Secretary of Defense Gates: No timeline for end of Libyan Mission

Excuse me, but what is the babbling that Obama is doing about handling off the mission in a few days. We will side with the Secretary of Defense on this one as the President has no clue -- he just talks, talks, talks and says nothing worthwhile.

Gates: No timeline for end of Libyan mission
March 23, 2011

CAIRO, Egypt (AFP) – US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said on Wednesday there was no "timeline" for when UN-backed military operations in Libya would end, and that the outcome of the conflict remained unclear.

Speaking during a visit to Cairo, Gates said the UN Security Council resolution that authorised a no-fly zone was "not time-limited" and that it was unrealistic to expect military action to be over in a matter of weeks.

"So I think that there is no current timeline in terms of when it might end," Gates told reporters.

The military intervention was designed to prevent Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi from using aircraft to attack civilians and supply his forces, and coalition forces would monitor the effect of the strikes, he said.

"I think we will be assessing this as we go along, in terms of when his capabilities to do those things to his people have been eliminated.

If this wasn't so serious, it would make you burst out laughing when reading this comment from SecDef Gates:

"But I think no one was under any illusions that this would be an operation that would last one week, or two weeks, or three weeks."

He might want to take that up with the President who told everyone the United States would be done in a couple of days. Looks like Obama doesn't listen to his Secretary of Defense either. Just who does he listen to is what we would like to know? Valerie Jarrett?

The Pentagon chief also said it was difficult to gauge the strength of opposition forces because they had grown out of popular uprisings.

"I think it's been very hard for us to assess that frankly," he said when asked about the effectiveness of the rebels.

In the unrest that had erupted before international military action, Gates said "it wasn't as though you had an alternative army moving back and forth across Libya."

Some who had initially joined the uprisings, including troops from military bases, appeared to have withdrawn in the face of the regime's crackdown, he said.

Excerpt: Read More at Yahoo News

Has anyone in this Administration bothered to check to see if some of the rebels we are protecting are Jihadists? Rolling Stone reports:

America is now at war to protect a Libyan province that’s been an epicenter of anti-American jihad.

In recent years, at mosques throughout eastern Libya, radical imams have been “urging worshippers to support jihad in Iraq and elsewhere,” according to WikiLeaked cables. More troubling: The city of Derna, east of Benghazi, was a “wellspring” of suicide bombers that targeted U.S. troops in Iraq. …

A West Point analysis of a cache of al Qaeda records discovered that nearly 20 percent of foreign fighters in Iraq were Libyans, and that on a per-capita basis Libya nearly doubled Saudi Arabia as the top source of foreign fighters.

The word “fighter” here is misleading. For the most part, Libyans didn’t go to Iraq to fight; they went to blow themselves up — along with American G.I.’s. (Among those whose “work” was detailed in the al Qaeda records, 85 percent of the Libyans were listed as suicide bombers.) Overwhelmingly, these militants came “from cities in North‐East Libya, an area long known for Jihadi‐linked militancy.”

Does anyone know the truth about the rebels in the area of Northeast Libya know for Jihadi-linked militancy?