Almost the entire world is celebrating the fall of Muammar Khadafy, whose only friends were the kinds that money can buy. The civil war in Libya may seem to have ended well for NATO, but the events of the so-called Arab Spring may mark the beginning of the end of the alliance as we know it.
Political pundits have fretted about the future of the alliance ever since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but our politicians, diplomats and military men have generally downplayed the issue. That is no longer the case; the spectre can no longer be buried, now that none other than U.S. Defense Secretary has addressed it in public without any sugar coating. Whenever our leaders speak frankly about bad news, it is wise to listen attentively, because it is even rarer than last week’s East Coast earthquake.
A couple of months ago Gates scolded our European allies for their “unacceptable” efforts in the campaign in Libya, in which only 14 of the 28 NATO participated.[1] In the cases of nations like Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Italy, that participation was shallow at best; this is especially surprising in the case of the Italy, given that it is one of the most powerful European countries, one whose shores are less than 200 miles from the Libyan coastline. Even what little contribution Italy promised to make was cut back when it withdrew its aircraft carrier simply to save some cash.[2] What is even more pathetic is that some of the allies ran short on munitions, which contributed to the scrapping of half of the planned sorties.[3] France and Britain were supposed to take the lead, but performed only half of the bombing missions. As usual, the U.S. and Canada were forced to take up the slack, even though our European allies had initiated the Libyan campaign with the promise of bearing the brunt of the fighting themselves. Without our contribution, Khadafy might actually have beaten NATO; Gates spoke the truth when he said that “the mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country - yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the US, once more, to make up the difference.”[4] Gates didn’t realize just how firmly he hit the nail on the head when he warned of “the very real possibility of collective military irrelevance” on the part of Europe, which has been covering up its precipitous decline by riding on our coattails for much longer than is generally suspected.
The Rise and Fall of Europe in a Nutshell
It is difficult to understand the decline of NATO without a solid grasp of why the power of Europe itself has been ebbing away for more than a hundred years. As I deal with in detail in The Retreat of the West, the voluminous sleeping pill of a book I once intended to serve as my dissertation[5], Europe was once far behind other civilizations like China and the various Islamic empires in terms of the ten principal forms of national power. As defined by political scientist Hans Morgenthau, these include things like military equipment, money, size of the population and the level of technology. Between the 1400s and roughly the year 1900, the combined power of the nations of Europe, together with those settled by Europeans like the U.S., Canada, Australia and the like, grew in tandem due to a number of factors to the point where they dominated the other regions of the world. Chief among these factors was a process I called “cosmopolitan competition,” by which technological inventions circulated among the countries of Christendom faster than they reached those of competing civilizations. By the 19th Century, however, the global communications and trade networks set up by the Western countries when they colonized the rest of the planet broke down those barriers, which made it progressively easier for Third World countries to get their hands on our technology faster than we could invent it. The Internet has only shrunken the lag time between inventions and distribution further. At the same time, competition between the Western countries reached such destructive levels in the World Wars and Cold War that it reduced the power of this group of nations relative to everyone else.
As a result of such factors, the relative decline of former great powers like France, Britain, Germany, Russia and other European countries has been accelerating since their strength peaked beginning of the last century, when Western powers controlled virtually all of the territory on the planet. In some countries, that decline has been manifested in sudden collapses of their colonial empires, as in the case of Russia when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Others, such as France and Britain, have witnessed more gradual decline, but decline nonetheless. The numbers don’t lie: the territory they control, the military equipment in their inventories and their shares of the world’s industrial base and global population have unquestionably fallen steadily ever since the beginning of the 20th Century.[6] A case can even be made that France and Britain are no longer great powers deserving of places on the U.N. Security Council, because aside from their per capita income levels and possession of nuclear weapons, they exercise little weight on the international stage against nations they used to beat up on regularly just a few short decades ago. How can France and Britain, with their aging populations of 65 million and 59 million people respectively, hope to compete with emerging heavyweights like Brazil and Pakistan with their young and growing populations of 200 million and 170 million respectively, or with India and China, each of which has well over a billion apiece? They can’t without a substantial lead in technology, which has been progressively less possible since the breakdown of cosmopolitan competition, especially in the age of the Internet. Without far better technology or industries capable of competing with the new centers of the global economy in East Asia and India, they soon won’t be able to afford the weapons they need to conduct expensive military missions, even against small, divided nations like Libya. One hundred years ago,, when the British Empire controlled more territory than any empire in history, the Royal Navy could patrol China’s rivers at will; a little more than sixty years ago, both India and Pakistan were colonies under their direct control; half a century ago, France was capable of conducting scorched earth wars against both Vietnam and Algeria at the same time. In 1961, Britain alone was able to prevent Iraq from taking over Kuwait merely by fomenting a coup; thirty years later, Britain was only capable of making a small contribution to the armed forces marshaled by the world’s leading superpower against Iraq’s million-man army. If you’re looking for an exhaustive list of such symptoms of waning influence, refer to The Retreat of the West. Since I wrote that back in the mid-‘90s, the decline has proceeded to the point where it took Britain and France six months of fighting solely from the air, with all the casualties being borne by the Libyan rebels on the ground, to get rid of a leader of a desert Third World nation not far from their own shores, with six million people led by arguably the most insane dictator on the planet. In all likelihood, NATO would have faced its first-ever defeat, had not the U.S. and Canada stepped in once again to provide the bulk of the military assets needed for the war. Without them, it is possible that Khadafy could have overrun Misrata and Benghazi despite the ineffectual bombing of the French and British.
