NATO's war against Moammar Gadhafi ends at midnight, eleven days after Gadhafi's death. That finality is 180 degrees opposite what Danger Room has been predicting since the war began in March.
Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who will be in Libya tonight to visit with the post-Gadhafi interim government, tweeted the war's end earlier on Monday. That follows an earlier social-media announcement by the war's military commander, Adm. James Stavridis, who recommended on his Facebook page October 20 that the war end.
Lots of questions remain about the future of Libya. Will an insurgency develop? Will Gadhafi's loose missiles be recovered? Will the U.S. keep a CIA presence in Libya, even as it says there aren't any boots on Libyan soil? Will the security contractors seek more bids to augment the new government's forces? Do the Qatari commandos who helped the rebels march to Tripoli head home?
But the fact is that the Predators are heading back to their bases, as are the AWACS spy planes. Like the rest of the NATO fleet enforcing up the sea blockade, the U.S.S. Mesa Verde will return to port. NATO rejected a request by interim leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil to maintain aerial patrols through December 31.
And so, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I need to concede that I got the Libya war wrong. Several Danger Room pieces under my byline ran this year predicting that Libya was an open-ended mission, lacked a clear plan for victory, and could lead to NATO peacekeepers battling post-Gadhafi insurgents. While reasonable people can disagree about whether the war was in the U.S. interest (or even legal), or whether President Obama portrayed it honestly, the fact is that the war successfully ended after eight months, contrary to consistent predictions on display here.
We owe it to you to acknowledge forthrightly that we were wrong, and probably too blinded with fears of Iraq 2.0. It's not just the Pentagon that has trouble with predictions.
Photo: Flickr/al-Jazeera English
