No wonder France and Britain are angry.
That’s the downside to putting out a video like this. NATO wants a propaganda win to show that it’s going to take the fight to the dictator. But every day Gadhafi hangs on makes the bombardment of an idling tank look impotent. And that’s a danger for the Obama administration, too, because it’s likely to increase pressure from Congress torecommit the U.S. to bombing Libya, a week after U.S. involvement in strike operations ended. NATO might be trying to mollify its French and British members, but it could end up making their case for them.