The severe decline of Europe in every form of national power has reached the point where nations like Germany, Italy, France and Britain can’t even prevent their own borders from being overrun by immigrants with distinctly different cultures and no intention of assimilating. For all intents and purposes, once all of the sugar coating is removed, they are being invaded by the same peoples that they conquered centuries ago while establishing their colonial empires. The decline has been masked by high per capita incomes and by the banding together of the continent under institutions like NATO and the European Union, but it has by no means stopped it. Europe today resembles a giant museum, a mere tourist attraction with fewer security guards posted all of the time. Don’t expect any more guards to be posted anytime soon, because none of the European powers has any plans to increase their defense budgets. As I deal with more directly in The Retreat of the West, they have been cutting their military inventories of everything from tanks to battleships to number of men under arms steadily ever since the end of World War II and the trend only promises to continue for the foreseeable future. The British military, for example, has been cutting its bases worldwide and its military inventories as far back as the 19th Century, when budget constraints forced them to begin closing forts on Canada’s border with the U.S. Now that process has reached the point where Britain can’t even take on Libya, even with French help. The future bodes more of the same, according to a recent Strategic Defence and Security Review by the British government, which forecast further losses of five more warships, 4,000 sailors, 7,000 Army soldiers, 100-plus tanks and a couple hundred armored vehicles, 5,000 Royal Air Force members, two RAF bases and all of its Harrier jump-jets.[7] The F-35 Joint Strike Fighters slated to replace the Harriers won’t be available until 2020. The most shocking aspect of the new plan is the discontinuation of any naval air arm until later this decade. Britain used to pride itself on its naval power, since it is an island nation dependent on marine power to protect its own shores, but today it has only one working aircraft carrier and one helicopter carrier. The current plan is to discontinue the former this year and the latter in 2014, after which they will have no naval air arm until 2016, when the new helicopter carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth enters service – and just as promptly leaves it in 2019, when it is expected to be decommissioned after just three years.[8] They won’t have an aircraft carrier ready for action again until 2020, a date which can of course be pushed continually back under the pressure of further budget cuts. In the meantime, rising powers like India, Pakistan and China that were once firmly under the thumb of nations like Britain are planning to add to their carrier fleets. Those who have carriers can theoretically project power across the globe while those who don’t cannot. Hypothetically, if all other deterrents like alliances and cruise missiles were taken out of the equation, it would be possible for India to attack Britain by sea in 2015, but not for Britain to attack India.
Burden-Sharing: Better Now Than Later
This same reversal in fortune is affecting other Western nations like America, Canada and Australia, although the disease is less advanced. The same symptoms of decline are all there: rampant illegal immigration, declining industrial capacity, fiscal insolvency and the like, because they are also Western nations affected by the myriad trends driving the Retreat of the West. Nevertheless, the slower pace at which America is losing its national power does not indicate that we ought to continue to bear as much of the burden of NATO’s costs as we do. Do the math: America and Canada together have about a third of a billion people, but the other members of NATO have a combined population of more than 544 million.[9] Granted, some of the smaller newcomers like Estonia and Romania don’t have per capita incomes in the same league as North America, but Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain do. These five together have 312 million people, or roughly the same as the U.S., but America is now footing 75 percent of NATO’s bills. The European Union members outside of NATO could also make a much more substantial contribution to the continent as a whole; minus Russia, the continent has a population of roughly 700 million, or more than twice the U.S. and Canada combined. America needs to cut back on its military spending simply to avoid overstretching itself at the long-term risk of undermining the whole foundation of its economic power, its high value-added industries. Even hawkish fans of high defense spending need to read Paul Kennedy’s seminal book on imperial overstretch, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which outlines how many empires – including the Soviets and the British – did themselves in over the long term by devoting too much to defense and not enough to industrial competitiveness. There has to be a point at which some money has to be dedicated to maintaining the national industrial base and technological lead, otherwise you won’t be able to afford a strong military in the long run. That might not stop the decline of America’s national power, since many other trends are feeding the Retreat of the West, but taking on the defense burdens of all of our allies is certainly an aggravating factor. Sooner or later, our shrinking budget and industrial base will force America to retrench its far-flung network of bases, just as Britain began retrenching its worldwide system of colonies and fortifications more than a century ago under fiscal pressure. It is better to choose to take those steps now while we still have time and an industrial base left to repair. That means vacating our bases in Germany, which are pointless now that both Germany and Russia have been neutralized as global military threats for decades to come. It means shifting the burden for keeping North Korea at bay to the governments of South Korea and Japan, who are our economic competitors. Now that the American Century is giving way to a Pax Sinica, our influence in East Asia is bound to wane.
There are many reasons America has continued to bear these burdens, but sooner or later we will simply exhaust our capacity to act as the sole pillar of stability in our unipolar world. Foreign bases, for example, are prizes hard to come by in international politics and are thus not relinquished carelessly, even obsolete ones like those in Germany. At heart though, the real unspoken risk is that two things will happen if America requires its allies to bear their burdens: our friends in East Asia will rearm, but our friends in Europe won’t. The rising nations of East Asia are not only competing against us economically, but stand as our greatest long-term security threat, once those economic benefits allow them to field world-class armies. In contrast, Europe is on the same threat level as a nursing home; the whole continent has not only been in decline for many long years, but they have also grown old in a spiritual sense. Europe no longer has any ideology, except the same God that America responds to now: Mammon, or the love of money. Europe has been busy boiling down its people into the same bland melting pot that it no longer stands for any ideology at all beyond the lowest common denominator; this process has gone on for so long that it has even lost the will to prevent itself from being overrun by millions of illegal immigrants (or invaders, once all of the politically correct terminology is swept away). It stands for nothing so it is a threat to nothing. It is much easier for our allies there to let themselves be boiled like frogs, slowly letting their strength slip away like elderly folks who push the possibility of death far from their minds while doing nothing to avoid it. We might stop sharing the burden of Europe’s defense only to find that even Europe itself is unwilling to defend itself. It will be easy for them to explain away the threats of genocidal maniacs in places like Afghanistan and Somalia and do nothing about them, thereby guaranteeing that those threats will gradually grow; the same logic applied by a previous generation of European leaders allowed Hitler to graduate from a drunken bozo in a Munich beer hall to a real menace. Europe’s greatest crisis is not even one of national power, but of will; it believes in nothing, which means anything goes. That is why they can’t even resolve to take action to close their own borders to invasion by millions of illegal immigrants. America and Canada ought to insist on proportional burden-sharing, but if Europe isn’t even willing to defend itself, how can we defend it for them? What I am calling for is not dissolution of the alliance by America, but for Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain and the other NATO members to stop acting as if it were already dissolved. In actuality, they already seemed resigned to letting their own national borders, languages and cultures dissolve before their eyes. Much of Europe is not even willing to put up any internal resistance to the stultifying, pointless homogenization of their cultures by the European Union or the slow handover of the whole continent to colonists who want to replace them all with a completely different civilization.
If things are gone this far, it will be exceedingly difficult for America to strengthen the alliance by equitably sharing the burden of defense without an immediate, palpable hazard to European security. Without one there will always be a temptation to downplay any external threats and procrastinate against taking action, cutting corners all the while. Russia has fallen so far economically and lost so much territory since the collapse of the Soviet Union that it will be generations before it can ever pose any kind of threat to Europe, so the raison d’etre that brought NATO together during the Cold War is gone for good. There are real dangers out there, especially the rising power of the Orient and the unchecked spread of Islamic fundamentalism, but the physical and income gaps between them and Europe means that it will be a long time before they can pose any real peril. Unfortunately, the mindset of America’s NATO partners guarantees that they will waste all that time sliding further into irrelevance.
The Aftermath of the Libyan Civil War
Meanwhile, as the museum called Europe sleeps, most of the Islamic world is ablaze with fervor. This is also true in Libya, where too much of the young population seems driven as much by the sheer excitement of fighting as by their hatred of Khadafy. Whenever people are caught up in that kind of thinking, they usually go looking for another fight. What occurred in Libya wasn’t a social revolution like those in Cuba, China or Iran which reverberated across the world, but even lesser political revolutions of this sort tend to spread beyond their borders in one fashion or another. If Libya’s rebels go looking for another fight, they might find one internally, but there is also a chance that they could go looking for one externally. Now that they are conscious of their power, the crucial question to ask is what they will do with it. Chances are, in the long run many of them will exercise it in ways the West doesn’t like.
The dominant school of thought seems to be that there is a real risk of the Libyan rebels turning their guns on each other. It would be easy for them to divide on the basis of region and tribal loyalties, especially since the revolution began partly out of resentment in Eastern cities like Benghazi against Khadafy, who didn’t share the nation’s oil wealth equitably. Furthermore, regional tensions may emerge since the rebels based in Benghazi had more resources but were largely ineffective against Khadafy’s gunmen. In contrast, the rebels who broke the siege of Misrata (Libya’s equivalent of Stalingrad) and the started the second front in the Nafusa Mountains demonstrated outstanding tactical brilliance and leadership. Moreover, the rebels in the mountains are of a separate ethnic group, the Berbers, whose language and culture have been long submerged beneath Arabic across North Africa. They are now enjoying a renaissance of sorts in Libya thanks to the crucial role they played in the war. The political landscape may be further complicated by Khadafy loyalists, particularly among certain tribes and towns like Abu Salim, Sirte and Sabha which benefitted most from his patronage. He does have support among some of the older generation of Libyans, who remember the roles he played in nationalizing the country’s oil and in extracting much more money from the West for it during the oil price shocks of the ‘70s. How much of a factor they are will depend on how long it takes to find Khadafy. Unlike his fellow fugitive, Saddam Hussein, he is highly intelligent, but he is also too mentally unbalanced to build the kind of mystique Bin Laden did during his ten years on the run. Since he is a nutcase, he might cling to the green flag of Libya that he designed himself, trusting in his own Green Book of psychotic political ramblings until the very end. The sooner he is caught the better it will be for everyone concerned.
Even if Libya were to split along tribal and ethnic lines between such widely varied factions as Khadafy loyalists, the Berbers, the rebels of Misrata and those of Benghazi, it is not likely that the strife would be as long lasting and deadly as that in Somalia, where clan infighting has led to national ruin. Even in Somalia, politics has gradually begun to revolve more around the role of Islam than with clan loyalties with each passing year. The same process is likely to happen much faster in Libya. Western oil companies are already salivating over Libya’s rich, which may soon cause a backlash against the West, if our aid is perceived as a blatant oil grab; many of the Western leaders in favor of it may have had genuine humanitarian motivations, but in order to build the necessary political coalitions you can bet that they had to sell the idea to other leaders as a means of getting to that oil. Libya’s mere six million people and complete dependence on oil exports means it will never be a direct threat to neighbors like Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt, but it is entirely likely that it will end up picking up where Khadafy left off a decade ago: in an informal alliance of sorts with Islamic fundamentalist states like Sudan and Iran.
The Cresent and the Eclipse
When the rebels say they want democracy, I salute them, because I believe that it is the best political system for deciding which leaders to put into office. That’s all it is though: a particular system of staffing. The ideology of democracy doesn’t say a thing about the ideology of the people who should be elected or what issues they should debate; it only speaks of how they should be elected and how the issues should be decided. Once Khadafy’s gone, the Libyans will decide which issues they want to debate next and they may decide to divide along regional, ethnic, tribal or class lines, or by religion, gender or any other difference they think of. Chances are, however, that the role of Islam will be that dividing line. This has simply been the trend of politics in every corner of the Islamic world since the mid-1970s, as politics in each and every Muslim nation has slowly shifted from the issues of class and nationalism during the Cold War to the role of religion. This is true in Palestine, Algeria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and many other nations the so-called experts once considered safe from the march of Islam. In virtually every nation in the Islamic Umma, fundamentalists of various kinds are either in power, as in the cases of Turkey, Iran and Sudan, or provide the major organized opposition to the ruling regime, whether democratic or not. This has also been the case in all of North Africa since 1990s. In 1992, the Algerian military stepped in to cancel elections that the Islamic opposition had won fair and square, sparking a bloody civil war, while the En Nahda party and the Muslim Brotherhood always provided the primary opposition to dictators like Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Both of these men were cronies of the West, who became unpopular partly for adopting Western economic policies that drained away their national wealth and impoverished the common people. The Arab Spring has not only eliminated these dictators who were so friendly to the West, but has also opened the door for parties like En Nahda and the Muslim Brotherhood to compete legally in elections and assume the governments of their nations. Whether or not they succeed immediately, the new freedom of the Islamic opposition does not bode well for Western interests in the future. Even in this interim period of uncertainty, Western influence has already ebbed in subtle ways that don’t bode well. For example, smugglers are now essentially functioning as the local government of the Sinai Peninsula, while the leading candidates for Egypt’s presidential elections are far more anti-Israeli than either Mubarak or his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. Like many men who sell out their ideals in middle age, Khadafy was well on his way to becoming just another corrupt dictator allied with the West, like Ben Ali and Mubarak, so his removal has actually opened up a similar kind of power vacuum inimical to our interests. Just over a decade ago, Khadafy was a member of the very loose coalition of anti-Western allies Iran had put together, but the promise of better trade ties and respectability lured him into a détente with the Western powers. At one time he was even avidly pursuing a program to acquire weapons of mass destruction, which is why I once wrote a newspaper column seeking military action against him (I also came out in my high school paper against the 1986 American raid on Libya not out of love for Khadafy, but because the party responsible for the disco bombing that brought it about was actually Syria’s dictator). His selling out to the West actually had the positive effect of depolarizing the Middle East a little bit, but now that Khadafy is gone, the door is open to repolarization. This time, Libya may end up with capable leadership allied with nations like Iran out of choice, rather than a crazy tin-pot dictator who wanted only a temporary alliance of convenience.
Until the revolution in Libya began, the only organized opposition to Khadafy consisted of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a rebel group that allegedly has ties to Al-Qaeda, although one of their leading spokesmen publicly denies this. The group changed its name to the Libyan Islamic Movement, or al-Harakat al-Islamiya and joined the joint revolutionary command in the rebellion against Khadafy; its leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj became the head of the Tripoli Military Council just a few days ago. In the early weeks of the war, many other mullahs and rebel soldiers spoke quite plainly about injecting Islam into Libyan politics after Khadafy was eliminated. Furthermore, the leading rebel general, Abdel Fattah Younes, was assassinated in mysterious circumstances just a month ago. All of the credible evidence to date suggests that he was arrested by the rebel government in Benghazi on suspicions of working secretly for Khadafy, but that a group of Islamic militants intercepted him on his way to Benghazi for questioning and killed him in cold blood, possibly as part of a power grab within the rebel front. Perhaps the role of Islam will lead to immediate violence, or perhaps it will come about through a peaceful vote in the same manner as Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s election to the presidency of Turkey. Either way, the whole macropolitical trend in this region seems to be driving Libya in the same direction, towards a regime that is much less secular than anything found in Europe or North America. Many observers keep expecting the Arab Spring to turn out much like the collapse of communism did, with the same sort of jubilation that followed the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent establishment of middle-of-the-road parliamentary democracies, but they are looking at the world through Western eyes. Thanks to the Retreat of the West, the people of the Islamic Umma are increasingly looking to their own very different cultural roots for answers in times of change. When Eastern Europe rejected the alien ideology of Stalinism, it reverted to Christian ideals of democracy, mixed with a dose of Pharisaical plutocracy; now that Libya has rejected the alien ideology of Khadafy’s Green Book, it is likely to default back to Islamic ideals of governance which are very different from our own. There may be a dash of parliamentarianism, as in Iran, but the substance is likely to be too theocratic for our comfort.. Now that Western influence has faded over North Africa and the Middle East, so too is our alien philosophy of secularism – which is actually a product of our civilization’s real religion, the love of money, not of Christianity. Anyone who has ever read the Koran honestly will come to the same conclusion that most of the people of North Africa and the Middle East have, that Mohammed’s philosophy is not compatible with either form of Western religion. Friction is bound to result, especially since most of the nations affected by the Arab Spring also have every incentive to oppose Europe on issues as diverse as immigration and oil prices.
For a long time to come, the nations affected by the Arab Spring will not have the power to sway those divergent issues in their own favor as much as they’d like, but that trend has been changing for almost a century now. It would take decades for the weak Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East to become the military threat they were to Europe during the medieval times, but in the current limp mindset of Europe’s leaders, that merely gives them decades more to fade into relaxing, senescent dissolution, rather than doing the hard work of repairing their industrial bases and maintaining credible military deterrents. It will be even harder to restore Europe’s broken spirit, now that is has essentially resigned itself to becoming a vast museum of glories past; at present, it really has no other ideology, no other reason for living beyond accumulating money and spending it before death. One civilization is rising and the other is falling with a swiftness that would seem melodramatic compared to the rise and fall of other empires of the past, but imperceptibly slow to our leaders, who only think a couple of months or years into the future, not in terms of decades or trends that take centuries to play out. That is why they do not appreciate that some of their military actions in Libya and Iraq may in the long run help those who want to overwrite our civilization completely; to groups like Al-Qaeda, the Arab Spring is just one more small opportunity they can take advantage of towards their eventual goal of global genocide. If more and more Muslims begin to take Mohammed’s teachings on religious war at face value the way Bin Laden did, then a generation or two from now we may be faced with a nightmare that took our Christian ancestors a millennium of sacrifices to escape from: a whole civilization on the warpath, bent on spreading their religion by the sword. It may take thirty or more years to reach that point, but the way NATO’s European members look at it, that’s just another thirty years in which they can whittle down their military budgets even more. It’s a vicious circle, really; the longer they are at peace despite irresponsible defense cutbacks, the more they can justify further cutbacks on the basis that there is no credible threat. Like smokers who claim they don’t need to quit because they feel fine, they are certain keep smoking until they get lung cancer. Their very mentality makes long-term failure inevitable. At some point, America will have to turn over more of the burden of Europe’s defense to Europeans themselves, but they may not be up to the task. At some point, one of NATO’s military missions will fail – as this one would have failed, if not for the brilliance of the rebels in Nafusa and Misrata, or America’s war chest - which will embolden our rivals everywhere. And at some even more distant point, Europe will need the defensive capabilities it once shirked. In the meantime, more cracks will be exposed in the alliance, NATO will go on dissolving on one side and Islam will go on reverting to what was before the West’s rise to power centuries ago. The Arab Spring is a small sign of a greater historical movement, the rise of the Crescent Moon, the symbol of Islam. NATO’s reaction to it has sadly been a clear sign of Europe’s eclipse.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.
[1] See "Libya war exposes 'Nato's chronic weaknesses,” in the Mail & Guardian Online, June 10, 2011. http://mg.co.za/article/2011-06-10-libya-war-exposes-natos-chronic-weaknesses
[2] p. 2 Marquand, Robert, "Could NATO's Libya mission be its last hurrah?" in The Christian Science Montor, Aug. 21, 2011.
[3] IBID pp. 1-2
[4] "Libya war exposes 'Nato's chronic weaknesses,” in the Mail & Guardian Online, June 10, 2011. http://mg.co.za/article/2011-06-10-libya-war-exposes-natos-chronic-weaknesses
[5] I wrote this back in the mid-‘90s, but what I wrote even more revelant today than it was then. I’ll be posting it online for free in .pdf format sooner or later so that someone somewhere might get some benefit out of it.
[6] All of these figures are available ad nauseum in The Retreat of the West.
[7] Kirkup, James, “Navy aircraft carrier will be sold after three years - and never carry jets” in The Telegraph, Oct. 18, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8072041/Navy-aircraft-carrier-will-be-sold-after-three-years-and-never-carry-jets.html.
[8] IBID.
[9] Added informally from figures available at http://flagpedia.net/organization/nato. The idea is more important than the exact numbers.
